Love On The Weekend
by Shannon Wolf
I had been terribly bored for three years until I saw David again. England is remarkable to those who do not know it, but a small town there is much like a small town anywhere. At night, children are put to bed in tarnished houses; teenage boys put DVD cases back on their father’s shelves with the wrong discs inside; men and women stumble out of bars and make not-quite love on the hoods of cars in dark alleys. I had spent the last three years indoors every night, huddled on a couch I’d bought with the man I was going to marry. I left the couch and Sergei and our tall white curtains in Brittany, and took only my books when I returned home for good to England. A hometown holds a lot. Not just memories but whole people, as if they’d never been left behind.
"You're such an idiot, I love you," I threw up my arms. David whirled around and raised a pale eyebrow, ready to raise conjecture. I waved one palm, to keep him mute."I mean, obviously I love you, I've known you for however many years. I don't mean that I love you. You're an idiot."
He knew that I meant the opposite and that I did love him, but he had a vast capacity for kindness when it was convenient. It was more than time to be asleep, for this night to be done. I was no longer a person who could go clubbing, I had realized, by the third one. I had been relieved when he agreed to go home, leaving his cluster of friends in the smoking area without so much as a goodbye. I knew though that six double vodka and cokes in, walking through a dark parking lot behind the kebab shop near his house in Taunton wasn't exactly the landscape for these declarations. "Well, fine," he said, leading the way back, "I knew that. This night has been stupid. You just infuriate me. How can we be so good in private and so bad the second we're with my friends?" Even though five years had passed, he was wearing the shirt I had picked out for him the week we had broken up. My hair was twice the length it had once been. I was wearing the underwear he liked and he knew it.
I rolled my eyes toward the inadequate sky. "Well we're never with my friends, are we, so I couldn't really tell you.” I wasn’t sure he knew half the names of my girlfriends these days, actually. The years of absence had not seemed like much of an obstacle at first, but a canyon was appearing faintly between us. “I don't want to fight with you. Don't you think it's a little bit awkward for me, having to make small talk with the last girl you slept with?"
The concrete was grinding underneath our shifting feet, we were stopping and starting between the abandoned cartons of doner meat on the ground, shunting and spilling their slaw. "Well, I thought we said we weren't putting labels..."
I wanted to hit him. His blond hair curled over his ears. It was much darker than when they had first met, and his chin and neck shimmered with the stubble I hadn’t known he could grow. I wanted to reach out and touch it. "Who said I was asking for a label? I don't want one. That doesn't mean I have to look like an idiot. She probably thinks I don't even know.” The girl in question had a frizzy dye-job and especially bad eyeliner but I was attempting to fight my internalized misogyny and focus on the real culprit. “You're an idiot." He was smiling as if he could see my frustration dissipating over the hoods of the cars in the parking lot. I knew I was no longer angry. The anger was a costume I had tried on, knowing I would take it off just so that my skin could be closer to his.
"You know how much I care about you. She was just once. She doesn't give a fuck about me, or you. We weren't even together then really, I mean we're not together now." The conversation we had been avoiding for the past few weeks kept resurfacing; a dead body, bound improperly in a shallow lake.
We quieted our voices and we walked, subdued, not touching. I held my breath, feeling the specter of our separate lives clouding the air behind us. Moments later he was running across the sidewalk and into the road, glancing back at me with that damn smile of his. I was chasing before I knew it, fleeting footfall in my pointed heels. Low heels of course, because he was only an inch or so taller than me. He was darting across the green amassed under the office blocks, between pillars and matte steel statues. He was hidden in a second, and I slowed my pace, lengthened my strides, waiting for him to jump out.
He did. I faked loud surprise, and then we both looked around at the still townhouses, waiting for a window to be let down, for a shout to ring out. He kissed me, that long aching kiss that we had so perfected, and I was sixteen again, in a park draped in snow. I knew he liked the little sighs I dripped through our kisses. In a few moments we would go through his front door, and onto his dad's sofa bed, an arm's reach from the kitchen. In the morning, when I drove home to my mother’s place, I would play at forgetting him again. Now though, I tap him on his shoulder so lightly I might not have been there at all, and I run from him. He is It, and we are electric. Across town, others run and linger and kiss and scream, I am sure of it.
Shannon Wolf is a British-American writer, living in New York, where she teaches for Bard College’s Prison Initiative. Her debut full-length poetry collection Green Card Girl was released in 2023. She received a joint MA-MFA in Poetry at McNeese State University and also has degrees from Lancaster University and the University of Chichester in the UK. Shannon is the Acquisitions Editor for ELJ Editions. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction, and her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in Bending Genres, Heavy Feather Review, and The Forge, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.
