4. Ryan
RYAN
The bed doesn't work tonight.
I tried it for an hour—lying flat on my back staring at the same ceiling I've been staring at since I was seven years old, which tonight feels like a comment on everything—and then I got up, put my back against the wall, and slid down until I was sitting on the floor.
The floor of my childhood bedroom, in the house I grew up in, thirty feet from the room where the woman I threw away is sleeping in a bed my father made up for her before he knew she was coming.
The house is quiet. She went back up after the kitchen—I heard her on the stairs, heard her door, heard the silence afterward settle into something that meant everyone was in their rooms and nobody was moving.
My stomach has been in a knot since I saw her tires on the gravel. I haven't been able to eat right in eight months. Tonight I couldn't have kept anything down. The chamomile in the kitchen was for my hands.
I go over February.
I've gone over February roughly four hundred times in eight months and it hasn't gotten any cleaner, but I keep doing it because somewhere in me I think if I understand it precisely enough I can explain it to her.
Not excuse it—I'm not looking for an excuse.
I just want to be able to give her the true shape of what I did, which is different from what it looks like on the outside.
Her name was Britt. She was someone I'd met at a distributor's event in the city, pleasant and unmemorable, and I barely remember her now except for the fact of the choice I made.
It was a hotel bar. February, after the event had wrapped and the room had thinned out. She was standing near the end of the bar and said something about the wine list. I laughed, bought her a drink, and I knew—clearly, in real time, not in retrospect—exactly what I was doing.
Later, in her room, I remember lying on my back and staring at a different ceiling and thinking: there it is.
The exit. The reason. The thing that was going to blow up the best thing I'd ever had.
I remember feeling something I couldn't call relief exactly, but was close enough to it that it disgusted me.
I came inside Britt that night. Bare. First woman I'd been inside without a condom in two years.
Two years with Jade and I'd never come inside her once. Not for lack of wanting it. For wanting it too much.
Here's what was actually happening: I was twenty-four. I'd been with Jade for two years. I was in love with her in a way that scared me—permanence-of-it scared, kids-on-this-land scared. I started picturing it and going cold every time.
I grew up watching my parents be in love.
The hand my mother used to drag through my father's hair when she passed his chair at dinner.
The bedroom door that closed at nine on weeknights and Killian and I pretended not to notice.
I thought it was excessive. I thought I'd never be like that. I was twelve, so.
By the time I was twelve the door had mostly stopped closing. The hand through the hair had stopped. I watched two people who'd wanted each other with that much force go quiet and coordinated. I made my conclusion in this room at fourteen: hot things go cold. Desire is what breaks it.
My mother sat me down two years after the divorce.
Her new kitchen, smaller than ours, plant on the windowsill she hadn't had at the estate.
She poured herself a glass of wine. She poured me one too—I was sixteen, she was making a point about being adults together—and I held it because I didn't know what to do with my hands.
"Ryan," she said. "I want to tell you something."
I waited.
"I loved your father. I want you to know that. The way I loved him was real. That part isn't—I don't want you to think?—"
She stopped. Picked up her wine. Set it down.
"It's just that we never figured out how to talk to each other. Not really. Once the heat went between us, we didn't know what to do with the rest of it. There wasn't anything else there. We hadn't built it."
I nodded because I was sixteen and I didn't know what else to do.
"Be careful what you build on that, sweetheart. It looks like the only thing that matters at the time. It isn't."
I drank the wine. I'd decided this two years ago in my bedroom at the estate. She didn't know she was confirming it.
So when I started feeling something with Jade that felt that size—bigger than anything I'd had before, closer to what I'd watched at that dinner table before I understood it was doomed—I knew exactly where it was going.
What I was most afraid of: coming inside her.
Coming inside her would've been the irreversible thing.
The thing my body couldn't take back. I jerked off to the thought of it more than I jerked off to anything else for two years.
I'd picture pushing into her bare. I'd picture her body holding me.
I'd picture giving her something she could feel for hours after I was gone.
I'd come on my own stomach and feel the cost of what I wasn't letting myself give her.
She deserved it. The intimacy. The ownership of the act. I knew she did. I gave her a condom every time. I finished in my own hand, pointed away from her body. I called it being responsible. I knew what I was doing.
I walked through the door in February so I could say I was the one who'd opened it.
The truth is I'd been opening it for a year. The moment I understood how much she mattered I started pulling back. Letting her want more than I was giving. Being present enough that she'd stay, distant enough that she'd know better than to count on me.
And then February. Just to be sure.
The thing I tried to protect myself from happened anyway.
I lost her. The destruction I was avoiding is the destruction I'm sitting in.
The only thing I don't have is the in-between—the bare years, the version where I let her have what she deserved, the memory of being inside her with nothing between us.
I have the ending. I don't have the rest of it.
She found out in March. I still don't know how—I never asked, which is its own kind of cowardice. She called me one afternoon when I was at the estate and I picked up and the quality of her voice told me before she said anything.
"Ryan," she said. "Is there something you want to tell me?"
I could've lied. I didn't. "Yes," I said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Okay."
I drove back to the city that evening. She was already at the apartment when I got there, sitting at the kitchen table with her coat still on, and she looked at me—the green of her eyes going still and final, the thing I wasn't prepared for.
No anger in it. Just something decided, like she'd made a decision on the drive over and by the time I walked in it was already done.
"I think you should keep the apartment," she said.
"Jade—"
"I'm going to start packing up my things." She looked at me for a moment longer. "You don't have to help."
She went to the bedroom and she packed. Not all of it—she couldn't carry all of it. She took what she needed. Left two boxes sealed in the corner. Drove away and didn't call me.
When the lease was up I brought the boxes here. I wasn't going to make her drive back to the city for them.
Her boxes are thirty feet from where I'm sitting.
She still had her coat on when she walked in tonight, the brown one she's had since before we got together, the collar worn at the left shoulder from the way she carries her bag.
Her hair down, the deep auburn of it catching the entry light before she stepped inside.
I noticed the coat. Then her. In that order.
I think about my father's hand on the wine bottle.
The reach of it, so unhurried. He poured her glass first without looking at me, without saying a word, and I watched it happen and I felt it the way you feel confirmation of something you'd been refusing to look at directly—not news, just a door swinging open.
He noticed her the same night I brought her here two years ago.
I watched it happen across this table and I told myself it was nothing, just Dad being attentive.
It's not how he treats guests. I've watched him with guests my whole life. I know the difference. I chose not to look at it.
Killian too. The jaw tonight—clenched when Dad's hand went to the bottle, clenched again when he poured her first. He set his empty glass down.
He picked up his fork. I know my brother.
I know what that jaw means. I watched it at every Sunday dinner for two years and told myself she was mine, the line was real, that was the end of the conversation.
I threw her away in February. By tonight, inside of eight hours, both of them had moved into the space I left.
I haven't touched another woman since Britt.
Eight months. My body hasn't let me. Every time I've tried to think about anyone else—at a bar, on my phone, in my own head—I get to the part where I imagine taking my pants off and my cock goes flat.
There's no woman my body wants except the one I threw away.
I've spent the last eight months haunted by the question of whether she's been with someone since me.
I'd picture some man I'd never seen taking off her clothes.
I'd picture her saying yes to him. I'd picture her finally letting one of them come inside her—the thing I never let her have.
I'd do nothing about it because I'd given up the right to do anything.
Tonight's worse. Tonight there's no faceless man.
Tonight there's my father at the head of the table and Killian across from her, and there's me at the sink watching all of it.
I watched my father pour her wine first. I watched Killian's stare across the table after I went to the dishes.
She didn't flinch from any of it. She didn't flinch from my father saying the guest room's made up and she didn't flinch from saying okay. I know what that means.
I'm the scumbag who cheated. I gave up the floor when I walked into Britt's hotel room. I get to stand at the sink and watch.
I'm hard.
I hate that I'm hard. I'm sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom at whatever hour this is, hard from watching my father look at her across the dinner table, from Killian's jaw, from the awareness of Jade in the guest room thirty feet away in a bed my father had made up before she even knocked.
That's exactly where I am. I'm not going to dress it up.
My hand goes to my cock through the jeans once. I move it back. I haven't earned anything tonight.
The bed is too much. If I got back in the bed I might walk to her door. I can't do that. She sent me to bed downstairs—quietly, kindly, clearly—and I went. That's the only honest thing I've done recently.
I've thought about going to her door a dozen times since I came upstairs.
The quiet knock. Her opening it. The look on her face.
I'd want to explain—the year before February, the moment I understood how much she mattered and started pulling back on purpose.
I'd want her to know I knew what I was doing.
She'd listen. She always listens.
That's not what would actually happen. What would actually happen is me, needing something from her at two in the morning, eight months into her carrying what I did. I'm not going to. I haven't earned it.
I lean my head back against the wall.
Same water stain near the closet that's been there since I was twelve. I was fourteen the first time I stayed up past midnight in here, listening to my parents not talk to each other downstairs.
I was wrong about all of it.
I told myself desire was the problem. That fire burned the marriage down. Tonight I watched my father pour her wine first. Ten years alone on this land and he's never once looked like a man in the wrong life. His desire didn't burn out of him. It was waiting.
I built my worst choice on a theory I'd had at fourteen with no idea what I was looking at.
I put my wrist over my eyes.
I'm going to stay on the floor. I'm going to be at the table in the morning. I'm not going to ask her for anything I haven't earned.
She said I know and sent me to bed.
The house is quiet. The wall between us isn't thick. I don't put my ear to it.