But Todd doesn’t seem to grasp that my feelings for Skye might be legitimately real. He views her as my midlife crisis, an itch that felt too good not to scratch. And maybe he’s right. I don’t know. All I do know is that I can’t stop thinking about Skye.
Something about her face makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. She’s got this smile that spreads across her whole face like butter on hot toast, and big brown eyes that warm the space behind my chest, bringing me this sense of ease. I don’t know how to explain it. Even though I’m pretending to be someone else when I’m with her, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more like myself.
When I’m not with her, I’m thinking about when I’ll be with her next. It’s crazy. Completely crazy. Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating on Heather, and I have to remind myself what this is all for.
Every time I remember what I’m actually doing, I feel sick to my stomach, so I’ve trained myself not to think about it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve slipped out of Skye’s apartment early （feigning an early start time for my fake job） to head to a coffee shop or my place in Crown Heights and hit the ground running on my search. The way I see it, there’s still time. If I can manage to land a decent job in the foreseeable future, I can drop this whole con-artist act and go back to my life, leaving Skye unscathed.
October 28, 2018
I just reread my last entry—so much has happened since then. For starters, I am indeed in love with Skye Starling.
I probably knew it after our first real date, but the situation was new and overwhelming and bizarre, and in retrospect, I couldn’t have recognized it. If I had, I might’ve found the strength to put my foot down, to go back to Heather and demand we find another way.
But I’m too deep in it now, and when you remember how incredible it is to be in love, there’s no turning back. It reminds me of that Billy Joel song—
I’ll take my chances
I forgot how nice romance is
I haven’t been there for the longest time
Skye is the one who’s gotten me back into Billy Joel. His music reminds me of Langs Valley, but not of Heather. It just reminds me of me, I think. And now Skye, too.
What I’m realizing is, I haven’t been there for the longest time. The more time I spend with Skye, the more I realize that I’ve fallen out of love with my wife. And it isn’t because of Skye. I don’t think I’ve been in love with Heather for a while now, and I’m not quite sure what to do with that. I never realized it was possible to be so happy and so sad at the same time.
Skye is nothing like Heather. You can’t compare them. There are just … these things about Skye that fill me, that make me feel whole.
She’s got one of those old vintage turntables, and it’s her face when she puts on a record, the way the corners of her mouth poke up toward her ears as “The Stranger” fills the room. It’s how her eyelids grow heavy when she’s had a couple of negronis, the way it doesn’t bother me to watch her get drunk. It’s how nice she is to waiters, how thoughtful she is toward her friends, how diligent she is about work, and the way her whole face always seems to be on the verge of a smile. Skye is good at her job, but even though she won’t admit it, I can tell that book editing isn’t her passion. Not really. And I want her to find her passion. I’ve only known her six weeks and I want that for her. I want it for her even more than I want it for myself.
Skye has this thing she says about the way people laugh. She says a laugh is like a fingerprint, the way each one is unique to every person in the world. Isn’t that incredible? I love the way she makes observations like this that are so simple, but profound.
Skye thinks her OCD defines her, but it doesn’t. I’m not lying when I tell her that I’ve mostly stopped noticing her routines, but I don’t think she believes me. I don’t know how to get her to understand that she’s so much more than this stupid disease.
The thing is, Skye is vulnerable. Skye’s compulsion to knock on doors and wood and clocks in a specific method under certain circumstances is no easy cross to bear. It’s interruptive for her life, certainly. It’s the reason that she works from home as a freelancer. And it’s the reason some pretty horrible things have happened to her, most notably an ex who used Skye’s OCD to sexually assault her. When she told me that story, tears visible in the corners of her eyes, I was overcome with the desire to find this asshole and knock his teeth in, especially when she said she’d never pressed charges. She did report the incident to the jerk’s grad school, which thankfully resulted in his expulsion, but she didn’t want the reasoning made public. She said she’d been so insecure at the time, she hadn’t wanted to draw more attention to her OCD. I was practically fuming on Skye’s behalf, an anger so strong I couldn’t shake it until I saw my own reflection in the bathroom mirror and stopped, frozen with disgust. If this guy was bad, I was worse.
November 17, 2018
Last week I told Skye that I love her.
I hadn’t been thinking about it before I said it. We were sitting on her couch, listening to the Beach Boys on vinyl and talking, and I swear I could talk to her forever. I found myself telling her things about my past, straying far from the narrative I’d rehearsed. I told her about my drug and alcohol problems in high school, how I got sober senior year, and then how I relapsed during my second year at Credit Suisse.
I probably should’ve stopped there, but I didn’t. I don’t know, it just felt right to tell Skye about the incident with Doug Kemp, how he got off scot-free, my arrest, and the nightmare of a year I spent in prison. Once I started talking, it was like something cracked open inside me, and I couldn’t stop. I told her about the corrupt guards at MCC, the prolonged isolation, the filth, how cold it got in my cell at night, the interminable stretches of monotony punctuated by flashes of explosive violence. Things I’ve never told Heather. I didn’t even think about how horrifying it must’ve all sounded until I stopped rambling and saw the shell-shocked look on Skye’s face. Girls like Skye Starling don’t date ex-felons. But then her expression softened, and her eyes filled with tears.
“I am so sorry that happened to you,” she said. It was a simple response, but one that warmed the space behind my chest. No one had ever said that to me before. Heather was ecstatic when I got out of MCC, but she was equally furious at the financial position I’d put us in by losing my job. She’d certainly never asked for details or exhibited any sympathy toward me. I was starved for connection; I craved open dialogue, some gaping channel of release for my pain. I told Heather I wanted to try Alcoholics Anonymous, but she said AA was for suckers, and that I needed to land on my own two feet like a man. She dealt with my relapse and my year in prison by pretending it had never happened. We never even told the kids.
As liberating as it was to open up to Skye, it also felt strange to reveal the darkest part of my life without telling her the whole truth. Without being able to describe the pain of sitting helplessly behind bars while my daughter came into the world, while my son turned three and became a big brother.
As Skye smoothed the hair from my forehead and planted my face with kisses, I was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for her, for whatever insane, appalling circumstances had brought her into my life.