I don’t believe that there’s a man out on the street. He’s tall and broad and his legs are planted wide.
And as soon as he jumped out of his vehicle and took a few steps toward the driveway, he lifted his face and his eyes found me up here.
Like he knew where to look already. He knew where to find me at this time of night.
It would horrify me that a stranger is staring at me like that. It’s exactly what happened the night I lost control of my car.
But it’s not a stranger.
It’s him and it’s real.
Because as soon as he found me, he didn’t wait for even a second. He started to stride toward me.
He came back.
Oh my God, he came back.
I don’t even stop to think.
I shove away the journal and flashlight from my lap and climb down from the roof so fast – faster than I’ve ever done before – that I can’t catch my breath.
Only when my feet touch the ground do I take a deep breath, a deep, hiccupping breath because I can see him clearly.
I can see his face under the tiny lights of the driveway.
He’s breathing hard like me. That’s the first thing.
Like, really hard.
The kind of breaths you take when you break the surface after being underwater for a long time. The very first, sweet breaths of life.
And then, there are his eyes.
Gosh, his dark, dark eyes.
They look haggard and tired and in some major need of sleep, they’re bright. Brighter than these man-made, artificial lights in the driveway.
Brighter than the moon I’ve been watching.
“You could’ve fallen,” he says and I decide I was wrong.
His voice is the most extraordinary thing about him right now.
It’s barely there. It’s so low and thick and whatever is there, whatever sound is left inside his throat, is pure gravel.
It makes my bare toes curl on the heated cement. “I’m used to it.”
“You are, aren’t you?” He flicks his eyes over my shoulder to the tree for a second before focusing back on me. “That’s how I saw you, that first time. It was my first night here and I saw you grabbing hold of that branch and scaling it up to the roof. I’d never seen someone climb a tree so fast. I thought you were an intruder or something but then you sat down and took out your journal and started writing. I realized that you were the girl next door.”
Girl next door.
Yeah, that’s what I was and he saw me the same day I saw him: on my sixteenth birthday. It’s weird that I never asked him this. I never asked him exactly when he saw me.
But now I know.
I know that we saw each other the same day, maybe hours apart but we’ve had this obsession for exactly the same amount of time.
Exactly the same, that’s what we are.
Before I can form a word, he continues, “I’d look forward to that, you climbing up to the roof every night. In fact, that used to be the highlight of my day. Watching you in moonlight.”
That pushes his chest to the extreme. That makes him punch his shirt – is it even buttoned correctly? – with a gusty breath as he shakes his head once. “I’ve beaten myself up a lot for that. Watching you, I mean.”
I swallow, letting his gaze wash over me, letting him look at me as I look at him. As I still try to soak in the fact that he’s here.
I know I’ve been saying this to people all along and I trusted that he’d come but God, it’s happening.
And it feels so real and sharp and breathtaking.
Maybe because he’s saying things, telling me things.
He never says anything; I’m the one who does the talking, which is a surprise in itself, really. Because I don’t talk much with others.
Only with him.
I’m a different me only with him.
“You’re here,” I whisper when he goes quiet.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
He swallows. “I came for you.”
He came for me.
His answer is more potent than anything else about him right now. More drastic and weightier.
I have to close my eyes for a second and just let it sink in.
Again, I knew that but still.
He’s here for me.
Not only that, but he’s saying the exact words to me that I said to him the first night I found him at the bar.
I came for you.
That’s what I said, and now he’s saying it back.
When I open my eyes again, I notice that he’s come closer. He’s taken a few steps toward me and his focus is on my feet.
I wiggle my toes, confused, and look at them myself. They seem perfectly okay to me, bare and small.
“You left behind your nail polish,” he says.
And I realize the reason for his focus. My colorless toenails.
“I left behind a lot of things.”