Page 65 of One More Weekend

The words broughta new wave of tears to my eyes. I’d cried more this summer than I had in the last ten years. But every goodbye Sy and I had ever had was for a few weeks or a couplemonths for winter and summer breaks in college. At most, we spent two months in a row apart.

And even then, one of us usually went to visit the other.

But as the driver took us over the Williamsburg Bridge and onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

We hit a patch of traffic, the car crawling forward.

Turning around, I looked out the back window at the skyline. My eyes moved from the Freedom Tower and our apartment up toward the Empire State Building – a location I was now intimately familiar with.

I wasn’t pulled away until the car sped up and took an exit heading out to JFK.

I’d have to get used to cars again, walking wouldn’t really be an option in L.A. But I hated driving and I wasn’t sure how the fuck I was supposed to build a community with a collective love-hate relationship with the MTA.

The thought made me giggle, remembering all of Sy’s late-night rants about how lucky we were to live in a city with a – janky, yes – 24-hour public transit system.

How was I supposed to live without her waxing poetic about all of the things she loved?

Nearly forty minutes late, the car was slowing in front of my Terminal. The Uber driver hopped out and started to move my bags.

But my body refused to leave as I looked back at the city, a light haze cast over it from this distance.

My mind started to race.

What if I can’t leave?

The Uber driver tapped the window, making sure I was okay and prompting me to get a move on.

Swallowing hard, I put my hand on the door handle.This is it.

44

SY

Trudgingup the stairs had felt like a Herculean task, my breathing ragged from holding back tears as I made it to our landing.

But walking into the apartment was worse. The movers would be here in a few hours, hauling away the rest of Jenna’s life.

I shoved my hands into my pockets as I let the door close behind me, crossing the apartment to stand in Jenna’s doorway. Glancing at the key rack, I realized there was only one pair dangling there.

She’ll have to mail those back just in case I get a roommate.

My chest tightened as I leaned against her doorframe. Her room hadn’t looked like this since the day we moved in. Up against the wall, her bed frame was disassembled next to a stack of boxes labeled “BOOKS”.

Clear as day, I could see myself sitting on her floor with sweat dripping down my face as I built her bed frame for her the first night in the apartment. I had offered partly because I wanted to hang out with her while she put clothes away. But I also didn’t trust her ability to build a bed that she could actually sleep on.

And then her bed was built, always made up like she was expecting a magazine photographer to show up and capture it.

I couldn’t stop the giggle from rising in my chest as I remembered us fleeing up onto it when we saw our first cockroach. It was an inevitability in this city but that didn’t stop it from being any less gross.

Jenna had squealed, making me think it was a rat or something. So I followed her blindly into her room and up onto her bed. Until she was able to form words and tell me what was actually going on, and then I hopped down and grabbed the can of Raid to get rid of the fucker.

And of course, the memories of this summer flooded back. The sex. The cuddling. The way it felt to please her. All of it came back to my body like it was still happening.

Ripping myself from the doorway, I popped my head into my room. Neatly folded on my bed was a familiar t-shirt.

At least she replaced the one she took.I grabbed the fabric from the bed and brought it to my nose, taking in as much of her scent as I could get. There was no way of telling how long the smell would linger, how many nights I could sleep with the shirt pressed to my nose before it would fade.

I set it back down on my bed and shook my head.

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