The One That Ran Away

by Hildred Billings

  I was also doing my laundry. It must have been a weekend night, because all the machines were full, and people didn’t do their best to come get their crap. You know how it is. All you want to do is your damned laundry, but you’re up against a dorm full of assholes who don’t remember they left their pile of laundry in a machine for half the day.

  I excused myself from the movie to swap my laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. Naturally, there were no dryers available. I picked one with a load that had long cooled off, signaling that the negligent owner of this wardrobe had really been out to lunch – and probably wouldn’t give a shit if I did what anyone else does in this situation.

  Fists full of clothing came out of the dryer. Shirts, pants, towels, and yes, underwear, piled up on top of the machine so I could dry my clothes. It was a woman’s collection, not that I recognized any of it. I said a silent apology, hoping she wouldn’t be too pissed that her thongs and sheer T-shirts ended up on the machine, but hey, she should’ve been by to get them!

  I held a suspiciously tiny pair of purple underwear up and shook my head. It was followed by a lacy white bra that made me blush.

  “That’s mine,” she said.

  By that time, I knew her voice. Soft. Melodic. A tiny sarcastic bite that only made me more curious about her. That night, with her underwear in my hand, she approached me with a laugh of disbelief and a casual swagger that made me want to sell my soul to the devil.

  “S… sorry!” I slammed her underwear on top of the pile. Tucked beneath her arm was an empty laundry basket. “I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, no problem.” She kept her eyes forward as she came closer to me. God, she smelled like spring rain. I didn’t know what that smelled like until that point. Was she fresh from the shower? Was that why she took so damn long to come get her stuff?

  Or had something else been afoot? Something from the cosmos, conspiring to make us bump into each other? I know we lived in the same dorm, but it was a big one. What were the odds that the woman whose thong I had in my hand belonged to her?

  “Better you than one of the guys.”

  I cocked my head, still flabbergasted that this had happened. “Huh?”

  She began dumping her clothes into the laundry basket. “Better you than a guy going through my underwear. Can you imagine if one of these dudes found this?” She held up a pair of electric blue underwear. Naturally, my brain went there. Images of her wearing that, and nothing else.

  Obviously, she didn’t know I was gay. Because my twenty-year-old brain was so dirty that I had been undressing her with my eyes every time we bumped together. I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t help it! She was everything I found attractive in a woman, and I yearned to know what else there was to her. Including beneath her clothes.

  Well, now I knew. Electric blue underwear and lacy bras. That did not improve things.

  “By the way,” she said, tucking her feathery hair behind her ears. “Thanks for coming to that party the other night. It could’ve been a total bomb if you didn’t bring your friends.”

  “Hey…” My attempt to sound normal almost embarrassed me to my core. Surely, she saw right through me. She knew how much I wanted to kiss her. She had to have! It was tattooed on my forehead and throbbing with every glance she shot me. “I hear there’s free food around here, and I show up! Although I really did need to drag my friends.” Sara was antisocial, and the exchange students still not confident in their English abilities. Making sure they had fun at the party had distracted me from my growing attraction to this woman. “If you have more parties like that, I’ll help!”

  It was the beginning of my overeagerness. I wanted excuses to see her more often. I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to either fall more in love with her, or discover reasons why it would never work – so I could get over her. It didn’t matter how we did it. I’d join the fucking dorm council if it meant seeing her every week at the meetings.

  Dinner with her. Doing homework with her. Even if we never dated, I wanted to at least be a friend who saw her often enough to bask in her aura. Her energy was like a magnet pulling me to her. Bam. A chain in my gut. Dragging me. Cutting me open.

  “That could be helpful. What was your name again?”

  “Jessica.” Why did I tell her my full name? Even my friends didn’t know my real name was Jessica. “You can call me Jess.” I wanted that to sound special. That only she got to call me that, though everyone – from close friends to professors in my department – knew me by that name.

  “See you around, Jess.” She hoisted her basket up and showed herself out. Not once did she look back at me.

  She left a plain white sock behind. By the time I worked up the nerve to chase her down and give it to her, she was already gone.

  Next time.

  ***

  That same twisted fate that made Jess grab Shannon’s underwear must have been the same one that made her shopping cart slam ahead.

  Shannon jerked up from the freezer. Her bra strap was all the way down her arm now, and when she spun around, her black tank top revealed a nipple breaking free from its cotton prison. Great. You were standing over that freezer for a while, huh?

  “Hi…” Jess pushed her cart out of the way. “Sorry.”

  The man in the fedora shoved his way between them. A convenient excuse to move farther apart.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Jess was taken aback by the sudden hostility. Because that nipple wasn’t the only sharp thing on Shannon’s person. “Shopping. Like you, I guess.”

  “Do you live around here or something?”

  A woman shopping with her toddler looked at them. This was Portland, after all. Even the gentrified core of Northwest wasn’t immune to random fights breaking out in the middle of any supermarket.

  “I don’t, actually. Just do a lot of work around here.” Jess clasped her hand on the back of her neck and turned away. “You? You live around here now?” Jess had been coming to Northwest for almost three years. Seeing Shannon twice in one week insinuated she was a recent transplant.

  “I do.” Shannon said nothing more than that.

  “Well…” Jesus! Could this get any more awkward? Jess hadn’t expected Shannon to treat her with such disdain. Given how we ended things… Well, maybe it wasn’t that farfetched. Except it was eight years ago! Shit! What kind of chip did this woman have on her shoulder now? We’ve both changed since college. Not physically, though. Because Shannon was still the most beautiful woman in the supermarket – and the mother shopping behind her looked like a former beauty queen.

  “Sorry again. See you around, Shannon.” Jess gripped her cart and pushed forward. Shannon’s eyes burned a hole in the back of her head.

  Jess told herself that she wouldn’t steal one last look before lining up to check out. Yet how she could avoid it, when Shannon checked out two lanes away? Luckily, her back was to Jess, giving the impromptu stalker a great view of someone’s ass in those tight jeans.

  “Ma’am?” The cashier said to Jess. “Did you bring your own bag?”

  Jess jerked herself back to the world of the living. She pulled her shopping bag out of her cart and handed it to the cashier. By the time she left, she was yards behind Shannon – and possessed with memories that refused to let her go.

  Chapter 4

  Shannon

  Oregon wasn’t as rainy as Shannon remembered. Even though she moved there in time for the rainiest season of the year, she was more shocked to find a light dusting of snow on the ground Christmas Eve than by how dry it was the rest of the winter.

  That suited her Californian ass fine. Sun was necessary for one’s survival. That’s why Shannon had stocked her apartment with a SAD light and enough vitamin D pills to last her the rest of her life. Or the end of the summer. Whichever came first.

  It also meant enjoying restaurant meals outdoors, even at the beginning of February. Cafés and restaurants hesitantly added outdoor se
ating, looking toward the sky as if they didn’t trust the blue hue and the bright, flaming orb making its way to the horizon. Most of the seats were tucked back inside before dinner. But for lunch, Shannon and her close friend Kelsey were more than happy to enjoy their sandwiches and fries along the busy sidewalks of Northwest 21st and 23rd.

  Shannon drummed her nails on the metal table while waiting for Kelsey to get back from the bathroom. A large No Smoking sticker stared back at her. Thanks. I’ll suffer, I guess. Shannon had attempted to kick her habit multiple times over the years, but when a girl got hooked because her high school boyfriend decided he couldn’t date “squares,” well, what was Shannon supposed to do? Say no to cigs and weed?

  The things I’ve done for the guys I’ve dated. The things she had done for women.

  She had done more things for Kelsey than any other woman. Like agreeing to come to a restaurant stuffed with carbs and sodium. And sugar, probably, but when Kelsey said she needed a hearty helping of hamburgers and fries, they couldn’t think of anywhere else to come. That was cheap, anyway.

  “Sorry. I drank so much water at the gym earlier.” Kelsey sat down, her tiny braids shoving across her shoulder from the force of her weight planting against the metal chair. “God! I swear, if I’m not pumping my weight by the end of the year, kill me.”

  “Might need you to kill me first,” Shannon muttered.

  “Why?” Kelsey snorted. “Your ex still giving you hell?”

  I had almost forgotten about Andrew. She only thought about him when at home, where a few memories remained in the furniture Shannon sorely needed to replace. Instead, she spent her whole time out and about fretting that she would bump into Jess again. Twice, now. Twice. She doesn’t live around here, and that’s twice in one week I’ve bumped into her!

  Fuck her. Fuck that chick, seriously.

  “Earth to Shannon!”

  She grabbed her bottle of beer and chugged back half of its contents in one gulp. When the bottom of the glass bottle hit the table again, she said, “You’ll never guess who I’ve been bumping into recently.”

  “Not Andrew, right?”

  “No. He’s long gone.” The guy had taken his transfer and bounced to Eugene. “Remember that girl from college? The one who lived in our dorm for a couple of years and…”

  “You mean the lesbian stalker?”

  Shannon bit back the rest of her words. That’s not how I remember her, exactly. “Probably the same woman you’re thinking about. Anyway, she lives in Portland, I guess. I’ve seen her out and about twice this past week.”

  “Nah. No way.”

  “Yes.” Shannon propped her head upon her hand and stared at the cars and tourists ambling by on the street. The close-quarters of Northwest Portland had appealed to her when she first moved here. Her hometown looked nothing like this. Not nearly as much greenery, and not enough smiling and people attempting to have one of the best days of their lives. It had been infectious, at first. The sort of harmony Shannon strived to have more of in her life. I told Andrew that I wanted to be like a couple we saw at Little Big Burger. A young man and woman shoving truffle fries in each other’s mouths. Every time one of them laughed, Shannon’s heart grew another size. “I saw her at Trader Joe’s the other night.”

  “Oh my God, so she’s already stalking you again?”

  Shannon bristled to hear that. “I wouldn’t say anything she did was stalking. She had it bad for me, that’s all. Honestly, I’ve known way more guys who simply wanted to fuck me and acted way creepier.”

  “Still creepy. She was always going out of her way to bump into you.”

  You mean trying to orchestrate a hundred thousand meet-cutes on a college campus? Shannon had never felt threatened by Jess. Not really. Had things gone the way they were supposed to, then she would be a fond memory of that one time a little lesbian really, really got it bad for Shannon. Like a rite of passage. Up there with getting so drunk that Shannon once passed out in the dorm bathroom. Or that time she jumped in a frigid cold stream on her birthday. Or that time she…

  “It’s not like that,” Shannon insisted. “But it’s unnerving. After Andrew dumps and leaves me, she comes back into my life. Actually,” she chuckled, “I walked into her life. She was doing her thing when I happened to walk into the same café.”

  “Please tell me she’s gained a lot of weight.”

  “What is your problem?”

  “It’s what she would deserve.”

  Shannon almost couldn’t believe it. Kelsey had never liked Jess. Not from the day they first met at a party, and especially not when she found out what she and Shannon had done senior year. I never understood it. I thought maybe Kelsey was a latent homophobe, but she had no problem putting together petitions to offer more protections to LGBT students. Kelsey had the drive and connections to make it onto the student council. It wasn’t all talk, right? It was a super liberal campus, but Kelsey was always so passionate about social justice that her canvassing for legalized gay marriage in the state of Oregon felt genuine.

  Yet something about Jess had set her off.

  “We’ve all gained weight since college,” Shannon muttered. “We’re not twenty-one anymore.”

  “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  “What? Why would I do anything? I’m only saying it’s unnerving and really weird timing!”

  “Suuure. Start documenting evidence for that restraining order now.”

  “What’s gotten into you? Is that guy you’re seeing making your hair stand on end again? I told you to dump him.”

  That was enough to shift the conversation. Good, because I can’t stand this any longer. Shannon hadn’t expected such a vitriolic response to Jess’s resurgence. A stalker? Really? That was rich, considering Shannon was often the one bumping into her or… well…

  Trying to kill her?

  ***

  Memory #4

  Something was wrong with my bike. It hadn’t been right all day, but when I was already late for my first class on the other side of campus, I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what was making me veer to the left every time I tried to turn right.

  I should have taken the time after class to fix it. By the time I was jetting off to have lunch with Kelsey and getting ready for a dorm council meeting, I had no excuse besides being a negligent fool.

  I don’t know what I was thinking about when I took that corner by the student fountain at top speed. It was something I had done a million times before. If anyone got in my way, I rang my bell and expertly rode around them. I knew I was risking it every time I acted like a fool, but I was twenty! Let’s thank God that I wasn’t driving a car back then.

  The bike veered to the left when I wanted to make a sharp right turn. Hug the wall, you know? It was the best way to avoid pedestrians coming around the corner. Instead, I mowed one over like the dumbass I was.

  “Ahh!”

  I’ll never forget that scream of fright. Jess hadn’t seen me coming, and I had no idea that the blur of red and black was her until my bike clipped her arm and sent her down to the pavement.

  I don’t think she knew it was me, either. I honestly could have kept going. Hit and run her ass, you know? God knew it was tempting when I had so much to do.

  But I like to think I was a semi-decent person back then. Maybe not Kelsey levels of seeking justice, but if I hit someone with my bike, I stopped and checked on them.

  “Holy shit!” I almost fell off my bike when I came to a sudden stop. “You okay?”

  The thing I feel the worst about isn’t that I hit her – and there was blood. It was that I vaguely recognized her, but couldn’t remember her name for the life of me. I saw her long brown hair and remembered something about my underwear being in her hands.

  Not the best thing to think about when you’ve hit someone with your bike.

  She swore I hadn’t hurt her, though I had cut a gash in her arm. She clearly needed to go to the campus clinic and get it loo
ked at. It was on the other side of campus. The opposite direction of where I needed to go to meet Kelsey for lunch.

  “Fuck it,” I thought. I had hurt someone. I needed to take care of it, because Jess was obviously in shock if she thought it didn’t hurt.

  Back then, I didn’t know why she sounded so peppy as I escorted her to the clinic. For fuck’s sake, there was blood coming out of her arm! A guy stopped to give us his handkerchief when he saw Jess’s blood. It was nice of him, but I was in such a hurry to get to the clinic that I slammed my hands on her shoulders and shoved her forward.

  She laughed. Can you believe it?

  Now I know why. She was in love with me. Even back then, when I barely remembered her name or that we lived in the same dorm, she was in love with me after only a few short encounters.

  I wish I could say the same about her, but she was just another girl. Pretty, but forgettable. Nice, but I had met nicer. We had nothing in common. I didn’t even know we were both sophomores until much later.

  I dumped her at the clinic as soon as the nurses took over. She waved at me with her good hand and profusely thanked me. My ass couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Not only because I had places to go, but because I was so embarrassed.

  Later, I realized she had a scar on her arm. Not a big one, but I knew how she got it. Every time I saw that scar, I felt a new layer of guilt.

  She still has the scar. I saw it at the supermarket, when she rolled up her sleeves to grab something from the depths of the freezer. I also saw her butt in those pants.

  Kelsey calls her a stalker. Meanwhile, I’m over here hating myself for perving on a woman I dumped eight years ago.

  ***