Checkmate

“Do you know how to play?” He asked, his voice raised only to a whisper. The late summer air wafted in through an open window, his breath steady behind my neck. He reached his arm around me and placed a hand on my chin, directing my eyes to the chessboard in the lavish living room. 

My knees pressed against the cool marble floors as I sat, eager as ever. I switched on one lamp, the orange light burning barely above an ember. “No,” I replied. “Teach me.” 

“The objective is simple. Back the king into a corner until he doesn’t have any legal moves to escape capture,” he said, grazing his hand over the piece. 

“That’s checkmate.” 

…

When I was in seventh grade, I had my first ever boyfriend. His hands would travel over my thighs in empty movie theatres and in the backs of history classes, his smile sweet as he’d take whatever he wanted. A couple of months in, a video surfaced of him kissing my friend in a corner at a house party. But he’s irrelevant to this narrative. 

His best friend is our King piece. He was such an asshole in middle school. He had this bright ginger hair that would get brighter when he’d get mad, and the kind of confidence in his voice that prompted multiple principal’s office visits a week. 

He took an interest in me. He was meaner (or nicer) to me than he was to the rest of the girls, calling me late into the night just to tell me I looked like a slut at school, then asking me about cheer practice. He’d push me the way schoolboys on a playground do when they like a girl, and I’d fall for it every time. I’d shove him into lockers like I meant it and giggle when I turned around, and he’d text me under his desk the following period to tell me he thought it was cute when I was pissed. 

By the time graduation rolled around, I had moved to a different high school, then to a college on the other side of the continent. 

For seven years, I joked about this ginger I had a crush on in middle school, a forgotten side story that had accidentally set my type in men — cocky, cutting, a little violent. His presence in my life was inconsequential for the majority of my adolescence, a fleeting inside joke between my childhood best friends and me, pulling the middle school card every time we couldn’t quite place why we kept gravitating towards a man. For seven years, we didn’t speak. Our lives had simply moved in divergent directions. 

Last summer, on an uncharacteristically hot night, my friends and I sweat it out at a dive bar. I felt a hand on my shoulder as I swayed, the same kind of “excuse me” that prompts the beginning of something new. As I turned and cocked my head to the side, it only took a moment to register his face. It felt like the breath had been knocked out of my diaphragm. In a single moment, I had fallen all the way back to thirteen. 

“Alyssa. Hi,” he said, smiling. 

My eyes travelled over his hair (a little darker now, but still red), his height, his shoulders, his freckles — that same smile. 

I beamed back, throwing my arms around his neck like I was greeting any old friend. “Oh my god! It’s so good to see you — it’s been so long — you look so different,” I said, tripping over my words and cutting myself off, my disbelieving laughter making for a minuscule level of coherence. “I almost didn’t recognize you.” 

He laughed, replying, “I recognized you, easy. How long have you been back?” 

I paid his question no mind, overwhelmed by the excitement of it all. I took his hand and dragged him across the bar to the rest of my group, introducing him as an old friend and watching him shake each of their hands. It felt like picking up a game we’d abandoned mid-match, both pretending not to remember the last position on the board.

“Let me buy all of you a round.” He said, putting down his card. 

I smiled, impressed by his chivalry. He leaned in as I fired off my questions, sugar dripping off his voice. The night went on as we rehashed our history, old habits coming up my throat. I made fun of his hair. He told me I’d dyed mine the same colour. I laughed and said he never called. He told me I’d changed my number at least seven times. 

“Do you remember our eighth-grade graduation? That party you threw at your house — convenient it fell on the same day as your fourteenth birthday.” He asked, obviously laying the groundwork for some jab. 

The memory was as exacting as the smell of plum perfume — my pink basement walls, the blindfold my friends had tied around my head, the red dress I wore in an attempt to look as sexy as a real teenager would be. In some perverse junior-high tradition, the birthday girl would spin in fourteen circles and get kissed by a mystery man. As he recounted the night, the memory washed over me. 

“Did your friends ever tell you who kissed you?” He asked. 

“God, you’re kidding!” I replied. 

“No — no, I’m not.”

“That was our first kiss?” 

The corner of his lips curled up into a smirk, prompting the flush of my cheeks. So cliche. “Actually, that was my first kiss. Ever.” He said. 

My hand flew to my mouth in disbelief as I smiled, stunned by the poetry of it all. He wrapped his hand around my wrist, gently nudging it aside. It felt as though I had been holding this secret of us in the palm of my hand for so long, the unfinished tension and suspended crush. My every instinct told me to run before it was real. I knew, even then, that this was a game with no winning. But before I could, his other hand fell on my cheek as he leaned in, his gaze so unafraid, so exacting, pulling the feeling out of me. He was a much better kisser than I remembered. 

We spent the summer together, wining and dining over and over again, racing bikes through open fields and swinging off ropes into shallow lakes. That summer, everything was romantic, every minute packed with the excitement unique to first crushes and puppy love. 

We fought like hell — a habit we couldn’t seem to kick. I’d nudge a pawn into his territory just to see if he’d bite, and he’d fall for it every time. I’d yell at him with a smile tugging at my lips, shove his shoulders back just to pull him back in by his collar, hang up to see if he’d call me back. I’d do it to see if he’d still play. He always did. 

One evening, still sticky from the heat of the lake, he kissed me against my car — a beat-up rental I had leased for the season. The sun paled behind us, drying our skin and hair, the sky turning pink as we spoke. His body pressed into mine as his lips grazed my neck, and the back of my head bumped against the aluminum doorframe. He pulled away like it was instinct, moving his hand to the soft part of my skull, acting as a barrier — like I was something he needed to protect. He made sure it didn’t hurt me, then kissed me again. An action so casual, so natural to him, shouldn’t have affected me as much as it did, but it did nonetheless. 

I laughed at him as it happened, saying, “You’re so much gentler with me now. You’ve lost your edge.” I expected a quick retaliation, perhaps an insult to my intellect or a bite to my lower lip just hard enough to draw some blood, but for some reason, he didn’t take it as a challenge. 

“I think I have,” He said, “Maybe I could stomach it back then, back when I was thirteen, but I can’t anymore. I stopped playing that game a long time ago.” 

My smile dropped, breathless and nervous, an inexplicable feeling coming up my throat. 

He was the one to break the silence. “How long do I have you for?” He asked, his eyes flickering up and down, just inches from my face.

I took a breath, knowing that my answer would only solidify the impossibility of us. “I fly back to California in August. A couple more weeks.” 

I knew how the game would end. I played anyway. 

Before I left, we spent a night in his parents’ house, a big white residence in the best part of the city. He taught me how to play chess. His fingers moved around the board as he told me how each of the pieces moved — their direction, their reach. He was so patient with me as I fumbled over and over, his subtle strength and quiet masculinity infused in each of his whispered corrections. 

He beat me every time. I had never felt more in love with him. 

The last time I saw him, I buried my face in my hands, attempting to turn my head before I let him see me cry. He told me he loved me. 

“Don’t say anything. I don’t expect you to,” He whispered into my hair. 

I think the heat had made my mind hazy, made it much too easy to fall in love. Or maybe I just can’t call it what it is. As the semester progressed and my courses picked up, the air fell brisk, and I forgot what it was like to be in his arms. A couple of weeks into the semester, he told me to block off a couple of days on my calendar. I panicked. It all became so real, my summer love moving off the board, into uncharted territory. 

All I could think about was my courses, my future, and the assurance of my winning. It came back to me in flashes — his schoolboy cruelty, our fighting and fucking, the softness in his kisses, the power in his patience. More than I’d like to admit, his fleeting presence in my life has taught me how to play the game. There is no running from him. 

I called him late into the night, “I know what I said, I’m so sorry. But I can’t. I don’t know what I thought this was, or what I was doing —” I rambled. 

He cut me off, saying, “I’m not mad at you. Stop apologizing.” 

My mind raced while I maintained a smile, my heartbeat pulsing up my throat. I think I’ve always loved love — always have, always will. I believe in fun, in racing and play. Yet, I think the idea of being cared for has always scared me more than it should. I am afraid that being known, that being seen, would equate to belonging to someone. Would mean capture. It would mean losing.

He filled my silence, a smile in his voice, “I know you. I knew what I was getting myself into.” 

I thought about that night on his living room floor, crouched around the chessboard. His eyes flicked from the board to mine, his chain dangling over the marble. “Think about that one again,” he said, motioning to my latest move. It was our third game, after I had begged him to play me again. I smiled under my breath, moving the piece back into safety. “Stop helping me. I’m your opponent.” I teased. 

I think to fall in love is to risk your endgame. His voice pulled me out of my trance, his soft breathing into the microphone. 

“You’ve backed me into a corner here, Alyssa.” 

It made me laugh, the poetry of it. Maybe love has always been about surrender — the kind that only works when you stop trying to win. I knew I could end it with a word. It teased at my lips, the seduction, the irony, the simple knowing that my evasion would only be my loss. But surrender is hard. Winning is easier. I took a breath, my lips parting into a smile as I said it, the only word that ensured my success.  

“Checkmate.”