7:14am
I know that walk. Confident. Purposeful. Salt-weathered.
No. It can't be. I thought to myself, even as I knew it, of course, had to be him.
There are doors you open because you're expecting someone. And then there are doors you open because something in your body already knows. Portals. Windows. Perhaps Mirrors. Which reminds me of a story….but I digress….
Exactly four minutes between the knock and the answer. Four minutes to change into my loungy pants, run a single finger of gloss across my lips, and decide whether this morning was going to be the kind I write about, or the kind I keep.
You already know which one I chose, Sirens.
His name doesn’t matter. Not my lover from the summer before last — I know you're thinking it — a different story entirely. The universe, apparently, has developed a theme.
Standing in my doorway with the particular confidence of someone who has sailed through worse weather than deciding to see the woman who might not be pleased to see them. Salt on their collar — which made me think of the saltiness of their neck, just below the earlobe. A bottle of something amber in one hand. The audacity to look like that at seven in the morning. I gave them mental points for the nerve.
"I was in the harbor," he said, as if that explained anything at all.
"You always are," I said. Which was a lie but felt true in the moment. Basically the same thing.
Here is what nobody tells you about desire: it clarifies. The fumbling desperation of early wanting - that urgent, aching need to be chosen - burns away like morning fog. What remains is something cleaner. More dangerous, really. You want because you want, not because you're afraid of what happens if you don't.
I let him in.
I never feel I owe an answer to the question — not even the ones asked only with their eyes. Not because of any particular logic. But because it was New Year's morning, the ocean was doing its best work outside my window, and I had on the kind of outfit that deserves a witness.
New Year's resolutions are all about revolving, am I right Ladies?
We stood on opposite ends of my kitchen island, which is its own kind of flirtation ... the geography of not-yet. Two glasses were poured. I took mine slowly. The amber caught the light the same way his eyes did, which I noticed and chose not to mention. But his eyes told me they noticed. We may have been oceans apart, but as we all know, no one is an island.
He glanced around the room and asked about the journal on the table. I said I was writing things down.
"What kind of things?"
"The kind that are mine," I said.
A smile. Not the practiced smile people deploy when they think charm is required, but the other one — the one that starts in the eyes and arrives at the mouth by accident. I've learned to tell the difference. It took years, and several mistakes I don't regret, but I can tell.
We talked for two hours. About nothing that would make sense on paper. About everything that does.
At one point he reached across and touched my wrist — just the inside of it, just for a second — the way that isn't accidental and isn't a promise either. The exact language of maybe.
I let him have that.
When he stood to leave, he paused at the door. "Same time next year?" he asked.
I looked at him over my coffee.
"I make no promises I can't keep," I said. "And no promises I don't intend to."
Laughter. The door pulled close. Retreat.
I sat back down, reached for my pen, and wrote his name on the first real page.
The journal had begun.
Just as I promised myself a few detours, the phone rang.
I stared at the name on the screen for several rings. Then I picked up. Because some calls you don’t miss. And some conversations are never quite done.
