If I’m honest—and I am trying very hard not to be honest right now—the excuse was never the point.
The knowing doesn’t help.
The knowing never helps.
I lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling and think about the parking lot. The stars. The half-second when my wall came down and I looked at him and he saw it and waited, and I went anyway.
The worst part isn’t that it happened.
The worst part is that I want it to happen again.
Chapter 7
Grady
She kissed me and drove away, and I’ve been replaying it for thirty-six hours.
This is ironic. I’m supposed to be the one who doesn’t loop. I have a whole system built around not looping: fire season, forward motion, enough adrenaline to keep the quiet from getting loud. I’ve been running it successfully for three years. It works great. It works until a woman with dog hair on her clothes says I know this story and kisses you anyway, and then the system encounters an edge case it wasn’t built for.
Thirty-six hours. Four hundred and three replays. I’ve counted.
Fine. I haven’t counted. But still.
Stop replaying it, I tell myself, at various intervals across thirty-six hours. Think about fire. Fire is a neutral topic. Fire is good. Fire is the thing you understand, the thing that makes sense, the thing that doesn’t kiss you in a parking lot and drive away with your entire operating system in the back seat.
Fire doesn’t drive away. Fire stays where you put it. Fire is predictable in the ways that matter.
The dog’s follow-up is today. She’s professional. She’s composed. The wall is back up. Not perfectly—there are hairlinecracks if you know where to look—but from the outside it’s load-bearing and she’s leaning on it. She greets me the same way she greeted me the first week: warm, competent, the version that ends exactly at the exam table. She examines the dog. She makes notes. She doesn’t mention the other night.
I don’t mention the other night.
“The flank is healing well,” she says. “He can start going without the dressing. Keep monitoring the dermatitis. I want to see him again Thursday.”
“Thursday,” I say.
“Thursday,” she says.
The air in this room is approximately seven hundred degrees. She doesn’t notice. I appear to not notice either, which is the only contribution I’m making to this situation currently.
“Any changes in appetite or energy?” she asks.
“No.”
“Good.” She makes a note. “He’s doing well.”
The dog, who is doing really well, looks between us with the expression of an animal who has assessed this situation and found the humans to be handling it poorly. He’s not wrong.
“Great,” I say. “That’s great.”
She makes another note. I watch her make the note. My entire contribution to the last two minutes has been two words and a lot of not mentioning the other night.
“Any questions about the aftercare?” she asks.
“No.”
“Okay.” She caps the pen. “See you Thursday.”
“Thursday,” I say.
