HER
I saw him.
I saw him as I expected I would, and perhaps as I hoped I would. He looked the same, but different, as people do after a time. But I could tell by the way he was standing, by the way that he was there, in the pew with his grandmother – bless her soul – with his head bent low, praying to a God for something I’d always hoped he’d find in himself, that he was the same.
The same as I’d left him.
I almost walked out. I wondered about my motives. My true motives. Was I over him? Was I there to toy with whatever was left of his heart that I’d been given, and I’d tossed back? Or was I there to prove to both of us that an ending doesn’t have to be a crime, but can be a pardon from a life sentence?
My own head bowed, I’d gripped the edge of the wooden pew, staring at the tiny chip in my blood-red fingernail polish and getting angry. Angry at what? At him? At myself? At the nagging pinprick of some devilish feeling that was stabbing at me as though I were a voodoo doll wrongly standing in a house of God?
I closed my eyes slowly and waited for the preacher’s sermon to wash over me like the blood of Christ. When he was done, I felt energized. Really, I did! I felt bathed of any red-hot sins I’d walked in with. I walked over to him, as I’d known I’d do. My stilettos, probably too high for church by the standards of some, clicked loudly against the gleaming tiled floor.
He saw me coming. I guess I’d made sure of that.
“Hey baby,” I’d said.
As though jabbed in his arrested heart with a paramedic’s needle full of adrenaline, his brown eyes lit up with fire and then just as quickly, his face clouded with something I’d seen before. Something I’d seen the day I left.
“What are you doing here?” He’d asked. Or maybe … did he growl?
It was then that I knew I had him. But did I want him? And if so, what for? I smiled and casually played with the gold bangles on my wrist I wore special for today, the very ones he’d given me as a gift on our first anniversary, and I said, “It’s church.”
WOW
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