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This is the fifth.

It will be the truth.

Your letter hurt me. It made me furious, relieved, defensive, understood, terrified, and hopeful enough that I spent several days trying to convince myself the hope was only another form of weakness.

You looked directly at parts of me you once treated like stories that ended before you entered my life. I wanted that from you for so long that receiving it now feels almost cruel. I keep thinking about how different everything might have been if you had seen me this clearly while I was standing in front of you.

That anger belongs to me, and I won’t soften it to make this easier for either of us.

Neither will I pretend it was the only thing your letter gave me.

If I were there, I would put my hand beneath your chin, wait until you stopped trying to look anywhere except at me, and tell you, mírame. Hear what I am saying before your fear changes the meaning.

I need to clarify something so you never have to worry about it again.

What follows will hurt you. Hurting you isn’t my intention, and I am telling you in this much detail because I need you to understand the difference between what you imagined and what happened.

I try not to fuck women without my shirt.

There have been drunken nights when I did, and I won’t lie to make the number smaller or myself easier for you to love. I never explained the meaning of my tattoos. They invite too many questions, and the tattooed guy becomes a bucket-list check mark for more women than you would believe.

My body was available.

My history wasn’t.

I don’t give vulnerability to women I don’t trust completely. Half the women I slept with were barely undressed. I didn’t stay the night, share breakfast, promise another call, or offer anything beyond paying their Uber fare when we finished.

There was no romance in it.

Temple was one of those women.

I put the pen down.

Her name sits alone at the end of the sentence, carrying more weight than it should. Charm asked for the truth, but I can already imagine her reading this with her body going rigid and her mind racing ahead of whatever I write next.

I pick up the pen again.

It happened three days before Thanksgiving.

I was in Michigan, and every minute I wasn’t on the ice became another minute I fought the urge to drive past the ABC apartment. I went out with Cade, Easton, and Briggs. Bliss and Aura didn’t come because I knew seeing them without you would make me want to ask questions I had no right to ask. If you had come with them, I would have wanted you when I still had nothing healthy to offer. If they excluded you for me, I didn’t want you hurt by that either.

Detroit was already difficult for more reasons than I could explain inside one letter.

You were the first.

I was only a few weeks removed from sitting in a room with executives and attorneys while your father’s accusations turned the worst photographs I had ever seen into evidence against me. I was hurt, furious, ashamed of everything I hadn’t known, and split between wanting to drive to you and understanding why I couldn’t.

Temple was in the press box with representatives from the public-relations firm she worked for. We went to the bar across from the arena after the game. Detroit won, so everyone around us was celebrating. The loss pissed me off, Briggs had just started seeing Lyric, and Rider was playing in Massachusetts that night.

I was the only single man at the table.

Temple sat beside me.

I spent most of the night talking about you.

Then I told her to make me forget, and she agreed.

There was no wine near a fire. No music. I didn’t take my time undressing her, carry her to bed, or make love to her on a rug while snow fell outside the windows.