67 ~ Mandy! Mandy! Mandy!-2

“Amanda?” He blinked at me, his brow furrowing slightly as his gaze lingered on me, and I watched as his hazel eyes traveled from my face and down my arm to my fingertips where I grasped a bottle of beer by the tip of the bottle, the serrated edge of the cap pressing into the pads of my fingers, but I didn’t shift the bottle around in my hand or change positions because the focus of the mild pain gave me something else other than the fact that he was there, in the kitchen, with me, and that he looked . . . normal. His face was shaven and without the blond bristles that occasionally adorned his cheeks, his hair wasn’t tousled or too long, his clothes didn’t look unusually wrinkled or old, as if he had worn them for days, and his eyes were clear and confused, not dazed with loneliness. If it was as if our breakup had never happened—as if we never happened—and my silence after he had asked me if we would be still be together if Roxanne were alive hadn’t happened either. Or maybe they did happen and he was unaffected by it anyway, our relationship just a speck of dust in his eyes, easily swept underneath the rug and dubbed a “bad decision” or “understandable given the circumstances” but nothing more. He looked as he always did, and this saddened and angered me. I felt hallow and alone, and he looked complete. I glanced away from him, swiftly, and allowed his figure to haze into a narrow, green and blue blur with a golden tip in the corner of my eye, as I reached forward to grasp the fallen, empty beer bottle by the center, the condensation dampening the label and it slid underneath my fingertips as I placed it upright again, clinking the tinted glass against another one of the bottles gathered on the island. I could still see him standing there, shifting his weight somewhat awkwardly and removing one of his hands from the pocket of his hoodie before, hesitating, he shoved it back inside, and his gaze had trailed away from my face down to my fingers as I adjusted the beer bottles, quietly, and hoped and dreaded at the same time that he would say something. I wanted him to take a step closer to me, remove his curled fists from his pocket, and admit to me that his appearance was deceiving, and that he missed me, even if only because Albert no longer had anyone to hand-dry his washed dishes. But instead, he drew in a breath, the kind of breath that sounds so final that it chills you faintly because you know what comes next will be cold and detached, the words that you had been avoiding, and that breath was readying to ambush you with them. Realizing that I still held one of the beers, picked by random, in my hand, I turned around and away from him, my hip grazing against the edge of the island, the cool marble smooth and soothing on the exposed sliver of skin of my waist in between the hem of my shirt and my jeans, and I walked toward the countertop on the other side of the kitchen, reaching for the bottle opener, and I heard the sound of my heels hitting the tiling, as if it were the hands of a clock ticking away the seconds in the still kitchen, the muffled melody of a barely blasted song emitting through the walls. I clutched the bottle opener so tightly that my fingers started to turn purple as I stood there, facing away from him, and I fiddled with the arrowhead-like tip as I tried to wedge it underneath the jagged edges of the bottle cap. It was scraping against the glass, and it would occasionally slip from underneath the cap and graze against my cheek as it flew up. I was about to chuck it across the counter and against the wall, thinking of maybe just smashing the neck of the bottle against the side of the island to break the bottle open, when I felt the warmth of his fingers brushing against mine as he took the bottle opener from my hand, my fingers suddenly limp, and I felt my breathing hitch in my throat as he stood over me, my shoulder touching his chest as he breathed, gentle nudges against my elbow. It annoyed me and hurt me at the same time that the brushes of his breathing felt so even against my arm. “I probably shouldn’t do this,” he mumbled, his voice low and husky in my ears and I thought I could feel the warmth of his breath tickling the back of my neck as he reached over me, the fabric of his sleeve grazing softly against my arm as he gently clutched the bottle of beer from my hand, wrapping his fingers around the bottom of the bottle where I wasn’t gripping it, and his knuckles touched the side of my hand as faintly as the fragile wings of a butterfly, and I let him take it from me. He tucked the pointed tip of the bottle opener beneath the rounded edge of the cap, pressed down, and I heard the deafening pop as the cap flew off, bent and crumpled, and landing on one of the tiles beside the toe of my shoe with a clink. Then he nudged the bottle into my hand, and shoved his hand back into the pocket of his hoodie while tossing the opener onto the countertop, the slender tool gliding across the granite surface quietly before softly colliding with the corner of the bread box with a stick of soft and gleaming butter on the top in a dish. “You’re underage,” he said after a moment, his voice conveying the only fragments of emotion that radiated from his body as he bent down to pick up the bottle cap: awkwardness. I remembered how he went to that party to try and win Roxanne back, maybe with a mix CD of Michael Jackson tucked into the glove compartment of his station wagon or a couple of freshly plucked daisies to remind her of that summer, and as I watched him flip the bottle cap as if it were a coin, I knew that he wasn’t here to try and win me back.