This is a bad idea. I know it is. Windy didn’t push me to do this, I chose to do this, even though she feels otherwise. I have been avoiding every spot where memories of you are the heaviest since the beginning and it’s not helping anything. How the fuck can I hate you if I keep running from you? Maybe this will be the start of it.

She parks and we sit there a minute. I’m staring out across the lot to the basketball court and the metal benches on the other side of the chain link fence. I haven’t been here in over a year, not since that fight we had and I almost broke the basket trying to get out all my anger. At least I didn’t hit the wall. I’d never hurt you…I’d kill myself before that happened.

I can see the basket from where I’m sitting. It’s still bent, but it looks like they tried fixing it the best they could. Guess I don’t know my own strength. 

I don’t move. I can’t. I’m frozen in the seat staring at the bench where I first saw you. Damn, you were so beautiful that day, I couldn’t stop staring. The guys were giving me such shit for it, too, because my game got thrown off. I didn’t care. I just wanted to look at you, to show off for you, to get your attention. It didn’t work, but I wasn’t giving up.

I told Windy I didn’t pursue you at first and that’s true. But I never once stopped thinking about you. Within those few minutes, you took over every cell in my body and refused to let go. Did I ever tell you that? If not, I’m sorry. I really should have. You bled into me, became so much a part of me that being one minute without you drove me crazy.

“Lee?” Windy says softly. 

I don’t turn to her, my eyes still glued on that bench. You’re right there, your bright red hair slicked back, your blue eyes shining. Before you looked my way, you were smiling, laughing. I didn’t fall in love with you in that moment, but I easily could have. The way you held your hand to your face, the way the edges of your eyes crinkled.

“He was beautiful,” I say without thinking. “He was just sitting there talking to whoever he was with. I don’t even remember who it was. All I saw was him…” I swallow hard. My chest clenches and my stomach flips. I’m not going to cry, I can’t. I bite my lip and take a shuddering breath. “It was summer and hot as fuck. I think we went for ice cream or something after the game. He didn’t go.” My voice is soft, barely audible, but she hears every word.

She’s watching me, quiet and patient. She doesn’t push, she doesn’t say anything I don’t need to hear, she doesn’t ask stupid questions like everyone else does. I think that’s why I like hanging out with her. She really is like you. She doesn’t even rush me to get out of the car.

She drives a Honda, by the way. Green. It smells like fruit thanks to the air freshener she keeps plugged into the vent. Somehow that brings back the next memory.

“The first date we went on was to a festival. The Founder’s Day Festival. There were all these food stands but he wanted to check out the one that had fresh fruit on a stick.” My lips twitch and I bite my cheek. “They were seasoning it with Tajin or something. He bit into a watermelon chunk and half of it fell off. He laughed when I caught it and ate it. I know it’s cliche, but that’s when we had our first kiss.”

“When you ate the fruit?” she asks softly.

I shake my head. “During the fireworks. We were sitting on a hill under a tree. I couldn’t help it…the way his face was lit up, the way his eyes shone, his smile…I just reached over, and kissed him.” 

I expected you to push me away, to tell me I was moving too fast. But I’d been after you for months, and I knew you liked me by then. It just felt right to make that first move. That look in your eyes made my heart stop, the way your breath caught, the way your lips parted.

“Lee,” you said, your voice a whisper. “Why did you wait so long to do that?”

I wanted to cry…I wanted to hold you to me and never let you go. I think we missed the rest of the show because we were kissing for so long. You tasted like fruit and wine and I couldn’t get enough. 

I put my hand on the door handle and slowly pull it. “Come on,” I say before opening the door and step out, staggering a bit. The rum is finally starting to do it’s fucking job. I lean on the door a minute, waiting for my head to stop spinning before I push off, hands in my hoodie pocket. Windy is at my side, a warm and solid presence in this place of memories I don’t want to face.

We walk in silence toward the court. I keep my eyes down, walking around the fence to the benches and slow to a stop at the place where I first saw you. I remember it exactly. How can I not? She stands nearby as I stare at that goddamn bench, my fists shaking in my pocket. 

“He watched me play from this very spot. He said it was where he had the best view.” I shake my head once. “Liar,” I add in a whisper. 

Her head tilts, her hair shifting over her shoulder. “It’s so close, though.”

I turn my eyes to her and grin slightly. “See for yourself.” 

She moves and tentatively sits in your spot. I move aside and she immediately sees what I mean. Between the tree that’s standing there and the angle, you really can’t pinpoint any particular player. She smiles and giggles softly.

“Yeah, I see what you mean.” She looks up at me. “But this is where he chose to sit for every game?”

I nod. “He never sat anywhere else.”

“What position did you play?”

I jerk slightly. “Rear guard.” For the first time in eight years I look at the court from your perspective with that position in mind. A small smile crosses my lips. “Clever bastard,” I mutter.

She leans forward, her hands in her pockets, ankles crossed under the bench. “He knew what he was doing from the very beginning.”

That thought had never once occurred to me in all our time together. Why did you come to that game? Did you ever tell me? I thought it was because of your friend. That you were there to keep her company while her boyfriend was playing. But…you hate sports. There had to be another reason you showed up that day. You didn’t know me before then and had no interest in me for weeks after. 

“I told you he was cute.” 

My eyes widen as that memory, unbidden, sparks to life. 

“I suppose.” 

That was you. But there was something in your tone, something shy and almost…impressed.

I drop to the bench next to Windy. “He wanted me to chase him.”

“Probably,” she nods. “You just started out in the wrong way, that’s all.”

I grin slightly. “I guess so,” I mutter. 

After a moment, she says, “You know, it seems to me there was only ever one reason he ever came to your games, even though he had zero interest in them.” She slides a sidelong glance at me. I can see it in my peripheral as I gaze out over the court, watching the ghosts of myself and my friends as we play. I see the number of times he cheered for me, heard him tell me how great I was, felt each kiss through the chain link, his fingers laced through mine. 

“He came for me,” I say. “He didn’t understand a damn thing about basketball, or really any other sport I played, but he came to cheer me on regardless.” A chuckle escapes my throat as I lean back, crossing my ankles. “There was one time one of my friends told me Robin was making all their girlfriends look bad. They were unabashedly jealous because he was so supportive and their girls rarely showed. He took a lot of pictures, too. He submitted them to the local papers and a few obscure sports magazines and sites. Thanks to him, we actually got sponsored one year for a community game.”

“Did you win?”

I laugh. “No, we got our asses handed to us.”

She chuckles, her smile bright as the sun.

“But we still had fun and none of us walked away upset. The other team was just better and even offered to give us some pointers and play with us sometime.”

“Did they?”

I nod, my smile widening. “They were really amazing and taught us a great deal. Even then, the loss didn’t matter to me. It didn’t matter to any of us. What mattered was Robin was there. I remember I ran right up to him, picked him up off the bench, swung him around and kissed him in front of everyone. Homosexuality was only just starting to become more accepted and it was a huge thing for us to do something like that in public, in Redbrick in particular. Not that we cared, of course. We never gave a shit what society thought about us. We loved each other, that was all that mattered.”

“I remember that photo,” she says after a moment. I turn to her. “It was in the local paper. The caption was something like, ‘loss of a game doesn’t mean a loss of love,’ or something silly like that.”

I smile, that article coming to mind. I have it in a box somewhere. “‘A win for Equality on the Court,’” I say.

She returns my smile, only hers actually touches her eyes. “That’s it.”

Somehow, talking about all of this eases my mind, makes the memories made here less painful. 

Except one.

Trust Windy to ask, “When was the last time you played?”

I look down and shuffle my feet. “Over a year ago,” I reply. “Robin and I…we got into a huge fight. I came here to blow off steam, throwing basket after basket until I finally lost my shit and threw the basketball so hard I dented the backboard.” I pointed to the one in question. “I jumped and grabbed the basket, yelling, and nearly tore the damn thing off.”

That was the last time I cried.

There’s a brief silence, and even though she doesn’t ask out loud what it was we fought about, I know she’s curious. So I tell her.

“He accused me of cheating on him.”

Her eyes went wide. “No,” she said.

I nod. “We’d been engaged less than a month and some bitch came up to him telling him she saw me with some other guy at a club. It never happened. I didn’t go anywhere like that without him. Still, she planted this seed of doubt in his mind that grew and he became suspicious of damn near everything I did, where I went, who I was with, if I was hiding anything, trying to gaslight him, all that.” I shook my head. “It didn’t help that she was feeding into his anxiety and paranoia. Finally, he confronted me about it. Demanding who it was I was fucking on the side. I was blown away that he would even think something like that of me. We yelled at each other, said some shit we shouldn’t have, and I stormed out and came here.”

She swallows. “You would never.”

I shook my head. “He’s my everything, Bug. Why would I risk losing that? Even now, despite what everyone tells me, I can’t let go…I can’t move on. I just want him, no one else.”

She rests her head on my shoulder. “Did he follow you?”

I nod. “I didn’t know he had until after I tried breaking the basket. He’d been there the whole time. Sitting right here, crying. When I finally saw him, I was crying, too. I told him I wasn’t cheating on him, that I never could. I love him, I want him, I’m possessed by him.”

I realize I’m speaking in the present tense and the truth of it causes a white hot fire to shoot through my blood. 

“I believe you,” Robin cries, holding on to me, his sobs as loud as mine. “I’ll never doubt you, baby, never again.”

“I love you, Robin,” I sob into his neck. “You’re all I want in this world. You’re my soulmate. No one and nothing else matters.” 

There were other things said that day. Things I’ve tried so hard to forget…things I thought I had. My fist clenches in my pocket and I push those memories aside, drown them in the river of rum that courses through my body and soaks my mind.

What I will never forget was the love we made that night was so intense, I can still feel it to this day.

“People want you to move on?” Windy asks.

“They say I should,” I say. “He’s gone, I know that. But I can’t let go. I can never let him go. And that…” Makes me want to hate you. I really…really want to hate you. “And that makes all of this so much worse.”

We’re both quiet for a long time, just sitting there together, her head on my shoulder, my head falling to hers. 

“Don’t let go,” she finally says in a near whisper. “Everyone else is dumb, Lee. Love Robin for as long as you want.”

And that…that…put the first crack in the wall I never meant to build in the first place.

*