“Barely. And you still nee?—”
“Let’s not talk about that right now. It’s not the point.”
She studied my face. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for.”
“Listen, maybe we shouldn’t decide about all this tonight. Not all wound up with our bodies voting one direction.”
“Yeah. We don’t have to have it figured out tonight.”
“So we sit with it. See if it still looks like this when we’re not—” She gestured between us, at the wreck of the both of us.
She moved to climb off my lap, and I caught her hips and kept herthere one more second, just to feel it, and gave her a look that made her go still.
“For the record, though.” My voice dropped. “When we do decide, it’s not happening like this.”
“Like what?”
“Hushed. Half-dressed on a couch with one ear cocked toward the hallway.” I let my thumb drag once, slow, across her hip. “I’m laying you out somewhere. I’m taking my time with you. And you are not going to have to keep quiet for anybody.” I brought my mouth to her ear. “Because you’re going to scream. And I plan on pulling every sound out of you.”
I framed her face and kissed her goodnight.
Then she walked me to the door on legs that weren't steady.
“Night, Lyss.”
“Night.”
I gotto my place and lay in the dark running it all back, circling the same question. How much more of her could I have and still keep my feet under me? How far in could I let myself go and still climb back out, if it came to that?
I knew that crossing this line with her was me signing my name to a promise that I would not become the next man who broke her. And I knew myself. The second I signed that promise, I'd mean it. I'd mean it the way I meant everything I signed. That was my fear.
It wasn't sex. It was knowing that crossing this line meant agreeing, on purpose, to fall further into this thing. More to lose. A woman. A kid. All of it consciously held, instead of accidentally held. And if I lost her? If she got sick, if she walked away, if a car came down the wrong street, I was not going to be a man who put on a clean shirt the next morning and went to work.
I would be a man who slept on the floor next to a bed he couldn't bring himself to touch.
20/
no spinning the block
julian
I could have senta regret to Sabrina and returned the twenty thousand. That was the clean move, and a week ago I'd have made it without thinking.
I still planned to return her donation, but I came to her winning auction date anyway. Because I’d been told by multiple people at this point that Sabrina had cornered Alyssa in the corridor. I didn't know word for word what was said, but I knew enough. And I’d decided I was going to sit across from this woman one last time and make two things permanent: that whatever we'd had was over, and that she would never put Alyssa's name in her mouth again.
I’d been straight with Sabrina from the start, the way I was with every woman I’d been with: here’s what I can offer, here’s what I can’t. She said she understood, and I believed her because she carried herself like a woman who was uninterested in the performance of romance. We were similar in that way, I thought. So I broke my own rule with her. That once it’s done, it’s done. No spinning the block. With every other woman, we’d ended it clean, and months later we could be polite in a room. I’d circled back with Sabrina a few times. I was wrong about what she was feeling. That's on me for not looking more carefully. Her silence about wanting more hadn’t been agreement. It was strategy.
The pattern would be a few weeks of sleeping together. An ending that was mine to deliver. Months of nothing. Then she’d reappear. Stop by places I happened to be, with a reason. A run-in that wasn't a run-in. We’d sleep together again. Then end it again.
Months ago I’d ended it permanently. Yet her pattern continued. It didn’t seem dramatic. Just her maintaining polite contact. I responded enough to be decent. I didn’t want to be cold to a woman I’d slept with. I own that part. I should have cut all contact, with no exceptions, insteadof managing the distance and hoping she'd eventually take the hint. That was a failure on my part, and I don't make excuses for it.
She’d figured out early that the Gala was a room she could engineer. Bid on a bachelor, the bachelor has to take you to dinner, and suddenly he’s sitting with her at a candlelit dinner, doing the thing he’s never once offered to do on his own.
I sat across from her and watched her perform. Every laugh calibrated. “You're quiet tonight,” she said. Practiced smile in place. “Everything okay?”
“Long week.”
