Page 12 of Meet Me Back Here

Seeing Forrest’s carefree grin makes me feel like I could float out of this chair. I think I keep waiting for him to say Never mind. I’m out.

Today is not that day.

His answer pops up quickly.

Forrest

You’d better hurry… I’m going to get a table, and you know how Bruno feels about holding tables.

Well, shit. The place may be called Theo’s, but Bruno is the incredibly Massachusetts chef who runs the grill, and he’s the man in charge. He does not let campers sit at his tables on the weekends. If Forrest really intends to claim one while he waits for me, he’s taking his life into his own hands.

I tumble out of the chair as I fire off my next message.

Me

Don’t get murdered before I get there. I’m not sure I can enjoy my bacon beside your corpse.

In five minutes flat, I’m backing out of my driveway. A few miles later, I’m throwing my car in park and jumping out before it’s fully off. I burst through Theo’s door, sending the bell above it smacking against the wall violently just in time to see Forrest slide onto a stool at the counter that faces the kitchen.

Following the sound of my entrance, Forrest finds me and waves me over. I notice several heads have turned toward me in response to my tumultuous entrance. Bruno’s is one of them, and he narrows his eyes at me before returning to his griddle. I expect I’m on thin ice for disturbing the peace.

“You got here fast,” Forrest says as I squeeze between tables to reach him.

“I was driving for your life,” I say back with a huff. “I thought you were coming right in.”

“I did.” Forrest shrugs. “There was a wait, and Denis is working.”

I turn to look back at the door where a teenage boy is wiping menus down among a clump of waiting patrons.

“I work with his dad, so he let me get in line even though my whole party wasn’t here.” Forrest raises his hand toward the kid who eagerly waves back.

Forrest turns back to the counter and opens his menu, even though I’m sure he’s going to order the same thing he’s ordered every single time we’ve come here. He claims he likes to check anyway. Just in case something catches my eye, he’d say.

It won’t. He’s a creature of habit. It’s comforting.

I, on the other hand, am a chaos goblin and always order the special no matter what it is. I usually don’t even ask. I just make sure it comes with a side of bacon. Forrest calls it breakfast roulette, but it’s never led me wrong. Well, except for that one time the special was some kind of mystery mushroom mush… but we don’t talk about that. I think even Bruno pretends it never happened.

Everything feels normal. Good. Safe. Arizona is back in its locked box, and I’ll be blessed with bacon soon enough. I breathe a sigh of relief.

“Tell me more about your trip,” Forrest says without preamble, his eyes still scanning the various toppings that can go on a Belgian waffle. Then, he sets the menu down and turns to me. “Tell me about Arizona.”

The Arizona box has been blown up.

“Forrest, we don’t talk about Arizona. We both know it, and we don’t even talk about why we don’t talk about Arizona, though I think we both know that too,” I say, trying to figure out why he’d so blatantly rain fire on our system. The system is good. The system has worked.

Forrest folds his hands on top of his menu before tilting his head and really looking at me. His eyes are a rich green, like grass on a sunny day, and I feel exposed.

“I hate not knowing about a whole part of your life. I don’t want to have things we don’t talk about. I want to be here for all of it,” he states, looking so damn earnest.

He slides his hand across the counter until his pinky rests against my wrist, just a pinpoint of contact linking us together. I resist the urge to shudder. I expect Forrest doesn’t notice, but this—the touching—started for us when we were together. He’d always find a point of contact for us, no matter how small. At the movies, out to eat, on one of our couches, in the car.

“Something tells me it was an important time for you,” Forrest continues, seemingly unaware of the fact that all my focus has homed in on the tiny touch from him. His pinky shifts ever so slightly, up then down against my skin. I watch the motion for a few seconds before I snap back to the present.

What Forrest is asking for might not be completely insane. I can’t say I haven’t felt the same way. Like the Dark Days (TM), as I’ve unlovingly named them in my head, have been an enormous wall between us, keeping us from being the friends we were before everything.

But I don’t know how I tell Forrest about anything from my life out West—the beauty of the desert, the way I was forced to actually be an adult by myself for the first time in my life, or how my writing flourished—without hurting him.

The truth is, I loved my four years in Arizona. I love the experiences I had, the people I met, the classes I took. I love who I was there, who I became.