“Tell me about the night you scored the hat trick,” he says one time, when we’re both high on his couch, a documentary playing muted in the background.
I shrug. “It was a fluke.”
“Bullshit,” he says, and I wonder how he’s so good at calling me out.
“Darius set up every play,” I say. “He’s the reason I got half those shots.”
He tilts his head. “You talk about him a lot.”
I snort. “Yeah, well, old habits.”
He smiles, and there’s a sadness to it that makes me feel briefly like I’m the one in control.
But then he starts in again, and I answer, because the only thing worse than talking is silence.
After the third or fourth visit, I realize I’ve told Vincent more about the shooting, about the aftermath, about my own panic attacks, than I’ve told anyone. Not even Dr. Sharma. Not Darius.
Not myself, if I’m being honest.
The realization makes me queasy, like I swallowed a shot glass and it’s just sitting there in my gut, unbreakable.
But I tell myself it’s fine. Vincent’s a reporter, that’s how he is. He just wants to understand.
I try to convince myself it’s normal, that maybe this is what intimacy is supposed to feel like, an endless game of questions and answers until there’s nothing left but the core of who you are.
I should know better.
But I go back anyway.
Every time I step into his apartment, I feel lighter, like maybe he can extract the parts of me that are still haunted. Maybe if I answer all the questions, the ghost will finally shut up.
But every night, as I drift off with his arms around me and the city lights bleeding through the window, I feel the weight in my chest grow.
And every morning, when I walk out of his building, my phone is still empty, and I’m still waiting for a message that will never come.
That’s the real joke.
And I’m the punchline.
———
It’s been three weeks since I saw Darius in person. Not counting the seconds at the rink, when we pass in the tunnel and our eyes slide right off each other like we’re ghosts wearing someone else’s faces.
I’ve rearranged my entire life around the simple goal of not running into him.
Gym? Only after nine p.m., when the after-work crowd has gone home and the cleaning guy just wants to get it over with. If I see a familiar car in the lot, I go back to my building and do pushups until my arms give out. Morning runs are solo, earbuds jammed so deep I can’t hear my own breath.
I take the old route, the one by the water, but it’s different now: no second set of footsteps, no one to match stride with, just the slap of sneakers and the snot-freeze cold.
This is what I wanted, right? Someone who wants me, who says it out loud, who texts “when can I see you again” instead of waiting for me to break first.
But even as Vincent’s arms wrap around me, even as I let him mark up my neck like he’s laying claim, the only thing I feel is the echo. The missing.
After the third straight Saturday night at Vincent’s, my body finally stops fighting. The sex is routine now. He tries to make it new, different positions, new music, a silk tie around my wrists that leaves faint red lines for days.
He narrates every move, tells me how good I taste, how hard I make him, how he wants to keep me all to himself.
I let him say it, let him do everything he wants with his hands and his mouth, let him push me to the edge and pull me back, but every time he tries to go further, every time his hips angle and his breath gets sharper and his hand reaches for the nightstand drawer, I stop him.
