“This week. Before the follow-up. So by the time you’re on my table for the last session, it’s already handled.”
“Do you want me there?”
“No.” He says it without hesitation. “This is mine. My boss, my disclosure, my professional risk. You being in the room changes the dynamic.”
“Okay.”
“But I want you to know before I walk in. I want us to have made this decision together even if I’m the one who says the words.”
I get off the arm of the couch and walk to the kitchen. He watches me come. I stop in front of him and put my hands on the counter on either side of him, not touching, just close. His eyes are steady.
“Together,” I say.
“Together.”
His hand comes up and rests on my chest, flat, over the sternum. The same way his hand landed last week after the exhale, after everything we said and heard and held. Warm and steady.
“Your grandmother told me to come back,” I tell him.
“She tells everyone to come back.”
“She told me specifically.”
His mouth moves. Not quite the full smile, but close. The bruises from the last month are still there underneath, visible if you know where to look, but the warmth is pushing through them and the warmth is winning.
“Then come back,” he says.
I lean in and kiss him in his kitchen where his grandmother was standing, in the apartment I walked into because I wanted to, at the end of a shoulder case that stopped being the reason months ago.
We stay like that for a while. His hand on my chest. My hands on the counter. The collards in the fridge and the magnolia petals on the sidewalk and the quiet of an evening that didn’t need to be anything other than exactly what it was.
?
Five Hole Fiction #3
Thompson
finished. ratings
i’m giving it a 4
Berger
4.3
Mueller
decimals are statistical theater Berger
Berger
and whole numbers are intellectual laziness Mueller
Mueller
it’s a 4
Berger
