the surge of sensations that crashed through me at seeing her. I guess there’s a reason I’m a gym-junkie muscle head and not an English Lit major.
I stared at her and she stared back. She tucked a strand of that coppery-russet hair of hers – hair that felt like cool silk streaming through my fingers – behind her right ear, an ear that still had the tiny gold cuff I bought for her one morning at Bondi Beach after a particularly awesome surf.
I ate up her face with my eyes. I apologize for how cheesy and corny that sounds, but I did. I stood there among the tired travelers and sign-carrying drivers, and took in every inch of her face. Her blue eyes, her straight, dark-red eyebrows. Her slightly turned-up nose with its smattering of freckles. Her lips … lips I’d felt against mine over and over …
Oh fuck, I wanted to kiss her.
Right there. Right then. In the airport, no doubt stinking from over half a day of traveling, I wanted to run to her, swoop her up like some lame-arse movie hero and kiss her. Erase the last twenty-seven months of being denied her with a kiss that would make the airport security kick us out of the terminal.
I wanted to remind her, in that kiss, why she’d overstayed her visa in Australia. I wanted to point out how stupid she’d been to walk away from us . I wanted to prove to her I was the only one who could make her feel alive, that if there was someone else in her life now, it was time to say goodbye to him.
Yes, I understand how full of myself I sound, how arrogant. I’ll even go as far as to say I sound like a condescending wanker, but I was looking at Amanda Sinclair, and no matter how many times I’d tried to convince myself otherwise in the months since she left, I knew she was “the one”.
Again with those damn quotation marks, eh? I guess you can figure out what state I was in at that point. Keeping myself motionless, keeping myself from running to her and hauling her off her feet was harder than any workout I’ve ever done.
Instead of running to her, I smiled.
She smiled back.
It dawned on me then the Amanda standing in front of me was not the Amanda I’d last seen here in the States almost three years ago. There was a hesitation in her eyes I’d never seen before. A nervousness. She was also slimmer, like she’d shed a lot of weight quickly. Too much weight. And she looked … tired. Drawn. She was still the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, but she looked far more fragile. Fragile was not a word I’d ever associated with Amanda Sinclair, and it did my head in.
The smile on her lips faltered. A little. “Hi Bren. Thanks for coming.”
Amanda was the only person I knew who called me Bren. Amanda was also the only person to rip out my heart, but I wouldn’t hold that against her right now.
When I didn’t respond, her smile faded completely. To be honest, my brain was still in a holding pattern. Somewhere stuck between kiss her you idiot and this doesn’t mean we’re friends again .
“They served chicken and sweet potato on the flight,” I said.
Way to go, brain. You champion.
Amanda frowned. “Was it nice?”
I nodded.
She frowned some more, studying me. One of the things I first noticed about Amanda, way back when we met on the Thredbo ski slopes, was how expressive her eyes were. You know the saying “The eyes are the window to the soul”? That was Amanda.
For the entire time we were together, I knew what she was feeling. I could see it in her eyes. Except for the day she told me we were over. I couldn’t read a damn thing in her eyes then.
Now was the same. I had no hope of knowing what she was feeling, thinking, as she stood there frowning at me. I suspect, however, that she’d expected something more than a recount of my inflight dinner.
Clearing my throat, I tried again. “Hi, Amanda. You look good.”
And she did. Even with the exhaustion in her face. Yes, she’d lost weight, but no one could ever accuse her of being anorexic.