I sit back down. The water’s still running in the bathroom, so I look down and start to think.
It hits me sitting on the edge of her bed in her room in her apartment — clean, unannounced, full force.
I’m done for.
I’m completely gone for her.
Not in the first three dates way. Not in the infatuation way. Not in the way I’ve watched Stanley be gone for three different girls in two years. This is the bones version. This is the version where my hands are smoothing her comforter without me telling them to. This is the version where I parked my truck on Linden, and it didn’t feel like visiting; it felt like home. This is the versionwhere the smell of her shampoo is going to wreck me every time I walk into a drugstore for the rest of my life.
I’m sitting here, in her bedroom, waiting for her to get out of the shower, and the waiting is the part that has me by the throat. I’m not bored. I’m not restless. I’m not checking my phone. I’m just here, listening to the water, content in a way I have not been content in any room I have ever sat in.
She has me hook, line, and sinker, and the hook went in clean, and the line paid out fast, and the sinker has just hit the bottom, and I’m down here now in the dark with her, and I’m not coming back up.
My chest tightens.
This.
This is why I never jumped.
This exact feeling, this exact full-body gone-ness — this is what I have spent all these years not allowing to happen. Because I knew. I knew, somewhere under the we’re just friends and the I’m focused on hockey and the the timing’s bad, I knew that if I let her all the way in, she’d take over my entire life. I knew there wouldn’t be a corner of me she didn’t touch. I knew I’d be the kind of man who straightens his girlfriend’s bed while she showers and feels, in the straightening, the same dumb peace he feels on a clean sheet of ice.
I knew I’d be hers.
And I’m scared of it.
I’m sitting on the edge of her bed, and I’m scared. My hands are a little cold. My chest is tight. My breath is doing the shallow thing it does before a faceoff. Because I just spent eighteen hours with her and I’m already this far gone, and we have years in front of us, and the further-gone is only going to get worse, and at some point this love is going to have a hook in me so deep that losing it would gut me, and I know it, and I’m walking toward it anyway.
The water shuts off in the bathroom.
I hear her humming. The shower curtain rings sliding back.
I close my eyes.
I promised her.
I promised her last night I wasn’t going to run anymore, and I meant it then, and I mean it now, and I’m going to mean it the next time the fear comes for me. I’m not running. I told her I wasn’t, and I’m not. I’m going to sit on the edge of her bed and feel the fear and not move. I’m going to let it land. I’m going to let her have all of me. I’m going to trust her with the keys, and I’m going to be the man who stays.
Because not having her is a version of my life that I cannot imagine anymore. That version is gone. It died. Last night killed it completely.
I want more.
I want all of it.
I want it so much it scares me.
She comes out of the bathroom in a towel.
Her hair’s wet and dark down her back. Her face is scrubbed clean. There’s a flush along her chest from the hot water. She’s holding my clothes in a big ball in her free hand, and she stops in the doorway when she sees me sitting on her bed, and her whole face goes soft.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
She crosses the room and drops the clothes next to me. She stands between my knees, and I put my hand on the back of her thigh just under the towel, and she puts both her hands on my shoulders.
“What are you thinking about?”
I look up at her.Does she see it on my face? The place where my mind goes to?I look at her and wonder if she knows.
