When I get out, I look at myself in the mirror. Really look, which I don't always do, have been avoiding doing for a while, because the woman in the mirror has been hard to recognize. There she is, though. Brown hair still damp. Gray-blue eyes. Jeans, a gray t-shirt, the jacket with the deep pockets. Nothing that tries too hard. Nothing that says I don't care. The kind of clothes that don't require a decision.
She looks, against all odds, like she might be alive.
I sit on the edge of the bed and check my phone.
Three hours.
Three hours until I need to leave, and suddenly three hours is an impossible amount of time to fill. I think about what he might do, and my body responds to each possibility like a hand to a flame. Heat low in my belly. Breath coming shorter. My heart rate climbing, one step at a time.
I put my hand on my chest.
Beating. Fast and real andthere.My heart, which has been very quiet for five years, apparently has opinions about Miami.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the water-stained ceiling.
Brown ring in one corner, an old leak, the kind of mark that motel ceilings accumulate like tree rings. I count the minutes onmy phone screen. They crawl. One, then two, then five, each one taking slightly longer than sixty seconds, I'd swear it.
I don't know his name. Don't know his face. Don't know what he's planned, what the room looks like, what his voice sounds like, whether he'll give me warning or whether the fear will just arrive. I have no control over any of what comes next.
The absence of control is itself a kind of fear. Already working on me, even now, even here, with hours still between me and the moment.
The ceiling stares back, patient and water-stained.
I'm lying in a budget motel room in Miami, watching the clock crawl toward the hour when everything might change, and my heart is beating so fast I can feel it in my palms.
I laugh.
Small and quiet, a sound for no one. Five years of nothing, and here I am, getting a head start on the fear like some kind of overachiever.
The laugh fades. The feeling doesn't.
I put my thumb over my pulse. Still there. Still climbing.
Tonight.
Tonight I'm going to walk into a room I've never seen and let something happen, and I'm going to feel it, all of it, whatever it is, with every nerve ending I haven't used in five years.
The minutes crawl. I don't want them to stop.
I can't wait to be afraid.
2 - Logan
The ocean is dark when I get in.
Just the way I like it. The city glows behind me, orange and distant, but out here there's only water and the sky beginning to lose its black at the eastern edge, turning the faint blue-gray of something that isn't quite morning yet.
I push off the sand and go.
Freestyle. Reach, pull, turn. Reach, pull, turn. The ritual is the same every morning — has been for nine years, since Jorge gave me the apartment above the club and I figured out the nearby ocean at 5am was the one place in Miami where no one needed anything from me. My head, which doesn't quiet down at any other hour, goes quiet in water. I don't know why. I don't analyze it. I just get in.
I swim until my lungs burn. Then backstroke, staring up at that lightening sky, arms sweeping wide. Then freestyle again.
My mind drifts.
It finds the ad. The words I typed and deleted and typed again in the dark office last night, the whiskey in the crystal glass, the cursor blinking. The confession I made to the void.
And then the reply. Four words on my screen past 2am, from a number I didn't recognize, landing with a kind of quiet impact I hadn't prepared for.
