I get what she’s talking about and answer her back with an understanding grin. “Sounds good. I’ll see you next week. I felt my phone vibrating while we were talking so I’m assuming Marco has already fired up a group chat to confirm our plans.”
“Can’t wait,” she replies.
I give her a wave and we contentedly head off in different directions—she going deeper into the school and I making my way outside.
Five minutes later I’m walking through campus when I feel my phone vibrating again. I reach inside my bag, ready to tell Marco to relax and that he can pick any restaurant he wants for our get-together when I look at the screen and freeze. It isn’t Marco.
It’s Greg.
Greg calling me after he hasn’t in almost two years. I keep staring at the phone. I’m electrified and afraid and all-consumingly curious. But I still don’t answer.
I keep walking, my eyes glued down at the phone as I try to decide what to do. It feels strange to have Greg unwillingly inserted into this moment. He’s not a real part of my life anymore but now he’s made himself part of today, whether he should be or not.
I start to cave, as I always do when it comes to him, hovering my thumb over the answer icon when a voice interrupts me. A voice I remember. A glowing, hazy dream that never fully faded.
“Aren’t you going to pick up?” the voice asks now. “You’ll make me feel bad if you don’t.”
My eyes fly up and there he is, right in front of me. The world goes still. My hands are shaking. I want to run forward and far away all at once. I grip my phone so tight in my hand that I’m afraid it will snap into a million pieces.
“Hi, Greg,” I softly answer.
The espresso machine screeches like a steam train whistle as Greg and I sit across from each other in a café not far from campus. I’m still getting used to having him in front of me. He looks the same, but not the same, too. He’s still handsome. His angular face looks cut from marble, and his blond hair is just the right degree of bed tangled. But even with his familiarly pleasing exterior, it somehow feels like I’m meeting an actor in person after only ever seeing them in movies. He’s different than I remembered. Not as tall. His tone not as melodic. He doesn’t quite match up with the filtered version of him that lives rent-free in my head.
“This is weird, isn’t it?” he asks with a smile. Nowthat, I remember. That’s the same. His smile always had a way of calming me down and pulling me in, making me forget that anything else in the world mattered except for him.
“It’s a little weird,” I agree, glancing down at my cup of Earl Grey tea and shifting it around in my hands. I return my gaze up and his smile is still there. It takes me back to the beginning of our relationship, the parts where everything was shiny and golden. I feel myself starting to slowly relax. “How did you find me?” I go on to ask.
“It was a lucky guess. I was in the neighborhood, and I figured I’d take a shot.” I look at him with a speculative gaze and a guilty grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. “You also may have been tagged in a photo or two. Or twelve, in Daniella’s case.”
And the culprit is unmasked. I’ve told Daniella not to tag locations in photos in real time, but I guess the excitement of the day got to her. I make a mental note to sign her up for an internet safety seminar, pronto.
“You’re not mad I came to see you, are you?”
With my attention back on Greg, I try to decipher my feelings and no, I’m not mad. But I’m not as happy as I thought I’d be, either. I’ve imagined this exact event millions of times since I left Chicago. Greg getting on a plane and showing up out of nowhere. I wanted it so bad for so long and now that it’s here, I can’t make heads or tails of it.
“So you came to New York to find me?”
Greg leans forward a little over the table, his mouth opening but then closing before speaking. “Technically, I’m here visiting my parents and for my cousin’s wedding, but a big part of why I came was because I was hoping we’d be able to meet up.”
I nod my head and move my thumb along the outside of my cup. I don’t say anything. Greg seems puzzled by my silence as he straightens his posture.
“You stopped texting me back,” he says quietly. “I don’t like not talking to you.”
“We’ve gone months without speaking before,” I remind him.
“Yeah, but then as soon as one of us would reach out again, we’d usually get right back into talking. We didn’t this time.”
What he means is, this is the first time thatIwas the one who stopped responding. In the past, there were no set rules for what would make one of us text the other. Maybe something during our day reminded us of each other, maybe we were wishing each other happy birthday or maybe we were just bored. We’d text back and forth, sometimes days or weeks at a time, then sooner or later he’d stop responding. I wouldn’t push for an answer and radio silence would follow. Inevitably, he’d reappear with a random text, and we’d pick up again like nothing happened. The theme of it was I was always available. The past two months I haven’t been.
But I don’t mention any of that. Instead, I take a sip of my tea and set it down on the table. “I’ve just been really caught up in school and work. And then there was Italy, obviously, so it was hard to text back with the time difference.”
“No, I get it,” Greg says, “but I’m glad we’re talking now.” He reaches his hand forward to gently take mine. The tips of his fingers wrap around my hand, and it’s so achingly nostalgic that I almost don’t know what to make of it as he goes on, “Italy must have been amazing. Did you love it?”
“I did,” I answer. I want to focus on our conversation, but I keep looking down at our hands that are still between us. Still holding on.
“Do you have pictures?”
His question draws me out of my momentary stupor, and I use the opportunity to pull my hand back as I reach into my bag to fish out my phone. “I have a lot of pictures. Probably too many.” I tap the screen to open my photo album. I scroll backward to find something to show him. First, there’s the million I took in Capri. Not wide landscape shots, but close-ups of scenes that I was hoping to use for fabric. Greg wouldn’t want to see those.
