I take the turnout just past the marsh bridge because I always do when I need to make a decision. Gravel crunches under the tires. The car noses toward the water and stops. I kill the headlights. The world goes darker and deeper. The dash throws a faint glow over my hands, then dims. I let the engine idle a minute longer, then turn the key and let the quiet take the car.
Wind moves through the eelgrass in a dry whisper. A buoy somewhere out in the inlet bobs and clanks lazily. The night is not empty.
I could pretend I’m choosing between two paths. That’s clean. I like clean.
But there aren’t really two. There’s just the one; it’s only a matter of whether I stop this now or I don’t. Either decision will cost. One costs her. The other costs me.
Either way, I’m paying.
I put my forearms on the wheel and let my head hang for a beat. Heat rises behind my eyes. I blink until it disappears.
She said everything. I want everything. She said it like a woman who understood the size and depth of the word and wanted it anyway. It knocked something loose in me that I thought I’d cemented over. Not because I think I know how to give everything, but because I haven’t wanted to try in a long time.
The bite I left on her—God help me. I picture it nestled in the sensitive skin where her shoulder meets her throat. That mark is a statement I had no right to make.
The part of me that wants to see it again tomorrow is the same part that earned every rule I wrote for myself. I’m old enough to know the difference between a man who is careful and a man who thinks he is.
I open the door and step out because the car feels too small for an argument with myself. Cold air hits the heat on my skin and makes both more obvious.
I stand at the guardrail and breathe the marsh—iron, salt, rot, life. The dark water holds light in thin, broken lines. My hands find the top bar without thinking. The metal is cold enough to bite. Good.
I count. Not numbers. I count the things I have to do.
I have to show up tomorrow and treat her like a colleague who is excellent at her job.
I have to keep my distance without being cold and obvious.
I have to keep my hands to myself.
I say the last one out loud. “Keep your hands to yourself.” The sound gets eaten by the wind before it can echo, and that feels appropriate.
I don’t trust myself with her.
I don’t regret it. Not the wanting or taking or the marks we put on each other. I regret the after, the impression I left her with. That it was a mistake. That I could walk away and file it under poor judgment. That I made her feel like she might be punished for it.
God.Are you going to fire me?
It cut me open in a place no one sees. I did that. I made her feel like she could be erased, disposed.
I look down at my hands. There are faint, thin lines on the backs where carpet bit, and when I tilt my wrist, I see the shallow arc a nail left earlier when digging in, already scabbed at the edges. My body looks like what happened. There’s no erasing that.
I get back in the car because the cold is starting to seep into my skin. The key turns, the engine catches, the dash wakes.I pull out slowly, gravel giving way to asphalt as I turn toward home.
I let myself say the thing I haven’t said because not saying it doesn’t make it less true.
I want her.
I also want her to wake up tomorrow and not flinch when she sees me. I want her not to pay for my actions with her job, her pride, her comfort in a place she’s earning with a speed that makes me proud.
So I take my want, and I put it somewhere else and cover it with a lid. I don’t throw it away. I’m not that noble and I’m not that stupid.
Some men are made simpler by want. They burn and then burn out. I am not one of them.
It makes me careful, to a fault. It makes me cautious. And apparently, it makes me cold.
It breaks down the lie that I’ve told myself for years: that I can keep the two halves of my life in separate rooms and never open the door between them.
The door is open now. I can pretend it isn’t. I can try to shut it, lock it, throw away the key. But it won’t stay that way. Because it’s been opened, and I’ll always remember what it was like.
