Page 6 of Lying Hearts

She sighs. She mother fucking sighs. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Didn’t you think I would support you?”

“I didn’t know…”

Something inside me doesn’t believe that’s the reason at all. And that ‘something,’ I will ignore for a whole year, including right now. I walk to her and pick her up off the couch, put her on my lap. Her arms slide around my neck like they always do when we sit like this and she looks at me with open love, a love I’ve come to rely on, thinking it will always be here. Just like her. This is the girl I plan to marry. She’s the reason I don’t mess around with other girls. Why have a burger when you can have steak? I kiss her. “Sara… Of course I’ll support you. It’s amazing you got in. I’m proud of you.”

The first smile since she came home washes over her face. “Really? You’re proud? Oh my God, that’s such a relief!” She hugs me and I squeeze her back.

I look into the future and see us on the other side of the U.S. It’s not a terrible idea. As long as we’re together, it could be great. I’ll miss my friends, but I can make new ones. New York isn’t lacking people to get to know. Plus, she and I are each other’s best friends. We hang out with each other more than with anyone else. She’s all I really need. I smile and admit to her, “I never thought I’d live in New York, but I’m a city guy. I’ll probably love it. I might have to come in the second semester, though. I don’t know when you applied but it sure wasn’t tomorrow. I’m sure it’s all filled up.”

Distressed, she interrupts my planning. “Oh, but I’m a year behind you so it’s okay to switch with two to go, but… do you really think you should change schools this close to finishing?”

I chuckle, give her lips a peck. “Nah. It’s no big deal. Communications and marketing? I can do that anywhere. Who gives a shit where I… Wait.” Someone steps on my heart with a steel-toed boot. “Don’t you want me to go with you?”

She pauses, smiles, and rolls her eyes. “Don’t be crazy. Of course I want you to come. I just want what’s best for you, too.”

“Oh.” I’m trying to believe her, but the look I just saw in her eyes was disturbing. A terrible instinct is bitching at me from my gut. I can’t help but wonder why she never told me. How it would have taken asking people for letters of recommendation, and so much preparation, all of which she must have done behind my back. Why she waited until a Sunday when I know the mail doesn’t come on Sunday. Why she isn’t begging me to go with her.

She must see the worry on my face, because she says, “Brendan, hey. I’m not gone yet.”

I kiss her hard on the mouth, holding her cheeks. I whisper against her lips, emotions building up in my chest, my heart aching. “I can’t even think about it. I’ll miss you so much.”

She nods. “It’ll be terrible. What are we gonna do?”

A knot tightens in my throat and I can’t speak, so I kiss her again. My hands search for solace beneath the soft cotton of her dress. I press my fingers into her thighs, running them slowly up to the part of her that makes me throb every time I think of it. I love this girl. But long distance relationships never work. Do they? The knot grows hard and I try to gulp it down. We grope and ache for each other, kissing hungrily. Unzipping my pants, she shifts her skirt so that nothing is between us. Her hands wrap around and pull on my cock, making me groan with painful pleasure as tears threaten to drip down my cheeks. My fingers penetrate her, searching and exploring. She’s always so wet. Today isn’t any different except that today is the day I will remember every day for the next year of my life. I’ll remember her kissing my chest, pressing me into her, enveloping me into the silky wetness of her sweet, tight pussy. Her braid bouncing up and down. Her breasts pushing out of the dress, my mouth traveling across them as though it will be the last time. Hard and full, my moving fast inside her, pumping hard just to hear her moans grow loud, while desperation pounds my own senses to obliteration. Staring at her, my heart squeezed with pain, her eyelids fluttering closed, losing herself to the pulsing. Her looking like a Pagan princess with lips-moistened nipples and white dress-straps hanging down from her shoulders, her mouth open and beautiful. Thinking she can never leave me. Feeling that she needs to be forever and always mine.

Over the next month and a half before she leaves, I will try to convince her to leave college altogether and study at The American Conservatory Theater here in San Francisco. I will – even on the day I put her on the plane – suggest that I can quit school and go with her, if she’d just say the word. I will call her every day after she leaves. I will mope around school and remain faithful to her while sitting in classes I never remember. I will pay the rent on this apartment all on my own, convinced she’ll be coming back for the summer, and that we’ll move there together then, for her last year. I will cry, sob like a two year old when, a year later, she tells me about Steve, the jock she will meet at NYU who she becomes engaged to without telling me that we’d even broken up. I will have a ring, too, but she will never know it.

But today, with her riding me like this and crying out my name, I think I have won, and there is no way she’ll really leave. I hold her tight and tell her, “I love you so much, Sara Brighton. You know that? I really, really love you.”

She sighs into my chest, and reaches her chin up to ask silently for a kiss I’m more than happy to give. “I really, really love you too, Brendan Clark. You’re so good to me.” She smiles and nuzzles into me again. “So good.”

“Not as good as you are to me,” I say, smiling and feeling safe again.

What a fucking moron.

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