Since You've Been Gone

by Morgan Matson

noticed I’d been sticking to the outside, leaving enough room for someone to run next to me.

it was much easier to volunteer to do the brave thing, and much harder to actually have to follow through with it.

I watched him, rather than the fireworks, as the light changed over his features, from red, to blue, to orange.

“I don’t think you have to do something so big to be brave. And it’s the little things that are harder anyway.”

Frank had taken off his jacket, and we were dancing up a storm, so much so that people were starting to give us a wide berth. He would twirl me in, then send me spinning, and I’d almost bonked my head twice on a centerpiece when he’d dipped me and I’d lost my balance. He wasn’t the best dancer, but neither was I, and after a song or two we had found our groove and were dancing together as easily as we ran together. The band had just played a cover of “Sweet Caroline” that had everyone on their feet, and Frank and I had been yelling the bum-bum-bums at each other. When the song ended, everyone clapped, and I felt myself laughing, not for any specific reason, just that I was flushed and tired and happy.

“What?” “Just . . . you,”

“You’re the brightest thing in the room,” he said. He lifted his hand from my waist, and slowly, carefully brushed a stray lock of hair from my cheek. “You shine.”

He kissed me back. It lasted just a moment, but he kissed me back, right away, without hesitation, as though we’d always been doing it.

And it was a kiss that felt like it could stop time. The rain was falling on us, but I didn’t even feel or notice or care about it. We were kissing like it was a long-forgotten language that we’d once been fluent in and were finding again, kissing like it was the only thing either of us had wanted to do for a long, long time, kissing with the urgency of the rain that was pounding down all around us and onto the hood of the car.

“And I know it’s scary, but the things that are worth it are.

It was like swimming under the stars, like sleeping outside, like climbing a tree in the dark and seeing the view. It was scary and safe and peaceful and exciting, all at the same time. It was the way I felt when I was with him. “Like a well-ordered universe.”

She was my heart, she was half of me, and nothing, certainly not a few measly hundred miles, was ever going to change that.

There was tension between us again, but it wasn’t the simmering, angry kind that had been there the day before. This felt like the way you get nervous right before something exciting happens—the moment when you’re balanced on the top of the roller coaster, the hush before the surprise party, the second after the diving board but before the water, when you can close your eyes and imagine, for just a second, that you’re flying. The feeling that good things were coming, almost here, any moment now.