The Decision

The rodeo grounds were silent now. The roar of the crowd was gone now from the wooden paint pealing bleachers and the canned tinny loud speaker only resonated in an echo of memories. Grooves were still furrowed into the ground where the cowboys grasped the horns of the bulls as they tried to settle them in the dirt before they settled the cowboys permanently. Only a few golden and crimson leaves attended the arena now on this warm Indian summer Saturday.

As she stared out across it her hand worked the knob on the radio grabbing snatches of one song, and, then despairing of lyrics and tone she quickly located another tune that added to her agitation. This is how she spent her time waiting. The phrases of the songs mixed in and competed with the declarations shouting out in her mind. Fear was tormenting her stomach and waves of nausea were sending signals to the back of her throat. The sun beating through the windshield of the car was creating dampness in the part in the hair down the middle of her head and she kept glancing around the gravel parking lot wondering if she’d made a mistake. Five minutes went by and, in that five minutes she convinced herself that she should wait. Then, at twenty-five minutes mark, right as she was reaching the end of reasons to convince and console herself with as to why she shouldn’t go ahead and turn the ignition key, over the top of the softly playing radio she heard tires crunch cautiously up the drive approaching her car. A quick glance out her window confirmed that he’d pulled up beside her in his copper colored used station wagon. As she sat in her driver’s seat, hand hovering over the door handle, waiting yet again, she watched him furrow into the top pocket of his checked red and blue flannel shirt and draw out his pack of Marlboros. As he held the cigarette tightly in his lips, he inhaled quickly on it as he jabbed the car cigarette lighter up to the end of it. Drawing on it deeply, once, he then clipped it between his fingers and removed it from his mouth and stared out through his windshield far past the rodeo grounds. He hadn’t even glanced over at her car yet much less at her. And flustered that she was even anticipating that he even would she once again returned to the radio station. Somebody was making a public service announcement about STD’s so she blurred away from that one frequency to stretch into a hailing of rhythmic complaining guitar chords on one farther up the band. Shaking her dark head she commented, “Why do they always play all the crappy music on the weekends?”

Caught up in her argument with the radio she almost forgot where she was and as she raised her head to glance out her side window as if to just study her surroundings, her blue-green eyes rose up on a pair of sky blue eyes that had probably been on her for a while now from the other car. Her internal reaction was that of, “I’m naked.” She knew it had been three years since she’d seen those eyes and she knew that she would’ve remembered their effect had not she’d been distracted by the playing with the radio knob. But, there he was. How long had he been wandering through her soul? Her face colored with the fact that he’d caught her being so unobservant. Had she been one of these high desert creatures, he would have not have only by now swooped her up with his talons, he would’ve eaten her as well. Now as always those eyes were causing her to pause and when they did she always felt that she had to search to find her place in the world again. It was as if by just looking at her, he could remove her from it to exclude her to himself only.

As she continued to be trapped within her conspicuous position he raised his head in a nod and turned to get out of his car. The hand that she held over the door handle suddenly dropped away in trepidation as she heard his car door shut crisply. At the last minute she pulled hard and opened her door just enough to slide out then she leaned up against her white compact car and waited. His long lean stride skirted the tail of his car and his boots crackled with curiosity through the gravel. She was his height, both tall and she could’ve squared with his eyes had she felt she could have dared a glance at them, but instead she followed the movement of the long lean legs in his jeans as he came over to stand in front of her. Feeling faint she grabbed for the door handle of the car as if it was an anchor. But it was an anchor that was being pitched into the sea and she with it…there to sink to the bottom. The nearer his eyes came the more they melted her and she could feel the heat from them as he confirmed with them that she looked the same as when he last saw her. A stiffness launched through her muscles and bravery forced her to regard the face that made her feel ambivalent. Ambivalent because she knew that it would make her suffer to look at him but then she knew that she would do it because she couldn’t imagine not looking at him.

He ranged himself nearer to her than she thought that he would. All during the drive over to his small cow town she played with the dimensions of just how far away he would stand away from her out of his shyness and, at what distance that would be from in which to study her intention. But, now here he was, within her personal space and it caused her to inhale slightly in surprise. She felt her face heating up. Whether it was from standing in the sun or from the embarrassment that awkwardness installs, she didn’t know. All she did know was that the breeze was stirring the dishwater blond hair resting just above his shoulders and that he had just taken a breath.

“What’s it been, three years and a few months?”

For some reason it surprised her that he remembered the exact number. Then he added in the fact that indicated the reason for the transition and she felt a little nervous as he pointed it out because it meant he further identified her.

“But you didn’t graduate.”

“No.” She agreed but didn’t want to fill in the blank that was now feeling like a bloody gushing wound.

Glancing away from her face that he had been secretly assessing, as he recalled this information his eyes fell over on the passenger door handle of his car. “Shall we go for a ride?”

“Ok.” She agreed simply.

He made his way over to his car and by the time she got there he had the door open for her and was inviting her to take a seat. Tossing his hair clear of the breeze he climbed behind the wheel of his car. Taking his cigarettes out of his pocket he tilted the pack toward her and shook it a bit.

“No…thank you.” Again she said it simply and he started the motor. She had no idea how any of this prelude was going to work into a destination.

“Good…you still don’t smoke…wish I didn’t.” He drew out another one and pushed the pack into the dashboard in front of him with the flap to the Marlboro box open, to be ready because he felt he was going to be smoking a lot of them now that he was seeing her again.

“No, I don’t.” She confirmed as she kept inquiring of herself if she was going to continue to make inane replies to his comments. She sighed out of the exhaustion that this was putting her through and he inhaled deeply and thoughtfully waited. He was waiting for her to say, “Ok, this is what I came to talk to you about.”

But instead her mind was swimming with so much emotion and pieces of things that she’d prepared to say, with the things that she wanted to say, that it all got confusing and, when it did her every intention got stuck in her throat and she could barely speak. Her eyes wanted to pour over him, drink him in as if to quench a horrible thirst, to immerse in his cool waters but all she could do was stare straight ahead. So, finally he did what he always did when he wanted to figure something out, he probed.

He knew that this was about her but that somehow he fit into it, he just didn’t know how. She had wanted to talk. He agreed to meet her and he knew that in the past he’d helped her work through some things and she’d seemed grateful for his counsel. As he was driving past the city limits of town he focused on her face through the side of his eyes and he noticed that her eyes were turned down not tilted up happily in the normal way that he had remembered them to have inquired into all of the mysteries of the universe. And her head was inclined just enough that he knew that something significant was weighing on her. It was sending her active mind running at full capacity. He wanted to say, “You’ve been crying,” but something held him back and instead he said, “You need someone to listen…I’m listening.” His soft voice caused her head to turn and she emerged from the place she’d been visiting in her thoughts.

As she heard him it made her remember the first time that he spoken to her. She’d been sitting with the group of other students as they pumped their brains with the caffeine from the last of the coffee that the campus cafeteria had made for the night while their mouths expounded on speculations and philosophies. She had just made a remark regarding a parallel universe and he’d shifted his eyes in her direction. They brightened as if in admiration when he said, “Yes…Ellis sees it…I see it…” Secretly she’d smiled to herself because when she heard his words they sounded as if they had been issued with the same voice that Clint Eastwood possessed. It was a speech pattern she knew so well. How many times had she allowed his clipped dialogue to wash over her from all those late night old westerns? She knew from that minute on that she would never forget any of the words that would ever be spoken by Shane’s voice. Now here she was hearing it as it offered itself again and it made her shiver to even think that she was with it again. With him. But at the same time it’s effect was leaving her mute and she still didn’t know how to start when he said it again, “Something’s going on.” It was a gentle nudge to get her melodic speech working.

Briefly closing her eyes to center herself so that she would budge enough to line up her thoughts and succinctly deliver details and not allow her words to charge out of her in a hapless deluge, she began in the territory that seemed the least threatening; history. “You remember that guy Tom over at your dorm?”

He knew it wasn’t the reason that she was there with him now but it was a start and he was patient. But the sentence also brought with it a flood he hadn’t expected. The same emotion resurfaced as he remembered the surprise and anger on Tom’s face when he saw the guy's coat as Shane had presented to him. Then he recalled his own anger toward Tom for having treated Ellis with so much disrespect. The more Shane thought about it the more he thought Tom had staged his little entrance into their group that cold winter night. He could still remember that the poet had stamped dramatically into the student union as if to command an audience from a stage and how he personally held Ellis within the spotlight, in front of all who were listening as he espoused on the particulars of how she had wronged him. Her horrified reaction to his unjust accusations colored Shane again and made his high cheekbones draw the flesh tightly around them.

“I see that you do.” She spoke again as she looked into the side of his eyes as she recognized the same expression that was put there on that night as Shane had reigned in Tom’s angry tirade with, “You for real, man?”

Not sure where she was going with her point he nevertheless was willing to see what it was going to be because he knew that she wouldn’t have brought it up unless it was going to somehow be relevant. She may have used a lot of words to walk her way through an explanation and, she may have seemed unsure as she picked through her vocabulary to find the precise way that she wanted to express herself but, she never squandered any of her speech. So, he reaffirmed, “Yeah, I do.”

“Why did you do that?”

Upon hearing the question it put him miles away from her present situation and up to the point where he’d almost forgot that she was at present wearing another man’s ring. Instead it put him back into that moment when he was zealously ripping the buttons off of Tom’s coat in front of her. As he now stood in that moment again he remembered the surprise on her face then, but even more so he felt the freedom that had been unleashed in him as his fingers snagged and pitched the buttons with contempt off onto the floor. How did she do that? She’d looked into his head but the only answer now that he could manage in the revelation of what he’d just found in that memory was, “Don’t know.”

“You don’t?” As she said it she wasn’t questioning his memory, she was prompting him to admit that the memory made him find a feeling and it was important for her to know what feeling he’d just bumped up against.

Because she had wedged him in a vulnerable spot he covered for his nervousness by putting out the rest of his cigarette and lighting another one. As he blew a quick stream of smoke out of his mouth he said, “Is it important?”

She knew that because he had just asked this question he knew that the feeling that had come up for him was important but she also knew the content of his words meant, “What does this have to do with what’s going on with you now?” Upper most in her mind when she was with him was not to allow her feelings to make her behave stupidly. So she sat quietly and thought of how she should answer the question. It wasn’t that she was playing a game but she didn’t want to come out and fill in the blanks about the incident and assume that his feelings were all about her perception of them. She didn’t want him to grow silent and shut her out because she was trying to gage his emotional temperature either. So she continued from the only place she knew she could, her feelings about the whole incident. “I was honored that, when I told you about what had happened between me and Tom, that you knew I wasn’t the prick tease that he said I was, and that no guy should ever have to trap a woman in his room. That no woman should ever be forced to do anything she didn’t want to do.”

A bit of a smile broke across his face. “Yeah…you did some quick thinking in what you told him.” Then, he paraphrased what she had said then, “Ok, what do you want a boy or a girl? And I remember…you reiterated it in a bored flat tone.” He chuckled slightly, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re not clever.”

She smiled slightly as his compliment warmed her but then she removed her heart from her head once more to continue. “I was grateful that you said that you’d give him his coat back but I was totally shocked when you yanked the buttons off of it like that. It seemed illogical.” There, she picked a word that he could identify with. “In fact, by your reaction it seemed as if you were the one he wronged.”

“Well…we didn’t get along…told you that at the time.” He unconsciously rationalized.

“Yeah, but there is not getting along and then, there’s loathing. Did he ever do something to you that you never told me about?”

“No. Some people just rub each other wrong. You know?” Then he thought about it as the words flopped weakly in the air. No, he didn’t like that guy but what made him come to hate him was what he did to her. He knew that now and he knew that she knew that he did. Then, why was he sitting here playing it off?

Nervously she considered what he was saying and came to the conclusion that she wouldn’t be able to find in him what wasn’t installed there already. Nor was she going to define for him anything that wasn’t there and make a fool of herself doing so. So without beating a dead horse she grew quiet again.

He drove up a dirt road that lead to a spot in the apple orchards that were now swelling with red delicious apples. He didn’t know why he drove there he just did. Something in him sensed privacy or, maybe the privacy of intimacy and the thought of that overwhelmed him. He shut off the motor and sighed reaching for his pack of cigarettes. The conversation had started in a circle and she was confusing him and her face revealed that she was searching for something in him. He only wished he knew what it was. He wondered if he was the question or maybe the answer. So not knowing what to do he crawled along neutral territory. “Want an apple?” He started to open his car door to reach up into the ample tree just outside of it but then retrieved his arm, as she replied, “No. Thanks, anyway.”

“Ok.” Then he did what he did best, he studied the situation; he studied her. Besides the strange conversation what he came up with was, she looked lost and very burdened. The more his eyes darted over her features the more he realized that she was burdened by something life changing. The knowledge of this made him more uncomfortable but it also drew him closer to her. Another thing that was happening to him as he reflected on her as she sat beside him her arms across her stomach, was that he was falling into her. He knew he shouldn’t but he was anyway. It was happening again. Everything that he put away when she chose another man was resurfacing in the curve of her shoulders that begged for his hands to cup around them. This thought effected him so much that he clamped his cigarette in his lips and briefly examined his hands. He stared at his empty palms. They longed to reach out and pull something; he could almost feel them moving as he recognized that they wanted to be filled with her. As they mesmerized him he could almost feel the silkiness of the auburn facets of her hair that were now glinting in the sunlight as her head was averted to stare out of the window as if she was searching for something unattainable.

While her face felt the heat of the autumn sun the back of her head felt the heat of his eyes and this caused her to turn her body completely around on the car bench seat, and as she faced him she found his eyes. When she did there was no mistaking what she recognized in them and it relieved and frightened her all at once. Blinking fully, she squared her shoulders to support her in the defeat that she knew that would soon overwhelm her upon his discovery. She opened her mouth to speak then closed it to line up the words in order of importance.

As he saw her square her shoulders he reacted as if he should prepare to defend himself. So he shied away and put out his cigarette just as she stopped her lips.

In this moment that was so critical and vulnerable for both of them she faltered as he turned away. She felt rejected and he had to prompt her again to get her to finally reveal her burden. “I’m sorry…you were saying.”

“It’s just…” Kicking herself in her head for stumbling at the start she nevertheless continued because if this was only about her she had to know now.

Confusion was flooding him again. Part of him wanted to know and part of him didn’t care what any of it was about she was here that was all that mattered. She was here and he knew that there was a reason this was happening. He was becoming so rapt in his own indistinction that as he watched her chest heave and her lips purse and her body strain toward him in dedication to her declaration, that he almost didn’t realize what she was saying. Only the drama of her physical movements was talking. Somewhere outside of himself he heard her begin, “I can only speak from where I’m at…” For some reason it sounded like the beginning of a college lecture. Her words were protecting what her body could not. Then clarity formed her words and when it did they stunned him with their impact and all he could do was turn away because they left him speechless and he thought he had to go somewhere else to find a response…if, he even could. But he knew what he heard and more so he knew what her body was telling him, and as he sat there to consider this information his mind repeated the news again and again. Each time he heard it the feelings exploded further and more pieces of the past danced in his thoughts. He closed his eyes as if to shun away the pain but the images kept coming through. He recognized the relieved yet frightened sighs adding magnitude to the words, “Shane, it’s always been you. I…I can’t help it I fell in love with you in college. It happened then and it never went away. I tried to tell myself I was imagining it but I know now I’m not. It was you then and you now and it will only be you for the rest of my life.” But her statement kept leading him to the same thing and finally he turned back and stared at her body pleading for an answer and all he could do was ask the question that had been lingering in the back of his mind for three years and a few months. The question that he tried to bury under hard work and empty love affairs. “Then why did you marry him?”

What he heard he never expected, “Because, I thought…thought you didn’t love me. I knew he did.” Her body cried but her eyes stayed dry out of fear.

The words tore into him. He didn’t think that he could stand knowing that she had sacrificed herself to a loveless life simply because she felt that he didn’t want her. At the same time he knew that she never would’ve come to ask him about any feelings that he would have because she had propriety and she wouldn’t willing compromise his feelings because she did love him. Now she was doing just that because she couldn’t live in a pretentious situation anymore and her feelings for him were killing her, it was written all over her face. But he was in such shock that all that entered his mind now was, what did she expect him to do now? The answer he gave her was couched in protecting himself as he stared out through the windshield slowly blowing out at thin stream of blue smoke as if trying to hook onto something in the distance with it. Something that had to be tendered back, carefully, so as not to lose it again after it was caught. As he sat there he knew that what he was pursuing was there in front of him waiting to be reeled in. It was the reality of his feelings but his deeply reflective announcement only reeled in so much line before he let the rest of it hang, “I did have feelings for you…” That was the substance of it. There was no, “once or but, I don’t now.” It was only, “I did have feelings for you…” and because it had been delivered from his voice it charged the air.

It caused her to choke on what one does when they try to figure out just what kind of surprise they’ve been handed and, then she finished the rest of her revelation. She tore away all the cobwebs from her pretentious self. “And…I’m pregnant.” There she laid out all the truth and waited for the damage report. All the bravery she could summon allowed her to do it without shedding a tear because she knew if she’d relented to even one she would’ve unintentionally roped him in with a victim demeanor and she didn’t want to be a mere object of pity. She couldn’t live with herself if she thought that he would only love her out of pity.

The word resounded in his head with more impact than her last phrase and it was remarkable to him that she’d delivered it in such a collected demeanor. But her body couldn’t mask the terror she really felt about all that was bombarding her. Had he not seen that he might have reacted differently. Her body language was the only thing that wasn’t giving away a hard fact coldly now. Whereas he turned away when she declared herself now he was looking at her because that one word defined everything. His voice filled with concern and he found himself scrutinizing her for evidence of the fact as his eyes slowly fell on her abdomen. “How far along are you?”

“I just found out.”

Clearly she looked mixed about the discovery.

“What are you going to do?”

But as she gazed into his eyes she knew he was asking, “Are you going to stay with him?”

“We’re still getting divorced.” She waited for him to lash into her because of her further display of insanity.

He was calm and nonjudgmental and considered her, “I know you’ve thought about this a lot. You would.” He knew she’d toiled and sweated over every piece of evidence and it’s implications. He knew that she would because he remembered how she said ‘yes…but’ a lot in their group. But he had to admit that he was a bit surprised that she was going against her conventional propriety but he also knew that she wouldn’t without a good reason so he decided to trust her judgement. But the issue of the divorce brought up some questions so because unconsciously now she appeared to him as fragile. He asked, “Is he going along with it?”

“Yes.”

“Even though…”

“Yes.”

This seemed perplexing to him. Wouldn’t a guy fight to stay with the woman he supposedly loved especially if she was giving him a child? He knew he would fight…but then he was a man and he knew her husband to be a child. Even though he knew this he questioned her for the reason that her husband wasn’t going to fight her. “Why isn’t he going to fight you?” As she gave him the answer he noticed shininess to the eyes that were paused on his with emphasis and he knew now that she wasn’t allowing herself to cry because she thought it would make her appear weak to him. That brought him to the realization that she had so much respect for him that she wouldn’t even dare to burden him with her tears. So when she said, “He isn’t fighting me because he loves me,” It made total sense to him why her husband wasn’t going to fight and he knew now just how much her husband did love her. He knew enough about the guy that even though he was a child he had always acted fairly and he would never keep what hadn’t belonged to him in the first place. Imbedded in the phrase was a deep message and once again he felt that it cast a spot light on his feelings that were stirring painfully now. This wasn’t all about her anymore it was becoming more about him, about what he never knew and he wasn’t sure how he could handle the knowledge that a woman was giving up everything for him. He surely never thought that he was that special. He knew that he was very bright and he thought that his brightness would bring him the awareness that he needed to avoid all the emotional confusion of the world. Yet it had found him anyway. As he sat there he had to admit that in a way she was right, he’d never pursued her. But it was because he was told she had made a choice and he would never interfere with what he couldn’t have, and he wouldn’t because it was disrespectful to do so. So, even though he logically saw all of the complications of her decision, emotionally it made him feel a bit free but it was a freedom he would guard very carefully because it could slip away. He knew that from this point on he would study the situation again and adjust his position accordingly in it. In his reaction he found his hands cupping her shoulders and he glanced at them and then back into her eyes. They told him of all the sacrifices she would make for him because her love was so deep that it couldn’t be fathomed. The thought of this frightened him because he recognized that she was giving him power over her. He knew that he was fully capable of holding power over others he just didn’t choose to because it was only right to use it only if you had to. She had placed herself on an altar in devotion to him. She was staring into the eyes of a god as she willing allowed her heart to be torn from her body in offering to him. This idea astounded him. Every fiber of him was crying out for him to assimilate that offering. To accept her slightly parted lips that were paused in surprise and experience that kiss that he’d only dreamed of as he did on the day that he silently counted each button that he tore off as a victory against cheap emotions. But he was afraid, afraid of the unknown and afraid that his feelings might be expressed in a situation that was going nowhere eventually anyway. So he followed his hands with his eyes as he reclaimed them so as not to make her feel rejected and the only thing she received for her offering was, “I have to think about this.”

She had grown overly warm in the sun and suddenly she opened the car door and heaved. He patted her back. “Are you ok? I mean…” He didn’t know what to do…he was scared that he’d hurt her…even so his paralyzed emotions wouldn’t let him comfort her.

As she wiped her hand across her mouth and closed the car door her eyes had changed. Now she was back to protecting both of them with, “It’s just morning sickness. I have it quite a bit actually…” Then her voice trailed off because all the announcement did was to reinsert one of the complications back into the direction for the feelings that were adding a heaviness to both of their tongues.

Without ever getting an apple he drove on through the orchard and back to the main highway. She didn’t speak anymore. He said he needed to think and she respected that he did. As they drove into town her eyes fell on the pile of withered leaves growing underneath the trees in front of the church where her husband’s Dad used to preach before he had transferred. She remembered how she almost fainted as she walked down the aisle so that her husband’s Dad could with a swelling heart perform the wedding ceremony. She knew even then that she loved Shane and she kicked herself for not listening to her own Dad as he caught her by the elbow and offered, “Are you okay, honey? Maybe you’re not ready for this.” But she couldn’t disappoint all those people, she couldn’t become a spectacle, she couldn’t be a failure. So she reassured her Dad and paused long enough to steady herself then…did her duty. She continued to do that duty faithfully in her actions but when she found out about the baby it nearly broke her mentally and she knew that she had to get things said that had been put on hold three years earlier. She had to so that she could stop lying to herself and get on with whatever future was left for her after she did. Now as she considered Shane’s silence all futures seemed murky at this point.

As he turned off the engine at the rodeo grounds he realized that he hadn’t had a cigarette the entire drive back to town and now…he wanted one. So as he lit up once again he regarded her. She was so still; it was almost as if she was deliberately trying to remove herself so that he could have space. But he needed to bring her back into that space so that a misperceived rejection wouldn’t set in. Quietly he said, “Hey, I’m glad you came…really I am.”

His words managed to coax a smile from her however she felt she heard a, but coming so when it didn’t it surprised her when instead she heard, “Is he moving out?”

“He already has. I couldn’t come see you until he did.”

Again he knew that she meant she wouldn’t because it would’ve been disrespectful. It was this kind of character that he knew she had that made his feelings run deep for her. There, he acknowledged it finally and he knew that what he just felt had played through the features of his face because he felt his muscles slacken. He knew that she’d noticed because she asked, “Shane, are you ok? I’m sorry, you know that this is…well…not like me. I…”

“I know.” He simply confirmed how he did know her because he’d made it a point to invest a lot of time looking at her and learning how to read her eyes.

She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. Dizziness was flooding her and she felt weak. She knew that she needed something to eat and to go lie down but first she had to summon the ability to drive home. Drive home without an inkling of what resolution might come from this. But she had the peace to know that she’d made her feelings known and that had relieved some of her burden.

He spoke up softly, “Ellis, are you ok?”

“Yes.” She said opening her eyes to once again find something in his.

“Can I call you?” The words ventured out carefully.

Sudden energy replaced her weakness but she only responded, “Yeah, sure, if you want to, I’d like that.” All the enthusiasm that she was feeling she kept under a tightly lidded box.

“Ok.” He answered then he came around and opened her car door and with the automatic reaction that a gentleman has when he hears that a lady is pregnant he helped her out of the car.

“Shane, thanks.” It was all she could think of to say but she saw his eyes react shortly before his hands freed themselves to grasp her shoulders and pull her close. Carefully she allowed her arms to support his back as she felt his hand slide into her hair. She held her breath because she didn't even want that to distract her from remembering every feeling of being in his arms. Then he pulled away and opened her car door. “This week, ok? You know…to call you?”

“Uh huh, that’s fine.” As she drove back out through the orchards that lined the highway she wondered if she should even have hope that he’d found those feeling he said ‘he did have’ for her. No, her heart wouldn’t go there right now because she couldn’t afford for a deluge of tears to cloud her ability to drive. She would allow herself to feel them running down her face as soon as she was behind her apartment door and she could look at his picture in the college yearbook once more. Then after they were spent she realized that she would begin to wait again because she knew at this point she would wait for however long it would take him to decide what he wanted to do.