To Be Alone With You

We lay in the grass in the field down the road, the long strands licking our skin like green and yellowing tongues. Her fingertips were just inches from mine and I longed to reach out and touch them, to roll over and plant my lips firmly on hers like hopeful tulip bulbs, but I resisted. Josselyn was something special, something different. She deserved my respect; in fact, she demanded it. With her, things would go slowly. Contact was something to be desired. And when she did touch me, the spot turned to delicious flames and I longed for her to touch me again.

“What are you dreams, John O’Callaghan?” she asked languorously, her long eyelashes batting lazily as she blinked into the sun.

“To be a successful musician,” I replied without missing a beat. I was a boy who knew what he wanted, with my career and with my women. I wanted to play music and, at the moment, I wanted her so badly it was driving me insane.

“Of course,” she muttered with a smirk. She never had anything constructive to say about my band, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t my prerogative to get her to like the music I made, only to get her to like me.

“Yours?” I enquired in return. The gauzy fabric of her shirt lifted in the breeze, revealing the tender, tan skin of her stomach. I could have died right there.

“To write for a magazine some day,” she answered, rolling her head so we were facing each other, her bright face kissed with sunlight. “To be a journalist. To do something cool. Something unique.”

We were quiet for a while, until she grabbed my hand out of the blue and I descended into the warm glow that was her skin against mine.



If they thought I was going back inside that place, they were absolutely kidding themselves.

Just the sight of Josselyn Clarisse Stevens made my blood boil, with her dark red lacquered lips and piercing blue eyes. The expression on her face – feigned surprise and regret -, the disgusting professionalism of her outfit, the way she had just sat there and waited for me to show up, knowing full well the consequences. Everything about her made me want to run in the other direction, so that’s what I did.

As I stood outside the restaurant, my hands shaking with an emotion I couldn’t quite identify, I lit a cigarette with my slowly dying Bic. Drawing it up to my lips and taking a drag, I savored the smoke that filled my lungs, thick and milky and terribly therapeutic. I tried to sort out everything I was feeling all at once – anger, confusion, nostalgia, paranoia, hurt – and compartmentalize it. Josselyn Clarisse Stevens didn’t deserve any emotion from me. Josselyn Clarisse Stevens didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as me. Josselyn Clarisse Stevens, Josselyn Clarisse Stevens. Oh god.

The fact that she was sitting inside with the rest of my band mates meant she’d realized her dream, and the bitter pride I felt for her pricked at my neck like tiny needles. We’d always talked about this, and now here she was. But there was a very solidified anger in my heart that steeled me to her and left me pacing in front of the building, preparing to light my second cigarette in effort to calm myself down.

There was suddenly a hand on my shoulder and I snapped around to tell the person off – figuring it was Josselyn or one of my band mates who didn’t understand the situation. Instead, there was Garrett, his lips pressed into a thin, crooked, sympathetic line. I easily could have crumbled right there, but instead internalized it. Garrett had been there through it all, only Garrett and Pat. Pat wasn’t particularly good with these kinds of things; being a tremendous kid at heart, it was kind of difficult for him to articulate helpful advice. But Garrett – Garrett had been there through everything and always understood and never forgot.

“She had to have known it was us, Gar,” I mumbled, rubbing my forehead with my forefingers before taking another nervous drag. “Why didn’t try and get someone else to do the assignment?”

Garrett sighed and placed an understanding hand on my shoulder. “John, it’s been years now,” he sighed. “I know it’s hard seeing her again like this, especially like this. But this is a professional setting and it will be different. We’ll get this over with and move on.”

I shook my head definitively. “I want someone else. Tell her that we need someone else to interview us.”

“I need you to be mature about this, please,” Garrett pleaded, his voice hushed from its normal decibel. “It’s been a long enough day and you don’t even really need to talk to her, only about the band. Please do this for us. Just this one time and she’ll be out of our hair for good.”

I glanced through the window and saw her sitting in the booth against the wall, hair in long dark waves and skin like a china doll, the way it had always been. I saw the girl I once knew, the girl that I hated with every bone in my gangly body. And then I thought of all the places I’d rather be, and just about any place ever sounded more appealing than sitting at a table with my band, talking to Josselyn Clarisse Stevens. The girl who was too busy to believe.

And then I looked to my band mates, confused but still excited. Pat and Jared, chattering with Josselyn enthusiastically, Kennedy laughing, all clearly trying to cover up the awkwardness that had manifested in the situation. And to Garrett, standing next to me with his brows furrowed and eyes tired, begging me to at least try. I began to swallow the hard lump in my throat that was my pride and decided.

“Okay,” I agreed tentatively. “For you. Not for her. For you.”

Garrett’s lips turned into a slight smile as he slipped the cigarette from between my fingers and dropped it to the pavement, snuffing it with his boot. “Let’s go get professional on her ass,” he joked, pulling the door open for me to enter. I gave him a courtesy chuckle, but in reality every organ in my body felt like simultaneously failing as we drew nearer to the table. Garrett smoothly slid into the seat farthest from Josselyn, leaving the only one open – the seat across from her – for me.

My eyes were everywhere but on her – literally anywhere else I could look, I was looking. The floor, the table, the flickering candle in the middle of it all, the way Pat stared at me from over his water glass as he sipped from it. She and Kennedy were deeply engaged in conversation, his eyes bright and excited.

“I still can’t believe you wrote that article on music ghost writers for The New Yorker!” he exclaimed breathlessly. “I ripped it out and keep it in my bag. So crazy.”

“Probably my greatest accomplishment yet,” she admitted, and the sound of her voice took my breath away – the same voice that I was once so familiar with. With all the anger in my heart I longed to hear it again, to sit and listen to her talk all day, the way I used to. Something about her voice was therapeutic to me. I didn’t realize it until then. I caught myself promptly after that, remembering all the things that took that voice away from me, all the things she did, and the anger returned.

“It was nothing, nothing compared to what you guys have done,” she continued. Her eyes flickered to me; I could feel the gaze on my cheek, hot and attentive. “But seriously, now that we’re all here we should probably discuss the plan of attack for our day tomorrow. That’s why we’re here in the first place.”

I picked the menu up from the table and started paging through it in an effort to distract myself. The plan was that she would do a ‘day in the life’ article on us, following us from start to finish and interviewing us along the way. A whole day together, a day of her following us around like a duck that imprinted on the wrong mother. My appetite disappeared at the thought.

The guys detailed our plans from tomorrow in between ordering and our food arriving, from the very first thing in the morning all the way until we went to bed. We had a signing session at some record store in Brooklyn around noon with a live acoustic set following, followed then by a radio interview and then essentially whatever we wanted. I could hear a pen scratching against a piece of paper as Josselyn took notes on every word. I absently took bites of my fries, waiting for it to be over.

Finally, everyone stood up to leave – shaking hands and laughing, all full of happiness. I hung back from the group, not wanting to have any sort of exchange with her. I had yet to utter a single word throughout the entire meeting and I planned on keeping that way, simple and silent. I needed to get out of there, I needed to get to the bar and drink it all into oblivion – that is, until I had to deal with it again the next day. The dread culminated inside me as I watched her say goodbye to Kennedy, her smile wide and ameliorating, a smile she used to give me.

“Call me if you have any questions,” she chirped, offering a glossy business card to him. He took it and tucked it in his pocket, giving her a subtle smile. Kennedy was becoming quite the card shark.

And suddenly, before I could stop it, our eyes connected. And suddenly, before I could stop it, I was turning the other direction.

“John, wait.”

I glanced around to my friends and a heartbeat later, they’d all dispersed and headed outside to wait. The frustration was with them was overwhelming; with none of them by my side, there was absolutely no avoiding her anymore. She had me cornered and she knew it.

“I have nothing to say to you,” I muttered darkly, turning away from her. “We’re gonna keep this professional and absolutely nothing more.”

“I just wanted to apologize for not warning you,” she said quietly, her voice a near whisper. “I tried to get out of it, I really did.”

“Maybe you should have tried harder,” I growled, my eyes scanning the restaurant around us. I tried my hardest to keep my voice down in the crowded building for fear of causing a scene. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to the fact that I was talking to the insufferable woman in front of me.

Things were quiet between us for a moment and we looked at each other cautiously, my eyes sparked with anger and hers apologetic. I struggled to keep my breathing under control; I wanted so badly to lash out and put her in her place for going through with this when she full well knew she shouldn’t have.

“I never meant to hurt you John, it’s just –"

Everything stopped as the anger boiled over, my gaze snapping back to her and taking her in fully and hatefully, examining her for exactly what she was. “Now you fucking want to talk about it Joss?” I snarled at her, the beautiful mess in the impressive office clothes who I wanted so badly to hurt the way she hurt me. “I’ve waited all these years and now you want to talk about it?”

Her gaze turned to the ground, ashamed and afraid. She hated when I raised my voice. The attention of the surrounding tables was piqued; I could feel several pairs of ears listening attentively to our conversation, lips posed to gossip about it later to their friends.

“I have better things to do right now than talk about my feelings with a cold, heartless bitch,” I spat coldly. “I just want to be professional and get this over with and never fucking see you again

“But-

“I hate you Josselyn. With every fiber of my being. I want nothing to do with you. I don’t want to talk about this. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And with that, her sharp blue eyes turned glassy with despondency, her jaw set with contrasting determination. She brushed past me hurriedly without so much as a goodbye, and I didn’t bother to call after her. The scent of her perfume hung in the air, as it always did when she ran away, only now it was slightly different in a way I couldn’t put a finger on. With an angry sigh, I waved it away with my hand before storming over to the bar and ordering a drink.

Only whiskey could erase the emotions she had dug up from deep inside me, dark and damp, like the depths of a grave.