Read Online When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney - Free Book Online

purchase, I stand up and leave the living room, mumbling, “Be right back.”
    I walk to the bathroom at the end of the hall. I shut the door. I head straight for the window. I slide it open and pop out the screen. I stand on the toilet seat, then climb the rest of the way out of the window and hop into my front yard. I close the window, and I walk and I walk and I walk.
    When I return an hour later, my greatest hope is she’ll be gone. My most fervent wish is that I will have made my great escape from her, from her hold on me. But instead Ifind her sound asleep on my couch, Sandy Koufax tucked tightly into a ball at Holland’s bare feet.
    I kneel down on the tiles where the book she was reading has slipped out of her tired hands. It’s a paperback, The Big Sleep . I run a thumb across the cover, wondering when Holland developed a penchant for Raymond Chandler. There was a time when she would have told me her favorite parts. When she would have tried to tell me the ending because she just loved it so much, she had to share, and I’d have held up a hand and told her to stop. Laughing all the time. Then I’d have read it too, and we’d have walked on the beach and talked about the best parts. We’d have done that tonight with the movie too. Imitated the actors’ inflections at their most over-the-top moments, then marveled at the blown-up buildings.
    I shut the book we’re not sharing. The ending we’re not talking about. I place it on the coffee table and walk upstairs, because if I stay near her, I will wake her up, rustle a shoulder, and ask her. Ask her why she left. Ask her why she’s here. Ask her what changed for her.
    When I get into my bed, I am keenly aware of her in my house, as if the rising and falling of her breathing, the fluttering of her sleeping eyelids, can somehow be seen and heard from a floor above. I imagine her waking up, walking up the stairs, heading down the hall, standing in my doorway, a sliver of moonlight through the window sketching her in the dark. I would speak first, telling her the truth—thatI’m still totally in love with her. That nothing has changed for me when it comes to her.
    Everything else is so muted, so fuzzy, so frayed around the edges. This—how I feel for Holland—is the only thing in my life that has remained the same. Everyone I have loved is gone. Except her. Holland is the before and the after, and the way I feel for her is both lethal and beautiful. It is like breathing, like a heartbeat.
    She would say the same words back to me, that she feels the same. Then she would say my name, like she’s been searching for something, like she’s found the thing she’s been looking for.
    Come find me, come find me, come find me.

    In the morning, I find her in my kitchen making toast.
    “I am the world’s deepest sleeper,” she announces by way of a greeting. “I did not wake up once all night.”
    I say nothing, just sit down at the counter on one of the stools.
    “I don’t think I even realized I fell asleep. I just woke up this morning all disoriented and then I was like, Oh, I fell asleep on Danny’s couch .”
    The toast pops up, and she begins to spread butter on it.
    “But thank you. For letting me fall asleep here.”
    “Right.”
    She hands me a plate. I look at the toast like it’s a foreign substance. I don’t eat it.
    “Are you hungry?”
    “No.”
    “Oh.”
    I push the plate back to her.
    “Sorry,” she says, and looks down at the plate, staring hard at the toast like it holds secrets. Then she fiddles with her star ring, twisting it one way, then the other.
    “Why do you wear that still?”
    She looks up, surprised that I’ve had the guts to ask her a real question for once.
    “No, really. What’s the point, Holland? Just take off the ring.”
    She shakes her head.
    “Seriously. Take it off. You don’t need it anymore. Take the star off and throw it out.”
    She swallows hard and presses her lips together, as if she is holding back