The One That Ran Away

by Hildred Billings

  “To be fair, you were the one stalking me across campus half of the time.”

  “Stalking you? Gee, never heard that one before.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that… I mean we kept bumping into each other for so long, that it felt like more than mere coincidence.”

  “Funny thing about coincidences.” Jess pushed aside her empty plate. “Sometimes there’s a reason things are happening after all.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “No suppositions,” Jess said. “Coincidences are a convenient excuse when it comes to stuff like that, but fact is, we were on a tiny campus. Of course we bumped into each other. It’s a miracle we never noticed each other until sophomore year. I wonder how many times we bypassed each other freshman year, and never realized it.”

  Shannon sucked in her breath. “Freshman year, I had longer hair and dyed it black. First time you talked to me, I had recently cut my hair and grown out my natural color.”

  Jess laughed. “Well, there you go. I always had a thing for short hair. As soon as the real you came out, I noticed you.”

  Is that how it was? The only reason Shannon cut her hair was to get over her ex. I wanted to feel like a new woman. She felt like she had shared similar sentiments with someone before. Who? Was it around the time Jess cut her hair, too? Had Shannon thought Jess had broken up with a girlfriend and wanted a fresh start? God, how many fresh starts could a girl get in college?

  Endless, weren’t they? College was like that. Every year was a fresh start. Every semester had endless possibilities. Some people took every new class as an opportunity to change their lives. Was that immaturity speaking? A desire to constantly reinvent one’s self? Would Shannon have changed that much if she walked into a class senior year with the attitude that she was now a raging dyke?

  I remember when you cut your hair and I thought you looked like a whole new woman.

  “Do you…” Shannon knew this would come out wrong, but she didn’t know how else to ask it. “Do you have a girlfriend right now?”

  Jess only shuddered for a slight second. Enough for Shannon to notice, but not enough for her to be concerned. “No,” she said. “Afraid I don’t.”

  “I see.”

  “What about your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have one anymore.”

  “We’re both single, huh?”

  I thought she’d be pissed, but now I’m the uncomfortable one! Shannon tucked her hair behind her ear and said, “Looks like it.”

  “Thirty, flirty, and dirty.” Jess chuckled. “Is that how it works? Because when I was twenty, I thought being thirty would be a lot more interesting than this.”

  “Same.”

  The waiter brought them their checks. Jess pulled out her debit card before Shannon could offer to pay for her. I knew I was a terrible date, but damn.

  Date. So this was a date, after all?

  “I’ve gotta get going.” Jess stood up, jacket slung over her shoulder. “Thanks for inviting me out, Shan. It’s nice to catch up. Maybe I’ll see…”

  Shannon stood up as well. “I’ll walk you out?”

  “Uh, thanks. My bus stop is right over there.”

  Shannon’s was in the opposite direction, but she didn’t care. To her, it was more important to follow Jess into the cold night and make sure things were cooler between them.

  Yet the world didn’t act that way. Just because Shannon intended to think or act one way, didn’t mean her brain and body would comply.

  “Take care on your way home.” That’s what she wanted to say. Instead, she brushed her hand against Jess’s and said, “If you want, you could come…”

  She stopped. Eyes widened. Chills claimed her beneath her thick winter coat. Only Jess remained nonplussed as she stood beneath the bright lights of the transit mall.

  “I need to get going,” Jess repeated. Her bus pulled up at that opportune moment. She pulled out her pass and raised her hand in friendly acknowledgment. “See you around, Shan. Have a good one.”

  Jess boarded the bus and was gone.

  What happened? Shannon continued to stand there as if she were waiting for the next bus pulling up to the stop. Just like that, she’s gone?

  This hadn’t gone how Shannon anticipated. Jess was supposed to be into her. Unequivocally. Unrepentantly. Shannon was the most beautiful woman in the world, wasn’t she? She was Venus. She was a Muse. She was the shit angels cried over when they came down to Earth to reclaim their own.

  That was what Jess said eight years ago, when Shannon invited her up to her room and fucked her brains out.

  What had changed?

  Besides… everything?

  Chapter 9

  Jess

  Jess saved the alcohol for home, when she could grab a bottle of rum and sit in the dark of her studio apartment.

  She lived in a quiet Southwest neighborhood, where the rent wasn’t too bad and noise pollution was a minimum at night. The views weren’t great, but who had the time to stare out windows when it was always raining, and she had somewhere to go? The night obscured the surrounding trees. If Jess were lucky, she could see the lights of other apartments shining through the mist.

  She lay her head on her only windowsill and thought of Shannon.

  Just because she had moved on, didn’t mean the memories didn’t still plague her. Shannon had been such a huge part of her college experience, after all. They may have only bumped into each other a few dozen times over three years, but they were some of the biggest memories Jess had. Most of the decisions she made in college were because of Shannon. She was the reason Jess became so outgoing, so desperate to meet new people. The off-chance they would bump into each other somewhere, work on a project together or heaven forbid, go out, was too desirous to ignore.

  Jess had loved her. As much as a woman admiring someone else from the distance could love them, anyway. That didn’t magically go away. It faded. It lost significance. But it didn’t go away.

  She had been an idiot to think anything would have come from that night besides utter frustration. Shannon played her usual games of will she or won’t she. She alluded to things that Jess had firmly put behind her and had no intention of indulging ever again. Do you know how many years it took me to stop thinking about you every single day, Shannon Parker? At least four years. Another four for good measure.

  “Fuck it.” Jess splayed across her bed. Had that woman almost asked her back to her place? Why? So she could fuck around with her some more? She had asked Jess if she had a girlfriend! Was this a terrible replay of college all over again? Perhaps some women really did continue playing those games their whole lives. Shannon seemed the type to have peaked in college. Old habits really died hard with those types.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about that long-ago night. When Shannon invited her up to her room.

  Even before that, though, there was the moment Jess first realized that loving Shannon Parker was a useless, heartbreaking endeavor. It was that memory that caressed her brain as she slowly drank herself to sleep, wondering why she had turned a woman’s invitation down after going without the female touch for way too long.

  ***

  Memory #9

  My housing situation at the start of senior year was a fucking disgrace. Housing had lost my application when I was abroad, which meant I missed every lottery and got stuck in a freshman triple with two whiny ass fuckheads who were away from home for the first time. After showing Housing the email they originally sent me confirming that they had received my application for the lottery, they promised that I would be moved to the top of the wait list. All I had to do was wait for someone to leave a single room or one of the apartments. A wait much too long.

  I returned to school a week early, before the place teemed with teens and others returning right before Labor Day. The campus was eerily quiet. Peaceful at that time of year. I was already considering staying in that town past graduation, or at least seeing if I could get a job around there. I
t wasn’t a terrible place to live.

  My temporary accommodations were across from the student union. I often went there and sat by the fountain to read or write in my journal. I had to admit, that after a few months of not seeing a glimpse of Shannon, I was ready for a fresh start. Sunshine and a quiet campus gives you that impression.

  I saw her that day. She stood on the other side of the fountain, talking to someone on her phone while puffing on a cigarette. I still remember how scandalized I was when I first found out she smoked. I had caught her a year ago on my way out of the student union. We sat on a bench, chatting, her cigarette smoke blowing right in my face. I have a smoke allergy. I put up with the itchy eyes and running nose because I was that desperate to be in her presence.

  That day at the beginning of senior year, she acted as if I didn’t exist.

  She didn’t wave at me. Didn’t say hello. No smile of acknowledgment. I didn’t expect a lot. She was on the phone, after all, but at least a little nod of appreciation would have been nice. We hadn’t seen each other in so long. I hadn’t forgotten the tone of her voice or a single curve of her face. The shade of her captivating hair was as poisonous as it had been that bright day sophomore year, when I first beheld her beauty and wondered what it would be like to be her girlfriend.

  Even though she didn’t speak to me, I still yearned for her. She could’ve called me a bitch to my face, and I’d follow her off the edge of the earth.

  Why? Why did she do that to me? What about her made me snap my head around that day and want to cry?

  I know now. We all have that woman who utterly destroyed us. The one who awakened us. The one we’ve compared every woman since to. The one who would never reciprocate the extreme emotions we felt, the insane rushes of lust that society warned us about. Shannon Parker was mine. I had long accepted I would never be that woman to someone else, because the stars had decided that before I was born.

  She hung up and sat on the edge of the fountain. She still didn’t look at me, but I rehearsed things to say to her. We had both come back from study abroad. I wanted to hear all about Belgium. I wanted to know about the people she met, the food she ate, what had made her laugh, if she had ever felt so homesick that she swallowed her feelings and kicked through another day… I wanted to hear those things that made her human and fascinating.

  I wanted to tell her about myself. She knew my name, but did she know me? Did she know how much I could offer her? I wanted to write songs about her laugh. I wanted to write a whole memoir about what her eyes did to me. I wanted to keyboard smash journal entries about how much life a single glance from her gave me.

  For some reason, the universe had made her sit next to me. For some reason, I knew it was useless to say anything.

  After she finished her cigarette, she stood up and approached the nearby parking lot. A black convertible pulled up, driven by an older man wearing sunglasses and spitting gum onto the pavement. Shannon opened the passenger side door and hopped in. The convertible sped away the moment she reached over and kissed him on the cheek.

  I wanted to throw up.

  You know how it is. You love a girl. The girl doesn’t know you. You don’t know why you love the girl. All you know is that she’s the one, and you’ll never meet someone who does this to you ever again.

  The girl is straight. All the girls are straight.

  You spend all of college wondering why you’re the only lesbian you know. You wonder what it would be like to cuddle with a girl on the couch in the student café. You wonder what it would be like to have a cute girl stop by your room to offer you a kiss. You wonder why your friends have so much relationship drama at their fingertips, and you’re the one manufacturing a nowhere romance between you and some girl who won’t remember you the day after graduation.

  To this day, I think about how much she changed me. There were times I decided that, even if we never knew more than our first names, I could use her as an excuse to come out of my shell and find new opportunities in my early twenties.

  Yet I hadn’t, had I? Because she still controlled me. This woman who didn’t know me from the other girls in her class couldn’t give a shit. She had her own life. I had to get over it.

  That was the day I came out to my mother, bawling over the phone that I was in love with a girl who would never love me back.

  She told me someone would, someday.

  I miss my mother. I wish I had someone with that much optimism about my love life around today.

  ***

  The teashop buzzed with people Jess had never seen before. She hesitated to put out her sign advertising tarot and horoscopes because the number of unfamiliar faces unnerved her. Why? God help me if I ever know. Sometimes Jess got like this. She didn’t consider herself someone with social anxiety, but after the week she had, would it be too much to ask Amanda to drop by and keep her company for a while?

  Nevertheless, she propped up her sign in the hopes someone would pay for her weekly groceries. She was rarely that lucky, but she always hoped.

  She may have also hoped to see Shannon come through those doors, but didn’t hold her breath. Nor did she think it would be a great idea to bump into her. They hadn’t exchanged a single text since parting ways a few nights ago. Like Jess had put some thoughts in Shannon’s head, Jess now dealt with her own demons pecking at her shoulder.

  She set aside her astrology books and pulled out her personal deck of tarot cards. These were different from the old Rider-Waite deck she brought along for public readings. Her personal deck was meant for her. She knew how to read the Rider-Waites and construct easy-to-understand narratives for people who knew nothing about tarot. But if somebody asked her to do a reading with her personal deck, she would become flummoxed. It was too personal, too metaphorical to decipher with spoken words. Besides, everyone who saw this deck quickly became distracted by the cute feline illustrations. Because Jess Mills would use a deck of cats for her divinations.

  While she shuffled the deck, she closed her eyes and thought of a question pressing at her subconscious.

  “What do I do about Shannon? Are her pursuits genuine? Dare I get entangled in her web again?”

  She fanned out her cards and picked the three that spoke to her the most. The first one she turned over was a mother cat leading her litter on a hunt. The second was a solitary cat staring into her soul with nothing but cautionary kindness.

  It was the last one, the one that represented her future, that sent a chill down her spine. A cat drinking water, but the card was upside down.

  Jess had been using this deck for so long that she didn’t need to look anything up. That was part of the problem. The moment she saw the kitties looking back at her, each one representing a pivotal part of her subconscious, she understood an unfavorable narrative.

  That was the thing about tarot. It wasn’t about true divination. It couldn’t tell her what to do to change her fate. People who asked for readings thinking their problems would be solved with one piece of advice sorely misunderstood the point. Tarot was a storyteller. It forced the subject to investigate her soul, her subconscious, and face some of the most infuriating demons to peck away at the heart. For tarot to work, Jess had to be completely open with herself and understand what the cards tried to tell her. That was how an agnostic approached it, anyway. I have to know myself to know what to do. It was what made looking at these cards so brutal.

  The mother cat and her litter were in Jess’s past. She represented learning how the world worked and the basic life experiences everyone went through.

  Unless she was upside down – which she was. Then she represented missed opportunities that other people took for granted. Like having relationships. Any relationships at all, romantic or otherwise.

  “Thanks,” Jess muttered. “For that reminder.”

  She never dated while growing up. Nobody asked her out, and nobody she was interested in were aware of her existence, anyway. College had been her opportunity to start over again.
She didn’t know anybody. They didn’t know anything about her. She had heard tales that college was a hot bed of sexual experimentation. She didn’t need a long-term relationship with a straight woman, but sex? That would’ve been nice.

  It never happened. Well, except for that one time. The time Jess now asked about.

  The card in the middle represented her feelings at the present. Regrets. More missed opportunities. Regrets upon more regrets. Regrets for what I have done in the past, and regrets for things that haven’t come to pass. That was almost too much of Jess’s nature, especially regarding someone like Shannon Parker. That woman was a giant walking regret.

  But it was the future card, the upside-down water drinker, that brought the most unhappiness to Jess’s heart.

  Upside-down cards didn’t have to mean something bad. Sometimes they represented a caveat, or a warning. When upside-right, the cat drinking from an oasis represented a much-needed bounty when times were tough. When upside-down? It meant the water would sustain the cat’s life, but the thirst would always remain.

  Thirst. Why did it have to be thirst?

  The cards were right, as always, with their ugly truths. Jess had been like a wayward kitten back in college, desperate for new life experiences that everyone else already had. Shannon had been her opportunity to change everything. To become a better version of herself. To see what the world truly had to offer. To come up with a plan that would give her the greatest memories she could have wanted.

  Instead, she ended up with regrets that cut her to her core.

  Now? Shannon may quench her thirst for the foreseeable future, but it would never be enough. She would always hold back. Jess would never find her eternal happiness with a flakey woman like that.

  She cleaned up her cards the moment a client approached her table, visage dripping with smiles as she excitedly pointed out Jess’s display to her female companion. Back to work it was.