“Come in,” I yell at the tentative knock on the door to the apartment I’m staying in over my parent’s garage.

“Are you okay?” Malone asks as she takes in the picture of me, carrying bags as she comes inside.

I’m sure to most people it looks like I’m a science experiment gone wrong. I’m lying on the couch with a contraption on my leg, watching a TV show. “It’s cold therapy,” I explain. “It continuously has compression and sends penetrating cold to what’s being healed. I overextended a little today, so I’m spending a little extra time hooked up,” I explain as I close my eyes, letting the machine work it’s magic because it feels so good.

“Did your PT say it was okay to overdo it?” she asks as she puts the bags on my counter.

“He’s the one who told me it was okay to run in the pool.”

“Oh Slater, I bet you went balls to the wall didn’t you?” There’s a hint of a laugh in her voice.

“Is there any other way to go when they tell me I can run?” I open an eye and watch as she starts unloading the bags. “What do you have?”

“I brought stuff to make for dinner.” She turns around, looking at me over her shoulder. “I figure neither one of us wants to go out and be the talk of the town just yet, so maybe we can have a cozy night in.”

“You? You’re gonna cook for me?” This is something she’s never done before, and I have to admit, it’s warming a place inside my chest that’s been cold for a long time.

“Yeah.” She grins. “Is that cool with you?”

“Sweetness, if you wanna get that fine ass in the kitchen and make me dinner, I will not complain.”

“I assume you still eat all that healthy stuff right?”

I rub my stomach nodding. “Even though I’m recovering, it doesn’t mean I can go crazy with my diet.”

She holds up a package of chicken and a couple of sweet potatoes. “This good?”

“Can never go wrong with chicken and veggies. If you’re baking the meat, there’s a ton of spices up in that second cabinet.” I point to the one I’m talking about.

“Perfect.” She gives me a smile as she gets set up at my kitchen table. There’s not a lot of counter space, and this allows me to watch her as she goes to work. “You thought of everything didn’t you?” I notice she’s also brought disposable pans.

“I didn’t know what your situation was like here, if you have a dishwasher or whatever. Didn’t want to make more of a mess for you.”

“Appreciate it.”

Before she came in, I’d been watching my team play a game that I’m not a part of. Now, I can’t pull my gaze from her. She may or may not notice me looking at her, she’s not giving me any indication either way, but I can’t stop my eyes from eating her up. She’s peeling the sweet potatoes, dicing them up, and putting them on a pan.

“Why are you staring at me?”

Her question pulls me out of my observation. “When did you stop talkin’ with such a thick accent? When did you start dialing it down for other people?” I turn the question around on her.

“When I moved. Didn’t want people to think I was a country bumpkin they could walk all over. Many of my coworkers made the mistake of assuming I was naïve because of how I spoke. It never sat well with me, so I changed my accent.”

“I miss it.” I close my eyes, listening to her talk. “You had this soft way of speaking that always made me feel at home. The way you said your I’s, and the way you dropped the g every once in a while.” I rub against the stubble on my face. “You wanna know a secret?”

“Do you trust me enough to tell me one, Slater?”

It’s easy to fall back into old habits, they die hard, but I do trust her, more than I should, especially after how we ended it before. “I never stopped. It’s hard to not trust someone who knows all your secrets.”

My eyes open, and I see that she’s looking at me now, having stopped what she was doing. “Some of the things you say break my heart.”

“It’s okay.” I run my hand through my hair. “We’ve got time to fix it up.”

There’s a quietness in the room as we both process what we’ve just let slip. This is one of those moments that makes or breaks situations, and I don’t want to make light of it. If there’s ever a time for us to be honest with each other, it’s now, considering the fact we weren’t honest before.

“Do we really?”

“We do,” I assure her. “Because I still have a voicemail on my phone that you left me ten years ago.”

The chopping she’s doing ceases, and her eyes meet mine over the distance between us. “Which one?” Her voice is soft, full of emotion.

“The one where you told me you made a mistake, and then told me never to contact you again before you hung up.”

“I left that two weeks after we left each other. I was missing you in the worst way. I knew nobody at school and I just wanted your arms wrapped around me. Trust me, I know how selfish that is. Especially when I’m the one who asked for it. That night, though, I missed you so much, I was willing to give it all back, to forget about everything I’d said, and do whatever you wanted.”

“I knew you were willing to do that.” I sit up, taking the cool wrap off my knee, stretching it out. “I could have enticed you to come back, I could have tricked you into it, but I knew you were weak that night. And I also knew that if I got you back just because you were weak, it wouldn’t last. So I pretended like I either never got the voicemail, or I just ignored it. It killed me,” I face her. “Because I’ve always been a fixer for you. I’ve always been the person who made sure you were good. From the minute you said you’d be my girlfriend. If anybody fucked with you, they answered to me. I took that responsibility, and that night, I gave the responsibility back. I wasn’t willing to be the fixer I’ve always been. It just didn’t feel right. At the same time, I also knew I’d officially lost you. That was an olive branch you extended, and I purposely turned it down.”

I walk over to the table and have a seat across from her. Folding my hands in front of me, I take all of the walls down. “I’m not saying that was the best thing for me to do, I’m not saying it was right, but it’s what I did at the time. It set us on this course, Mal, and I have to say I’ve had a good life. With you in it, would it have been great? I don’t know, because you may have hated me. You may have grown to resent me more and maybe we would have had two kids, the white picket fence, and you would have divorced me.” I shrug at a loss for words.

She reaches over, grabbing my hand in hers. “I’m glad you were the strong one, because you’re right. We both needed to do some growing, and now I think we need to do some moving on.”

“You mean that? Like we can put all this other shit behind us?”

She nods. “I think we’ve talked about what happened enough, we’ve cleared the air, and now it’s time to make some new memories.”

“Making new memories sounds amazing to me.”

A weight has been lifted off my shoulders, one I didn’t know was still there, at his words. Guilt has plagued me for years, because of how I handled our break up. I knew, without a doubt, that the reason we didn’t work out was because of me. Every time I’d see a happy couple or a young family walk by, especially in the beginning, I would think about what might have been. I would spend days in a dark world where I berated myself for being so damn stupid and selfish. Eventually, I realized that things happen for a reason, and regardless of when, we would have broken up sooner or later, because we’d never allowed ourselves to grow without one another. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I learned it, and now I appreciate sitting here across from him more than I ever would have before.

“You know, this is one of the things I was always looking forward to doing for you,” I tell him as I season the chicken and the potatoes I’m going to roast before throwing a bag of broccoli in there too.

“What’s that?” He purses his lips as he looks at what I’m doing, his confusion is written plain as day across his face.

“Cooking for you. I always wanted to take care of you, the way you took care of me, but ya know a couple high schoolers who didn’t have their own living space? I could never cook you dinner, wash your clothes, or any of that stuff. It might make me sound like a housewife from the fifties, but those were some of the things I dreamed about doing for you. But in the end, I also wanted something for me.” I laugh as I realize how weird it sounds.

Slater switches seats so that we’re sitting next to each other, he turns me so that I’m sitting in between his spread legs, then leans in. “Hey, any time you wanna take care of me, you can do that. I have laundry for days, and I never eat homemade food. I have a delivery service, and at best, I put it in the microwave.”

The grin on his face warms my heart as I laugh, and surprisingly the laugh turns into a sob. A full body shaking sob that I can no more push back in than I can fully let out. I cave in on myself as I try to hold it back.

“Mal, wait, wait, what’s wrong?” He tilts my chin to him as I try to hide my reaction. Right now I can’t stand for him to look at me, so I bury myself into his body.

“I don’t know.” I shake my head. But I do know, I’m crying for everything that could have been between us. The time we possibly wasted and the memories we’ll never get back. But I just told him I want to make new memories, and I can’t put us back there again, so instead, I sob. Forever it feels like, I sob as he holds me. When I finally feel as if I’m cleansed, the tears stop, the shaking stops, and I pull back, rubbing my eyes. “Sorry.” I exhale deeply.

When I look at him, his eyes are red too, there are tracks down his face, and he offers me the same exhale. “Don’t be sorry, I know what happened there, and I feel the same way you do, but we’re not gonna talk about it.”

“No, we aren’t.” I force myself to get up from my seat and walk the two trays over to the oven I’ve had pre-heating. “What we’re going to do is eat this nutritious dinner, and then gorge on the brownies I brought from the bakery.”

He moans loudly as he rubs his stomach. “You brought the brownies?”

“I did.” I laugh at how excited he looks. “I remembered you saying they were good.”

“They were more than good. They were like orgasmic good.” He leans back in his chair, closing his eyes.

I’m hit with a vivid memory of the first time I gave him a blow job, when I glanced up as he moaned and spilled across my tongue. He’d looked exactly like he does right now, and inexplicably, I want to be the person to make him moan like that, want to the be one who makes him throw his head back.

“You okay?”

Shaking my head to clear it, I answer. “Perfect.”

Because now, I know I have a new mission in life.