• There she was. Sitting diagonally in front of him and a couple of rows over. Head tilted to the side to keep her side bangs out of the green eyes that were glancing between the board and the notebook page that she was covering with meticulous notes in purple ink. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, mostly faded red, but with light brown roots starting to show. Her neck was exposed, the skin pulled taut by her head tilt.

    ‘How many times did I kiss that neck?’     he thought, remembering all at once the way the skin, still winter pale, felt under his lips. He clearly recalled how warm the flesh would grow as she arched her neck to allow him better access because that was one of her favorite places to be kissed.

    Unaware of his eyes on her, she raised her hand to give input to the class discussion. Her voice was loud enough to carry through the room, each word clear, but with a thick, almost sticky undertone to it that sounded as if she was getting over a cold. Somewhat raspy, it was the same voice that she’d used to tell him of her love for the first time. She’d been miserably ill and had ordered him to stay away as a result. Her roommate tipped him off that she needed some cheering up so he had showed up at her door with bottles of cough syrup and orange juice. After she’d berated him for not listening to her well-meaning orders, she’d thrown her arms around him and said, “I love you.”

    He loved to hear her say those words and to repeat them back to her, especially because it never failed to make her smile. The last time they’d talked one on one, she hadn’t smiled at all. It’d been his fault, the tears on her face. He was a junior that was highly uncertain about his future. He was so uncertain that that uncertainty spilled over to areas of his life that he’d previously been so sure of.

    “New Jersey is pretty far from Ohio,” he’d told her. “We won’t be able to see each other all summer. And I hardly get to see you now because of my workload.” She, a freshman taking upper level courses at a college several states from her home nodded understandingly, the look on her face grim and betraying the fact that she was dangerously close to tears. “And besides,” he continued, “I don’t want to be in a committed relationship after college so what’s even the point of us being together now?”

    She protested, insisting that if that was the case they should just make good of what time they had to them. However, her words were falling on deaf ears. He listened, but not really, and then reiterated his points. There was a long silence and then she said, her voice tiny and strained with the effort of keeping back her tears, “So does that mean you want to break up with me?”

    Uncertainty prevailed for him again. “I don’t know,” he told her.

    A look that he couldn’t place an adjective on passed over her face and then her eyes spilled over. It was difficult for her to get the words out through her tear clogged throat, but she said, “Well, I really don’t want to do this because I really, really like you, but I think we shouldn’t be together anymore. Because it isn’t fair to me if you don’t know what you want.”
    At the time he was relived, glad she’d saved him the trouble of removing this one variable from the equation of his life. He’d been worrying so much about his future that he had checked out of his relationship with her.

    For the next month whenever he saw her, even when she looked happy she didn’t really seem happy. And whenever they happened to pass each other in the Quad or one of the classroom buildings, she wouldn’t look at him and appeared to pick up her pace just to get away from him. There was also the time when he’d happened to pass through the cafeteria after the dinner rush and spot her sitting at a table with several of her friends as she cried, and cried hard from the look of it. Clearly, she was suffering. He gave it no more than a passing thought, however, as he returned to his single life habits of drinking to excess and flirting outrageously with anything that was female.

    As time wore on and she appeared to be growing happier, he began to miss having someone to chat with online, having someone who would listen to his occasional ranting, someone to make fun of television and movies with, someone to make smile by telling her he loved her. And now here she was, on a Monday morning, sitting in class, unaware of his longing for her. Idly, she tucked a loose bit of hair behind her ear as he wished that it could be his hand doing so.

    Before he realized how much time had passed, their professor dismissed the class. As she turned to put her things in her backpack, she caught him looking at her. Their eyes met and, swift as a cyclone, she looked away and swung her bag onto her back before leaving the room. He followed, but she deftly navigated the crowd rushing down the stairs. Finally, outside in front of the building, he caught up with her. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

    She turned around, her reluctance to do so reading plainly on her face. “What is it?”
    He wasn’t entirely sure why she was giving him her attention, but he knew he had to make the most of it. “I miss you.” She folded her arms across her chest; he started to get a sense of what her response would be, but he plowed ahead anyway. “I want to get back together.”
    Her face flickered through several emotions. He caught sadness, pity, and what was perhaps the faintest glimmer of hope, but it was gone too fast for him to really tell. Finally it settled on an expression that was neutral, but soft.

    “I…I can’t,” she said, all classroom confidence gone out of her voice. “I’m not looking for Mr. Perfect, but I’ve realized you’re definitely not who I thought you were.” For a moment she looked as if she might start to cry, but she bit her lip and the look receded. “And, besides, I don’t think I can survive breaking up with you again. It nearly shattered me. I’ve only just got back on my feet. It was hard as hell for me to get back to normal and I’ve decided that you aren’t worth the pain of a second break up.” She looked him square in the eye before she said, her voice gaining a strong edge of finality, “My answer is no.”

    Then she walked away. He could tell by the way she was carrying herself that she was proud of herself for resisting, but he had never felt more depressed.