Rob watched Jane intently as she spoke. Somewhat selfishly, he had to admit it felt good to pass the microphone. After all, how do you summate ten years? And to someone who knew your heartbeat better than anyone else? Rob had exes, of course. But something was different about Jane. Jane wasn’t Mae, who filled him with brimming distain and inadequacy all the same. Jane was his best friend. After all these years, once you shook the cobwebs off, and once you get out of your own head, talking to J was like taking to your own subconscious. It felt like a limb he hadn’t moved in a decade, or a song he hadn’t played in a long time. It was comfortable, but it flickered—wavered in the air, as he and J seemed to struggle to get the needle back into its groove. [i]”Not even when you were mine,”[/i] The words dissipated in her wake as she slipped away before he could even process them. [u]Mine.[/u] He used to belong to someone. Of course he did—he had before—but something about the past several years aloe had lulled him into a false autonomy. He had been a machine, recently. His tasks were to play music, make money, and be there for Elle. Not in that order. Living for Elle was easy. It came naturally, whether primal or deeply ingrained. He never doubted it and it was simple. But being someone else’s was different. And a feeling he had to admit rocked him as he considered it. As J described rehab and sobriety, Rob felt a pang of anxiety shoot through him. Whether she smoked or not, he couldn’t help but feel a bit bad about the wine and the joint. But it was probably his realization that he hadn’t gone two days sober off of everything in longer than he could remember. He stuffed the thought down. Not important. “Crescent City?” he couldn’t help but repeat. [i]All the way up there?[/i] “You’re closer to me than Long Beach.” Images of J surfing on the coast rushed through his head. The jagged peaks that rose higher and higher on the north-end of the state, almost into Oregon. The Douglas firs that littered the area, the smell of endless Christmas like the Cascades in his own back yard… They both had retreated, in their own way, Rob soon realized. But it was her sobriety that filled him with joy most of all. He honestly couldn’t say how often he had to be there for her in that downward spiral. How much puke he cleaned off of their bedsheets and walls. The strangers in their home when he got home too early for her to shoo them away. Entire evenings where she’d be comatose on the couch—sometimes crying, other-times a million miles away. She had asked him what month it was, at one point. The thought of all of that being a distant memory; a healing wound, opened up something in him. He listened to the rest of her story, and her requests. But it was the sobriety that he kept thinking on. “Wow, J,” he started, already regretting his tone. It sounded like he was going to break her. He powered past it and hoped he didn’t notice. “Five years. Holy shit.” It took her three tries—something he didn’t want to consider. But she did it. He had thought so from the moment he saw her yesterday but needed that confirmation. “That is so incredibly cool. And I mean that in the…the fuckin’ heaviest sense of the word…I’m really proud of you—” The final three words choked in his mouth as hot tears rushed to his face. The words came out shaken and finally stopped coming at all. For a moment, everything boiled over; crashing into him at full-speed. [i]Why was he crying?[/i] He took a second, looked away, and wiped his eye with his sleeve. “Sorry, woah,” he feebly attempted to play it off. “Don’t know where that came from.” He feigned a laugh, took a deep breath, and continued. “I’m really happy for you, and—and that sounds incredibly nice. I wish I’d spent 33 surfing. I spent a lot of it gigging out for rich kids and figuring out some iPhone game Elle was obsessed with. My greatest achievements included finally buying Rogaine and getting into the Emerald League for [i]Winky Think’s Puzzle Master.[/i]” Scrambling through what she had said, he remembered her mention the billboards, and the band, and couldn’t help but blush. He wanted desperately to apologize for what was probably a horrendous year of seeing your ex plastered all over everything with his new girlfriend, but there wasn’t a way of mentioning it that didn’t make him want to die. “I try to keep a low profile these days. It’d be nice to live somewhere where people didn’t ask me how much I got out of my divorce or if I signed a prenup or not.” He took a deep breath. “I missed you too,” he said, before he could even consider whether he should say it or not. “—and everyone, and all the…you know what I mean.” [i]The anxiety was just burning at this point.[/i] “But I missed [u]you,[/u] and…we’re cool.” Ten years of conflict and some deeply buried resentments were gone. At least in this moment. They would undoubtably come back, once dinner ended. Maybe when they discussed that infamous night. And maybe, when the nostalgia wore off and the reality remained that this was still the woman—his best friend—who cut him so deeply and painfully he left. He can still remember the throbbing pain of his bare feet slicing on the litter of their street as he marched–fourteen blocks in a tear-stricken rage to the nearest bus stop. But right now, that was a lifetime ago. Right now, it was nice to catch up with his best friend again. “Hey, you two!” Rob’s head whipped over to the sliding glass door of the home, where Austin’s head was poking out. Behind him, Sam was laughing about something. “I know you’re having a moment but we’re getting in that pool. Unlike Rob, some of us don’t have nice private pools to swim in every day.” “Oh, fuck off,” Rob shot back. He looked to J. He wanted back in the moment, but it was fading fast. He looked down to his now-clean plate, and back up to her. “That was…[i]so[/i] much better than pasta night, by the way. Seriously, thank you.” He stood up and began to collect both his and J’s plates, before gesturing to the far-too-nice pool in question. “Want to swim?” His mind wandered to the hot tub, then to J, but he shut it down quickly. After all, they had just gotten back on good terms for the first time in a decade. Maybe that was enough progress for one night.