Love and Other Words

I shift my hips up, feeling the clench in my chest when Elliot’s body slips from mine. I feel him retreat beneath me, his eyes filled with an ache that seems to build the longer we’re silent.

“You never let me explain what happened,” he says.

I can’t meet his eyes. It goes so much deeper than this, but even though these details seem tiny now, I know it’s where we have to start. “You said you loved me that night,” I remind him, “for the first time.”

He nods eagerly. “I know.”

“You asked me to marry you.”

Elliot reaches for my arm, circling his fingers around my wrist. “I meant it. I had a ring.”

I look at him in shock. “If I’d said yes, would you still have fucked Emma?”

“Okay.” He stands, pulling his pants up, buckling his belt. “Okay.” His shirt hangs loose, hair remains a mess from my fingers. Elliot looks down at me, backlit by the moon and the distant glow of the party. Bending to retrieve his glasses, he slides them on. “Do you know how many times I’ve told you this story in my head?”

“Probably about as many times as I’ve tried to pretend I didn’t see what I saw.”

He crouches. “I didn’t know what happened until a few days later.”

“What?”

“I mentioned to Christian that you hadn’t called me back, and he said, ‘Probably because she saw Emma naked on top of you.’ ”

I blink away. I still see the image, so clearly.

“And the worst bit of that,” he says quietly, “is that until he said it, I didn’t know I’d been with Emma. She wasn’t there in the morning.”

I need to digest this for two, three, four breaths. “You woke up with your pants at your knees, Ell. That didn’t clue you in?”

“This is the part I can’t figure out,” he whispers. “In my head, it was you. In my head, you came up to the party, you found me passed out on Chris’s bed. In my head, you went down on me, climbed on top of me. I don’t remember having sex with Emma that night. I remember having sex with you.”

“Can you hear yourself?” I stare at him, mouth agape. Inside my rib cage, my heart is a barreling thunder at the words went down on me. I never went down on him—but she did? “Do you hear the bullshit meter screaming in the background? You’re telling me that the night you had sex with Emma, you thought it was me?”

Elliot groans, raking a hand through his hair. “I realize how insane it sounds. Even at the time, I couldn’t piece the night together, and I’ve had eleven years to try to make sense of it. I was so drunk, Mace. I remember waking up to the feel of your mouth on me. I remember touching your hair, talking to you, encouraging. And when I look back, I still see your face when she climbed on me.”

He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes closed, and when he says this, I remember what Brandon started to say, something about how Elliot wouldn’t.

“I woke up,” he continued, “and had a moment of blistering embarrassment because Chris’s bedroom door was open and a few people were walking around cleaning shit up. I was all alone with my dick hanging out. I texted you asking where you’d gone. Two days I went along with things, thinking I’d had drunk sex with my girlfriend at a party. I thought you were embarrassed or angry at me for being so wasted, and that’s why you hadn’t called.”

Is this his truth—some quiet, heartbreaking mistake? Part of me aches for this version of things, wanting to believe it so badly that it makes my teeth clench. The other part of me wants to scream that this tiny whimper of a drunken misunderstanding unraveled everything. It should have been something intentional, something enormous. Something worthy of what came after.

“If you’d have let me explain . . .” he says quietly, looking at me in bewilderment. “I called you over, and over—”

“I know you did.”

I was aware that Elliot called several times a day, for months. I never checked my old email account afterward, but if I had, there would probably be scores of unread messages there, too.

I knew his regret was enormous.

But that wasn’t ever the problem.

“I fucked up,” he says, “but Macy, even as bad as that is—and I know it was bad—was it really worth this?” He gestures between us. “Was it really enough to make you just . . . drop me? After everything? To not talk to me—ever again?”

I stare at him, plucking words from the masses and arranging and rearranging them into sentences. The Emma thing feels so small now. It was just the first domino. “We had this deep, unbreakable trust, you know—and you broke that, you did—but it’s not just that. It’s . . . it’s me. It’s been me, too.”

“You don’t think I deserved the chance to explain?” he asks, misunderstanding my incoherence, restrained emotion making his voice tight.

I can tell he’s waiting for an answer. And the answer is yes, of course he deserved a chance to explain. Of course he did. In an alternate reality, he would have called me later that day, and I would have answered.

“I loved you,” he says. “I have always loved you. There was never anyone but you for me, you knew that.”

I fumble through my words: “It was a really bad . . . it was a bad night—”

“I know it was bad, Mace.” His voice is growing harder, nearly disbelieving. “We were each other’s first love, first sex, first everything. But come on. That’s a knockdown, drag-out fight. That isn’t . . . disappearing for a decade.”

“It wasn’t just that.” My heart and mouth seem to agree that we cannot, in fact, do this right now.

Metal screeches against asphalt in my ears. I close my eyes, shaking my head to clear it.

“Do you have any idea what it’s been like?” he asks, getting more frustrated now in the face of my inarticulate fluster. “Every day, I woke up and wondered if that would be the day I’d see you again. And if I did, how would it go? I missed you, so much. I’m twenty nine, and I’ve never loved another woman.” He stares at me, unblinking. “And every woman I’ve been with knows it, unfortunately for them.”

I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He stares at me, bewildered.

“You want to know what Rachel meant about how fucked-up I was? Well, here’s one example: the first person to go down on me after you left had to sit there while I broke down like a fucking maniac,” he says, “trying to explain why I didn’t want her to give me head.”

“I’m sorry.” I cover my face, breathing in, breathing out. Item twenty-seven on Mom’s list was to remind me to breathe. In and out, ten times, when I’m stressed.

One . . .

Two . . .

“I’m sorry, too. I want this,” he whispers. “I want you.”

Three . . .

I want you, too, I think. But I don’t even know how to tell you that Emma is the least of it. Another woman giving you head is the least of it.

“Talk to me, Mace,” he urges. “Please.”

Four . . .

Five . . .

“I want you,” he repeats, and his voice carries a strange distance. “But I’m realizing now that maybe I shouldn’t.”

Six . . .

Seven . . .

By the time I reach ten, my hands are no longer shaking when I lower them. But because I didn’t expect Elliot to leave, I never heard him walk away.

In the dark night, the reception on the outdoor porch is a beacon of tiny lights and stars thrown from candlelight traveling through glasses of champagne. Heat lamps placed at regular intervals are warm enough in the night chill to make the humid air warp around the slow-dancing couples.

I find George to the left of the dance floor, near the wedding cake, which has already been cut and shared. His cheeks are red, smile wide, eyes watery with happy inebriation.

“Mace!” he yells, pulling me into a lumbering hug. “Where’s my brother?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

He reaches up, pulling a small twig from my hair and good God it only occurs to me now that I have no idea what I look like coming out of the gardens after fucking Elliot.

George grins. “I suspect you have a better idea than I do.”

Liz comes up beside him, grinning at her tipsy husband. “Macy! Whoa, you look . . .” Understanding comes into her eyes and she barks out a laugh. “Where’s Elliot?”

“The question of the hour,” George murmurs.

“I’m right here.”

We turn, finding him standing just to the side, holding a half-finished glass of champagne. The warm flush I felt on his cheek, against my lips, is gone. In its place is a pale stare, a slash of a frown. His tie is missing, shirt unbuttoned at the collar and smudged with both dirt and lipstick. Looking at him now, it is doubly obvious what we’ve been doing.

I smile at him, trying to communicate with my eyes that there’s more to discuss here, but he’s not looking at me anymore. Tilting the flute to his lips, he downs the rest, places it on the tray of a passing waiter, and then says, “Macy, did you need me to drop you off at your motel?”

Shock causes a cold wave to pass through me. George and Liz go quiet and then shuffle away under a haze of secondhand mortification. My heart takes off, a snare drum leading into a cymbal crash as I realize I’m being asked to leave.

“It’s fine,” I tell him, “I can grab a Lyft.”

He nods. “Cool.”

I take a step forward, reaching for him, and he stares at my hand on his arm with a frown, as if it’s caked in mud.

“Can we talk tomorrow?” I ask.

His face twists, and he picks up another glass of champagne, downing this one in the time it takes for the waiter to offer me one, and for me to decline. Elliot grabs another before the anxious waiter ducks away.

“Sure we can talk tomorrow,” he says, waving the glass. “We can talk about the weather. Maybe our favorite type of pie? Or—oh—we haven’t yet talked about the merits of a Crock-Pot versus a pressure cooker. We could do that?”

“I mean finish what we’ve started,” I whisper, realizing we’ve drawn the attention of a few family members. “We weren’t finished.”

Alex watches us at a distance with wide, worried eyes.

“Weren’t we? I thought we had the grand finale. You did what you’re best at,” he says, smiling grimly. “You shut down.”

“You walked away,” I retort.

He laughs harshly, shaking his head and echoing in a murmur, “I walked away.”

Softening, I say, “Tomorrow . . . I’ll come by.”

Elliot lifts the glass, swallowing four gulps and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure thing, Macy.”

At one in the morning, the sky feels haunted in its darkness. I climb the porch to my old summer home, skipping over the predictably broken step. Using the long-ignored key on my ring, I let myself inside, where it’s even colder than it is in the woods; the insulation keeps the chill stored within the dark plaster walls. I turn on lights as I go, and kneel to set a small fire in the wood-burning stove.

Obviously, if I’ve been here only once in the past ten years, I should remember the exact dates, but I don’t. I only know it was a week, maybe two, before I left for my sophomore year at Tufts, and we drove up at night to sift through our possessions and move all the cherished things into closets we could lock, to keep curious vacation renters from taking anything. The memory of that night feels like a blur of watery color streaking through fog.

Upstairs, I sift through the other keys on my ring, finding the smaller one, and slide it into the lock on Dad’s closet door. It enters in jagged steps, sticking halfway through, requiring a tiny wiggle before it clicks and turns with a rusty protest.

His closet opens with a whiff of musty air, and my stomach drops when the scent and realization merge: I’ll need to throw most of this out. He kept some shirts and pants up here. Hiking boots, a fly-fishing vest. There are photo albums on the shelf up top, a nativity diorama I made in fourth grade. Letters from Mom. And, at the back, the stack of questionable magazines.

My butt lands on the floor before I realize I’ve been sliding down the door frame. Beneath the smell of mildew, there is the unmistakable smell of him: the Danish cigarettes, his aftershave, the bright linen scent of laundry. I pull a shirt from a hanger—messily; the wire flies up off the rod and hits the door on the way down. Pressing the flannel to my face, I inhale, choking through a sob.

I haven’t felt this way in so long. Or maybe I never felt this particular emotion: I want to cry. I want to positively sob. I give it full access, letting it tear through me into these awful howls that echo off the high ceilings and shake my torso, curling me forward. Snot, spit: I am a mess. I feel him right there behind me but I know he isn’t. I want to call out to him, to ask him what’s for breakfast. I want to hear the even cadence of his footsteps, the intermittent snap of the newspaper as he reads. All these instincts seem to live so close to the surface that they warp and weave through the fabric of possibility. Maybe he is downstairs, reading. Maybe he is just getting out of the shower.

It’s these tiny reminders that hurt, the tiny moments where you think—let me just call out to him. Ah, right. He’s dead. And you wonder how it happened, did it hurt, does he see me here in a sodden, sobbing puddle on his floor?

This is the only thing that interrupts the torrent, pulling a thick laugh from my throat. If Dad ever found me crying like this inside his closet, he would stare down—befuddled—before slowly lowering himself to a crouch, and reaching out, gently running his hand down my arm.

“What is it, Mace?”

“I miss you,” I tell him. “I wasn’t ready. I still needed you.”

He would get it, now. “I miss you, too. I needed you, too.”

“Are you hurt? Are you lonely?” I swipe an arm across my nose. “Are you with Mom?”

“Macy.”

I close my eyes, feeling more tears slide across my temples and into my hair. “Does she remember me?”

“Macy.”

“Do either of you remember you had a daughter?”

I’m not myself, I know I’m not, but I’m not embarrassed to be found like this, either, especially not by Dad. At least this way he’ll see how loved he was.

Strong arms come beneath my legs, around my back, and I’m lifted from the fog of mildew and Dad, and carried down the hall.

“I’m sorry,” I say, again and again. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’m sorry, Dad. It’s my fault.”

I’m still on his lap when he sits on my bed. He’s so warm, so solid.

I haven’t been this small in years.

“Mace, honey, look at me.”

My vision is blurry, but it’s easy to make out his features.

Greenish-gold eyes, black hair.

Not Dad, Elliot. Still in his tux, eyes bloodshot behind his glasses.

“There you are,” he says. “Come back to me. Where did you go?”

I slide my arms around his neck, jerking him closer, squeezing my eyes closed. I smell the grass on him, the bark of the olive tree. “It’s you.”

“It’s me.”

He needs my apology, too.

“I’m sorry, Ell. I ruined everything because I forgot to call.”

“I saw the lights on,” he whispers. “I came over and found you like this . . . Macy Lea, tell me what’s going on.”

“You needed me, and I wasn’t there.”

He goes quiet, kissing the top of my head. “Mace . . .”

“I needed you even more,” I say, and begin sobbing again. “But I couldn’t figure out how to forgive you.”

Elliot pushes my hair out of my face, eyes searching. “Honey, you’re scaring me. Talk to me.”

“I knew it wasn’t your fault,” I choke out, “but for so long it felt like it was.”

I see the confused tears fill his eyes. “I don’t understand what you . . .” He pulls me into his chest, one hand in my hair as his voice breaks. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

And so I do.