“You came to tell me I’ve gotten fat, haven’t you?”

He leaned back in his chair across from her and her pomegranate margarita, hands behind his head in that easy way of his.  He tilted his head a bit and smiled a tight-lipped ironic, or was it rueful, smile.

“Yes,” he said.  “I looked you up because I had a feeling that you had let yourself go.  Somebody had to tell you.”
“Ah…well.  Fuck you very much, then.”

There were his teeth, now, his smile broadening.  Still the gap between the front two—not a little gap, either.  She always wondered why his father, a talented West Coast dental surgeon, had never fixed that.  Jimmy had said the gap was a sign of luck, or of royalty.

She had once suggested that perhaps it was a sign of in-breeding, which evoked another toothy grin and a playful chase around her studio apartment… Jimmy muttering something about, “I’ll show you in-breeding…”
“Seriously, why did you look me up?”

He shrugged.  “I’m turning forty.”

She guessed he thought that should explain things.  But it didn’t.  She had already turned forty.

“Have you kept up with anyone?” he asked.  “Travis? Neal? Janey?”

She shook her head and swirled her drink.  He had to know she wouldn’t have.  It was her trademark—when she was gone, she was gone.  No looking back.  No clinging, cloying sentimentality.

That road trip they took that last summer, she drove him crazy with her “law of no returns.”   If they passed a gas station and then realized that they needed gas, they’d just better hope and pray that another station was coming up—‘cause no way in hell was she turning that car around.

It was just one of her things.

“I’m married now,” she blurted.

“Yes,” he said.  “I know.  And you have two girls, and a dog.  It’s actually a bit disturbing how much you can find out about a person with just thirty-five dollars and the internet.”

Disturbing barely scratches it, she thought.

“I’m married, too,” he announced, as if this could possibly be news.

“Yes, I know—hard to miss the two of you on the covers of all those supermarket tabloids while I’m checking out.”  She wasn’t going to let him know that she had closely watched his roller-coaster of a career through the years.  She had cheered as his bit-role, movie-debut character floated off into space.  She had relished the cancellation of his first primetime drama series.  (It had sucked, truth be known, and his acting was abysmal.)  But she couldn’t finish watching Band of Brothers—nobody, not even Jimmy, deserved to be gunned down that way.   And now he had risen again and had taken up residence in her favorite Sunday night melodrama.  He was, apparently, intent on ruining everything for her.

“She’s very beautiful,” she said of his wife.

He nodded and then said, “She looks a lot like you.”

Now she sat back in her chair—casually, she hoped, and quietly studied her hands.  They were folded calmly over a napkin on the table in front of her, belying the excruciating and exquisite rush of emotion, thought, and sensation that had become her body, making her chest pound, trapping her breath.

She needed time… time to find the right thing to say.

“What the hell, Jimmy?” is what came out.  “What the hell?”

“Lily!” he said in a “keep your voice down” kind of tone—and then, softer, “Lil.”  He reached out and put a hand on top of hers.

She didn’t move.

She didn’t speak.

She continued to study her hands, now with the addition of his.  Slowly, she allowed herself to feel the weight of it—then the warmth.  She shivered.

What was he thinking?  What was he thinking she was thinking?

She needed time… time to find the right thing to say.

She should pull her hand away.  But she didn’t want to.

Actually, she wanted to stay just like that, just like they were now, on the cusp of—something.

Not in, not out.  Not going forward, but definitely not going back.  Here, in this “no place,” she could be who she was, who she had been, once again.

Had he said—had he meant to say—she was beautiful?

She wanted to look into his eyes, but the voice in her head said, “No.  Don’t move.”

Not forward, not back.

She remembered how her body would respond to just her name on his lips.  Would it still?  Would she still?
Don’t look.   Don’t move.  Don’t cross that line.

Tears were slipping down her cheeks, but she could not move her hand to brush them away.  She would not.  No, this time she would let him see.

“Why did you do it, Jimmy?  Why did you just leave me like that?”

He didn’t speak for a long while.

She lifted her eyes to finally search his, and he looked away, retracted his hand.

“I just didn’t want to hurt you.”

There had been a time, up to about five minutes ago, actually, when any number of sarcastic, caustic retorts would have sprung instantly to her mind.  But in this minute, the only thought that came to her was small and meek: but it did hurt.

“This was a bad idea.  I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have come.”  He was scraping his chair back from the table.

“No,” she whispered.

“I know.  I’m really sorry.”  He was standing now, fumbling with his wallet.

“No,” she said, again.  “But you did come.  You opened this, this thing… and you’re going to just leave?”

He sat back down.  “I…”

“Shh,” she cut him off, raising her hand.  She wanted to speak before she had the sense to stop:  “I thought you were coming back, Jimmy.  You knew I did.  I waited.”

“I told you I didn’t know if I would come back.  I didn’t want… I told you I’d understand if you needed someone, you know, here.”

“Months later.  In a letter.  You also said that you wouldn’t come back if I had moved on, if I had found someone else—yet, here you are.”

He leaned toward her, “You said you would want me to.”

“I meant after you were done with your little…”  She waved her hand in the air and shook her head, “whatever.”  She paused, hoping for some coherence.  “Finding someone else is not necessarily “moving on,” Jimmy.  I thought you’d be gone a year, maybe two.  Not eighteen.”

“I was a boy,” he said.

You’re still a boy, she thought, only a little meanly.  He was right.  He had been just a boy:  a sweet, barefoot boy who wrote songs for her and spent an entire Sunday afternoon trying to make bagels from scratch in her postage-stamp kitchen.  He had shocked her with his tenderness.  She never saw it coming, had never expected it for herself.  She was still comforted, when she felt lonely, by the memory of waking up, feverish and thirsty, to find him studying his script in a chair next to her bed, icy water in a glass waiting for her.  How long had he been there?  All night, he had said.  He didn’t think she should be alone.

But still, he left.

And she had been a girl: a girl with an excellent education, a girl with a good job at a prestigious firm, a girl with a bright future.  She had been a girl who would have impulsively thrown that all away and followed him to the ends of the earth—or at least to Australia, which is where he was going—had he only asked.

He knew this.

He didn’t ask.

This was something he needed to do, he had said.

She knew it was something that he needed to do, alone.  She honestly couldn’t have pictured herself on a Walk About, eating, what?—grubs? Roughing it, to her, meant the Holiday Inn.  She had let him go without a fuss.  She drove him to the airport.  She kissed him at the gate.  She had cried—but prettily.  She stood and watched: him, disappearing down the gangway, and then, his plane as it rose to a mere pinpoint in the clouds.

And she did what she needed to do, as well.  She found someone: someone who made up crossword puzzles with clues only she would understand, someone who would sing spontaneous “travel operas” with her on road trips, someone who moved her car for her—in the rain—when she forgot it was street-cleaning day, someone who eventually worked longer and longer hours, but who also, eventually, came home.  Dependability, she found, was attractive.

She had become comfortable, sometimes a little bored, but secure in the outer life she had arranged for herself.  She had set up a little home for Jimmy somewhere deep in the recesses of her being: a place she could go when the mundane world got to be too much, where he would continue to treat her sweetly, make her bagels, and thrill her with a chase.  He would always remember her birthday.  He would always, eagerly, talk to her at breakfast.  This was a place where she could feel adored.  
And now he sat across from her, with a new wife and purportedly with a baby on the way, like a giant, sparkling, stainless steel pin bursting her iridescent fantasy bubble.

Damn him.  She needed that place.

He cleared his throat, “My therapist says…”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Yes,” he continued, “my therapist says that it’s not uncommon to…  It’s like the Holy Grail.  People spend their lifetimes searching for it…I’m meaning love, you know…”

She nodded, she got the metaphor.  Don’t say it.   Don’t say it.   She tried psychically to stop him, but he was impenetrable.
“I didn’t know that at twenty-two, I had it—right there, in front of me.”  He was looking straight at her now.  He placed both his hands in the middle of the table, palms open toward her.  She didn’t move.  She wondered if his wife knew he was here.  
“It was so easy for us, it just, flowed.  I guess I just thought that it would always be that easy, you know.  And when I found out that it wasn’t… it was too late.”

How long did it take him to make this discovery?  There had to have been any number of points over the last eighteen years when a letter, a phone call, an appearance on her doorstep would not have been too late.  Why now, she wondered?  He still hadn’t answered that question.

There were a million questions rattling her head, but sometime during his psychological reframe of their relationship, her common sense returned.  She would leave those questions unasked.  She didn’t want any answers.  She sipped her margarita, allowing the salt and the sweet to wash away the sour taste in her mouth.

She allowed herself to meet his gaze.  She felt his eyes searching for something deep within her.  She wanted to be angry at him, for the invasion, but she felt compassion welling up, instead.

She grasped one of his hands as she sat up straighter in her chair and gave it a quick, firm squeeze before letting go.  “Twenty-two is like a Jamaican vacation at one of those hedonistic resorts, Jimmy.  It’s beautiful.  It’s hot.  But nobody really lives there, not forever.”

“Right… right,” he said.  He started to lean back in his chair, but stopped, mid-tilt, and rocked back toward her.  Leaning in closer, he bowed his head to the table and then looked up at her, “I guess, I just wanted you to know, in case you ever wondered:  I didn’t leave you as easily as it looked.”

She was surprised by the warmth of her relief.  A wave of gratitude left her unsteady as she realized how much she really had wondered.

He gave her a tentative smile that seemed to ask, “Are we okay?”

She took a deep breath, allowed a small smile, and nodded.

He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, easy once again.  “So, tell me about your girls.”