Kessian, without further ado, started unbuckling his belt.
I whipped around to give him privacy, only to hear a snorting chuckle.
“You’ve seen it all before.”
“That was … different.” I paused. “Wasn’t it?”
“Different because we were three drinks deep, orballsdeep?”
I blushed so hard, I thought I might be having a hot flash. Did cis men get hot flashes?
“Should I turn around while you change, or can I watch?” Kessian teased.
“Turn around! Please.”
Kessian shrugged. “All right, all right. Keep your knickers on. For now.”
He turned his back, and so did I. My bedroom was silent except for the rustle of clothes hitting the floor and our breathing, and I wondered if I’d inadvertently created a moment more intimate than the one Kessian suggested. Because he was right, I’d seen him naked before, and he’d seen me. I could picture the curves of his back and his spine like a strung violin. Those two dimples right above his—
“All done,” he said. “My modesty is preserved. Do you have a preferred side of the bed, or do you sprawl in the middle?”
“The right side, usually.”
“Then I’ll take the left.”
He flipped over the covers and climbed in. Due to the height limitations of the loft, we couldn’t sit up. Once he reached his pillow, he curled up on his side facing the middle, the covers bunched up to his chin.
A masochistic part of my brain took a snapshot of the image, to pull out and flip to when feeling nostalgic about the one time a boy curled up in my bed and looked like he belonged there.
Before getting in with him, I took the amulet off and put it on the bedside, where I could easily retrieve it if need be.
I settled in across from him. Above us, the skylight offered a perfect view of the starry sky, for once so clear you could see every pinprick of light.
I preferred the constellations of freckles on Kessian’s cheeks.
“Goodnight,” I said into the dark.
He said “Goodnight” too, and maybe it was a mirage cast by the witching hour, but I could have sworn it sounded wistful.
I wake in a garden, watching a man with tattoos and his hair in a top knot dig up delphiniums with a spade. Dominic, my boyfriend. (Ex-boyfriend.) He lays the plants out on some newspaper in two equal bundles. His strong hands used to pull knots out of my shoulders. Now they’re pulling up the roots of our life together.
I don’t know if the plants will survive the new soil in the tiny garden where I’m going or succumb to environmental shock. The soil in Bellgrave is slightly alkaline, but I haven’t had the chance to visit the place I’ll be renting in Shearwater, let alone test the pH of the dirt. The sound of the roots tearing makes my heart ache.
Dom doesn’t look at me hovering. He didn’t tell me he was going to split everything we owned right down the middle. It works with material possessions, but not so well with living things.
The last night in our shared bed, he reaches across the gulf of mattress to put a hand on my thigh and says, “One last hurrah to say goodbye?”
My stomach turns. “So I’m worth one last fuck, but I’m not worth keeping?”
“Hey, don’t make it like that.”
“You’re the one who made it like that.”
I roll over, as close to the edge of the bed and as far from him as I can be, trying to view my refusal as a victory while a shameful part of me wonders if I could have given him head good enough to convince him he’d made a mistake. (It wouldn’t, because the sex hadn’t been the problem. The sex had been the point. The problem was me.)
By the time I’ve packed my old Volvo to the gills with the contents of my life, my hips pop and I ache in muscles I didn’t know I had. An engine starts behind me, and I turn to watch as Dom pulls out of our drive (not ours anymore) and he doesn’t pause, doesn’t even wave. (I guess it’s a kind of closure that I wasn’t even worth a goodbye.) It still takes thirty minutes to set off because I can’t see the road through the tears in my eyes.
I pass a sign that reads:Shearwater Spring. Take a magical step through time.(Can it bring me back to the past and leave me there?)
