We arrived back in the Bay Area tired from the long drive, but smiling—and found Kath’s mother crying in the driveway.  Her dad had been diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer, and he was already in the hospital, with very little time left to live.

I did what I could to comfort Kath when we received the news, and continued to do so when we were back on campus.   Those days were far from happy, but we found ourselves bonding at an increasingly deep level.

Only a few weeks later, it was time for me to fly back to New York for Christmas.  I enjoyed seeing old high school friends, and to finance my recreation, I took a seasonal job selling men’s clothing at a local department store.  I met an Indonesian-born model who worked in the lingerie department there, and we began spending a lot of our breaks together.  Then one evening, we had a sort of preliminary date back at her apartment.

I didn’t feel guilty about any of this, because neither Kath nor I had said anything up to this point about our relationship being exclusive.  And overall, I was enjoying my vacation quite a bit.  

I found that I missed Kath a lot more than I expected to, though.  And I realized that I loved her.

I cut my vacation short and flew back to California.