“You don’t need to be embarrassed, you know,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I was married to my Harold for sixty-three years. Your testicles are nothing I haven’t seen before.”
I close my eyes, then inhale what dignity I have left and exhale every stupid decision that led to this very moment.
“And I do know how cold it is outside. Why, this one time, my Harold, his testes?—”
“Lois?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Can we please stop talking about testicles? I’m trying to focus.”
“Oh yes, of course. Of course. Be careful now, you hear?”
“Working on it,” I mutter, and draw my arm back.
The first hit doesn’t break it—just a crack, a sharp star in the corner. The second shatters the pane with a sound that feels like a slap across my entire nervous system.
Glass gives, a triangle falls inward, and a spray of glittering shards skitters across the loft floor. Cold air knifes out and through me, and a few splinters bite the skin of my wrist where the cotton slips.
I shake out the boxers, wrap them again tighter, and knock away the remaining jagged teeth, clearing a gap large enough for a dumb man—this one, specifically—to crawl through.
I brush the bottom sash, swipe shards off the sill with the edge of my forearm, and get one knee onto the frame.
“Almost there,” I tell no one. The roof squeaks under my other foot. I plant my palms, tuck my head, and wriggle through.
For a second I’m a cartoon of a man birthing himself into his own loft: bare ass in the wind, shoulders scraping old carpet, boxers wrapped around my wrist like I just captured this flag.
Then I’m inside. I sprawl on the frigid floor, cheek against dusty carpet, lungs grabbing at the air like I ran a mile.
The pain in my left testicle thrums. Glass crunches under my palm when I push up. A small ribbon of blood slides across the back of my hand where a shard caught me.
I get to my knees and take inventory: skin scraped, hand nicked, pride annihilated, nut offended but intact.
The loft is empty. Nothing but dust, cobwebs, and now, glass hiding up here. I shuffle to the little half door, unlatch it, and climb down the short set of steps into the hallway.
The alarm panel at the end blinks a cheerful green like this morning never happened. I punch the bypass code for the broken dormer zone, just in case something decides to trip, and shuffle straight to the thermostat. Heat on full blast. My skin prickles as life returns to my feet in hot needles.
In the bathroom, I run warm water over my hands, wash the cut, dab at it with a towel, and catch sight of myself in the mirror once again.
New additions: a smear of blood on my wrist, an impressive scrape on my shoulder, hair that looks even more out of control.
I turn sideways, wince, and check the damage. The left side of my scrotum is already showing the faintest, traitorous bloom of purple.
“Buddy,” I tell it, because we’ve been through a lot. “I’m sorry.”
I shower, not to clean the night off so much as to stand with my head under heat and let the stupidity wash off my skin and out of my muscles.
The water scalds at first, then settles, steam fogging the glass. My body loosens. My brain does not. It keeps replaying the last forty five minutes of morning like a loop I can’t stop: Stephanie on the porch. Tori in the street.
“I did. To get divorced, you dumb idiot.”
I lean my forehead against the tile and breathe.
The truth is simple and humiliating: I didn’t trust her. I made assumptions based on a snippet of a conversation I overheard, drank myself into oblivion, and then, when she showed up at my house and said the one thing I’ve been dying to hear for months, I pulled a Leo and fucked it all up.
I didn’t say “I’m proud of you” or “Are you okay” or “Do you need anything.”
I’d already made assumptions, let her believe a lie because I was angry, and was too far into my trip to Fuckupsville to reroute my internal GPS and fix the situation.
