Liftoff

She had always been early. Of course, she was already here. Jacy saw her faster than he wanted to, if he was being honest. Some part of him had, in rehearsing this moment in his head the night before, expected to have to search the room for her. But his eyes leapt to her as if magnetized. She was gnawing her thumbnail, wearing the jean cutoffs he had helped her make when the hole in the knee of those pants had torn so wide that she’d had to hold it together to walk up the stairs. Now they sat a little tighter on her hips, the zipper curving out as it reached upward for the button. Out of habit, he stared almost hopefully at the freckled stripe of skin above it, waiting for a response that didn’t come.

            He only had a few moments to regret his own wardrobe choices before she saw him. She’d been rubbing at her upper arms, unused to the blast of air conditioning that turned every city café into an icebox, but froze for a moment when she saw him – and then unfroze, directing one of those kilowatt-smiles his way. Evidently she thought he had forgotten what her real smile looked like. He waved, stupidly. 

            “Jacy,” she said, and hugged him. He hugged her back carefully, inhaling the smell of Suave coconut shampoo. New to him; previously, it had been vanilla. “How are you?”

            “Hey, Kit-Kat,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

            Her face, when she stepped back from him, looked a little stunned. He quickly corrected himself: “Katherine.” And then wished he hadn’t, because the way they knew each other now lay somewhere in between those two names for her, and the wrongness of them both sat in the air like a cement block.

            “Good to see you too,” she said, rescuing him, and then there was a blessed flurry of logistics: where to sit, do you drink coffee these days, what food is good, lord it’s all so expensive here, of course it’s on me, no don’t be silly, until the server had gone away with their orders and there were no more scripted words for him to crouch behind. For a beat she just gazed at him, those dark eyes clear and pitiless, like they always had been. 

            “What brings you to the city?” he finally asked, licking latte foam from his bottom lip. 

            “Jessica wanted to scope out wedding venues,” Kat said, and of course it was weddings, of all things. He tried not to wince. “Brad proposed to her a few months back.”

            “That’s great!” Jacy said, trying to sound authentically enthusiastic and instead sounding, in his own estimation, like a cartoon of a kindergarten teacher. “I’m really happy for them. And, uh, glad you had time to come see me.”

            “Right,” she said, and held her coffee cup to her face, not drinking, just breathing in the steam from the black surface. She must still be cold, Jacy thought, and then wasted several seconds struggling with himself about whether to offer her his jacket. He realized, too late, that she was still speaking. “…you asked me here.”

            “What?” he said, indelicately, and cringed. “Sorry.”

            “I said,” Kat repeated, still half-behind the mug, “that brings up the question of why you asked me here.”

            Jacy had expected to have more time to work up to this, somehow; he should have predicted that Kat’s courage would overpower his (admittedly weak) small talk in no time. “Right,” he said, and bought a few seconds by taking a sip of his coffee. “I saw your story online, so I knew you were in the city, and… thought we could talk, or something. It’s been, I dunno, long enough, maybe.”

            Again, the cup was pressed to her lips, where she did not drink. That clear dark gaze gave nothing away. 

            Jacy experienced a moment of panic. He knew there was a reason he had invited Katherine to breakfast, but it had abandoned him, and now he sat skewered on the long sharp stick of all his previous decisions. 

            “Long enough,” Kat said, “since you left home, or long enough since we broke up?”

            “Both,” Jacy said. “I guess.” 

            Once again, temporary salvation: their food arrived. He was distracted when he noticed that she had asked for eggs instead of bacon on her BLT, this girl who had written several love songs to bacon in the second grade, but was at least wise enough not to try to divert the conversation towards breakfast choices. 

            “You were saying,” she prompted. 

            “Uh, yeah.” He bit into his own breakfast sandwich, trying to buy more time by chewing, and then regretted it when egg yolk started a sticky, glacial drip down his wrist. Kat didn’t fill the space left by his quiet cursing and struggle for a napkin, and didn’t touch her own food, either. Finally the words came out of him, which was terrifying, since he had no idea what they would be until he heard them. “I guess I felt like I owed you an explanation. I mean, obviously. I have for a long time. But I thought I might have one at this point, or maybe that you’d, I don’t know, be ready to hear it.”

            As if it were a reward for a dog finally sitting on command, she took her first bite. He felt absurdly relieved, and the words kept coming. 

            “We’ve been friends for forever. It’s felt so weird, being new to the city and not being able to text you about all the weird shit, like the neighbors who never say hello to you and the buses not waiting for you to pay fare and sit before they start moving. I’ve missed you, is what I’m saying, I guess, and I don’t know, I wanted to apologize for just vanishing on you.”

            Kat lifted her sandwich for the second time. She chewed as if she had recently bitten her cheek and had to be very careful to avoid the sore spot. “Why did you?” 

            “Why did I what?”

            “Vanish.”

            They were always going to reach this moment, and Jacy had hoped he’d magically have the right words, and he didn’t. “I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said, “that I couldn’t be with you, like the way we were. I thought you’d think it was that I didn’t love you or something. Obviously, I have since I was seven. It just, wasn’t the way you wanted it to be.”

            These last words came out as if pulled from his belly by a fishhook, scraping a little on the way up. She didn’t flinch. Braver than him. She’d always been, even at six, jumping from rock to rock in the creek that he was too frightened to try to cross.

            “Because?” she said, when he’d taken a little too long to swallow around the sharpness in his throat. 

            “Because,” he said, “I don’t like girls like that. None of them.”

            There it was. He breathed in without meaning to, needing to fill the space that had suddenly appeared in his abdomen, and watched her face. She cast her eyes down, hiding his best shot at figuring out what she was thinking, and took another bite. Her turn to buy time, he guessed. When she looked up again, the fishhook-scrape in his throat flared sharply back to life.

            “Why didn’t you just tell me that?” she said. “Jesus, J. It wasn’t like I didn’t know you well enough. It wasn’t like I was going to be judgy or something. I’ve always supported marriage for everyone and bathroom choices and all that.”

            Why hadn’t he? He’d struggled for a long time trying to answer this himself. “It wasn’t that I thought you would disown me or anything,” he said, hunting for a response that she could understand. “It was more like… I knew that people were, y’know.” Gay. All these years and he still couldn’t say it, feeling like the word was too fragile to survive the force of that direct gaze. “But, it was like… the last option. Like, okay, if you really have to be, you can be. But we didn’t know anybody else who was. There weren’t any ads or TV shows where that was just, like, normal, at least not when we were growing up. It felt like it was imaginary, sometimes, like unicorns, and if I was one of those people, then I would be imaginary too. There wouldn’t be a place for me in the real world.” He blew out a breath, accidentally making kind of a fart noise with his lips, and then the frustration of trying to describe an unnamable experience was shattered by the surprising bubble of her giggle. He laughed too, reflexively, and found that he had more to say. 

            “Besides, the way that we were growing up… it was more than friends, and I only knew one way for people to be more than friends. I mean, K, I practically grew up in your house. There was barely an experience I had that you didn’t know about. Hell, if you got sick and were absent from school, I would skip. Because why would I go if you weren’t there? You were my other half. And not being able to love you like you wanted, it felt like I was throwing all that back in your face. Like I wasn’t grateful for the way that we had always been.” 

            Something had shifted in Kat’s face while he talked. Her hands, which had been gripping her coffee, relaxed onto the table. 

            “And I was,” he continued. “I mean, I am. There would be no Jacy without Kat.” 

            Outside the sun was glaring down on the streets like it always did in August, shadowless and strong. He tried to imagine it trickling into his veins, liquid and gold, giving him this last little bit of courage. “I wanted to say thank you,” he said. “Because living here without you, and not talking, it’s been. I mean. Really hard. And it just showed me how much you matter, how much we matter, and that the way we’re supposed to be, I think, is like family. You’re my family. And you always have been.”

            Kat’s sandwich had disappeared at some point during this speech, and he hadn’t noticed. She pressed one red-painted fingertip into a crumb on the table and brought it to her lips. Jacy, suddenly ravenous, took a bite of his own sandwich, now cold and congealed, but still somehow exactly what he wanted.

            “Family,” she agreed. And the smile he’d been waiting for, the real one that was crooked and exposed the tooth she’d chipped in a skating accident, spread across her face. “I've missed you too, J.” 

            Just like that. His stomach felt the way it had when they’d been seventeen, having just stolen her stepfather’s motorcycle and roaring through the town streets in the dark: picking up speed towards the orange-streaked light of the tunnel, until he’d wanted to unwrap his arms from around her waist and hold them out so the wind would catch his sleeves and maybe, somehow, lift them from the ground.