Camp NaNo '22: All Our Yesterdays

The more time I spent with him, the more I fell for him. On his last night, he took a blanket and we laid outside on the grass to stargaze. It was all very innocent, by the way. We just watched the stars.

At one point, Cole turned to me, his face serious. “Marcy, I know I’m going back tomorrow, but… what do you say to us trying this thing?”

“Like, be your girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “That’s what I want.”


“It’s what I want too…” I trailed off, not sure how it would work when we were far away."

“Listen, if I get this album deal, I’ll go on tour, so I’ll probably be gone a lot anyway… I just want you to know what you’re getting into, so I understand if you don’t want to, and would rather find someone else—”

“Cole.”

He stopped and looked at me. Everything he mentioned was spinning through my mind, but in that moment, it didn’t matter to me. “Yes, I’ll be with you. I’ll be your girlfriend.” 


His smile in that moment made the rest of the world fall away. “I’ll give you my address and my phone and we can talk all the time. And we’ll see each other again soon.” 


“Okay,” I said.

He kissed me, and soon we were making out. But that’s all we did. I promise.

Even though we regularly spoke on the phone and even wrote letters, I was terrified that he was going to meet someone in New York and forget all about me. In the meantime, most of my world kept on world on turning as it always had. Obviously, business at the boat rental wound down into the colder months. As my father went back to his job teaching drama at the local high school, I got a job working as a barista at a coffee shop in town. 
 In my spare time, I worked on my painting. I worked mostly with watercolors, painting mostly landscapes. I thought I had average talent at best, and definitely wasn’t as good as my mother, but it was something I enjoyed and I found fun and it had a calming effect on me. I painted beaches, mountains, jungles, everywhere I thought I might like to go. Since I was painting from something between memory and imagination, they weren’t always realistic, and a little dreamy. Cole’s twenty-first birthday came in September, and I sent him a smaller one, of a jungle to his address. With it, I included a note. “I miss you. Hope this isn’t too bad.”

The next time we spoke, he told me he loved it and had it hanging in his room. “You’re a brilliant painter, Marcy,” he said. “I saw that and thought I was dating the next Monet.”

“You’re saying that…”

“No, you are.” I don’t know if Cole was just biased, but he was the first one that had ever acknowledged my artistic work in such a way. By extension, it made me feel loved, accepted and safe in a way that I hadn’t felt before.

Inside the apartment, everything was small and cramped, but I supposed it was cozy. Cozy and very modest. I could tell that while they weren’t poor, they were at least a working class family. Cole had hinted to this over the past couple of months, but it was another thing to see the place where he’d grown up with my own eyes.
At that point, we were greeted by his mother. Her name was Patty, was a woman who looked young to have a twenty-one and a sixteen year old save for some wrinkles around her eyes. She had dark hair and dark eyes and Cole very much resembled her. His sister Kelsey had been in her bedroom and only came out after she was beckoned to.
Already in her pajamas, she barely looked at me.
“Kels, this is Marcy,” Cole said.
“Hi,” I said, as cheerfully as I possibly could.
“Hi,” she said quietly, without looking at me.
After an awkward moment, she went back into her bedroom.
Cole turned to me. “Sorry, she’s shy.”
“That’s okay,” I said, figuring we’d get to know each other more in the coming days. I wanted Kelsey to like me, but I supposed I understood if she wasn’t going to be talkative this late in the evening.
Even though it was almost, Patty kept asking me if I wanted anything to eat.
I told her I was alright and I just needed to shower and go to bed. I was told that Cole would sleep on the couch while I had his room. I noticed what his mother was doing, but I was alright with it for now. Even though we’d technically been dating since July, this was only the third time we’d met in person, and I wasn’t ready to share a bed with him, not yet. Even if that’s all we did.