The Promise

by Melody Grace

  The first dusting of snow settled over Harvard Square the morning I arrived at work to find Kelsey had cut her hair short, a blunt exclamation point of a haircut razor-sharp against her jaw.

  “Wow,” I said, greeting her in the back room amongst the stacks of delivery boxes and old abandoned sweaters. “It’s . . . different.”

  “I hate it. Whatever. Moving on.” She slammed her locker shut and turned, revealing bloodshot eyes and a bare face: no smudged blank ink to disguise the raw, wrecked expression in her gaze.

  I inhaled in a rush. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Kelsey . . .”

  “It’s fine.” She forced a thin-lipped smile. “If he wants to go fuck every desperate groupie on the Eastern seaboard, that’s his prerogative.”

  Guy. I exhaled. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.” She was blazing and defiant, even with heartbreak written all over her face. “I told you, this is how it always goes. Guy, Theo, they’re all the same.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s true.” Kelsey laughed sharp, rasping. “God, look at you. You’re still hoping he’ll come back. Like that would ever make up for leaving in the first place.”

  I tried not to bridle at her disdain. I hadn’t mentioned Theo once in all those weeks, and she hadn’t asked, but I’d felt the question in her gaze. “It’s different,” I said softly.

  “If you want to spend your life being a total doormat, sure, go ahead.” Kelsey pulled down a black apron and knotted it angrily at her waist. “But for me, one strike and they’re done.” She pushed through the doors out to the bustle of the café, her boots stomping with determination.

  Was that what they all thought of me, waiting for Theo to come back around? The thought needled at me, pricking all day long as I went about my work. Our time together felt so unfinished, barely yet begun. But that was the storybook version of affairs; I was still holding out hope the daydream rules would still apply. The boy would come back, the kiss would be continued. Even when I knew that happily ever after was impossible, I’d still put my stock in all the rest. I should have learned by now that the plotline never worked so simply. Characters could depart your life without a moment’s warning, and the resolutions we so desperately wanted stayed lingering, just beyond our reach.

  The door jangled that afternoon, and Guy came sweeping in. Theo’s Indy outfit had been a costume, but Guy wore his persona like a second skin. Today, it was a button-down shirt and black drainpipe jeans, with a scarf knotted at his neck like an eighteenth-century cravat. I looked anxiously around; Kelsey was wiping down tables in front, with no counter to shield Guy from the scathing slice of her voice.

  “No.” She stopped him before he’d said a single word.

  “But babe—”

  “I said, no. Whatever you have to tell me, I couldn’t be less interested.” She strode back towards the register, and I had to jump out of her determined path, taking refuge behind the pastry cabinet as Guy followed, a hangdog look on his face.

  “But nothing happened! You’re overreacting, I promise, babe, it’s just a misunderstanding.”

  Kelsey spun, glaring. “I didn’t misunderstand the naked photos on your fucking phone!”

  Guy blinked, cleared his throat. “I didn’t ask her to send them! She’s crazy, just looking to stir shit up. Are you going to let her ruin this?”

  “Great, turn it all around on me.” Kelsey turned to the next unfortunate person in line. “Next,” she demanded, hard enough to make the grown man flinch.

  “I . . . I can wait,” he whispered, looking anxiously back and forth between them.

  I quickly edged closer. “Let me take this one.” I tried to steer her aside. “Why don’t you go talk in private?”

  “I’m fine.” Kelsey glared at the customer. “What do you want?”

  He placed his order in halting tones, and Kelsey set about attacking the coffee machine with enough venom to make all of us shrink back.

  Guy rounded the counter. “Baby—”

  “Don’t you dare baby me.”

  “Nothing happened,” Guy insisted, pushing back his shock of dark fringe. “So she sent me some pics, girls do it all the time. You should see some of the groupies I turn down.”

  “Oh, lucky me. You want a fucking gold star?” Kelsey set the latte in front of her panicked customer with a clatter, hot liquid sloshing over the edge.

  “Baby—”

  “I told you, don’t call me that. Don’t call me at all.” Kelsey slammed the register closed, then pushed past me, disappearing into the back room.

  Guy stared after her with a mournful expression, then caught me watching. “Nothing happened,” he insisted. “It was just a couple of drinks.”

  I looked around. Their fight had drawn an audience, and I could see the delighted whispers from a group of freshman girls by the window. “You should go,” I told him.

  “You believe me, don’t you?”

  I looked away. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. She’ll calm down,” I added gently. “You just need to give her some time.”

  Guy shook his head, and jammed his hands in the pockets of his coat. “Women,” he muttered, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in the resigned disdain. I watched him leave—past the table of giggling adoration—and wondered how much of his protesting was genuine, and how much was for show. He’d picked the fight in public, after all, still choosing the spotlight despite Kelsey’s fierce privacy. Perhaps he’d imagined it playing out differently: a grand romantic reunion, with us all witnessing, a kiss to charmed applause.

  We all grew up believing in fairytales, that the messy chaos of the heart could possibly make sense.

  I slipped back on my break and found Kelsey unpacking deliveries. “Can you believe that guy?” she huffed, tearing into another box with an X-acto knife. Guy was lucky he’d come by before she’d armed herself.

  “He said nothing happened.”

  “And I’m just supposed to believe him?” Kelsey looked up, and I saw for the first time the anguish in her naked stare.

  “I don’t know. But you could give him a chance to explain.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not one of those girls who turns the other way. I’m not going to waste my time on some asshole who doesn’t deserve it.”

  “So you’re just giving up?” I asked, feeling a curious twist in my chest.

  Kelsey narrowed her eyes. “I can’t trust him.”

  “Or maybe you haven’t tried,” I shot back.

  She got to her feet. “How is this any of your business?”

  “You kind of made it our business when you had a shouting match in front of everyone,” I pointed out. “Come on, what’s the harm in just hearing him out? Just shutting down like this, you’re not giving him a chance.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Kelsey’s voice rose. “You’re supposed to be my friend, and you’re acting like on of his fucking fangirls. Is this about Theo?” she added. “Do you think if I’m still with Guy, you’ll have a way of running into him again?”

  “No, this is about you, and the relationship you’re just throwing away!” I couldn’t keep my voice from rising, the heat pounding in my body. “I’ve seen you with him, you’re happier, you actually crack a smile for once in your life. I don’t understand why you’re ready to just walk away and leave all that for good!”

  Didn’t she realize how rare that was? Couldn’t she see what a privilege she was tossing aside, as if it didn’t matter? As if she couldn’t care less.

  I realized too late how I was overreacting. I stepped back, my heart still racing, a thunder aching in my head. “I’m sorry,” I muttered quickly. “You’re right, it’s none of my business.”

  Kelsey seemed to soften, to look at me with something like pity in her expression. “It’s OK,” she told me. “I really am fine. Or, I will be,” she corrected herself. “Yes, I cared about him, but it doesn’t matt
er now.” She shrugged, reaching to take her jacket down and tug it over her shirt. “There’ll be other guys, there always are.” She paused on her way out, and touched my arm lightly. “For you, too.” Then she was gone.

  But I was still wound tightly: my cheeks hot, a vice-like grip clenched around my skull. My head beat with an insistent thunder, so hard it stung to bear.

  I was still trying to process my sudden passion when Mika paused in the doorway and looked me up and down. “You don’t look so hot. Don’t tell me you’re getting sick as well.”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m serious, the last thing I need is another staffer sneezing all over the register. You should go home.”

  “It’s just a headache.” I went to my locker and pulled a pill bottle from my bag. I held it up as evidence, quickly swallowing one down. “See? I’ll be fine.”

  He strode forwards and pressed his hand to my forehead. “You’re burning up. Get out of here, take tomorrow off too.”

  “But—”

  “I mean it.” His usually placid expression turned stern. “You’re a walking health hazard like this. Home, bed, hot soup, that’s an order.”

  I reluctantly took my things and wrapped up against the cold. Flu was going around, and people had been calling in sick all week. It had been a boon for me: extra shifts, and tip share too, enough to invest in a new roll of canvas, this one to stretch over ten feet tall, if I could possibly find the space. Now, I reluctantly left the café before my shift was up, counting those lost dollars and resenting Mika for his over-cautious plans.

  It was snowing steadily now, but I didn’t go home. I found myself cycling a slow loop instead, along the red brick walls that bordered the old Harvard campus. Wrought iron gates invited me in on every block, spilling over with students and dark, thick ivy, but I kept pedaling through the crystalline flakes. To where, I wasn’t yet sure.

  I was still furious at Kelsey, although I knew she was right. It wasn’t my business, and Lord knew, I had no soft spot for Guy’s side of the story. But her recklessness stung; it burned with the careless ease with which she discarded him, so sure in the future that would come to take his place.

  There will be other guys . . .

  Hope had been certain too, once. Sure, she flirted and danced, ticking off men from her list like they were mere playthings along the road, always quick with the sarcastic dismissal, an exasperated roll of her mascara-smudged eyes, but deep down, in the dark of the night, she’d always believed that love, that love with a capital L would be hers by rights before the end. How could it not? Every movie we watched, every song on the radio dial, every poem and story and private confession revolved around the mystery and glory of it all. It was woven so deeply into the fabric of our lives—the one story society told to us in a million different forms from the day we were born, once upon a time, that we never once questioned happily ever after would arrive for us too, one day.

  Until those days could be counted off the calendar, measured by pill bottles lined up on her bathroom ledge, and the ever-shortening period outside those hospital hallways. I could see it, the closer the end came: how her studied ease hid a raw, dark desperation as the truth finally dawned. There would be no other guys for her, no “one day,” no taste of the sweetness we’d all been sold. Of all the things she wouldn’t get to do, this one was the one that tore her up inside, a jagged wound gaping wider by the dwindling day.

  “I wanted to feel everything,” she told me, her throat raw and rasping as the heart monitors beeped their stuttering song. The failure rang in every word, the razor blade of bitter regret. “Every last fucking thing.”

  I could only sit beside her and squeeze her grasping hand. We both knew there were no platitudes to save her now, no pretty words to dull the pain of such an empty death. To live and not know love was a slow, quiet cruelty. But to die without that knowledge?

  That was the cruelest fate of all.

  On my third loop, I veered right through the gates and dismounted, locking my bicycle into a rack with the rest of them and striding up the neat pathway before I could change my mind. I found a campus map etched into a solid statue, and carefully wove my way through the bundled-up crowds until I found Emerson Hall, sitting squarely on the edge of Harvard Yard. The stately red brick looked out over an immaculate quadrangle, the grass covered now with a fresh snowfall, and already, students were attempting to gather the soft flakes into small snowmen; laughter emerging with puffs of steam as they played and jostled in the cold.

  I hurried up the front steps and into the echoing warren of hallways and classroom doors. The scent hit me right away, that low musty note of used bookstores, footsteps echoing on the worn linoleum floors. I passed old wooden cubbyholes and peeling notice boards, layered thick with their flyers for class seminars, open-mic nights, and enthusiastic “roommate wanted” ads. A group of girls walked by me, my age I would have guessed; they wore long scarves and jackets, boots and jeans, clutching book bags and binders as they made plans to meet later and study. They didn’t give me a second glance.

  Were they in Theo’s seminar, I wondered? Did they huddle in the back row, watching his every move, seeing the light in his eyes when he got carried away on a subject, or that bashful smile when he said too much, too far? It had been almost six weeks since that night on the rooftop. Christmas was coming, and for all I knew, he could have moved on: found another girl to romance with Wordsworth and that dazzling smile. Another Brianna, older and sophisticated, or maybe a wide-eyed freshman to hang from his every word.

  Even the thought of it made my headache grow. I had no rights to him, none at all, but still the sense that he was mine strummed through every cell in my body, despite the silence, the distance, the time. Kelsey would have called me naïve; Hope would have given me a sympathetic smile and braced me for the sting of disappointment, but neither of them knew what I did now. That he’d awakened something I was privileged to even glimpse, and every day that passed made me more certain our story wasn’t yet done.

  It took me several wrong turns, up flights of stairs and down echoing corridors before I found the door with his name printed, neat on a card stock slide behind a Plexiglass frame. There were murmurs of voices inside, so I waited, my back to the wall as I tried to corral my now-racing heart.

  I could have backed out. I had twenty long minutes there, listening to the voices drift up on a cool breeze through the open window, watching the snowflakes turn thicker, a flurry from the gray glazed skies. Every heartbeat tempted me to turn on my heel and go. I didn’t belong there, in this collegiate world, a hum of learning that I’d never even wanted to join. What made me think this wouldn’t have ended in disaster? My raw, bruised heart offered up like sacrifice, when by any sound logic I should have been long gone.

  I didn’t know. I had nothing on my side except blind, restless faith. And Hope, of course, burned deep into my mind, and etched on that rubber band around my wrist. Her last requests, the certainty of her fading stare.

  Don’t you fucking dare let me down this time.

  The voices inside Theo’s office grew louder. I caught my breath, straightening as the door swung open, and a teenage boy stepped out, struggling to pull on his coat and juggle half a dozen hardback books.

  “Just remember to be concise, and use your footnotes more effectively,” Theo’s voice came from behind him, steady and reassuring. “It’s still early days yet, you’ll get the hang of it.”

  “I’ll try.” The boy saw me waiting. “Sorry, we ran long.” He turned back. “Thank you again. See you in class.”

  “Chapters three through twelve! Now, what can I help you . . .?” Theo’s question faded as he reached the doorway and saw me standing there. “. . .with,” he finished, the word falling to the empty floor between us.

  There was no turning back now.

  Chapter Ten

  “Hi,” I whispered, almost lost under the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. I ignored th
e headache, the chill of evening breeze, the clatter of students spilling from a classroom just beyond, down the hall. There was nothing in the world but us, just like it was supposed to be.

  God, I’d missed him. I’d been apart from him so long it hit me like the first time all over again. The grace of his limbs under that rumpled button-down shirt, the line of his jaw, and that dirty blonde hair falling too long again over steady blue eyes. The way my heart skittered faster in my chest, so wild I could have taken flight from a single word; the word he breathed like a prayer, a benediction.

  “Claire.”

  Theo looked at me, and the shock on his face slowly melted away. He took two steps closer and reached to press his palm softly against my cheek. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling his touch sink through me, rolling slowly through every taut wire and shivering string. He was there. He was touching me. “I don’t give up so easy.”

  I forced myself to look at him, so close, so bright, it hurt. “Should I?” I made myself ask, watching his face for the last sign that could send me running, the only way I would have ever walked away. If he didn’t want me, not even an ounce of what I felt for him.... I would have taken anything he had to give me; only nothing at all would be too little to bear.

  But Theo slowly shook his head. “No,” he murmured, leaning to rest his forehead against mine. I could feel his breath on every slow exhale, the shake of tension as his grip tightened on mine. “Don’t give up on me, Claire. Please, never give up.”

  We held each other for a century, not moving there in the fading rays of afternoon light. A heartbeat drummed, mine or his I couldn’t tell you; all I knew was the sense of belonging, of rightness that echoed through me, rising stronger until I felt invincible enough to tilt my mouth upwards and seek the answer I needed more than air.