10. Homecoming At Tide Table #4
She comes with my name on her lips, dragging me down with her, and when I do let go it’s with a force that turns the whole world white for a full ten seconds.
That’s the night. That’s what I still want, every goddamn day, the absence of it chewing holes in my chest.
I lie there in my old bed, the ghost of her scent alive in the fabric of my sleeves, and try to remember what it was like not to need her.
My hand moves faster, thumb dragging over the slick head the way she used to with those clever, patient fingers, and I can almost hear her — that's it, right there, don't you dare stop — bossing me even breathless, even wrecked, and the memory tips her over the edge.
I feel the phantom clutch of her, and it's too much yet not enough?
It's five years of a locked drawer opening at once.
I come with her name in my teeth and no one to hear it.
"Amber baby," I breathe, into the dark, into the empty, breaking clause nineteen where the only witness is my own ceiling.
The knot swells after, thick, useless, and furious, throbbing for a body that isn't here.
I sit up and work it down with both hands the way I've done alone in eleven cities, gritting through the ache of it.
It was supposed to be hers.
We swore that.
All three of us holding back for a wedding night that never came, saving the lock, the bond, and the whole ceremony of it for the one woman we then abandoned in a ballroom with a note.
What a bunch of cowards we are.
The room smells like sex, salt, regret, and the faint, phantom apricot my own mind supplied, because she isn't here.
She isn't here because I got in a car.
She's stronger without you, my mother's voice says, from this morning, from the truth.
And I'm still here, thirty years old, jerking off to a ghost in my childhood bed like the coward who drove away from the future we could have had.
Where she’d be here, riding my cock, as we make love and I enjoy the blissful peace that comes with hearing your Omega laugh at your crazy, not-so-funny jokes.
I clean up, lie back down, but can’t sleep.
Around two, I stop pretending I'm going to and I pick up the proposal instead, because the one honest thing I know how to do with this much wanting is turn it into work she can use.
I go to The Driftglass the next night, because Renzo asked and because a man can only stare at a security schematic for so many hours before he needs a room with a pulse.
Theo's onstage when I come in, halfway through a slow one, and he catches my eye over the neck of the guitar and doesn't miss a note.
The bar's the old sailmaker's warehouse, colored glass set into the walls catching the last of the sunset, and it's warm in here in a way the Hollywood decks never managed with all their bourbon lighting.
Local. Lived-in. Iris Moon runs the stick with the flat competence of a woman who has never once been impressed by fame, and she nods at me like I've worked here for years.
Renzo finds me at the rail with a whiskey I didn't order and a look I don't like.
"So," he says. "I'm selling."
I turn.
"The Driftglass?"
"Forty-eight and my knees are shot. I've been touring one bar for twelve years instead of the world.
" He says it lightly, the way you say the thing you've decided not to grieve.
"It's a good room, Cade. It just needs somebody who wants to stand in it.
" He lets that land, watching Theo. "Somebody who knows drinks, crowds, and obviously this town. Knows and protects it might I add.” He pauses and smirks my way.
“Somebody who's tired of living out of two suitcases and calling it freedom. "
He's got no idea how close to the bone that cuts.
"Renzo—"
"I'm not proposing. I'm just saying it out loud where you can hear it." He clinks his glass against mine. "You buy this place, you stop being a man who visits Honeybell Harbor. You become a man who's from here again. Think about it. Or don't. But look around first, before you tell me no."
He leaves me at the rail.
So I do the stupid thing: I look around.
Theo, onstage, home. Iris pouring for a table of fishermen who'll tip in stories.
The colored glass. The low tide coming through the cracked door.
A room that doesn't need me and would keep me anyway, a room that's warm and local and permanent, every single thing I've spent a decade telling dinner parties I was too free to want.
"No," I say, to nobody, out loud, testing it.
It comes out weak.
I notice that.
I finish the whiskey and go back to Marina's and work until the windows go gray.
I finish the proposal at 5:40 in the morning, an hour before the light, thirty-eight pages that turn a security problem into a party and never once let the bride see the trench coat.
Every instinct I own says drive it to her.
Show up on Bellflower Lane with two coffees, the document, and my whole face. Watch her read it, be there for the moment it lands, and await her praise — or scolding.
Fuck. When she’s mad, it turns me on, too.
It's the only move I've ever trusted, the in-person closeness. The four seconds that work on everyone alive.
I don't do it.
I open the Golden Hour Vows portal, and I upload thirty-eight pages into a secure inbox, and I do not attach a note, or a joke, or a single word smuggled into a filename.
I respect the clause and the boundary and the woman who drew it.
Allow the work to stand alone in a place she controls.
I close the laptop, and I sit in the gray dark space with my heart going like a snare.
She answers at 6:52.
I know because I haven't put the phone down.
Two lines. No greeting.
Approved for the project. Reporting structure attached. This is not personal.
I read it three times. The approval. The attachment. And the last sentence, set apart, doing the heavy lifting, the little wall she built in case I tried to climb it.
This is not personal.
"I know," I whisper, to the empty room, the phone, to her who’s far too many miles away to seek her out in this ungoldly hour.
Oh right, that’s not allowed. No contact…right.
Then I do the thing I have never done in eleven cities.
There's a red-eye I always pre-book, a reflex, an escape hatch — a return flight for right after the first event, so that when the wanting gets too big I've got a door with my name on it and a boarding time.
My thumb's already on the airline app out of pure muscle memory, the way it's been for a decade, the way freedom taught me.
What am I doing?
There’s just a moment when the thrill high goes to a halt as my thumb hovers over the “CONFIRM” button. I swallow the lump forming in my throat, realizing I’m falling into that cycle again.
The coward pattern I’m desperate to finally break.
I close the app without booking.
Then I get up, cross to the corner of my childhood room, and I open the second suitcase. The one that's been packed since March.
The one I've carried zipped across four cities, telling myself I just hadn't gotten to it.
I take out the forty-one glasses one at a time and set them on the shelf my grandfather built, coupes and rocks and the Nick and Noras, the only things I ever unpack, lining them up in the gray light where they'll stay.
Eight weeks.
However long it takes.
However, it ends.
For once in my life, I'm not booking the flight out before the check comes.
I'm going to stand in the room until the lights come on.