Chapter 20 #2
I turn pages slowly. Not reading everything. Just…moving through her. Feeling the weight of each page between my fingers, the slight texture of her pen strokes from the other side. Dates at the top of each entry. Months of her. Years of her. A whole interior life I was never supposed to see.
I don’t read everything. I’m not ready for everything. I let it fall open where it wants.
December 30th, 2021
Made a list tonight of places I want to eat before I die. Got through two and then stopped because the two felt complete somehow, like they said everything the list was trying to say.
Breakfast at Takada Castle Site Park during cherry blossom season.
Dinner in Paris. By the Eiffel Tower. Actually by it, close enough that you have to tip your head back to see the top.
I keep thinking about why those two specifically. They’re complete opposites, and I think that’s exactly it.
Takada is quiet. It’s the kind of beautiful that doesn’t announce itself.
You have to show up at the right time of year, in the right light, and just sit with it.
The cherry blossoms don’t last. That’s the whole point.
You’re eating breakfast under something that will be gone in two weeks, and the brevity is what makes it matter.
It’s beauty that asks nothing of you except to be present while it’s still there.
The Eiffel Tower is the opposite of that.
It’s been there for over a hundred years, and it’ll be there for a hundred more.
It’s loud and bold and completely unapologetic about existing.
Half the world has seen it. The other half wants to.
There’s nothing quiet or temporary about it.
It just stands there saying ‘look at me,’ and the whole city agrees.
I want both.
I want the breakfast that knows it’s ending and the dinner that knows it isn’t.
The whisper and the shout.
The thing that’s beautiful because it won’t last and the thing that’s beautiful because it will.
That’s not too much to ask right?
Well, if it is, I’ll just make it impossible by wanting them both…on the same day.
I read it twice. Three times.
I’ll just make it impossible by wanting them both…on the same day.
She’s joking. I can hear it—the self-deprecating tilt of it, the way she laughs at her own wanting because wanting too much is easier to carry if you make it absurd first.
I know that feeling.
I’ve been making things impossible on purpose my whole life. Wanting things I had no right to want and then burying them so deep they stopped feeling like wants and started feeling like just the shape of the hole where something should have been.
She does it with cherry blossoms and Paris.
I do it with her.
We’re the same kind of ruined by wanting things that are out of reach—just in completely different languages.
We’re the same kind of…something, even if it’s in the impossible.
A metallic jingle breaks the silence. The scrape of her key finding the lock. I know that sound, I’ve heard it from the street below a hundred times. And then the click of the deadbolt turning.
I’m on my feet and the diary goes back in one motion—pen, elastic, face up, exact—and I’m across the room in four silent steps, into the wardrobe, pulling the door to within an inch of closed before her front door opens.
I control my breathing. Slow it. Make it nothing.
Through the gap, I can see the bedroom doorway and the edge of the hallway beyond it.
I hear her drop her bag, the sound of it hitting the floor.
She never sets it down, always drops it, like it takes the weight of the day with it.
I hear the keys landing on the entry table, one shoe being kicked off, then the other, the soft double thud of them.
She moves through the apartment the way she always does. Unhurried. Like the space expands to receive her.
I hear the fridge open. Close. The tap running briefly. Then her footsteps coming down the hall, and I go absolutely still—the kind of still I learned in rooms I don’t name anymore. The kind that lives in muscle memory now, the kind that has kept me alive more times than I can count.
She comes into the bedroom, doesn’t turn the overhead light on. Just the lamp on the nightstand, and the room becomes something else entirely. Something private and lit from within, and I’m standing in her wardrobe in the dark watching her move through it and I can’t look away.
She reaches back and pulls the tie from her hair without thinking.
All of it falls, layers and curls of gold I’ve only ever seen from a distance, falling loose around her shoulders, and she shakes it out once, a single small, unconscious gesture, and I feel it somewhere behind my sternum like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know was there.
She rolls her neck slowly, a fluid half-circle that releases tension in small increments, and I can almost hear the soft crack of vertebrae realigning. Her fingertips find the hem of her sweater—pale blue cashmere.
I should close my eyes.
I don’t.
The sweater comes off in one pull, revealing a thin camisole underneath, the kind that moves with her, and she reaches up to pull that off too with the practiced ease of someone completely alone in the world, completely unguarded, the trust of a woman who has never once considered that her bedroom might not be empty.
She isn’t wearing anything underneath, and the lamp catches her in amber. The line of her collarbone. The curve of her waist. The unique softness of her. As she turns to the side, I can see the curve of her breasts, the peak of her nipples tightening slightly in the cool air.
Fuck.
My throat dries. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That thought lands in me like a stone dropped into still water, and I can’t stop the rings spreading outward, can’t take it back, can’t file it away somewhere manageable.
I’m already hard—my cock thick and aching in my jeans before I’ve fully registered the decision to want her. I press my palm flat against my dick through the denim. Slow, hard pressure. The kind meant to suppress, to manage, to get through the next sixty seconds without making a sound.
I squeeze, and the pressure detonates something else entirely. A corridor. Dark. The smell of cologne and cigarettes. The sound of a lock turning. A boy who learned to leave his own body because leaving was the only exit they couldn’t take from him.
I fracture. Not loudly. Not visibly. Just—gone.
Pulled backward through thirteen years of distance into something cold and airless and inescapable.
My body is in her wardrobe, but I’m not in my body.
I’m in a room that smells like cruelty and twisted fucks, with hands that did that, with a version of me that had no language for what was happening and no one to tell even if he had.
Switch it off. Just switch it off.
That’s what I learned. The particular violence of self-erasure. Of making yourself so small and so absent that what’s happening is happening to no one. To nothing. To a body you’ve temporarily vacated like a house you don’t live in anymore.
I got very good at it.
I’m doing it now, in her wardrobe, with her scent in my lungs and her lipstick on my thumb, and I hate it—hate that it still works, hate that my body still knows the route back to that corridor, hate that wanting her of all people is what sent me there.
Jesus Christ. No.
I press my eyes shut. Hard. Both palms flat against the wardrobe walls, grounding myself in the wood grain, in the physical fact of this moment, in the sound of her moving through her bedroom on the other side of this door.
I count backward from ten, forcing each breath down slowly, making it controlled, making it silent, because she can’t hear me. She can’t know I’m here.
Eight. Seven.
The wanting is still there underneath the fracture. That’s the worst part. It didn’t leave—it’s just buried under something older and uglier, and both of them are living in the same body simultaneously, and I don’t know what to do with that except survive it.
Six. Five. Four.
The bathroom door clicks shut.
Three. Two.
The shower starts.
One.
I open the wardrobe, rush out of her room, and cross her apartment in a stealth I’ve mastered. Past the shoes I straightened. Past the book she left face down. Past the mug with her lipstick on the rim.
I let myself out, the door locking in place behind me. That’s when I just…pause. Her scent is still in my lungs and her lipstick still on my thumb, but the memories are there too. The worlds—no, my world’s way of reminding me the cold, hard truth.
I can never have her. Ever.