Page 147 of Two Marlboros

“Well, I gather we won’t have many more opportunities to be together, will we?”

Until that moment, I was quite convinced that a beating heart was beating in the left side of my chest; that sentence wasenough for him to lose a beat or maybe two before it cringed and shattered into a thousand pieces.

He went back to keeping his eyes on the drops, and I felt like dying. I had been stupid to fire the “I don’t know if I’ll be back” cartridge, and I wondered why he had taken it so seriously. There was something in his reasoning that escaped me.

Neither of us said anything. We let the tapping of the rain on the grass fill our silence.

“I’m glad I met you,” he said, out of nowhere.

“Look, it’s not like I’m leaving tomorrow! Don’t worry.”

In the darkness of that evening, I caught a glimpse of a tugged smile, like the one he had given me when I had told him of my likely departure.

“You’re right. But not every time is a good time to say something like that, and I wanted to make sure you knew that.”

I didn’t want to remain silent, but I couldn’t find the words either. I moved closer to him, close enough to notice that he barely tightened his lips and, in those moments, lowered his gaze. Then he would release them and pull a smile.

He turned back to me. I read such melancholy in his eyes, perhaps certain that he would never see me again for the rest of his life. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to leave forever, it was more of an idea that appealed to me rather than a real intention, but he didn’t seem to understand that.

I encircled his body with my arms, and he, stiff at first, let go and returned my embrace. He wrapped me completely in his grip, tighter and tighter, and we were so close that I could hear his sighs and his chest rising and falling. A drop fell on my head, but he held me so tightly that I barely flinched.

Suddenly he parted his lips and I thought he wanted to tell me something. And not just anything, but that thing, my reason for staying without ifs and buts. My heart began to hammer harder, waiting to hear those words, and the beat quickenedwhen I heard him open his lips one more time, as if seeking the courage he had not had just before. I closed my eyes and waited, waited for his voice to come out and speak to me, waited for him to make me happy and to tell me that he felt something for me...

...but the passing of many, too many, seconds diminished the hope that he would do so and increased the knowledge that it would never happen. More seconds passed and nothing came out of his mouth, not even the sound of his lips opening to say something. He became mute and I became more and more aware that, even that time, I had deluded myself.

I dissolved the embrace with a tinge of disappointment, but I couldn’t blame him. He was not ready, but would he ever be? And would he have wanted to start over with me of all people? But no matter how many questions I might have asked myself at that moment, the truth was only one: he was not interested enough in me.

I guarded what he had said to me just before and locked those words away, in some area of myself. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. There always comes a time to give up, and I had found mine. His eyes were staring at me, yes, but they were the eyes of a friend. He would never look at me any other way.

“I’m glad I met you, too,” I whispered, pretending there was something to smile about.

Inside, I was actually dying.

After a short while it stopped raining. Heading home, I too convinced myself that this might be one of the last times we would do something like this. Alan and I had shared so many good times, and sometimes I had thought that a glance would be enough to tell what was going on in each other’s heads.

So, I looked up at him, walking with his hands in his pockets and - only then did I notice - his sleeves rolled up. I reached out a hand toward him and closed it over the exposedskin of his forearm. He stopped and turned to me, surprised, as I approached him without taking my gaze off his. His pupils flowed swiftly over my eyes and his lips tightened ever so slightly. His profile was brightened by the light of the streetlamp across the street and the headlights of the cars that passed us by.

What separated us was only the likelihood that we would never see each other again, but there was nothing else that could have parted our lips. I might have… I would have kissed him, but what would be left of us afterward?

There were so many things I wanted to tell him: that for him I would stay, that he had to give me a chance, and that I had been dying to kiss him for at least a couple of weeks. If before it had been just a whim I wanted to get rid of, at that moment it was almost a necessity. However, I almost had an inkling that even if I stayed, he would continue to keep me on the fringes of his life. Whether his was an excuse or not, I might never have found out.

I still watched his eyes flicker, his mouth tighten with the uncertainty of not saying the right thing; but it was in that very instant that I realized he would never do it. He was too scared to take charge of his life again, turn it upside down and push Oliver aside.

I threw a smile, but he did not do the same; instead, he sighed and started walking again. He stopped after a few steps to turn back, and motioned for me to follow him. I didn’t take it twice and started walking behind him, as the rain began to tap above our heads again, a little harder than before.

A group of boys popped up in front of us.

Alan raised his head and a moment later some clubs popped up. I stopped, but Alan got ahead of me and sprinted in front of me as a shield. I shifted my gaze from him to those guys and began to get scared when one of them tapped his bat on his palm.

“Uh, look here, the Harlem slut and his boyfriend.”

It was the boy in the center who had spoken, who appeared something like twenty years old and who seemed to be the leader of the little group. There were six of them. There were two of us.

Those guys started snickering and came forward.

One of them threw a hook at Alan, who dodged and returned the favor, sinking the blow. Another came up behind him.

“Look out!” I shouted.

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