Bounced! Chapter 1 #3
The name went off in me like a flare.
Every part of me that had spent the last two years carefully not saying that name lit up at once.
My feet didn’t move.
My mouth had gone dry in a completely different way than it had all night.
He was here.
Wes was here, thirty feet away, wet and real and half-turned.
In the space of a single breath, my whole traitor body reorganized itself around one idea, which was to cross the room, put my hand on that shoulder, and have him turn and say my name the way only he ever said it, like it was the answer to something, like it was the answer to everything.
God, I wanted that… and I hated myself for it.
I actually took a step.
That’s the part I’m not proud of.
I took a step, because for one bright, stupid, weightless second, I wanted him so badly that I was willing to not care how, or why, or what it would mean. I was willing to walk straight into a ghost and pretend, just to feel known for the length of one night.
Then he shifted and started to turn.
My nerve whooshed out of me like a plug pulled from a drain.
Because I didn’t want to know.
If he turned and it was him, I’d have to survive it, right there, in nothing but a towel.
And if he turned and it wasn’t Wes—my Wes—if it was some stranger with the wrong face and the right shoulders, he’d wonder why an enormous, graying man across a steamy room had gone the color of a bedsheet.
I’d have to survive that instead, which was somehow worse, because it meant I’d become a man who saw a lost love in the back of every dark-haired stranger.
I didn’t want the answer.
Either answer.
I wanted, with an intensity that frightened me, to keep not knowing, to leave that door shut the way you leave shut a door you’re afraid is empty.
So I did the only thing my legs would do.
I turned before he came all the way around, and I speed-walked back down the amber hallway, past all the open doors and their standing invitations, past the low sounds behind the closed ones, one hand clutching the stupid towel and the other pressed flat to my own sternum as though I could hold everything in my chest together from the outside.
I didn’t look back to see if he’d finished turning.
I didn’t look back to see if he was watching me go.
I didn’t look back, because looking back was the whole trap, and I’d fallen into enough of it for one night.
At my cubby, I got dressed like a felon fleeing a scene, which, emotionally, I was.
Pants helped.
Pants dampened the signal to my nether regions considerably.
Nothing dampened the other thing, the flare that hadn’t gone up, the name still ringing in my mind like a struck glass.
The kid at the front desk still had the pink hair, which made me think of Benji, which made me think of the bar, which made me think that in about nine hours, I’d be back there pretending I’d had a perfectly ordinary night.
“Leaving already?” he asked, not judging, just making conversation between bubble pops.
“The towel and I had creative differences,” I said, and was impressed my voice came out level.
“Yeah,” he said with feeling. “We really need to order the bigger size. You’re not the first.”
“How many of us are there?”
“You’d be surprised. Lots of big guys in Tampa.” He slid my ID back across the counter. “Have a good one.”
Outside, the night had that thick Florida funk to it, the air only a few degrees cooler than the steam room yet somehow even more humid. My truck sat alone under a light with a moth situation happening around the bulb.
When I climbed in, I didn’t turn the key right away.
I sat there with my hands on the wheel and my phone in the cupholder. My body was still humming, still warm from the inside out. Only now, on top of all of it, I felt wrung out by a man whose face I had deliberately refused to see.
Maybe it was him.
Maybe Wes was back in Tampa, drying off in a bathhouse on a Tuesday, close enough to touch.
Maybe it was a stranger who happened to have his shoulders and his ink and his unhurried way of taking up a room, and I’d fled a total innocent.
I would never know.
I had made very sure I would never know.
That was the one thing I’d accomplished, and I’d accomplished it thoroughly.
I felt the whole shape of it settle over me in the quiet. I was forty-eight years old with a bar full of people I loved like blood, a ghost in a steam room, and a towel-shaped hole in an evening where a simpler man’s good time should have been.
I picked up my phone. I don’t know who I thought I was going to call.
The screen lit my face and showed me the truth of it, a contact list full of people who worked for me, drank with me, depended on me, and not one single name I could dial at midnight to say the actual sentence out loud, something like, “I think I just saw Wes, or I think I just needed to, and I’m not sure which is worse. ”
I put my phone back in the cupholder, face down, then I started the truck, because the one thing I still knew how to do, reliably, at any hour, fully clothed, was drive myself home.