But, decisions, right? I didn’t have a red or blue pill this time. I had a rainbow assortment with a laundry list of side effects next to each.
One looked like the present moment. We could die in my bed together. It was dramatic, and it would take a while, and Ophelia might decide to be the captain of her own destiny and leave me to wilt into the sheets alone. Though, that option looked a lot like another, which was remaining in Coconut Creek, denying the secondary interview, continuing to work for TechOps, and living with my friend and his wife, and eventually their litter of kids. That was actually less appealing than becoming one with my mattress the longer I imagined it.
I could go to Colorado, take the second interview at the end of January, see Ophelia and fly back home again, play the never-ending waiting game. Sit in a room half stacked with boxes, hoping on one hand to get a call that I didn’t get the job, while the other hand searched for apartments in Pine Ridge just in case.
Then there was Mom. Addy. I’d spent so much of my life away from them already, and I was finally in a place where we could all be together like we used to, relying on one another for the love we needed and the family we lacked. I had become so accustomed to long periods of time away from them that I never prioritized it when I finally came back home. Shit got in the way, life, jobs. I was busy, Addy was busy. Excuses I shouldn’t have been making as the man in the house. Nevertheless, I was sacrificing a sure thing for something that might not work out over time, letting my heart do that stupid fucking thing Mateo warned me it would and putting blind hope in futile emotion.
The fact of the matter was, none of my options gave me everything I wanted: a job I loved, my best friends, my family—and the full, satisfied, rumbling happiness that felt like that first spring sunshine after a winter of gray personified.
Ophelia. All the time, every second of the day. I wanted her like a tattoo. I wanted her in my veins, ink scabbed over, healed inside of me, part of me, on display, branded.
I lifted her thick brown hair off my arm, rubbing it between my fingers idly. She was so quiet as we lay there, tired from the day. It was the first time since I met her that we actually sat in silence. The only other moments she was sedentary or voiceless were asleep or underneath me, when we needed nothing but tongues and touch to voice our thoughts. Even dog-tired, breathless, hungover, intoxicated, we found something to say to one another, a joke to be told, a memory to cajole, a small, unimposing fact that could use an audience.
In fact, I didn’t like the reserve one bit, or that this might be one of the last times I had her all to myself for quite some time. The house would be loud with the Swan boys come tomorrow, and the party would remain on through New Year’s, celebrating engagements and job interviews, drinking, laughing, avoiding the obvious, which was her leaving in less than three days.
When we’d had sex earlier it was different. Not without the normal, syrupy passion that didn’t take any effort from either of us, not different in that it didn’t feel right. Different like we were both entirely on the same page and somehow also dusting over the epilogue. Our bodies were there, fuck they were there. But both of our thoughts were not.
She kissed my side again and I trailed my fingers down her scalp like a slide, drawing circles with the pads of my fingers on her shoulder, dropping them down her naked spine, squeezing her closer to me. Closer to me.
When I finally spoke my voice was rough from the unuse. “What time does your flight leave on Sunday?”
She stiffened beneath my touch. Soft, slow puffs of breath coming more rapidly against my skin, her fingernails halted at the center of my chest. I put my fingers overtop them, flattening her palm to my hot skin. The steady beat of my pulse thrummed through her hand and knocked on mine.
“I don’t know,” she replied faintly.
I didn’t believe that. Ophelia was a planner—she knew dates and times, she remembered birthdays and star signs, and the name of the nail polish color on her toes so she could get it again the next time. She carried a notepad around with her in case of emergency, and that afternoon was the first time I’d actually seen her unprepared for the spontaneous use of the fucking thing.
I didn’t know it for sure, but I would have put money down on a girly little calendar with the flight numbers and departure schedules highlighted somewhere in red and green marker. It was a lie or a tell that she was actively unaware, but the latter made more sense the deeper I let it sink in.
Because just like me, the haze of sex and fun and carelessness was dissipating like condensation on a mirror for her too. Now we were reflecting, and considering, and watching reality materialize in the glass in front of us, and that reality looked the same in her mirror as it did in mine.
“We fucked up, didn’t we?” I put words to it for the first time.
A subtle nod of her head came in return. My eyelids pinched together, emotion swirling deep inside me that had been lying dormant, seemingly waiting for it to be voiced like a whistle into action. A knot tightened beneath her palm and mine, making it hard to speak without a jolt of pain.
“It hurts,” I murmured against her forehead, putting more pressure at the center of my chest with her hand to show her. “It hurts right here.”
She sighed, both anguished and relieved. “I know exactly what you mean.”
34
A house full of large, loud, animated, and spectacularly attractive men was quite similar to standing outside the glass at an exhibit at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.
Nat and I were basically furniture in the presence of the four former operators, observing them silently from across the room with our glasses of wine and the scraps of a charcuterie board. They were like boys again together. Burly laughs hitting the low ceilings like an echo chamber; teasing, taunting conversation; slaphappy palms on jean-clad asses. They wrestled as a way of affection, headlocks and hair tugs, brute force establishing some benign form of a pecking order when it was aggressively obvious they were all different suits of the same deck.
Frankie and Mateo put on a show alone, but introducing another pair added kerosene to the chaos.