There Will Be Time

In the drawer where she kept her toiletries, a pink hair tie and two bobby pins got left behind. The cheap varnish on the counter is still stained blue from a botched DIY dye attempt. Dust bunnies of curly hair still cling to the rug.

Alex catches the dead-eyed look on his face in the mirror and smears on a smile; sets his shoulders back.

“Got everything?” Perfectly pleasant, nothing amiss.

“Just shoving Snuffy in the carrier!” Bianca calls, amid a stream of frustrated curses.

Snuffy yowls, and Alex shuts the bathroom door behind him so she doesn’t check for the straggling accoutrements. It always takes both of them to corral the cat and he never walks away without scratches all over his arms.

Bianca is on her knees, wrestling the carrier over Snuffy’s head while he fights to wriggle between her hip and elbow. Alex chuckles and strips off his hoodie to swaddle Snuffy and cram him inside. Bianca zips the door shut with a huff and a grin.

“I don’t think I’m getting that back.” He licks his lips and laughs to cover the almost-addition of a joke about how she can keep it. Bianca doesn’t notice.

Alex carries her pet for her while she hefts two cooler bags of the groceries that they split and her essentials in a backpack. Despite having six months’ notice, Bianca still waited to the last minute to get everything packed, and it’s already a muggy sunset.

Her moving truck has left, but that she’s still here, car packed full to bursting with room for Snuffy only on the center console, has Alex still imagining that she could change her mind. Not take this job, not move six states away.

Bianca props her hands on her hips once Snuffy has his spot. “That’s the last of it.”

“It is.”

She takes a breath, absently swinging the driver door in her dusty leggings, messy bun from this morning now all askew and sweaty. Then she announces, “I’m hungry. We should get food.”

Alex arches his brows. Yes—he still has his half of the apartment and all his food and kitchenware. He could cook, but her cat’s already packed away. His litter box has been bagged up for six hours.

“I can heat up the spaghetti?”

“I want bigot chicken.” She purses her lips, looks at her full passenger seat, then at his SUV across the parking lot. Her keys jangle in her hand, overstuffed with chibi figures and her half of a heart charm colored in pink, white, and blue stripes.

“You want to follow me?”

Alex’s pulse thumps loudly in his ears. “Yeah,” he says, perfectly pleasant.

“We can park in that spot by the runway.” Bianca doesn’t wait for a response, dropping heavily into the driver’s seat of her car.

Alex gestures back toward their apartment and runs to get his own keys that are as crowded as hers on a Pluto lanyard. His half of the heart has all the silvery plating rubbed off by his anxious thumb, left in the acrylic rainbow stripes and the ugly brass on the back.

Bianca waits for him at the gate to their complex and leads the way. He tries not to stare at the taillights of her car or the digits of her license plate like he’s actually going to miss not seeing them again. The university parking decal slowly disintegrating on her rear window flaps in the wind. Her plate expires in two months; he tells Siri to remind him to remind her about it.

The line at the house of bigot chicken is blessedly long as always. When he pulls up to order, the cashier asks if his name is Alex.

“…Yeah?”

“Car ahead ordered for you and paid,” the chipper cashier says. “Pull around to the window.”

He rolls forward in line, then puts his car in park to physically restrain himself from any last-minute dramatic declarations of love.

She’s moving. She’s got a better, easier life with a livable salary ahead of her. She’s doing what’s best for her and he’s happy. He’s happy, he’s happy, he’s—

“Here’s your order, sir,” the next employee says with a smile.

—He’s happy with this person specifically and nobody else.

The access road in front of the airport belongs to an old 7/11 missing its sign from a hurricane six years ago, ads in the windows bleached blue by the sun.

Bianca parks her car onto the soft shoulder and leaves her windows cracked, toting her to-go bag and lemonade past his passenger door for the trunk.

Alex listens to the trunk open and takes a deep breath before joining her. Perfectly. Pleasant.

She’s kicked her shoes off, sitting on an old beach towel next to textbooks he meant to donate 8 months ago, shoving whole waffle fries down her gullet. An extra fry carton waits next to her nuggets.

Alex swings his feet over the bumper and eats a little slower, so this lasts a little longer. “Did this satisfy your craving?”

“Mhm. S’good.” She slurps her lemonade.

Vivid visions abound of a speech he’s thought to himself while staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping countless times. He’s got a captive audience. If she gets upset, she’s leaving anyway.

But then, they’re here, in this exact spot where two years ago, he’d picked her up from a horrible surprise-date gone wrong and she’d had him pull over so she could throw the guy’s ‘do me’ daisies out into the swamp and scream without anybody caring.

“I just want one guy friend who isn’t treating our friendship like an unskippable tutorial to getting in my pants,” she’d shouted, pacing in circles while he’d listened to her letting it all out. “Just one! Be my friend and only my friend, is that so hard?”

It hadn’t been, two years ago. He didn’t see what the problem was—friendship isn’t hard—and told her as much.

Now, though he’s always known that there is no ‘owing’ in relationships, that you have to love somebody for who they are, not who you were hoping they’d be… he understands.

But, his friend wants a friend to be just a friend, so he’s going to be that. It’s simple, black and white, no discussion necessary.

Bianca is onto her second carton of fries, a packet of honey mustard balanced on her knee and crumbs on her cheek. Alex hmphs and smiles to himself. He’s going to miss this.

“Thanks for the food,” he says, to break up the wordless silence of chewing and airplane engines.

Bianca bats the air and hides her mouth with her hand to mangle, “Don’ worry ‘bout it.” Then, “Can I have a fry?”

He chuckles and places his fry carton between them, staring ahead at the hazy yellow horizon like he’s in a cheesy music video. He’s not keeping track of her lemonade and how it’s already half-empty, pellet ice rattling. He’s not counting the dwindling nuggets, or the last crispy crumbs of the fries.

Bianca crawls through his trunk for floss-picks and his box of strawberries-and-cream Tic-Tacs.

He’s going to miss this, too.

He’s going to miss her annoying him by leaving the silverware in the sink. Snuffy’s fur all over his clothes. Her shoes piling up in the foyer and always tripping them both. His joggers going missing because she likes them and they happen to be the same size, instead of buying her own with the logic that his are already broken in. Movie nights when they sprawl over the couch and yell at the screen over characters’ dumb decisions. Her food hogging all the space in the freezer and every time she burns the popcorn.

A plane takes off and he watches the wheels fold up. Bianca isn’t taking one, but he imagines one of those Hallmark airport dashes, the ones where even TSA understands the stakes at hand waving the hero through, having to catch the tram and checking the departure times for a delay. And for whatever reason, she’s always near the last to board, about to scan her ticket when the guy comes sprinting down the terminal. Then he confesses and she skips her flight and the whole airport cheers.

Bianca’s lemonade is empty. All her trash is piled up in the bag and a Tic-Tac clacks against her teeth.

A dozen different ways to phrase shouldn’t you be going? sit on his tongue. She’s got a long drive and a cat to worry about and bed to put together when she gets there.

She should be going, but she isn’t.

“Oh, wait. I forgot.” Bianca sorts through her keys and wriggles off her set for the door and mailbox. He holds his hand out for them and hopes he’s not imagining her hesitation to let them go, but he definitely is. “I’ll get the parking decal in a sec.”

He pockets the keys. “I’ll get these to the leasing office in the morning.”

Alex resumes staring ahead so he’s not caught staring at her. She still doesn’t leave. Another plane takes off.

“Al?”

“Hm?”

Bianca is staring, a serious look on her face.

His stomach drops.

She knows. She knows and she’s about to tell him how uncomfortable he’s made her all this time, but she didn’t want to say anything to make it awkward before, but now that she’s leaving there’s no pressure.

He clenches his toes in his sneakers and hopes the terror isn’t showing on his face while he waits for her to find her words.

Bianca brushes back flyaways and picks up the Tic-Tac box just to put it down again, standing upright. She smooths her hand over the fish pattern in the beach towel and picks up two errant crumbs from her meal.

“I um…” her voice wavers on those two sounds and now she’s looking everywhere but at him. “I’m…”

Bianca nods to herself, then scowls, then nods again. “I’m going to be selfish,” she declares, “because I think I’ll regret it more if I don’t. I like you. I have for a while now. And I know this is really awful of me to dump this on you but I didn’t want anything unsaid between us. I don’t need a response, or pity, or anything. I just wanted you to know.”

She says it all nearly in one clinical breath, and now waits, muscles in her neck straining like they’re physically holding back more to her speech.

Alex stares, a ringing in his ears that he’s probably imagining, and manages a baffled: “What?”

Bianca rolls her lip and crosses her arms. “I’ve been thinking, and I think I knew that night you were making that homemade ziti? But it wasn’t actually ziti, it was a pasta bake, you just assumed ‘ziti’ is the word for all pasta bakes?” She nods to herself again like she can will this memory into his mind. Alex remembers this night acutely. “The look on your face of this fact like I’d told you the secret to world peace. You’d made this tiny little ‘oh’ and I just—”

She sighs heavily though her nose, jaw ticking.

“That was it. You said ‘oh’ and then went back to cleaning the dishes completely oblivious to the psychedelic trip I went on imagining life just like that, with you, forever, and how right it felt.” She smacks her forehead with her palm and grimaces. “And I know it doesn’t matter now, I know how selfish it is to tell you now, but I needed you to know.”

Silence.

Alex swallows dryly, Tic-Tac stale on his tongue. “The night you wanted to watch Homeward Bound,” he utters, one deliberate word at a time. “You always cry at Shadow in the mud pit, but you really wanted to watch it, so we did. You fell asleep on me before that scene. I didn’t wake you until he made it home.”

Bianca frowns, eyes flicking between his. “I remember. Last October.”

Alex swallows again. “That was it, for me.”

Bianca bumps her head on the roof of his car trying to get out. “Wait.”

She shoves her feet into her shoes, points at him, spins in a circle, and yanks her hair from its bun to rake her fingers through it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I…” Alex shyly recounts the aftermath of that horrible date and her wish for just friends.

Bianca touches her chest like he’s just told her their dog died. “All this time you—because of one emotional rant that wasn’t even about you, you—”

Alex shrinks in on himself. “I thought that’s what you wanted. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because!” She throws her hands up. “I gave you so many signals, Al!”

“You did?” When?

“Stealing your clothes?” She balls her fists on her hips. “Falling asleep on you? Deliberately picking a movie that would make me cry so we could cuddle? I couldn’t tell if you were being an annoyingly perfect gentleman, or you just weren’t interested but after enough attempts I gave up.”

Bianca cracks and drags her hand down her face. She holds her stomach like she’s about to be sick. Alex rushes to her car for a water from the cooler bags.

She holds it to her forehead, then the back of her neck, before opening it.

Alex doesn’t let himself fixate. What’s done is done, her moving truck is gone, her new lease is signed and he can’t escape the rest of his until it’s up. Her cat is in the car and she’s got to go.

Bianca dries her eyes and wipes her nose with the sweaty hem of her tank-top and laughs miserably. “You’re taking this uncomfortably well.”

Alex shrugs and holds his arm. “I’ve gotten good at under-reacting to things.”

Not the right words to say. Bianca flinches and her face scrunches up with the effort to hold back more tears.

“Come with me.” Bianca tosses her water bottle in the open trunk. “When the lease is up, come with me.”

The tinnitus is back. “What?”

“Al, come with me,” Bianca repeats, deadly serious. “You supported me for a whole year while I finished my graduate degree. I can do the same with my new job until you get on your feet. I know you’ve been wanting out for a while now.”

He shakes his head and backs up. “Bee, I know you’re upset right now but don’t make me promises you don’t intend to keep.”

Bianca gawps, then marches over to him. He expects a hit, a shove for being obtuse, or maybe for her to yell, and braces for it. Her tacky hands grab his face and when she kisses him, their teeth click and pinch his lip.

He almost falls backward arching away from her in shock.

Bianca lets him go and finger-combs his hair, eyes still shiny. “You know how in the movies they always say ‘come with me’ and they never do and they’re always miserable? Let’s not be one of those movies.”

A year of practice keeping his emotions to himself. Months, now, of mourning her quietly while she’s prepared for this move. Alex’s eyes sting and he gnashes his teeth. “What if—”

“Do you still love me?”

Love? He’s allowed to throw the l-word around? Alex nods rapidly and his voice cracks. “Yes.”

Bianca clutches his hands. “Then come with me. Until then we can do long-distance. We can make this work. We’ve already got proof of concept, you know?”

He nods again, eyes squeezed shut and a smile stuck on his face. “Yes.”

“Look at me.”

He does, and this kiss is far gentler. She tastes like lemonade and strawberries-and-cream Tic-Tacs.

Bianca drops her forehead against his and whispers once more, “Come with me.”

Alex giggles. “Yes.”