She likes to go there sometimes, to close her eyes and remember that chilly night, the nearness of him, the way he had almost put his arm around her. She listens to the fountain, and it sounds to her like him, like the kind of heroic love that saves you from your own mistakes; almost like a knight in shining armor, were she given to such clichés.
She never takes enough layers of clothing because that would be betraying the memory, she wants the cold to bite her like it did back then, she wants it to be exactly as it was, when she thought things could not be any more difficult or complicated, back then, in what she now knows to be the good old days, haunted as they were by the ghost of what so nearly was, of what she so often hoped for.
Oh, if she'd only known.
She sits, curled up against the cold, chin resting on her knees, arms wrapped around her legs, she sits and she thinks about him and she wonders again if she made the wrong decision. On the list of pros and cons it had all seemed so right, but Christmas and New Year and their non-anniversary had come and gone, and of course Valentine's Day but she'd made a point of not noticing that, and he hadn't called and she was tired of missing him, tired of her whole body aching for him, tired of fighting against herself for feeling those things.
You'll know, she'd told herself, if you leave, you'll know. And if you know, then you can move on. Get on with life. Bury the ghost of non-anniversaries past.
Except, of course, that you can't bury a ghost, can you.
She sighs from deep within and the tears come, unbidden and unwelcome. On those rare occasions when she's honest with herself she knows that this is why she loves this fountain, this fountain which weeps on her behalf, incessantly, with all the energy she wishes she could summon. But tonight the fountain isn't enough; her heart is heavier than usual. No reason, no anniversary, no trigger that she can easily identify. Some days are just like this: they are the days when before she drifts off to fitful, restless sleep she wraps herself in his Harvard sweater, the sweater that smells more of her than him now but if she really concentrates and imagines herself to be back in his office she can still remember: coffee and that aftershave she loves, the one she sometimes, on the bad days, sneaks into the drugstore and squirts just once, to stop herself forgetting.
As if she ever could. Or would. Or wanted to.
She opens her eyes to wipe them and just beyond the weeping fountain there's a blur that looks like him, but all blurs do, she knows that by now, knows that from all those moments like this when she's held her breath and reminded herself that it can't be him. Only this time the shape walks like him and it's wearing the coat he once wrapped around her and then he's close enough that even through the tears and the darkness there's no denying it.
"It's freezing out here," he says, and he takes his coat off, her hero all over again. Drapes it round her shoulders before sitting down next to her.
"What are you doing here?" she says eventually.
"I like this place," he says, and there is tenderness and love and kindness and concern in his eyes, she knows that from his tone of voice, but she can't bring herself to look at him. "I come here to think."
"What about?" She hears herself say, as though she had not lost the right to ask. He doesn't answer. He doesn't answer, and they listen to the fountain, and the tears come again, how she wishes she weren't so powerless to stop them. She forces herself to look at him and she falls in love with his coffee-colored eyes all over again and despite the coat she shivers. "What about, Josh?"
"You," he says, looking straight at her, his eyes holding hers. "You."
And he gently wipes her tears away and he holds her, warm and tight and tender and strong, as she'd longed for him to hold her back then, as she longs for him to hold her always.
Thanks to Sarah Salway at www.sarahsalway.blogspot.com for the "where I like to sit" prompt.
