Page 39 of Only After We Met

“Someday, little Ginger, all this will be yours.”

I swallowed and noticed the knot in my throat. Dad turned off the lights, and we walked out. I said nothing on the way home.

“Are you all right, Ginger? You said you were all right with it…”

I needed a moment to realize he was worried about lunch. Dean’s parents and mine were seeing us off, like in the old days. I shook my head.

“I don’t mind. Really.”

“All right. But if you change your mind, just say you don’t feel good and go to your room. Ginger, I know maybe I wasn’t as tactful as I should have been when you and Dean split up. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately…”

“Dad, for real. Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“I just thought he was a good guy…”

“And he is. But not for me. That’s no reason not to like him.”

“Fine.” He took a deep breath, a bit more relaxed.

I appreciated his thoughts, but I didn’t want my father to change the way he was with Dean. He’d always treated him like the son he never had, and he expected him to take a role at the top of his company. There was no way I was going to wedge my way into the relationship they’d been building for so long just because we were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. It was fine. More than fine, even.

I didn’t mind not getting an explanation…

Or that we hadn’t even talked about it…

I kept repeating that, trying to convince myself. When we entered the house, the scent of meat pie was in the air and the whole Wilson family was in the living room. Dean’s parents hugged me so tightly, I was afraid they’d break a rib. We hadn’t seen each other all summer, and it was weird, to say the least. Maybe they didn’t realize I’d been avoiding them, because the past few weeks had been depressing enough without initiating an uncomfortable conversation I wasn’t ready for.

Dean stared at me with his hands in his pockets. He looked nervous. I nodded at him and went to the kitchen with the excuse of helping Mom take dinner out of the oven and put it on the plates.

Donna was last to come in, when we were already sitting down at the table. She took a generous portion and sat down beside me, thank God. I looked down at my plate and listened, chewing, paying attention only to the display cabinet full of old knickknacks Mom had never wanted to throw out: gifts from when we were baptized, old decorations long out of fashion. After a few bites, I felt the food getting stuck in my throat. I took a drink of water, trying to figure out why I was so upset. Finally I dared to look up at Dean, and…I didn’t feel anything. Not a trace of longing when I saw his brown curly hair, the movement of his Adam’s apple, or his dark eyes.

We were close not too long ago, working together in class, but funny enough, there in my home was the first time I felt differently about him. I think it was because I hadn’t realized till then what a constant presence Dean had been in my life ever since I was in diapers. I got that nasty scar on my knee when I tripped and fell running after him down the street behind my house when I was seven. He was the only boy I’d made love with. The first in everything. The one who took me to prom. The one I applied to college with. So many moments. So many memories…

And now he was there in front of me like a stranger.

My stomach started turning and I stood, wiping my mouth with a napkin. Everyone stopped talking and looked at me, not understanding.

“I don’t feel very good. If you’ll excuse me…”

I walked up to the second floor, stumbling on the carpet. Once I was in the bathroom, I washed my face with cool water and tried to calm down. I didn’t know what all that was about. It didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did. Maybe it made complete sense at the moment.

I heard knocking at the door.

“Ginger…can you open up?”

It was Dean. I took a deep breath, slid open the lock, and let him in. We looked at each other in the bathroom mirror.

“I think… I think we should talk.”

“It’s about time,” I murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He followed me to my room. Inside, he looked at the corkboard still full of photos of him. The silence was uncomfortable. Dean looked too big and too strange in that room, as if he didn’t fit there, however little sense that made.

“I don’t know where to start.”