* * *
Sasha understood that Cord loved her, but he didn’t need her, and that might have been the most attractive thing about him. He was restrained in his expressions of affection—sure, he loved sex and he was unfailingly kind—but he didn’t say “I love you” every time they hung up the phone, he didn’t bring her flowers or presents without occasion, he didn’t tell her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And that was the way Sasha wanted it. After all the heartache of her first love, she was done with grand romantic gestures. She had seen the tumultuous underbelly of such passion.
Sasha had fallen in love in high school. His name was Jake Mullin but everyone just called him Mullin. They had known each other since they were eleven, placed in the same gifted and talented program at their public school, a classroom in a trailer near the parking lot. He made her nervous, and she spent years giving him a wide berth. It seemed like he was barely looked after. He never wore a jacket, and even in the snowy winter she remembered seeing him standing on the edge of the playground wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. His family lived across from the wharf in a peeling green house with iron railings, and while Sasha’s own mother packed her lunches with hearts drawn on napkins and plastic baggies full of popcorn made in the air popper, Mullin never seemed to have anything. He didn’t even carry a backpack. Sasha was older before she realized he ate the free lunch, lining up at the cafeteria turnstile holding the small, laminated card at his side.
Mullin could draw. She’d never noticed, never paid attention, but one day in high school she walked by his desk and saw a bird so realistic she gasped. Though Sasha could draw almost as well, it was because she took art seriously, spent all her free time in the school’s art studio, built all her electives around painting and ceramics classes. Mullin would spend English class carefully shading the detailed veins of a leaf and its stem and then, at the end of the period, crumple the paper in the trash.
They got together the summer before junior year. There was a reservoir someone had discovered in the next town at the end of a long dirt road just before the highway. The gate was locked, but if you parked, then hiked ten minutes along shady paths, you came to a breathtaking lake with a stone tower at the center. Sasha and her friends spent the whole summer with a big gang of kids, drinking beer and smoking pot on the edge of the water, skinny-dipping and jumping off the tower. She didn’t know exactly how it started, but over the course of two hot months she became increasingly aware of when he was swimming, when he was stretched out on a rock in the sun, and she wanted to be wherever he was. Their first kiss was out by the tower as they were treading water. When he pulled away, he laughed and said, “I’m probably going to drown if we don’t move this to the shore.”
After that they were never apart. Her brothers and cousins loved Mullin. He had a landscaping job and had saved up some money for a boat, a Boston Whaler. He took them out whenever they wanted, picking up a case of Coors Light and bags of chips so they could spend entire days anchored out by the sandbar drinking and swimming. Whatever that darkness was that had kept Sasha at bay when they were younger had dissipated, and they were inseparable during their junior and senior years, her parents even allowing him to sleep over at her house. It was unspoken among them that Mullin sometimes needed to get away from his own family. His father drank and his brother was a cokehead. Mullin shared a bedroom with his brother and would sometimes arrive at school looking exhausted and strained.
Mullin had less than she did but was generous to a fault. He always insisted on paying for things, sandwiches or drinks or gas when she stopped to fill the car. When he came for dinner at her house, he brought her mother gifts: three pounds of steak from the butcher shop, a paper sack full of corn, a white bag of apples. Sasha knew it was unusual that her parents let her boyfriend sleep over, so she tried to honor that kindness—they never had sex under their roof, instead sticking to the back of her car, the boat, the beach at night.
When Sasha got into art school, he took her to dinner to celebrate. They went to the nicer of the two pizza places in town, and since Mullin’s dad was friends with the waitress, she quietly slipped them two glasses of sticky red wine in heavy goblets. Sasha would be going to Cooper Union in New York, the best art school in the country, famous for having no tuition. Mullin hadn’t applied to art school. He wasn’t interested in drawing or painting; it was just something he did when he was bored. Instead, he would be going to the University of Rhode Island in the fall. He would live at home and commute, keeping his job at the landscaping company. He hadn’t applied anywhere else.
As the summer arrived and Sasha’s move to New York loomed, Mullin became increasingly irritable with her. They went to the movies one night, and Sasha ran into a guy from her French class who was working the concessions. She ordered popcorn and he replied in French that the popcorn was disgusting and sat in the glass case for weeks. She laughed and took it anyway. Mullin was silent for the whole movie, and when it was over, he marched back to her car without a word. As they drove home, he wouldn’t speak to her until, five miles from her house, he demanded she pull over. He screamed at her for flirting with someone in front of him, slamming his hand against the glove compartment. He got out and started walking home. Sasha drove alongside him for a while but finally gave up and left him to walk. Two days later he came by late at night, crying, and she forgave him.
He did the same thing when he came to visit her freshman fall. A guy on her hall dropped by to say hello, and Mullin freaked out that she was cheating on him. He punched the wall in her bathroom, breaking a tile and getting blood all over the floor. He left and then a couple days later started calling her to apologize. He called her over and over and over until she had to turn off her ringer. He went to her house and talked to her younger brother, Olly, who called her sobbing the next day. Her family was all on Mullin’s side. “You know he had a fucked-up home life,” they said. “He just loves you and you left him.”
He showed up at her dorm the next weekend, and she broke up with him, but he wouldn’t take it. He was intent on winning her back. He mailed her gifts, he had flowers delivered, he bought her a diamond promise ring that she knew he couldn’t afford. Sasha wanted to be done with him, wanted some space to move on and make friends and start a new life, but she couldn’t. She loved Mullin in spite of everything, and she also knew that she was all he had. When she pictured him sleeping in his bedroom, his brother awake and blasting music, his father trashed and knocking into the furniture, her heart broke. She had left and he had nowhere to go. They spent that winter fighting and making up, Mullin going into jealous rages and then wallowing in remorse. Sasha’s friends grew to hate him, her mother thought it best she end things, her brothers and cousins still even more committed than she was to making it work. When Mullin hit a guy for talking to Sasha at a party and she was caught in the scuffle, she was taken before the Cooper Union disciplinary committee and Mullin was barred from campus. For her that was the final straw. She was doing something she loved, she was set to graduate free of debt, and Mullin was fucking it up for her. She hardened her heart against him. It was over.