You know that seed that gets planted in your mind? It grows like a weed. It spreads like a poison. And you can't get rid of it. You can't kill it, you can't stop it. It just refuses to leave. That's the problem. The question spreads in me and I can't sleep until I get an answer. I try to be the rational person but I just can't figure out why Holly won't tell me. It drives me crazy for a couple days and I go back and forth in my mind, debating whether to ask her more about it or just to ignore it. It's an obsession, and it's not a good one.
Clearly I can't ignore it, so I decide to ask her. A couple days after our run-in with Emma, I stop by Holly's apartment after work ends. We've been still talking but I can tell there's something between us. I'm probably no good at hiding the fact that I'm still wondering about Emma so Holly has definitely picked up on it. But she doesn't ask me about it because she doesn't want me to ask her about it. So it just kind of goes in a big fat circle where nobody wants to talk.
And since I am trying to do this right, I'm going to take the first step and ask her if she'll tell me. If she won't, then…then I'll figure it out. But we agreed to try. So I'm hoping she'll meet me halfway.
I exhale and knock on her door.
"Hey Gail," Holly smiles and leans in to give me a kiss—just a quick one. Good. I don't need any distractions.
"Can I come in?"
"Of course!" She opens the door wider and I walk around her into her apartment. I head straight for the couch.
"Want some tea?" Holly heads into the kitchen and opens a cupboard to get her mugs without waiting for my reply. I nod even though she has her back to me.
After a couple minutes, she hands me the steaming mug—the Mozart one. Or was it Beethoven?
Holly says nothing as she joins me on the couch. I can't tell if her silence is waiting for me to say something or just regular silence. Well, since I'm already here, I guess there's no backing out. I breathe in through my nose and hold my breath like I'm about to take a plunge into the ocean.
"Will you…will you tell me? About you and Emma?"
Holly exhales slowly through her nose and fidgets in her seat. Like, actually fidgets. She doesn't respond for a moment.
"Well. I can't pretend like I wasn't expecting that question. I don't think I hid it very well. Running into her was really unexpected."
"Why? Why do you feel like you had to hide it though?" I protest. Why does she feel like she can't be honest with me? What is so wrong with our relationship that she doesn't feel the need to share something from her past that clearly hurt her?
"It's not that I wanted to hide it," Holly isn't looking at me at all, she's only looking at the mug in her hands. Her hands keep rubbing around it, like she's trying to get warmth from it. "I just…don't like talking about it. I don't, actually."
"Don't what?"
"Talk about it. I haven't really talked to anybody about it. It's just…it's weird. And it hurts and it's not okay to talk about that stuff. I mean it's not okay for me to talk about stuff. You can talk about stuff if you want to, but Emma really isn't just stuff. She's Emma and there is a long long story there if I could even bring myself to talk about it and I wouldn't even know where to start—"
"Holly! Just start. Somewhere. Anywhere." She's doing the word vomit thing again and it's making my head spin.
A pause. A breath.
"I don't know if I can."
"I won't make you," I tell her. And it's the truth. I'm not going to bind her and force her to tell me their story. "But I would really like to know. Because it seems important to you. And you're important to me."
"She…she broke my heart. She did. After her, I didn't know if I could be whole again," Holly's voice is a whisper now and I get a tingly feeling from her words. I know that feeling when you're so broken, you don't even know how to begin to put yourself back together again. You don't even know if you have all the pieces to do it.
*Holly's POV*
I was nervous. After three years of horrible roommate experiences, you can't really blame me. But Emma seemed nice enough the couple times I met her. She had an apartment with an extra bedroom and was looking to rent it out. I called her and she showed me the place. She was definitely pretty courteous. Pretty too. She had that air of confidence about her that I wish I could have. So I agreed to live with her. I signed the lease and made it official.
I was still the quiet science major who sat in the back during lectures and rarely participated in discussions. Not that I needed to, I understood the material perfectly on my own. Emma was a literature major and it showed. She was eloquent and her bedroom was stacked to the ceiling with all sorts of novels.
We got along in a very polite way at first. She greeted me when she came home, she didn't make a mess, she didn't throw parties, but we weren't close. She seemed to go out a lot and had a lot of friends. Sometimes she'd have a friend over, but it was always only one at a time. And they usually slept over in Emma's room. It wasn't until the 5th or 6th one that I realized that those girls she bought back to the apartment weren't just "friends".
Even then, I only realized that because one of them was pretty loud during their…sleepovers. The next morning, after her "friend" had left, Emma came into my room with a sheepish smile and some crazy looking hair.
"Sorry about that last night," she made a face. "We didn't…mean to be so loud."
"No, no problem," I said, keeping my eyes on my computer screen. I tried not to look at her because I was already trying so hard not to blush. Strange that I had to keep myself from blushing when Emma was the one who was caught in her night time activities.
"You're okay with me right? I guess it's pretty clear that I am…who I am now. Maybe I should have told you, but I don't know, it didn't seem like it would matter to you."
"It doesn't," I told her, finally turning to look at Emma's face.
At that point in my life, I think it was fair to say that I was still pretty closeted. In fact, I wasn't even sure that I played for the other team. I know that I had various crushes on girls throughout my life but nothing substantial. Everyone has those crushes, I told myself. So I dated guys and I slept with guys, even though something deep down didn't feel right.
After that morning, since Emma had finally been open with me about who she was, I think she felt more relieved. And so, she became friendlier to me. She would insist on me coming with her to the bar for some drinks, even though I had some crazy exams that week. At first, I resisted. But then she literally shoved me out the door and locked it so I couldn't get back in since she left my keys inside. So I had no choice. And it turned out to be a pretty fun night.
That's when our friendship really took off. We would hang out a lot more in the common area, instead of staying in our rooms. We would have beers on the weekends, just chilling and eating junk food. Though I had gone through 3 years of college already, I never had a friendship like the one Emma and I had.
Her family actually lived in the area near our college, so they would stop by the apartment every now and then to pick Emma up for a meal. The first couple times, we would just exchange some small talk while they were waiting for Emma to get ready. Her parents and her 4 younger siblings—3 brothers and 1 sister were all just like her, easy to get along with. After a couple times, they invited me out with them. So I went. I went because my own family was far away and I missed that environment. They invited me right into the middle of their circle. We went out to eat and sometimes we would go bowling or go mini-golfing. I became part of their family easily.
Emma was easygoing, funny, and trustworthy. She had a way of making you feel like you're the only person that mattered. She listened when I had to rant about some jerk of a biology professor or some incompetent idiot in the group project work. She would ask me if I was seeing any guys or if I was interested in anybody. I always told her no. But slowly and surely, I fell for her, against my better judgment. My feelings beat out the rational part of me. It kind of crept up on me, like in the night. I knew I shouldn't, but I did.
Before I knew it, every time she brought a different girl home, I would find myself seething in my room. I tried not to care. I tried so hard. I kept my eyes shut, and I blasted the loudest classical music I could find through my headphones. Wagner is good for this, I found. His music is so intricate and so complex, that it almost made me forget about what was happening. Almost.
I tried to swallow my feelings. But do you know how hard it is to get over somebody that you see every day? Somebody who is literally 10 feet away from you when you sleep? It's impossible. I couldn't help it anymore. So one night, during one of our nights out at a bar, I kissed her. It took a lot of alcohol and all the courage I could find in me, but I did it.
When I pulled away, I opened my eyes and searched her face for some sign. For any sign. At first, her expression was just one of shock. Her eyeballs were pretty much bugging out of her head. But then she smiled. It was a smile that I hadn't seen yet from her. And it made my heart thump. So I kissed her again.
And she kissed me back.
We went back to our apartment and for once, I was the girl she was taking into her bedroom and into her bed.
It became a regular thing. We would go out for drinks, get wasted, and come back to our apartment to have sex. I tried to be detached from it all. But for somebody who really just discovered her inner-being, it was something I couldn't be detached from. They say you never forget your first, and they're right. She was my first on the other side.
I didn't tell her about my feelings. I thought if that was all I could get, then I would rather have that than nothing at all. We kept it up for months. We didn't talk about what we were doing. We acted like it didn't happen during the daytime. We still had our conversations and our junk food, but when we went out, it was a whole nother story. My feelings deepened, but I still kept them to myself even though sometimes I felt like they would suffocate me.
Emma stopped bringing girls home, and the naïve part of me wondered if I had changed her. I wondered if we were in a relationship, but never brought myself to ask her. We had fun, and I think that's all she cared about.
We both graduated—me with my biology degree and Emma with her literature degree. I had been accepted into a masters program in another city and it was starting soon, so I had to move there directly. It was almost half a day's drive away from our college. I still remember the night before I moved out of the apartment. We went out to a bar after I had packed everything. I drank until I couldn't anymore. We made it home and we fell into her bed. After we were finished, Emma fell asleep quickly. But I felt like I had sobered up all of a sudden. I left her bed and I sat on the couch in the living room.
I sat there until the sun rose. Should I tell her? What was the point of telling her anyway? Emma was taking a year off after college. She was planning to go abroad to teach English. Even if she didn't, I was still going to be far away from her. I was convinced that long-distance relationships didn't work. I sat there going back and forth until I thought my mind had turned into scrambled mush.
Emma came out of her room in the morning, her hair messed up as usual and that's when my heart broke. The words came spilling out of my mouth and the tears came spilling out of my eyes. I told her everything—that I had fallen for her a long time ago. That I couldn't do the detached sleeping together thing. Her face went from sleepily confused to one of great concern.
After handing me tissues and waiting for me to bring my sobs under control, she told me seriously that she had been trying to avoid this conversation. That's why she never talked about what we did. She liked things the way they had been. She didn't do the relationship thing. She cared for me.
The usual relationship break-up bs talk.
It was so stupid. How could we have had that conversation even though we hadn't been in a relationship?
I begged with her. Even though I knew that a long-distance relationship wouldn't work, I couldn't imagine being without her. Being without her suddenly seemed terrifying. I didn't think I could function without her around.
But she just shook her head. Then she got up from the couch and picked up one of my boxes.
"We should probably load this stuff up. This could take awhile. You should bring your car around," she told me flatly.
And that was that. We loaded my stuff. She gave me a hug after the last box was crammed in and told me to knock 'em dead. She hugged me, but I didn't hug her back. I was too shell-shocked, like all the wind had been punched out of me.
I had made a fool out of myself all for nothing. It would've been better if I had said nothing. As I drove away, I took a glance at the rear-view mirror. I could barely make out her shape through all the tears and puffy eyes, but I think she had already been walking away.
After that, I couldn't function for a long time. I moved into my own apartment near the campus of my masters program. I threw myself into my studies. Emma didn't call me and I didn't call her. Sometimes I would wonder if I could ever get over her. It wasn't a long time later until I felt comfortable going out to bars again. Until I could date. Even then, I was a lot more careful. I refused to let my feelings run away again.
It wasn't until I was in medical school that she finally sent me an email, asking me what I was up to. She told me about her life and her travels. She told me she travelled across Europe and into Asia. She told me she had a present for me and wanted to know where to send it.
Although I was shocked by her sudden return to my life, I replied to her email. I gave her my address and a package showed up at my front step a week later. It was two mugs—one of Mozart and one of Beethoven. I couldn't believe she had thought of me when she travelled.
We emailed periodically and she asked to meet up in person. I didn't find time until I had completed my residency because I was still in an area quite a distance from where she lived. When we did finally meet for coffee, I realized that I couldn't keep a friendship with her. I tried not to be petty, but the feelings and the pain was just too deep. I was over her, but the remnants were still there.
I got a job working for the police force shortly after our meeting, and the work kept me busy enough to tell Emma that I didn't have time to meet with her. She told me she understood, and we kept in touch every now and then. But I couldn't bring myself to see her again, until the other day at mini-golf. That was an accident.
She was the first. The real first. And those hurt.
A/N: Whew, that was long. So I debated A LOT about how to tell Holly's story with Emma. I couldn't decide whether to keep Gail's POV and have her just listen to Holly's story, or switch. But I decided to switch to Holly's POV because it was just a lot easier to tell the story that way, rather than have some long long long paragraphs of just Holly talking. Hope it's not too confusing. Also, I decided not to put Holly's POV/flashback in italics, because it was just too long and I hate when I read a story with a HUGE chunk of italics. So no italics. Let me know what you think :)
Have a happy new year you guys!