As the wind drove rain against the windows of my apartment, I held her and she held me as we slowly moved around the candle lit room. It was romantic and it should have been perfect but something was wrong. To me it seemed that Jana was only half there, as if she had been split into two people making it impossible for her to give her full attention. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking and that bothered me.
I moved in closer, pushing my face into her mass of dark curly hair. Her hair, so much thicker than my own, was like a jungle. You could get lost in it. I breathed in deeply, her shampoo smelled vaguely of apples. Turning my head I put my lips to her neck and whispered “I love you”. She seemed tense, a little sad. It made me want to both cry and kiss her all at the same time.
No; my mother doesn’t know. She thinks Jana and I are just friends. I love that word: friends.
I met Jana just over two years ago through a mutual friend. It was a blind date. I remember driving us to the restaurant, both of us trying to get over the awkward silence of the situation. Dinner was better, we talked and laughed and got to know each other. By the time I dropped her off at her apartment we were already making plans to get to together later in the week.
She had come with me to visit my family a couple of weeks ago. We drove down and I introduced her as the good friend who didn’t have enough money to fly out to see her own parents. So she stayed with us for those three days, getting to know my parents and brother, and sleeping in my bed while I slept on the couch.
On our second afternoon there we had been in the living room with my parents talking and generally ignoring what was on the TV. After a while my mother and father got up and left to go out to lunch. Jana and I sat there on the couch, looking at each other but not really saying anything.
“Well!” She said loudly, grinning at me
“Well...” I echoed quietly.
“What’s wrong?” She asked. She was watching me, concerned. I wanted to answer her, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how.
So what did Jana and I do, sitting on the couch, with both of my parents and brother out of the house? We necked. Maybe it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, but it was right, it felt natural. We found ourselves doing things like that more and more often. It was nice. It’s hard always doing things that you think are the right things to be doing. So, we necked.
Later that night I took Jana out and showed her around my hometown. Not that there is much to see in good old Burroughs, Virginia. Burroughs is a town, nothing more. It’s basically made up of two major roads that cross each other to form a town square complete with a small stage and statue of our towns founding father. There are a lot of old Victorian houses and grassy areas that would be called parks if there weren’t so many of them.
I showed Jana my old schools and the other places I grew up in. She seemed politely interested and she laughed at my stories about growing up in a town that, in places, looked about as real as a movie set. She and I walked to my old elementary school and played on the swings and other playground equipment together.
“What would you do if you won a million dollars?” she asked me. We were both sitting cross legged out in the middle of the school's soccer field.
“I’d invest it wisely,” I said leaning back on my elbows.
“No really, what would you do?”
“I dunno. I guess I’d use some of it to pay off debts and the rest to buy exceedingly and sickeningly expensive items that I’d never, ever use in everyday life,” I answered, “What would you do?”
She giggled and looked at me thoughtfully. I thought she must have been thinking about this one for a while.
“Honestly?” She asked.
“Yeah.”
That thoughtful expression again, “I don't know.”
Jana was always doing and saying things like that. It can be hard to get a straight answer out of her a lot of the time. It used to bother me but after a while I got used to it. Jana’s like that, you have to get used to things, become familiar with her.
But none of that was what I really wanted to tell you. I was talking about that night and the dance and what happened.
The song ended but we danced on in silence. We held each other close and for that moment all of the uncertainties inside me faded until the only thing that mattered was holding on. It was like a promise. A promise of a tomorrow. A future, together.
