An awkward silence dumped itself between us. I wrung my hands harshly, and she sat with her head still tilted to the side. I tried to think of something to say and was dumbfounded when I couldn’t think of a single word. Here was a girl that I had known since I was eight, a girl who I’d grown up with, slept with, conversed with, did everything with. And here I was, a month later, not able to say a goddamn thing. I groaned inwardly as I began to realize that this was a very bad idea. I thought of eight or nine ways to retreat, but she spoke again.
“How’s the Kid?” she asked.
“Oh, good!” I said relieved. “He’s all finished with school now so he’s… good.”
She nods her head agreeably. “That’s good.”
“Yeah, it’s good.” Stop saying good! “He wanted me to say hi,” I lied, as he never said anything of the sort to me.
“Well, tell him hi back for me.”
“Will do,” I said, sweating. It seemed like a good time to run away. I waved jerkily and had turned to flee back into my cave, when she said my name. I froze, wanting to keep moving forward and slam the door behind me and hide until she left. But I turned.
Her face had softened, and her eyes were kind. “How’re you?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, forcing a smile.
“Well, I’m happy for that, then,” she says quietly. “I’ve worried about you, Bear.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the type to never worry about yourself. Someone’s got to do it for you,” she said sadly.
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I know you’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself. And of Ty. I mean, you’ve done it for years, right?”
“Right,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
She sighed. “So I ask myself why I worry about you when you obviously don’t need me to. You’ve never needed me to, but here I am, doing it anyways.”
I winced. “Oh, come on, Anna. You know that’s not true.”
She looked away. “But you know it is. It’s not that you didn’t want me to. It’s just that you didn’t need it. I think that was part of our problem.”
“I guess,” I said, not really sure what she was talking about.
“How’s Otter?” she asked, quickly changing tact. It made me wonder if she was trying to catch me off guard, trying to make me say something. To trick me.
“Uh, fine, I guess,” I said, acting like I hadn’t just spoken to him a few minutes before, hadn’t just heard him say how hot I sound, hadn’t just said I loved him.
“Do you get to see him a lot?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’m over at Creed’s a lot. He’s always there.” I stopped, letting her fill in the blanks to whatever mad-lib is going through her head.
Anna nodded. “That’s good.”
“What is?”
“That you’re hanging out with Creed. You know, before he leaves,” she told me, averting her eyes slightly. She only does that when she’s not being completely honest, and for the billionth time, I wondered what she knew, or what she thought she knew. It would be so easy, I told myself then, to just open my mouth and tell her everything and end the goddamn speculating that was apparently running rampant through her head. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, my lips stayed glued shut, and I said nothing.
Then the doors whooshed open again and a couple of teenagers walked in and nodded a greeting toward us, and Anna smiled at them, and I took that moment to look at her without her knowing. She was beautiful still. I smiled painfully as I suddenly remembered everything about her. It was like that part of me had gone into storage, and I was looking through the boxes for old time’s sake. She caught me looking and stared at me questioningly, but I shook my head and muttered something about how I had to go. She shrugged, but I caught something in her eyes, something just underneath the indifference. I don’t know what it was, but it was there. I turned my head and walked away.
I could feel her eyes on my back. I got into the office and closed the door and sank down against it to the floor, my heart beating rapidly. I tried to conjure up that look in her eye again so I could rack my brain for what it was, but all I saw was that gold-green, and I wanted to go home. Home.
When it was closing time, I waited for Anna to walk out the door, and I locked it behind her. When I turned, she was still standing behind me, watching me with those big eyes of hers. I looked down at my feet, unsure of what to say. I felt like I should say something because it wasn’t just me I was watching out for, but the Kid as well. He needed as much of us around him as we could possibly get, and I knew that Anna was an integral part of his life. I tried to think of what I could say, what I could do, that would make her understand that he (I? we?) needed her to be there. Nothing came to mind, and I started to drown under a great wave of sadness. I heard her chuckle softly, and I looked back up.
She smiled at me. “Always thinking of things,” she said softly. “You’ve always done that. It’s one of the things that made me fall….” She paused, almost as if she was thinking she’d be better off not finishing. But then she did: “It’s a thing that made me love you.”