I knew all my teachers, and all my sister’s teachers, and the mailman, and the Culligan man, and the FedEx driver. The neighbors, their kids, their grandkids. I befriended the ladies at the grocery store checkout, and the pharmacy, and the church on Sunday. Accepted every hand-on-head prayer when I knew full well if there was a God, he was a dickhead at best, and my obligation to be there for my mother’s sake was perfunctory and performative if not already obvious.
I approached decision-making like a blueprint rolled out on a table. Do this thing…and then this one. Here are all the pieces: follow the directions, study the key, take your time, build the foundation first, take a step back, reassess.
And I did that, until it came time to ship out for the Army. That was swallowing a completely different, muskier tasting, settled in your stomach like a ship hitting the bottom of the ocean supplement. That one meant I had made a decision, and now I would forget what it felt like to ever have to make a decision again. There were only orders.
The Army dictated, and that’s what I wanted. The most submissive I’d ever been in my life was signing my name across that contract. Giving a piece of paper the power to disarm me.
Still, a decision nonetheless. One I made just as easily as I did the first, and one that I was proud of and had not once regretted in almost twenty years. Not even now. Not after flight school, or the Middle East, or South America. Not after my accident, or Vanessa, or the last few years of learning how to literally and figuratively stand on two feet again.
That trip out to the base in Colorado was a small blip in the canvas, an ink stain on the floor plan. Half of me treated it like a joke—not the actual interview of course—but the set-up with Tyler, letting Mateo find me a suit, the fucking Hook（Up） dating in Colorado Springs as if I could return to the early-twenties era of my life and play the field like a kid that finally got to go away to college. If I didn’t get the job, or if I realized I didn’t want it in the first place, there was no permanent harm done. I just…continued on.
But then I got on that plane…and somehow ended up with the most beautiful woman in the world attached to my side like the piece of a warped puzzle I expected would never have a perfect match again. Her curves marrying my lack of, her fingers stitching perfectly into the gaps in mine.
Ophelia—soft, warm, full of untainted innocence and that bright, unbreakable outlook on life I had no business believing I deserved. But as we lay in my bed, her nails running in figure eights up and down my bare, shuddering torso, kissing my ribs every few minutes, letting me know she was still awake, I did believe it. I knew that parts of me needed parts of her, and I didn’t want to let her go back to whatever life she lived before we met. I didn’t want her to see me as a lesson, or practice, or a fun time when our lives inevitably crossed paths again. I didn’t want her giving herself to a man that wasn’t me. Holding a hand that wasn’t mine. Having someone else elicit that throaty, sweet laugh, sharing moments yet to come in her life that should belong to me.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
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.