Then
They were sitting in silence on the hood of Ethan’s car, watching the stars wink above. Neither of them could think of anything to say that would be of comfort, either to themselves or each other, so the air was still between them apart from the sound of their breath and the occasional distant car passing by in the night.
It was Ruby’s last night in Beechfield. Her bags were packed, her books were stacked in boxes, and her father had the route to New York plugged into his satnav. There was nothing left to do now except say goodbye, but right now that felt like an impossibility.
Ethan reached out and took her hand, his thumb gently rubbing her palm. She felt a thrill go through her at his touch, but it was quickly tamped down by the weight of her sadness. She knew that they should be tearing each other’s clothes off right now, taking this opportunity to drink in every last drop, imprint themselves on each other’s skin, but she also somehow sensed, now that she was out here beneath this black canopy of sky, that tonight would be a strangely chaste one. Both of them were crippled by the anxiety roiling in the pits of their stomachs.
‘When do you start work?’ Ethan asked finally, though he already knew the answer. She started on Monday. In two days’ time, she would put on one of the business-smart outfits he’d gone with her to buy at the mall, get on the subway, walk down one of the wide, sweeping avenues he knew so well from the movies and would push through the door of some enormous glass skyscraper and be swept up in a world that he would never know and could never understand. Meanwhile he’d still be in Beechfield, serving shitty drinks to the same drunk loudmouths.
‘Monday,’ she said quietly. She felt a thrill of terror and excitement run through her, cutting through the sadness. New York, she thought to herself. For the past week, when the thought of leaving Ethan behind felt like a physical wound, she would conjure up an image of New York and marvel at it like a shiny new penny. New York will make all of this worth it, she told herself.
The silence descended again, each of them swallowed up by their thoughts. Ethan wondered how soon he’d be able to visit her. The thought of going to New York filled him with dread – he’d always hated the city because of its baseball rivalry with the Red Sox, and it wasn’t doing itself any favors by stealing away the woman he loved – but he knew that, as soon as she got there, it would be the only place he’d want to be. He could go down for a weekend over Columbus Day, maybe, and then maybe she could come up a few weeks afterwards. Then, in the spring . . . well, he hadn’t said anything to her yet, but he’d decided to go back to school. Ruby had been right: there were some interesting tech design courses around, some of them even in New York, so he’d sent out application forms to a couple. He knew that the only chance he had of keeping hold of Ruby was to try and make something out of himself. There was no way that she was going to stay with someone who was just a bartender, not when she’d soon have the whole of New York spread out at her feet. He had to try.
Ruby lay on her back and felt the residual warmth from the engine on her skin. There was a definite chill in the air, and the leaves on the trees overhead were starting to darken and droop. Soon the forests around here would be awash with brilliant color – reds and oranges and palest yellows – before the leaves finally gave up and dropped from their branches. She and her mother used to collect the prettiest leaves and press them between the pages of books to preserve them, though their color would always fade. After her mother died, she seemed to find them everywhere – each time she opened a book, brittle shards of dried leaves would flutter to the floor. Everything ends, she thought to herself, and felt a tear slide down her cheek and into the shell of her ear.
She looked over at Ethan lying next to her. His eyes were closed and the tips of his eyelashes cast a shadow in the moonlight. It would be so easy now to keep lying next to him and forget everything else: the job, the new apartment, Jessica, New York. She could stay in Beechfield with him. She could continue working in her father’s office, maybe do some advertising work for him. She could spend her nights keeping Ethan company at Billy Jack’s. They could move in together. It could all stay the same. It didn’t have to change.
She sat up and wiped away the tracks of her tears. No, it didn’t have to change, but it would. She’d worked too hard to give it all up for someone else, even if that someone else was the love of her life. She would move to New York tomorrow and start work on Monday – of course she would. How could she not? It was what she’d always wanted, and now it was stretched out in front of her. She hadn’t meant to fall in love over the summer, but it had happened, and there was nothing she could do now to stop it. She couldn’t give up Ethan, but she couldn’t give up on what she’d wanted for herself, either.