We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  He’s letting me into a place I’ve wanted to go for so long, except what’s going on inside is more serious than I could have imagined.

  “Tarek,” I say, regretting those horrible things I said. All that selfishness. “I had no idea. I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry for pushing you, and I’m sorry you were dealing with this.”

  He gives a slight nod of acknowledgment, but I can tell he isn’t done. “I think I’ve probably had it for a while. It wasn’t sudden, but I noticed it a lot more when I was on my own. It gave the depression time to fully take control, I guess. I hadn’t had a major depressive episode—that’s what the counselor called it—like that before. So I started seeing that counselor regularly, and I saw a doctor, who prescribed some antidepressants, and it wasn’t an immediate fix. I still had some fucking awful days. But little by little, I was able to function again. I went to class. I had to beg some of my professors for extra credit, for makeup assignments, for second and third chances. That was the beginning of December. I managed to get my grades back up to Cs, so I passed, but my GPA was shot. I finally told my parents when I was in Seattle for winter break, and they didn’t want to let me go back at first. I made a deal with them—I’d make a B average in every class, or I’d come home. And I did it. I worked my ass off the next semester, and I did it. And now… now I’m feeling a lot better. I have a therapist here, too, and I’m not cured or anything, but for now I feel okay.”

  I try to process all of this as the boat rocks us back and forth, the softest ocean lullaby.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “You—you could’ve told me. I would’ve listened. If that’s what you needed.”

  “I should have done a lot of things. I should have told my parents. I should have gotten help earlier. But I was so embarrassed at first. I was terrified of my parents finding out and wanting me to move back home. And part of me was worried there wasn’t a name for what I was going through and I was always going to be that way.” Slowly, I see the weight of this unhunch his shoulders, straighten his posture. “You’re the first person I’ve told. Well, besides my parents.”

  Another thing I’m not sure how to respond to, except with gratitude. I was a jerk, and yet he still confided in me. If he were anyone else, I’d ask if I could hug him, but I’m not sure what we are at the present moment. I’m not sure if we hug.

  So instead, I reach forward, brushing his hand with a few fingertips. A brief touch to let him know this meant something to me, too. He glances up when I touch him, his eyes full of an emotion I’m not sure I’ve seen before, and there’s an intensity there that makes me drop my hand.

  “Thank you for telling me. And I’m so glad you figured out you don’t have to feel that way.” I sag back against the wall before barreling forward with my own confession. If we have any chance at a friendship, he needs to know I’m in this too. That I can be vulnerable. That I trust him. “I’ve been in therapy too. Not as regularly anymore, but for a couple years, I was going every other week. Then every month, and now it’s only when I’m really having trouble managing it. I have OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. And generalized anxiety disorder, which is pretty common with OCD.”

  He nods slowly, taking this in. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “I—um. So it starts with these obsessions,” I say, the way my first therapist explained it to me years ago. “These thoughts I can’t control. Intrusive thoughts. I’ll be convinced the house will go up in flames if we leave the stove on or that if I lose my keys, I’ll be stranded somewhere and never be able to get home.” They always sound ridiculous when I say them out loud. “And I know they’re illogical. But my brain makes me believe they’re perfectly rational, and so I obsess over them and get even more anxious, and I become desperate to find a way to stop that anxiety, to make sure that the bad thing won’t happen. Most of them are ‘checks’—like, I have to be absolutely sure I have my phone and my keys whenever I open or close my bag. I need to know they’re still in there, so I check, and then I check again, and I get stuck in a loop I sometimes can’t get out of for a while. Sometimes I’ll do it with locking my car, or making sure the stove is off before I leave my house, or that there’s nothing on the floor Edith could get into. Those are compulsions.”

  “So it’s not just handwashing,” he says. “That probably sounds ignorant, but that’s what I would have associated with OCD.”

  “Not for me, no. I’m actually not a very organized person, which is almost annoying—like, if I’m going to have OCD, it should at least make me better at cleaning up!” He cracks a smile at that, like he knows it’s okay to. And it is. “But yeah, that’s what a lot of people think. They’ll say, ‘Oh, you mean you wash your hands a lot?’ or ‘I’m so OCD, I have to have an organized locker.’ It’s not just wanting things to be organized. It’s a real illness, and honestly… it can be brutal.”

  The worst of it was a few years ago: I couldn’t trust that the front door of our house was locked, which made it difficult to fall asleep. So I’d go downstairs, check the lock, come back upstairs—before wondering if I checked it enough, or if maybe while checking it, I’d somehow swiped it with my sleeve or a strand of hair and managed to unlock it. If it wasn’t locked, I was certain someone would break in and kill my family, and it would be my fault for not checking enough. In my mind, that was an inevitability. Back downstairs I’d go, checking it double the length of time… and end up trapped in a loop. It got so bad that for a full month I barely slept through the night.

  What I don’t tell him is that it started when my mom moved out, that I never felt safe in the house with just the three of us. Not because we needed two parents to protect us, but because the house felt off. There’s no other way to explain it. I was stealthy about it back then, though. I didn’t want my parents to have yet another thing to worry about.

  And it just didn’t go away, the anxiety only pushing pushing pushing against my lungs and taking up space inside my head. When my parents finally did figure it out years later, I thought they would brush it off, tell me I was acting silly, but I’d woken them up on more than one occasion, and when I told them I couldn’t control it, they took it seriously. They believed me, took me to a therapist, and slowly, slowly, I’ve gotten better about living with uncertainty. I can understand Tarek’s relief, knowing you don’t have to let your mind betray you over and over.

  “Some of the things you do,” he says softly. “The keys. I’ve noticed. I always thought you were looking for something in your bag. I hope it’s not rude to say that?”

  I shake my head. “No, that’s okay. Sometimes I feel weird about people noticing, but honestly, I think it’s better that they know. Therapy helps, and I take medication too. I’m not embarrassed about it or anything. Or at least, I’m not anymore.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” he says. “We missed out on a lot this past year, huh?”

  “And before that too.”

  He nods, and the two of us are quiet for a while. It isn’t a charged, uncomfortable kind of quiet. For once my mind isn’t a hundred places at the same time. If we were friends before, whatever we’re becoming feels like more of that. Something honest and real and new.

  “It kills me that you said what happened this past year hurt you,” he says, and there’s genuine concern on his face. “Fuck, I am so sorry. For last year, and for this summer, too. You were right—I’ve been overcompensating, and that was shitty. Can you forgive me? For all of it?”

  “Yes,” I say. There’s no hesitation. “Yes.” He visibly exhales, like this has been weighing on him. “You seemed so confident when you got here.”

  “It was hard to build myself back up over the past year. Therapy and medication helped, of course, but my pride took this massive hit. I really did like my classes, and I love the campus. Especially in the spring, it’s beautiful. I’m interested in this stuff. I just… struggled. Being away from home was harder than I thought it would be. And—” A pause. A softening of his mouth.
“Being away from you… was harder than I thought it would be.”

  I wanted to take my time with it. That was what he said about the email earlier. I was so wrapped up in what he was telling me that it barely registered, but now it’s all I can think about.

  “It was?” I say. That momentary peace is gone. Now I am all charged molecules, a spinning, buzzing brain.

  The space between our bodies grows smaller. “I love Mansour’s, but I also really liked seeing you at work. That was, like, the highlight of my weekend. It was always a little less exciting when we were catering something that wasn’t a wedding.” His long lashes—I swear I’m close enough to see every single one of them. “I missed those weekends while I was away. I missed talking to you, and I missed your weird jokes. I missed you.”

  “I missed you too,” I say, my voice low and scratchy, not at all like I’m used to hearing. “I had no idea. That you felt that way.”

  It’s too hot in this room, but I don’t dare make a move to leave.

  Now his eyes on me are so far from steel. They’re flint, maybe. Something that could start a fire. He gives this strange scrape of a laugh, one that indicates he doesn’t find this all that funny. An anxiety-laugh—the kind of laugh I am very familiar with. “Quinn, I was crushing on you last summer too,” he says. “The boat I rented—that was for you.”

  I have to clutch the wall to keep from swaying. It must be the choppy water beneath us, the lullaby turning frantic, that’s messing with my stomach.

  “Oh.” At first I can only manage a single syllable, my mind racing to fit this final piece into our relationship puzzle. “Oh my god. I didn’t—I had no idea.”

  For me. The boat was for me.

  That doesn’t make it any more romantic, or at least it shouldn’t. He didn’t know me well enough to know I wouldn’t have liked it, and obviously I made that clear to him. But something happens in the upper-left section of my chest that indicates otherwise. Maybe it was all performance, maybe it didn’t mean anything—but it was a performance for me.

  “Yeah,” he says, a little sheepish now. “I kind of figured. My parents have friends that rent it out, and I thought it would be… the opposite of what it turned out to be.”

  “I thought it was for Elisa.”

  “Wait. What? Why would you think it was for Elisa?”

  Ugh, now I have to spell it out. “You’d seemed close for a while. I just… I just assumed.”

  “Elisa and I are friends,” he says. “Good friends—there’s a certain bond you develop when you have to explain to ten kids in a row that no, we don’t have any macaroni and cheese. But that’s it. I’ve never had feelings for her, and that boat wasn’t for her. Is that why you keep bringing her up?”

  Slowly, I nod. I’m still trying to understand all of this. “Holy shit. I shouldn’t have said those things about it. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, no, it’s okay. I know that wasn’t what you wanted, and the timing was off. Guess we wound up on a boat together anyway.” I can’t tell if he’s inching closer to me or if the heat has made me delirious. “I never laugh more than when I’m around you. And you were—you are so damn cute.”

  Cute. Tarek thinks I’m so damn cute.

  “I’m eighty percent sweat right now,” I inform him. “Ten percent ginger ale, and ten percent Whitney Houston songs.”

  “I stand by what I said.” He reaches a hand toward my forearm, and it is not the innocent, calming gesture I made earlier. It’s electricity, white-hot, and it sparks up my arm and down to my toes. “I thought you knew. I thought that was why you sent that email—which I loved, by the way. That’s what I would have said if I’d responded the way I should have. I would have told you I liked you.” Another step forward. “That I’d been wondering what it would feel like to kiss you since last June.”

  He says this so breezily, like kissing is a completely normal way for the two of us to interact, as opposed to the firework it is in my head.

  Now there’s only a whisper of space between our bodies. He could burn me up with how warm he is, and I wouldn’t care. After all this time, I need to know what he feels like. I want a hand in his hair and a thumb on his cheekbone and my hips right up against his. “Do you… still? Want to do that?”

  “Yes.” That single syllable is a demand and a plea at the same time. It turns my throat dry, pushes me that final inch toward him. The walls could be closing in on us, and I don’t think I would notice.

  “That’s a shame, because I was actually about to go—”

  He traps the rest of my words between us, his lips meeting mine in a desperate clash. For a moment I entertain the thought that No-Boy Summer has been a spectacular failure. Then I kiss him back.

  There isn’t a sense of longing in the kiss, at least, not the kind of longing “I missed you” might convey. It’s fast, deep, punctuated by rough breaths that do little to give me the air I need. I find I don’t care. His mouth is warm, and he tastes like frosting and spearmint gum and all of our past summers.

  He places three fingertips on my jaw, gentle at first, before his hands drop to my waist, settling on my hips. I weave my fingers through his hair, that wonderful hair, run my hands along his ever-present scruff, like a razor just can’t keep up with his genetics. When his fingers hook through my belt loops, he tugs me closer before pinning me against the washing machine. I have never before loved belt loops this much. A dial digs into my back—another thing I can’t bring myself to care about.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he says with a sheepish laugh, a thumb rubbing my hip bone through the fabric of my slacks.

  Before I can pounce on him again, our phones buzz in rapid succession, and we trade apologetic looks as we reach into our pockets.

  “We’re being summoned,” I say, holding up my B+B chat. Where are you? Docking in fifteen.

  He shows me an almost identical message from Harun, and I step back to give us both some space. Between gulps of air, I straighten my shirt. The messiness of his clothing sends another jolt of satisfaction through me.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “We probably shouldn’t show up together. In case we look… suspicious.”

  “Right.” With shaky hands, I do my best to re-form my hair into something resembling a style. “Okay. I’ll, um—see you out there?”

  When I’m back on land later, I’m still dizzy with the scent of him, the press of his fingertips lingering on my skin.

  14

  Cute or trying too hard?” Julia says, gesturing to a welcome mat that says DORM SWEET DORM. It’s a game we’re playing at Target. Fringed blankets, fairy lights, and succulents are calling our names.

  Well—they’re calling Julia’s. I’m here for moral support.

  “I want to say cute.” I lean against Julia’s shopping cart, assessing it. “But it could honestly go either way.”

  “Trying too hard,” Julia says emphatically.

  “I’m starting to think you don’t value my opinion.”

  “Excuse me,” she says, faux-offended. “I absolutely do. It’s just not as meaningful as mine.”

  It feels like we haven’t done something just the two of us since the beginning of summer. Julia and Noelle confessed their feelings after their movie date, and while I’m glad they’re officially together, I’ve missed my best friend.

  It’s the first week of July, which means that in eight short weeks, she’ll get on a plane to New York, and I’ll drive home from the airport, willing myself not to cry. We’ve weathered other separations: different Jewish summer camps, the art intensive Julia did two summers ago, the three-week road trip the Kirschbaums took through the Pacific Northwest the summer before high school. But this one feels so permanent. That will be her home, while I’ll be staying here. A prisoner up in my tower.

  We pass other almost-freshmen trying to talk their parents into buying mini fridges and record players, because nothing screams college like music snobbery.

  “Trying too hard,” Julia whispers.
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  “Has Noelle done her college shopping yet?” I ask as we turn down the bath aisle.

  “She said she’s going to do most of it when she gets there so she doesn’t have to take too much with her. Which is starting to sound really smart,” Julia says as she eyes her cart.

  “And you two—things are going well?”

  “It’s just as I feared. The more time I spend with her, the more I like her.”

  I clutch my heart. “My baby’s in love.”

  “I didn’t say love. Did I say love?”

  “Your face did.”

  “Damn my overly expressive eyes.” She tries to school her face into a non-expression but spectacularly fails, letting out a frustrated little whine. “I like her. A lot. Let’s go with that.”

  “Speaking of… well, not love, but two people who are attracted to each other spending time together… Tarek and I, um, kissed on Saturday. On a boat.”

  I’d wanted to wait to tell her in person. I could barely sleep Saturday night, even though we got home after one a.m., and last night I replayed it so many times when my head hit the pillow that for a moment I convinced myself it all happened inside my mind. Saying it out loud reminds me it was real, his warm mouth and the press of his tongue and the way his thumb stroked my hip bone.

  “Excuse me.” Julia brings the cart to an abrupt halt. “We’ve been hanging out for a whole hour and you have yet to tell me about a boat kiss?”

  She says this last part in a whisper-shout that draws attention from a few shoppers around us. A mother pushing a toddler in a cart gives me a look that I can’t describe as anything other than Bravo, stranger.

  I feel my face flush. “Does it make it better or worse that it was a yacht? And we were in a very small, very cramped laundry room?”