“I think you’re cute,” I said. We were lying on the grass, gazing up at a black and yellow sky. It was his suggestion—the lying down, not the stargazing. He wanted me to sober up and I wanted to make a moment out of nothing.

“I don’t know what to say to that,” he said. A cop-out answer. An automated response. Command not recognized. They say the worst thing that can happen when you put yourself out there is rejection, but that’s untrue. A rejection is an answer. People can move on after answers.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said, and he listened to me. Not a chirp out of him. And so we waited there, shadows in the grass, absent and heavy. We talked about things he did know what to say to and I brought up other people to take the edge off the conversation.

It is an ugly limbo, uncertainty. You think you know someone, what they want and what they are about, but then they give you these looks that make you question who they are. Those are the times you really know a person.

I was hyperaware of the distance between him and me. Lying next to someone does that to you. It’s that much harder to gauge how close they are without turning your head, and you don’t want to do that because then you could be looking right at them, very close to you.

I needed yes or no. I needed him to tell me he only liked me as a friend or that he treated all girls this way. I needed him to tell me I was out of line because he had a girlfriend he loved. Tell me I was too early, too late, or just right because he felt the same way. Tell me I was delusional to think something could happen between us. Tell me I was crazy to think something could not.

We talked back and forth, never again mentioning how I felt about him or how he felt about me. He was the kind who wanted to sit a moment with me, an eternity with someone else.

I sat up and the scenery shifted back to a practical landscape. Plenty of people could make fools of the night—it didn’t have to be me.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I counted the sidewalk cracks as we moved together toward separate homes. In 300 feet, he would turn left and I would stay on the cement tracks all the way to Margaret Morrison Street. It’s where the buses loaded and dropped off kids. The drivers always honked because the kids crossed right when the light turned green. But can you blame them really? It was red when they looked.

200 feet. We passed two girls who eyed us like they knew what we were going to do. People talk, so in a way, I lived my fantasy in someone else’s assumption.

50 feet. I don’t often use words like yearn or hope or wish, but the sidewalk should have been longer. Construction crews are a merciless breed.

We reached the corner. Wind blew. Feet shuffled. Now I didn’t know what to say. The traffic light beside us glowed green, but no cars were there to go forward.

You know when you lean in to hear someone better, but it’s only a gesture and doesn’t really help? It was like that, except we leaned away from each other in a social segue way to an unspoken goodbye. We were peeling our bodies away from the situation. But while our bodies wanted one thing, he gave me that look again. The one that had the answer I wanted—he just had to say it.

But like Newton’s cradle, we swung back in with a force beyond our control and hugged instead. I say “we” because it wasn’t him that hugged me or me that hugged him. I don’t know that either of us wanted it—the kind of want you have in hunger and in love—but it was necessary to deliver and receive, something like a fax. It should have been intimate, me in his arms, his hold warm against the white bath of streetlights. But it wasn’t. His hug was not an embrace but a consolation.

I did not smell him. I did not close my eyes. There was nothing emotional about touching him this time. Maybe we don’t hug to feel closer to someone. Maybe we hug so we can feel ourselves let go.

Sometimes it’s too hard to give an answer, so the other end just has to wait. The most painful part of waiting is the moment you realize you had your answer the whole time. In his silent hug, there was, “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want.” In moonlit footsteps, down Margaret Morrison and up the stairs to my room, there was, “I’m sorry I want.”