Read When You Were Here for Free Online

possum under the couch.
    “And the first thing I did was call you. And you came over right away.”
    “Well, you did shriek a bit on the phone. But yeah, you had a possum under the couch. Of course I would come over,” I said, and I felt like every breath was magic in the night air, because I knew every breath would bring me closer to her. “But it wasn’t me who saved you from the possum.” I tipped my forehead toward my dog. I had brought Sandy Koufax over, and she ferried that possum right out of the house and into the backyard. Holland slammed the doors shut, then insisted on cooking a steak for my dog, who stood at the sliding-glass doors looking out all night and watching for the possum she’d almost had for dinner.
    “The point of all this is—you’re awesome. So it’s about time we just admitted it.”
    I inched closer to her. This was happening. This was real. “Admitted what?” I asked, teasing her.
    “This.” Then her arms were around my neck, and my lips were on hers, soft and warm and better than in all the times I’d imagined kissing her. Her perfect body was pressed against mine, and my mind was soaring, and my whole body was humming.
    At the end of the summer Holland went off to college, but we had plans. We were going to see each other twice a month. I’d drive down there, or she’d drive up here every other weekend. But the first time I was supposed to visit,my mom needed a blood transfusion, and even though Kate kept saying she’d take care of her that weekend, I wasn’t going to leave my mom alone. I canceled, and we made plans for two weeks later. But then Holland called and told me she had a massive project due in her women’s studies elective that Monday morning and if I came down she wouldn’t touch the thing, she’d only touch me, and so she had to resist me, a sentiment that was ridiculously endearing at the time.
    The next time we talked, she was a different person entirely. It was as if a machine inhabited her and moved her mouth with its robot hands and turned her voice into a cold talking computer. “Danny, I’m in college now. I need to get my head on straight. I need to focus.”
    A clean break.
    I didn’t see her again until my mom’s memorial service. She even read at the service, a line from The Little Prince , something about living in the stars, or laughing in the stars, or something that basically is supposed to comfort you and shred your heart at the same time. I near about lost it when she got up and read, and she pretty much did too.
    Now we’re having lunch.
    “Well, college sucks,” Holland says after the waiter brings her an iced tea. “I hated literally everything about my freshman year.”
    “You did?” This is news to me. Then again, everything about her life for the last several months is news to me.
    “Every. Single. Thing.”
    She reaches a hand to her throat, feeling for her necklace, touching the tab with the word SARAH on it. I watch her fidget with it before she lets it go to take a drink. Then I realize why she’d say college sucks. Her friend died.
    Soon we’re eating our sandwiches, and she’s paying the bill, even though I try many times, but she keeps insisting. I thank her as we walk away from the café. She stops, takes a deep breath, and turns to me. “Do you want to go to the movies?”
    “The movies?”
    “Yeah, that thing where they project two hours of famous actors in impossible situations on the screen?”
    “I’m familiar with the concept.”
    But movies ? That was what we did before . We watched big shoot-’em-up action flicks. “The more stuff that blows up, the better,” was Holland’s mantra. She had no interest in Oscar contenders, or quiet dramas, or period romances with English accents. “I want fires, and I want chase scenes, and I want dudes jumping out of tenth-story windows and then running through the streets like it didn’t even hurt.”
    I wanted the same. Life was full of enough family drama. I