Page 100 of Here & There

My chest clenches as I think of the three of them. Mac, Nate, Tink. My little gang.

I meet Mac’s eyes. They’re pained, like all he wants to do is come for me.

He even takes a tentative step.

But he pauses when I pull my sleeves over my hands, folding my arms in front of me. Even though I see the sincerity in his eyes, even though Ifeelit in his words, my heart is trying desperately to keep itself fortified.

I chew on my lip for half a moment before opening my mouth again. “Tell me,” I whisper.

“Tell you what, sweetheart?” Mac says. “I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”

My feet point toward him, my arms squeezed tight as if even my body wants to fling myself at him, heart be damned.

“Tell me what you miss,” I say.

He laughs softly, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. He works his jaw as he stares into the fluorescent light above him. Then he drops his eyes back to mine. “How much time do you have?”

He doesn’t wait for my response. He takes a step toward me. “I miss how you wake up and blink like a newborn squirrel before you’ve had your coffee.”

My mouth drops indignantly, even as a new tear falls.

Mac smiles. “The prettiest squirrel I ever saw,” he clarifies. He clears his throat. “I miss the messes you make when you cook. I miss seeing you and Nate kill those slimy monster guys.”

I smile, my chest squeezing tighter.

“I miss how you talk to Tink when you think no one’s watching. I miss how you laugh when you see something you love, big and open and holding nothing back. I miss how you getso damned excited when you see a camel literally anywhere, no matter how small.”

He takes another step toward me as I blink more tears away.

“I miss how you get soft and sleepy when you drink whiskey. I miss…” He swallows. “I miss how sexy you looked that time my shirt ended up in your laundry and you just decided to keep it.”

“I was going to give it back,” I whisper.

“No you weren’t.”

I laugh softly.

“I don’t want it back. Actually, I do, but just so I can smell it. You make everything smell good. Like oranges and lemons.”

He’s in front of me now. I don’t know whether he walked to me or I walked to him, but he’s here now. He must see the fear in my expression—the pain of trying to hold onto a heart that’s already tumbling down an unknowable cliff toward someone—because he halts, then shoves his hand in his pocket.

When he pulls it out, he’s grasping a stack of worn paper—little scraps, it looks like.

“I miss these,” he says.

It’s only when he unfolds one that I realize what they are.

The top one saysTink didn’t poop on her walk!

“That’s…not the one I was looking for,” he mumbles. He flips through them as my heartbeat ratchets up to the moon.

They’re the notes I left for him, from that week he worked late and we communicated in scrap-paper missives. Little mundane comments about what was going on at home while he was out.

“You kept them,” I whisper.

“Here it is,” Mac says. “‘Nate almost smiled at me today,’” he reads. “‘I bet his smile looks like yours. If either of you ever smiled together I’d eat my hat, but then I’d compare those two handsome smiles side-by-side.’”

He flips through to another one. “‘Do you like making Mac ‘n cheese because it has your name in it? Do you ever call it Me ‘n Cheese?’”

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