Chapter Two
I wake up around nine and lie there doing the one thing I promised myself I'd stop doing. Reviewing the night.
The light through the blinds is flat Sunday light.
No reason to get up, which means last night gets a full replay.
Meg's laugh when she said hi. The scarf on the lamp.
The moment her hand went down and I left my own body.
I run it a few times. I look for the spot where I could have done it differently.
There's never a spot. That's the part I can't get used to.
After ten years of this, you'd think there'd be one clean lesson.
A thing to fix. There isn't. There's just me, and the same result, over and over.
I get up before it can take over the whole morning.
The apartment is quiet when I wake up. Graham's door is shut, which doesn't mean he's asleep.
He keeps strange hours. There's coffee already made and still hot, which means he was up earlier and made some for me too.
I pour a cup. The mug is heavy and the coffee is good.
I've learned to just take it when Graham does something thoughtful.
Like finding an extra blanket on the couch that you didn't ask for.
You don't question where it came from. You just use it.
My phone's on the counter where I left it. There's a text from Claire.
She texts every Sunday. It's usually a meme first, a soft opener. Today it's a picture of a raccoon standing upright in a kitchen looking caught. me at the fridge at 11pm. Then, a beat later, the real one. how'd it go with meg?? ??
I stared at that for a while.
Here's the thing about my sister. She's the one person I could tell.
If I sat down and typed out the truth, all of it, the real number, the thing about my body, the ten years of near-misses, she would be kind about it.
She would be so careful and warm that it would land on me like weight.
She'd never make a joke. She'd treat it like a real problem, a thing to be gentle around, and the second she did that it would become a real problem instead of the running gag I've filed it under.
So I do what I always do. I type back something true that says nothing.
meg's great. think we're better as friends tho lol.
Which is technically accurate. We did agree, kindly, that we're better as friends.
We just skipped the part where I explain why.
She sends back a heart and her loss!! and I feel the guilt of being loved by someone I keep at exactly arm's length.
I take my coffee to the small desk by the window and open the laptop.
Sunday mornings are when I try to get ahead for the week.
Work is one of the only places where I don't feel like someone's watching to see if I'll mess up.
I copyedit and lay out technical manuals and assembly guides.
The kind of books nobody reads for fun but everyone needs at some point.
Right now I'm working on a four-hundred-page maintenance guide for a commercial dishwasher.
The kind that runs eighteen hours a day in a restaurant kitchen.
Somewhere in Germany, a team of engineers wrote the instructions, and they have to make sense when they're translated and read by some tired guy at midnight with wet hands.
I'm good at this. I don't say that about much, but it's true.
I can take forty pages of messy instructions and find the one warning that actually keeps someone's hand out of the machine.
I know where a reader's eye goes and where it gives up.
I know that if the sentence is too long, the guy at midnight will skip it, and if he skips it he might get hurt.
So I keep the sentences short. I cut everything that doesn't matter and keep the part that's true and useful.
I spend two hours on it and the two hours feel clean. No reviewing the night. No going over old ground. Just the work. When I close the laptop I feel almost like a competent adult, which is a feeling I don't get very often.
My phone buzzes. Dev.
gym at 4? also I found you a new app, it's the one where women message first, PERFECT for you.
Dev thinks I'm a bug he can fix. He's decided the problem is a settings problem.
Wrong apps, wrong approach, wrong openers.
If we just adjust the inputs the output changes.
He means well and he's completely wrong, and there's no way to tell him he's wrong without telling him the actual thing, so I let him keep his theory.
Everybody I know has a theory. Claire thinks I'm picky.
Dev thinks I'm mismanaged. My mother thinks I haven't met the right girl.
They're all wrong in the same direction.
They all put the problem out there, in the world, in the timing, in the pool.
None of them will consider the one boring possibility, which is that the problem came in the room with me, and has been in the room the whole time, and is me.
4 works, I text back. no new apps. I'm retired from apps.
He sends a GIF of a coach dramatically benching a player off the team. I send back a middle finger emoji and put my phone down.
* * *
I don't think about Dana on purpose. She just shows up when things are quiet.
She shows up around two, while I'm making a sandwich.
I catch myself doing the same math I always do: if it had worked with anyone, it would have worked with her.
We were together almost two years. People don't understand that part.
It wasn't that I never had the chance. I had the chance for seven hundred days.
I had a girlfriend who loved me, who was patient and kind and right there in the bed, and I still never crossed the line with her.
I've never told anyone why, because the why makes me sound insane.
The truth is I got a girlfriend because that's what you're supposed to do.
You reach a certain age and it feels like there's a box you're expected to check, and people start noticing when you haven't.
Dana was smart and warm and she laughed at my jokes.
My mother relaxed the day she met her. Standing next to her at things, I felt like I'd finally passed.
Like I was doing it right. From the outside, I had the whole package.
The girlfriend. The plans. The two toothbrushes.
I performed the relationship the same way I performed dinner with Meg. Funny and warm and quick with stories. And underneath it all was the one thing I couldn't do and wouldn't go near.
I never wanted it. That's the part I can't say out loud.
Not that I was shy or respectful or waiting for the right time.
I was hiding. Every time things started moving in that direction, I found a reason to stop.
Her stress. My stress. It was late. We were tired.
I got very good at being the considerate one.
The guy who doesn't push. Women think that's rare and sweet, and it made me look better than I was.
Really I was just running. Because I knew that if I ever actually got there, lights on, nowhere to hide, my body would do exactly what it did with Meg.
Nothing. And then it wouldn't be a secret anymore.
So I kept it a secret by never testing it. Two years of never testing it.
And here's how it actually ended. She didn't leave because of the sex.
She never even brought it up. Near the end she said we felt more like roommates than anything else.
That the spark was gone. She was gentle about it.
A little sad, probably relieved. And she was right.
She left without ever saying the thing I'd been braced to hear for two years.
She never told me what I was. She just closed the door and took the answer with her.
That's the part nobody gets. I'm not afraid of the verdict.
I'm starving for it. I would give a lot to have someone just tell me, once and for all, what I am and what I'm for.
Because I don't think I want the thing I've spent ten years failing at.
I just want to stop failing at it. I want the shame to end.
And I've never been able to tell the difference between wanting something and wanting to not be the guy who can't have it.
I eat the sandwich standing up. I put the plate in the sink.
* * *
I actually go to the gym at four. Dev's already there when I walk in, headphones around his neck, spotting some guy on bench press like it's his job. He grins when he sees me.
"There he is," he says, clapping me on the shoulder. "Retired from apps. That's what all the greats say right before they make a comeback."
"I'm not making a comeback."
"Sure you're not." He nods toward the squat rack. "You warming up or what?"
We lift together for about an hour. Dev talks the whole time.
About some girl he matched with who only communicates in voice notes, about how his boss is an idiot, about this new protein powder that tastes like actual garbage but works.
I don't say much. I just focus on the bar, the plates, the numbers.
It's easy to disappear into it. The weight either moves or it doesn't. There's no conversation to navigate, no version of myself I have to perform.
Just gravity and muscle and whether I can get it up one more time.
At one point, while I'm resting between sets, Dev leans on the rack and says, "You know, if you ever actually wanted to talk about the dating thing, I'm not completely useless."
I look at him. He's being serious for once, which is rare.
"I'm good," I say.
He shrugs, like he expected that answer. "Alright. Just saying. I got a cousin who's a therapist. She's not even that expensive."
I laugh once, short. "I'll keep it in mind."
We finish the workout, slap hands, and I head home. My body feels used in a way that makes sense. Nothing complicated. Nothing I have to explain to anyone.
* * *