Chapter 35: Vee

Yaron and I headed into the backyard. I walked quickly, in an attempt to leave behind those sticky and annoying emotions that the reunion with my father had awakened in me. Yaron followed my steps, in silence. I felt his breath in my ear. His smell was on my breath.

We sat down at our place. The place of our first kiss. The place we were going to meet when aliens came to invade our planet. The sun was shining brightly. The flowers were growing wild.

“How long are you staying?”

“Three days. I have to be in Los Angeles. I miss the days when I was free to do whatever I wanted.”

He nodded. He didn’t say anything. I realized he had become the quiet guy, listening more than talking and pondering every word.

“How’s college?”

His eyes lit up. “Piece of cake. Everything is going according to the plan. I love my classes and I’m acing them.”

“I’m so glad for you, Yaron. You’re going to be a great psychologist.”

He took my hand and squeezed it. “Thank you, Vee. I hope so.”

I smiled and thought that even my absence had just been a bump in the road for us, everything was going to be okay.

“How’s everything with your family?”

“Well, things are more complicated on that front. My father wants to retire, but since I refuse to follow his steps he has to keep working until he finds the right person to take his place in the family business. I’m not his favorite person right now. They’re putting a lot of pressure on me to drop my studies and take charge of everything.”

“It must be hard for you.”

“It’s okay. Nothing I can’t handle, but...” he turned his head and looked into my eyes, “I don’t know how to mend the gap between us.”

Was Yaron still talking about his family or was he talking about us?

Something had changed between us, whether I wanted to see it or not. Something invisible, difficult to locate and understand, but impossible to ignore.

We hadn’t kissed yet. We had barely touched. After our hug at his house, we kept a safe distance that I didn’t fully understand. I was dying to kiss him, but a part of me didn’t know if I could still do that. And that thought terrified me. I was scared because, suddenly, I realized that, if I no longer felt free to kiss Yaron whenever I wanted, it was because our had become relationship was more deteriorated than I thought.

Yaron and I were never a normal couple. We never put a name on our relationship. We never felt the need to talk about commitments or rules. Or whether we were still the same crazy lovers, despite the distance and time. We were simply there, for each other.

I was in Los Angeles living my dream; he was at Harvard pursuing his.

I met his eyes; so blue, so warm, so calm.

And I exploded.

“It’s been so long since I’ve kissed you that I’m scared to death because I don’t know if I’ll remember how to do it. It’s been so long since you kissed me that I’m afraid you won’t like me, that you won’t want me anymore, that we won’t fit together anymore.”

Yaron’s smile widened into a laugh; I frowned, even though it brought immediate relief to me.

“I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown and you’re laughing, Yaron Beilinson?”

“Because that was you, the pure, unadulterated Vee. I missed her.”

His hand slid down my neck. I closed my eyes against the wave of memories.

“You like her, huh?”

We smiled. The whole world condensed under my navel.

“I love her.”

And we kissed.

It was a lie what people say about time extinguishing the fire, because, when it came to Yaron and me, it only fueled it.

There, in a neglected garden where nature had taken over, Yaron and I lay down. We undressed and let ourselves fall on his shirt. His tongue ran over parts of my body that had lain dormant for more than a year, waiting for him. My sex sought his; he recognized it, and he rocked it. My hands wandered over his curves, discovering that his body was harder, more that of the man he had become and less that of the child, who had followed me everywhere with his eyes closed.

My voice screamed his name.

His orgasm whispered to mine.