That’s Charles.He doesn’t waste ammunition.He waits for the moment it’ll do the most damage and then delivers it like a gift.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the hallway floor.Tray in my lap.My ankle throbs.My eyes are doing something I refuse to name.
He’s wrong.
That's what he keeps forgetting when he's busy explaining me to myself.I don't lose.I don't leave.I wait.And eventually, every version of Charles that isn't mine gets bored and goes home.
Vanessa will too.
He has to be wrong.
Because if he’s right—if I don’t love people, if I only acquire them—then what am I doing in this hallway?What is this feeling in my chest that won’t stop, that keeps me coming back to his door with coffee and flowers and ibuprofen like some deranged Florence Nightingale who can’t take a hint?
It’s love.It has to be love.
Because if it isn’t, then I’ve done all of this for nothing.
And I don’t do things for nothing.
I call Luke.I don’t think about it.I don’t plan it.I just do it—the way you press on a bruise to make sure it still hurts.
The porch railing.That’s what I tell him.He says to give him an hour.I hang up and laugh at myself.What a joke I’ve become.
I called a handyman because my boyfriend told me I’m not worth loving and I didn’t know who else to call.That’s where I am.That’s the distance between who I was ten days ago and who I’m sitting on this floor being right now.
Now I have wet toast and a dead flower and a man coming to fix an emergency that isn’t really an emergency.
I pick up the tray.Stand.Walk downstairs.
I wash the dishes.I throw away the flower.I put the pills back in the bottle.
Then I go to the bathroom, fix my face, and wait for Luke like nothing happened.
Because that’s what I do.That’s all I know how to do.
From upstairs, Charles starts laughing.
Not the bitter kind.Not the mean kind.The real kind.Like something just occurred to him that he finds genuinely, deeply funny.
I stand in the kitchen and listen to the man I love laugh at me through the ceiling.
35
Luke
She opens the door with a smile that’s working overtime.
Her eyes are wrong.Tight.The skin around them held in place by force.Her mascara is fresh—recently applied, which means recently needed.There’s a faint smudge below her left eye she missed.
I notice the smudge.I also notice the line of her throat, the way her shirt sits on her collarbone, the small shift in her weight when she sees me.I notice everything about this woman and I wish I’d stop.
“Hey,” she says.“Thanks for coming.I know it’s last minute.”
“Railing sounded serious,” I say.It didn’t.We both know it didn’t.But I watch the relief move through her when I say it—the tiny exhale, the shoulders dropping half an inch—and something in my chest tightens that has no business tightening.
Her eyes drop to my hands.The swollen knuckles.The cut on my forearm.
“What happened?”
