a few pages

Leigh Hunter thought he’d said goodbye to her almost four years ago. Yet here she was, close enough for him to see that he was not mistaken. He was staring at Maia Morland, and not a woman who simply looked like her.

     Their love affair, which he had hoped would follow the happy narrative of a romance, had come to an end in high school. A fairly messy end, Leigh thought. The kind of mess that can only be created by lawyers, parents, and threatened charges of criminal negligence.

     Of course he could never forget her, and no doubt dreamed of her, even when awake. He had probably looked for her in every girl he’d tried to love since. But the fact was, even now, with Maia across the room, all Leigh could focus on was an image of her socks. Of blood seeping into her socks, and having that same blood all over his hands.

     Maia was talking to the host of the party at which Leigh was an accidental guest, and she hadn’t yet turned to look in his direction. There was still time for him to leave. The living room, like the rest of the apartment, was absurdly large, and there was no reason to believe Maia had seen him, in spite of his unabated staring. He could make his excuses to Kathleen, who had brought him along to the party in a gesture of friendship.

     “Are you all right?” Kathleen asked, her hand pressing lightly on his arm. “You look awful.”

     Maia turned right then, her eyes coming to rest on him. She didn’t look startled, but neither did she register recognition. She seemed, instead, to consider him. To consider all the variables of Leigh Hunter, her most devoted boyfriend from high school, turned murderous assailant, and now before her.

     Leigh, without looking away from Maia, asked Kathleen, “Do I really? As bad as awful?”

     Maia spoke to the man she was with—a man older than Kathleen, who at forty-two was twice Leigh’s age. The man with Maia was dressed, as Kathleen was, in materials both lush and tailored. Leigh, wearing his one good suit (bought last month for a job interview), watched Maia make her way toward him. She seemed, as she approached, to be full of shifting shadows and light. It was as if she were a painting, one best appreciated by a viewer willing to look from more than one perspective. Colors collided and shot out from her skin, her hair, her eyes.

     And yet, in spite of all this, he could barely see her.

     “It’s that you’re pale,” Kathleen told him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

     No, not a ghost, just socks, he thought. Socks and blood.

❧

It was inevitable that certain details would forever hijack his ability to think of or even to see Maia. Leigh could remember how his mother, when approaching a deadline or signing a new contract, had often said, with a certain weariness, “The story is always the same; only the details are different.”

❧

During his childhood, Leigh’s mother, Lillian Hunter, had more than one job, but most of the money that paid bills came from books she wrote with titles like The Duke’s Heir, Swept of Passion, or The Silent Governess. Although Leigh hadn’t read his mother’s books, he knew enough about them to believe it was true: the story always was the same; only the details were different.

     But even then, he’d also known that sometimes details did more than make a story stand out. Sometimes they blocked a story altogether. Like with a girl. Leigh had been barely seventeen when he and Maia met, and his experience with girls was, he thought, far short of the norm.

     Even so, he was definitely an expert in the way that the most unexpected parts of a girl could blind you to anything else. He’d lost hours on the space behind a girl’s ears, and on the muscles sliding up and down the legs of another, and the way the hands of still another fluttered when she spoke. When Leigh got too caught up in the way a girl’s neck curved, he knew he’d forever missed the big picture: her name, her friends, his chances of talking to her. Everything. Gone.

     Now, at twenty-one, Leigh was capable of staring at a woman’s hands while recalling her name, placing her friends, and assessing the possibility of seeing her again. All while talking to her. But what most clearly told him that he hadn’t changed enough were the bloody socks. They demanded his full attention as he thought of Maia and what had happened during his last year of high school.

     “Leigh,” she said, now standing right before him and holding her hand out, making a hug impossible.

     He felt her skin against his, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. He needed to say Hello or How are you? He would need to shake the hand of her date, and introduce her to Kathleen. He had to find out if she was well and happy. If she had recovered from what had happened, both to them and to her. And he had to do it without her ever knowing how desperately he needed the answer. But she seemed to know everything already, as her eyes remained on his. Her look no longer considered him, but took it all in: the four years since she’d last seen him, his current inability to think, and how he might have come to be at this party.

     It made sense that she would know more than he did, for the detail that made his and Maia Morland’s love story different was that Leigh was forever a few pages behind in the plot.