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Coming back home for Sam's funeral was Emma's doing, not mine.
My wife is Californian from head to toe; lithe, airy, blonde, startlingly beautiful and all-too good for me. When I first met Emma at some freshmen's event in college, I thought she had a mythological quality to her. It was the sea-green eyes, I think, and that feather hair-clip she'd pinned to the braid running down her golden hair.
"Got a light?" she'd asked. My new-found status as non-virgin had given me enough bravado over the summer to shrug and raise an eyebrow at her, like a judgemental ass.
"I don't smoke," I'd replied, trying not to grimace at my sheer Georgia-ness.
Maybe that impressed her, or maybe Emma was just into jerks at the time and didn't realise I was a faux-jerk. Or maybe I just a pathetic, hick version of one and she felt like branching out.
Regardless, the night had progressed to us drunkenly swaying to one another before I snuck her back to my dorm. Emma swears we never had sex. I can't imagine why we wouldn't have. Anyway, it would be the first of many trips.
Emma and I moved through our college years without spelling out exactly what we were, much to the chagrin of our friends. I knew about the several trysts she'd had with other guys - the soft murmurs of Brandon and Cody and, on one occasion, a Dakota, floated above her golden head like a halo of gossip that didn't do much damage to our own arrangement. I was having fun too.
The transition from casual sex to serious relationship startled me with its abrupt naturalness. It would come about one day, a month before we were set to graduate, when I was leaning against the doorway of Emma's bedroom in her shared apartment. I remember watching as she folded the last of her clothes into her suitcase; I was in a foul mood for reasons that I couldn't explain at the time.
"Em," I'd said simply. It was the first time I ever felt self-conscious saying her name like that. Em. It felt too intimate, too brazen, like I hadn't spent four years tracing my fingers on her perpetually sunburnt lower back as we lay side-by-side on the cramped space of my single bed.
I couldn't say anything more. All that bravado had been shred apart by the epiphanic gaze in her mermaidian eyes.
"Come home with me," she'd said.
Emma was too breezy and I, too permanently embarrassed, to ever declare our love with any cinematic calibre. But that was the end of that - or the beginning, perhaps.
