Chapter Text
April
At a worn table in a worn bar in Arlington on a Thursday night, between patrons half-assedly watching the game and the clinking sound of others playing pool, I found myself twirling a half-empty glass around and staring at strangers. Forgive me if the details of my recall are hazy — it was hot outside and I was already one drink deep. It was the end of a long day, a long week already.
And then there was him, of course, making it all worse. But I'll get to that.
The bar was probably a respectable place sometime, years ago, before the floors got sticky and all the lightbulbs hanging above the tables started buzzing and flickering, singing on their last verse. It had some charm to it, I guess, the low lighting and the feeling that everyone here knew each other. Not like myself, the odd guest, there for few enough days that I counted them in hours when I told my roommate I’d be gone. A seventy two hour trip in total, to a town three hours away, spending ten hours pitching and selling, trying to expand the reach of the company, and then seven hours sleeping, on repeat. What did that amount to? A few hours of free time every evening with no company?
It didn’t matter. I was at that same table for the third night in a row, in that same dingy bar with Christmas lights still up in April. They flickered too, by the way. Maybe part of me would miss the place, I thought, maybe I’d look back at this hole in the wall as the place where I was allowed to be nothing but an anonymous observer, free from my own existence like a break from life. It was sort of interesting, in a way, looking at people, observing them, seeing how they acted in flocks and in pairs. But it was pretty quiet for a bar, all things considered. Maybe that was to be expected in a smaller place than Houston, where my ears rang as I got into bed after a night out.
And that specific night was no different than the last. Another game went by on the screen, a little bit pixelated and with a random line passing up over the view of the field every now and then, but it was easy enough to follow. Nobody noticed that I was there. I got to watch a couple on a date while I pushed my straw past the ice cubes in my glass and took a sip. I wondered if it was the first or second date, scanning their body language to look for fidgeting or nervous eye contact. I was in the first row watching a bachelor party as the guests became gradually more intoxicated and laughed louder and louder as my own drink disappeared slowly. One of them tried to take his shirt off before he was stopped by his friend, and it was a little funny, I can’t lie, but my attention was inevitably drawn back to the girl and guy sitting opposite at a table just like my own, diligently asking questions back and forth.
I sincerely hoped they couldn’t see me staring, but even if they did, I can't say I gave a fuck. I was leaving the next day, gone like I was never there, and all I’d have to show for this annual trip was the memory of a stuffy bunch of offices, bitter coffee, a hotel room with a large tub, and a bar I wouldn’t have known existed had I not slowed down at a three way stop and stared out of the window at a man entering a liquor store dressed as Darth Vader. It was strange.
“What are you watchin’ so closely over there?”
A strange voice snapped me out of my trance, my vision fixated on the girl in the dress and the guy in the jeans. I didn’t look up, but I answered the question honestly. “I’m trying to figure out if those two are on a first date or not.”
In my peripheral, I barely registered a hand pulling back the chair across from me and a man sitting down, his glass set down on the table, and then his forearm resting behind it.
He turned his head, looked at them, frowned a little, then grunted. “What do you think?”
They were only a few tables away, far enough to hide my staring but close enough to read their expressions.
“First,” I said. “They arrived about fifteen minutes ago, she gave him sort of a strange hug and he pulled out her chair. He’s asked her what I believe is around fourteen questions. She answered and asked them back, asked a few of her own... No touching, there’s an onion ring left in their basket and neither of them are taking it.”
“Interesting.” Quite a deep voice, this stranger had, but I didn’t look over, I was too busy speculating, too busy watching the two people’s eyes focusing on that greasy ring, silently offering it to one other.
“Hey,” I whispered, nudging the man’s arm when his face turned a little too far to the left, “They’re going for the onion ring.”
He leaned in, his head tilted to look past a wooden pillar obstructing his view, and cleared his throat. “Five bucks she’ll eat half and give him the rest,” he muttered. His accent was charming, it was a little rough around the edges, words slurring into each other just barely.
“Then they’re not on a first date,” I countered.
He grumbled, “Fair enough.”
I got a whiff of warm cologne when he reached his arm up and pushed his hand through his hair, a very slight air of sweat following it, just the undertone of a long day mixing with the scent. But I didn’t look to the side — I looked at the girl’s fingers on the breaded onion ring, thumbs and index fingers pulling it apart.
The stranger nudged my arm back, “Told ya.”
I conceded with a huff of a laugh, and a reluctant smile as I shook my head and finally turned to face him. He faced me too, and it was only then I saw that this stranger was unlike the men who had previously tried to approach me to no avail, when I’d sat here by myself, night after night. He didn’t sidle up next to me, lids drooping, hat on backwards, rings of sweat under his arms, beer on his breath, spouting lines he had undoubtedly tried with multiple others in the same hour. He just sat across from me, smiling, and it reached his eyes, forming little lines on the tops of his cheeks. Beautiful brown eyes, he had too, brown curls and barely-there dimples. Only a few grays, more like silver, but I didn’t allow myself to look much longer. I feared I might be caught staring.
“Cash or credit?” I asked, losing our bet, reaching for my wallet.
He laughed then, rotating the glass slowly between his fingers as it balanced on its edge. “You’re funny,” he muttered, and his eyes were so piercing that my cheeks felt hot, hands a little unsteady while my fingers clutched the disintegrating straw in front of me. His lips parted on an inhale, but he looked away again, towards the couple, instead of speaking. The girl wiped her hands on a napkin while she asked the guy a question that prompted him to pull his phone out of his pocket and swipe through his photo gallery.
I followed his lead, looking away. “He’s showing her a photo of some sort,” I said quietly, straightening my back to see more. The man at my table was still much, much taller than me, blocking the sight of the bar counter behind him, the whole thing hidden by green flannel-clad shoulders. I tried to see what was on the screen, and I could feel eyes on me but I held on, by the skin of my teeth, to remain focused.
“A ton of dogs,” I remarked, and I knew I sounded bored watching the guy scroll through, “Some yellow sort of— oh, isolation. Some building project I assume. The hell is he trying to show her?”
“God knows,” I heard from across the table, and he took a sip of his drink, bourbon or whatever it was, golden brown, glass half full when he got it.
“Oh!” Finally, a photo was plastered on the phone screen, of—
“That’s an iguana.”
The stranger furrowed his brows when I looked back at him, and he was still smiling.
“He’s showing her a photo of an iguana on a date.”
The man leaned back in his chair, straightened his spine too, and looked at the screen as the girl held it. He nodded slowly, darted a glance back at me, and narrowed his eyes as he brought the glass up to his face again, playing subtle, stretching his neck while his eyes were firmly on that photo again.
“She’s swiping,” he said, and the corners of his mouth twitched behind the crystal glass. He held it in front of his face, scanned the bar, then looked back at the phone in question. “Guy’s lookin’ a little nervous.”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “That is a lotta dogs. Jesus.”
“Told you,” I said under my breath, watching him watch them, and I truly had no idea why he came over to me, or how long he’d been here, but a silly little part of my brain thought that maybe it was written in the stars that I was there that night. And it was naive, sure, but the man had no ring on his finger — not on the hand clutched around the glass, and not on the fist resting on the table.
He scratched at his beard with that hand, still looking, and his eyes shifted, trying to focus while a small group of women crowded around one of the tables between us and them. It was a dry sound, barely even audible over the music from the speakers hanging in every corner, but his nails caught at the bristles and he dragged them slowly down his jaw. There was a green watch on his wrist showing eight forty five.
“I’m not usually one for spyin’ on people,” he said absentmindedly.
“It’s kinda fun, though, isn’t it?”
“It is.” And just as he said it, his attention snapped back to me and his head turned away, his cheeks flushing a little brighter.
“Did you get caught?” I asked.
“Almost.” He stifled a boyish sort of grin, a little embarrassed as he looked down at the table. I could tell he was trying not to laugh, and I bit it back too, but it was difficult when he looked up at me. I averted my eyes, tried to contain it, sucked down the rest of my drink and glanced over to see that the two of them were back to chatting like before.
“You from around here?”
Distracted again, my attention was brought over to the man in front of me. I shook my head, “Just here on a work trip. Leaving tomorrow. How about you?”
“I’m here for the week, packing up my parents’ house. Or, more like helping them downsize, I guess.”
“Is it sad?”
He frowned and shrugged, tilting his head in an undecided way. “Not really. Just a lot of boxes of crap from the seventies I gotta go through while my dad tells me to keep ‘em all and my mama says to throw ‘em out. Never a dull moment.”
“You live close by?”
“Nah. Austin,” he said, “And you?”
Formalities ensued, typical questions asked back and forth, the thing that rendered us not all too different from the two we were spying on before. But I did learn a few things while the bar around us faded into nothing but background noise: I learned that he was from Arlington, that he worked in construction, I learned that he turned forty last year, I learned that he had a daughter who was staying at her best friend’s house for the week.
“She knew this week would massively suck, as she so kindly put it. I gave Ellie’s parents a hundred bucks to feed and house her for the week. Figured it was only fair.”
I learned that it was his one night of de-stressing before his little brother would come out to help get the last of the furniture moved from the house to the apartment. I learned that that bar was, in fact, the place to be some odd fifteen years ago, that they’d never replaced anything aside from the glasses and the speakers.
Maybe I laughed a little too loudly when he told me about the owner, hot from the alcohol, limbs loosened and my head not screwed on entirely straight, but he was just so— I couldn’t put my finger on it, couldn’t describe it in any other words than attractive in a way I had never experienced before. And I’d never been with someone older, I’d always kept it to two-three years on either side of my own age, but I saw silver in the scruff of his beard and I wondered if what my friends said was true.
I wondered, when I looked at him, half-heartedly listening to the story he was telling, if it was true that men who are fathers are better in bed, and it made my stomach all fizzy in an embarrassing way, making my face hot and my hands sweaty. I felt his knee against my own under the table, and I wasn’t not sure if he noticed.
“What do you do for work? Got me talkin’ more about myself than I have in years.”
“Sales,” I groaned, pitching myself after pitching all day. “I work for an office interior design company.”
His brows pulled together and I nodded, a little deflated and zapped out of my tipsy state.
“Essentially, we do these office makeovers that supposedly boost productivity. Do I believe that it actually has an effect? I don’t know. But it pays the bills.”
He laughed at that, and it might’ve been the alcohol emboldening him too, but with his eyes shyly avoiding my own, and a deep inhale, his hand landed on my knee, and I realized I’d been holding my breath the entire time when I gasped.
And then his eyes flashed a little darker at the sound.
“Are you staying with your parents?” I asked, and with that, he winced, regressing into a boy again, pulling in another breath and nodding, a little defeatedly. I could see the regret in his expression, the shy fluster on his cheeks once more as he realized he spoke too soon and got ahead of himself. His hand twitched, about to pull away, but I slipped under the table to hold it where it was, to stop him from moving.
“I was just curious,” I assured him, and his face was equal parts embarrassment and vulnerability. Talking about myself more than I have in years, he said, and I wondered if he hadn’t been on a date for quite some time. His hand squeezed once as he exhaled.
“I have a—” Now I was the shy one all of a sudden, stopping midway to breathe all shaky, “I have a hotel, just down the street.”
“Wanna keep talking there?”
He took my hand when he led me out through the bar after picking up the tab, and pushed the door open to a hot evening over dusty pavement and cars zooming by. The sun had already set by the time we got out there, and a few blocks away was my hotel, was my room, where my suitcase lay exploded on the second bed, and few words were exchanged before his lips were on mine, walking me backwards until the heavy door smacked shut behind him.
It was only then that I realized we never exchanged names, or that I was too tipsy to remember his, and it’s too late to ask someone’s name when they’re tugging your skirt down your thighs, hooking their fingers in the straps of your panties, and throwing them on the floor.
It was too late for me to ask his name when his tongue was on my clit, when my hands clutched the fluff of the duvet under me, and he licked me like I’d never felt the touch of a man before, with his hands pushing up under my top, grabbing at my tits, skin rough and calloused. It was way, way too late to ask, when he looked up at me, when we locked eyes, when he pushed two fingers into me and my eyes slid back, unable to focus, lost in his attention.
It became a blur much faster than I’d expected, just glimpses of him tugging his shirt off becoming clear through the haze of one orgasm after the other. It was overwhelming in a way I’d never felt, in a good way. A really, really good way. And he was gentle the entire time, kissing between my legs and across my stomach, gripping me with his whole hands on my thighs and my waist and my chest, feeling all of me, too intimate for what was bound to be a one night stand.
But the formalities of it all didn’t stop him, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand when he rose up on his knees between my spread thighs, undoing the zipper on his jeans, unlatching the belt, letting his erection push the fabric of his boxers through the open fly when he reached into his back pocket and there was a condom in his wallet. There must have been mortification in my eyes when I saw the gold gleam of the wrapper, because he chuckled to himself and shook his head, flustered again. “It’s alright, sweetheart, don’t be scared.”
We both knew where it was headed, unspoken beyond the few words we exchanged, but it’s hard to know what to say to a stranger when your tongue is in their mouth and their hands are busy pulling at the bottom of your shirt to rip it off your body. What else does it mean when you pull someone from a bar to a hotel room, knowing you’ll never see each other again?
I wasn’t scared until he pushed his pants down his thighs and his cock sprung loose, hanging heavy and firm when he tugged the denim past his feet and it fell to the floor while the condom, still wrapped, was clutched between his fingers. My shirt was on the carpet somewhere too, close to my skirt and my panties, bra slung onto the chair across from the bed. And then he was on me again, mouthing at my neck, plummeting back into the trance he pushed me into with his tongue, unaware of anything but the feel of his hard underside rubbing against where I was so sensitive, and it felt like I couldn’t possibly take anymore, before he was even inside me at all.
He got up on his knees again, tore the foil open, and through half-shut eyes, lashes heavy with mascara undoubtedly smeared, I looked at his body, at the hair on his chest and his stomach, I looked at a set of broad, thick shoulders giving way to thick arms. I gazed while I tasted him, for too short of a little while as he rolled his head back and groaned. I looked at a man. I pulled back and looked at his cock, at how big it was, at how the head flared out from his shaft, and I was a little bit nervous, just like he’d thought. But I was wet for him and soft for him when he rolled on the condom and lowered onto one elbow, pressing himself into me with his other hand around his root.
Every thrust was so deep, intense in a way I’d never felt, overwhelming when he kissed me at the same time, even when I couldn’t possibly kiss him back, gasping into his mouth. I’d never fucked a stranger either, and part of me wanted to tell him that, though I never understood why. I wanted to tell him everything, out of nowhere, I wanted to stay up all night, telling him my secrets. I felt innocent that night, in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager, already relishing in the soreness I knew I’d wake up with the next morning.
And it was like nothing I’d ever felt before, a cock so big it hurt a little when he got deep, but when I clawed at his chest, it wasn’t to make him stop. I wanted him to unmake me, and he did, on his lap and on my hands and knees, like a whirlwind, with his voice in my ear, just a husky rumble when I couldn’t make out the words. I heard shit, sweetheart in there somewhere, I heard fuck, then fuck, fuck, fuck, and groans, deep groans and grunts. I could feel him in my stomach, and my sheets were soaked, and I thought I fell in love that night, because beyond his sweat on my shoulders and the slick of my arousal covering his pelvis, there was his hand petting my hair and his thumb on my cheek.
There was safety, in that stranger, in that strange town I’d never been to before. There was chemistry, from the moment he sat down across from me until the moment I fell asleep with my head on his chest and his lips on my hairline, kissing me goodnight. He didn’t feel like a stranger then, he didn’t feel like a nameless figure who gave me his cock like he knew exactly what I needed, as if it was second nature to him.
It felt like he knew me, like his hands knew where to go by nothing but intuition. I didn’t know his name, and yet he knew my body as well as I did myself, and he touched me like no man who told me he loved me ever did. It was painful, already then, to know that I would leave, and no man would want to stay in touch with a hookup they met in their hometown who lived three hours away.
So I said nothing, and he said nothing, and the sound of his heartbeat soothed me to sleep.
The sun was still shining bright when I drove home, with soreness between my legs and the taste of him still on my tongue. The absence of him deep in the pit of my stomach, too, a little bit of self loathing coming to burn the frayed edges of the things I shouldn’t have been feeling for him already. And on the heels of that, was the sadness, the inevitable sadness and emptiness that first crept in when he zipped up his jeans and pushed his hand through his hair, when he turned in the door after giving me a kiss and I was left to gather my toiletries in silence. Drive safe, he said, and he had the kindest eyes I had ever seen.
Maybe we never exchanged names at all. Maybe I was nothing but an out-of-town convenience, a de-stressor, a step out on a woman he was dating. There was no way to know, and no way to find out, as I drove further away from the town he’d be in until the weekend, before returning back to a city three hours from where I was headed, and I watched the numbers decrease on the signs that pointed towards Houston. My stomach growled, too many hours past breakfast but needing to get out of that hotel room before I could smell him on the pillow covers and regress into a little girl with a crush on a man she would never have.
He wouldn’t have time for me anyway, I reasoned, when I felt my throat constricting around a hard lump every time I swallowed. It’d hurt more if he had my number and never called.
“How was it?” Gina asked when I closed the door and set my bag down on the carpet.
“Oh, you know…” I dropped my keys on the dresser, stepped into the kitchen and crouched as I opened the fridge. “Went to work, fucked a random dad I met at a bar, drove home.”
She was silent for a second as I stood up, and then, “They’re better, right?”
Tapping the tip of my nail on the top of the can, I could feel the warm flush again, spreading up from my chest to my ears, burning.
“Yeah, they are,” she teased, snickering when she looked up at me from her books, scattered across the dining table.
“I’ve had enough of you,” I chided behind the La Croix, and turned to grab my bag.
“What was his name?”
All I could do was shrug when I turned to face her. “No clue, didn’t get that far.”
“Dirty.”
I nodded, and I wanted to think of it as nothing but a hookup, but I could already feel the strings of attachment tugging at me, pathetically, after only a night. I should’ve known, should’ve told him I wasn’t the type who could let go.
“What did he look like?”
My face burned even hotter, sweaty under my arms as I thought back on it, as I remembered so clearly how raspy his voice became when it slipped into my ear, his accent painting every word when he looked down at how his cock fit into me, muttering, ain’t gonna last, gorgeous, you’re too damn tight.
“Brown eyes, brown hair, pretty tall…”
How his hand fit around his shaft when he pulled out of me after, his pupils blown black, sweat on his temples and his chest flushed red beneath the coverage of brown hair. The hair on his groin too, curled from the humidity, thick and dark, untrimmed, and how obvious it was that neither of us had gotten laid in a while, how we laughed a little after, right when he slipped out of me, flustered and vulnerable.
“And?”
“Pretty, like, scruffy, I guess.”
“ And? ”
I huffed a laugh, “And what?”
Gina just waved towards herself, impatient. I shrugged, leaning against the counter, rotating the metal piece on the top of the can in a circle. “Forties. Early forties.”
“And the dick was…”
“Big. Very big.”
“Hot. Are you gonna see him again?”
Sighing, I shook my head, and it was humiliating to feel tears begin to press at my eyes. “Doubt it. No name, no number, lives in Austin. That's all I know.”
“That’s too bad. Maybe he was married or something.”
“Maybe… It is what it is,” I said, and I wanted to believe my own words, I really did, but my stomach tied into a knot, feeling like I was depriving myself of the one chance I’d ever get to meet someone decent. The last thing I wanted to do was grab my phone and go back to scrolling through dim prospects, or meet yet another friend of a friend bound to leave me at a party he brought me to.
There was a beat of silence before Gina stabbed the last piece of her tortellini with a fork and asked me, through a full mouth, “Have you heard any more about the relocation yet?”
May
I thought the memory of him would subside. I hoped, at least, that it would. Just like I hoped, naively, again like nothing but a little girl, that he’d find me somehow. I thought that if he wanted to, he would, like they all said, the women on the countless videos sliding by on my phone screen while I was bleary-eyed, half awake, a bright screen burning my retinas in the dark of my bedroom at six thirty in the morning. I thought the romance books cluttered on the shelf across from me were right, that my own dreams were right, but day after day, and then week after week, time disappeared like sand between my fingers, and the stranger — the kind, generous, funny, handsome stranger— slipped between my fingers as well, until he was nothing but a memory. He was nothing but a spot inside of me I couldn’t reach, and nothing but a ghost I compared every man I saw to, bound to lose when set up next to him in my mind.
To some extent, I did it to myself. I could’ve chosen to say yes to the date Gina offered to set me up on. I could’ve stopped watching porn starring men who reminded me of him or what he did or how he looked, I could’ve stopped putting my phone away and instead making myself come to the thought of his hands and his cock. I strengthened my own one-sided bond until it was made of titanium, and every night when I sat down on my couch, I wondered what it would be like if he were there too. I wondered if he’d put my feet in his lap, if he’d cook for me, if he’d care for me like he did that night.
The same hope fizzled and then died out every time I got a text from an unknown number that turned out to be spam or a delivery notice. I saw couples on the street and thought of him, I saw advertisements for houses for sale and thought of him. I went to bars with my friends and thought that maybe he’d find me there, that maybe we were meant to find each other again.
But the day never came, and every day got hotter, and when I lay at the side of the pool next to Gina one Saturday morning, I realized I’d gotten ready without considering what he might think if he saw me. It hurt somewhere very shy and sensitive to know that I had looked nice every day for a man who would never see me, all dressed up with nowhere to go, wiping off my makeup at the end of the night with nothing but defeat.
June
“I mean, our vision goes beyond Houston. It goes beyond Texas, really, we’re aiming internationally, you know? We got the small towns down, now we need the big cities, we need Austin, San Antonio, and then—”
The voices around the table became a blur. I smiled and nodded along like the name of that city didn’t make my stomach hurt. Four of us were slated to relocate in the next few weeks, waiting for the new offices to open with the cutting of a silky, pink ribbon and bottles of champagne, just like the other ones. I guess I could take some credit for a couple, maybe three, of the new locations opening across Texas, but I couldn’t find it in myself to care anymore, and on my laptop at home there were LinkedIn tabs open for job listings out of state.
A week went by before I was called into my supervisor’s office.
“We were gonna let you choose between Austin and San Antonio,” she said, “But you know Anne’s boyfriend is over in San Antonio and… It worked out better, you know? Is that okay?”
As if I had a choice in the matter anyway — Gina and I were getting renovicted as she put it, given a few months’ heads up that we needed to find somewhere else soon. She was going to grad school, I was going nowhere in life, and I figured that Austin was big enough that if I stayed in my neighborhood and didn’t go near any bars, I’d eventually forget about the guy I’d gone from thinking about daily to every few days, and it was just as painful every time, but at least it wasn’t as frequent. I mostly thought about him at night, I’ll be honest. He slipped into my mind when my hand was between my legs and nothing could get me off aside from the thought of him. I could forget about it in the morning, go about my day as if I’d never met him at all, but the delivery guy who showed up at the office every Thursday looked a little, teeny tiny bit like him and I froze every time he was at the door.
I enjoyed my last few weeks in Houston, my home for the past decade, at Gina’s sister’s pool, with the sun in my eyes and drinks in my hands, a book up against my thighs, and music playing from a small speaker sitting on the grass. We had dinner together, and every night I decluttered more of my things, discarding what chained me to the past, and only bringing with me what would feel like the blank slate I was given.
July
I forgot to mention the one thing that made the move to Austin a little — a lot — easier; half of my friends from college moving there and staying put, all welcoming me with open arms when I sent the mass text saying I’d be joining them in a week. I said goodbye to Gina with reluctant tears in my eyes and my car stuffed to the brim with boxes and suitcases, three duffel bags stacked in the front seat and a coffee in the cupholder. I flew down the highway under blue skies, I turned the volume up on my speakers, and I did not think about him.
My new apartment waited for me, clean and full of sunshine, warm rays casted across the empty living room floor when I unlocked the door and stepped inside. It felt like a new start I didn’t know I needed, my life thrown in the blender the day we got notice that Gina and I had to move, and I realized I spent my days at work counting down the hours until I could go home and do nothing. I protested at first, in hindsight, thinking that all I needed was a week off, but the break I got going to Arlington didn’t do much to help me get unstuck, and fate took the wheel when I veered off course, landing me in the bright open space of my own townhouse, where I pushed in the boxes and headed straight for the department store.
It came together quickly with the help of a few friends who cheers ed while perched on my new couch, setting their drinks down on a glass coffee table and looking around at a place that came together just the way I’d hoped. The spacious bathroom counter became cluttered with our makeup, with brushes and curling irons and icy drinks in big glasses, and between it all was my phone, with a dating app opened for the first time in months, flooded with new men in a new city, and we took turns swiping, squealing at every match. I didn’t think about the possibility of the stranger from Arlington popping up. I tried not to think about it, at least, and if I did think about it, I thought that my friend had swiped him away, losing him to the void again.
“Hey, look at this one,” Julia called out, “He’s thirty five, barely has anything on his profile, a single photo, works as a contractor at nowhere, I guess, but holy shit, guys—”
I snatched my phone out from her hand while the others gathered around me, and I scrolled up and down on a profile with barely anything on it but a photo of a man who had long, black curls and dark eyes, and my face felt a little warm at the pop-up telling me that we matched.
I didn’t have time to message him before the Uber showed up, but it didn’t matter. A few drinks deep and damp at the back of my neck from the stifled air of the bar, I was on my way to the washroom when I collided with the chest of a man. I looked down to see brown boots, jeans, a white t-shirt, and then—
“You’re Tommy,” I blurted out, “Holy shit.”
“Pleasure to meet you too,” he said, and he had a killer smile, he really did. “Hey, I think I know you from the—”
“Fucking dating apps, man.” My words were already slurring into each other as I waved a dismissive hand at him, before holding them up in surrender. “But guilty as charged. I’m the one with the Toad costume, you know, from Super Mario?”
“Definitely won me over.” He winked, and I could tell I was swaying but he didn’t seem to mind. “You out with your girls tonight?”
“I am.”
“Sounds like you’re havin’ a good time if I were to take a guess?”
I winked back, exaggerated, with the entire left half of my face. “You sound like a real cowboy, Tommy.”
“Do I now?”
“A little,” I giggled, sucking down more of my drink, feeling the brainfreeze coming on as one eye squeezed shut, hearing the man in front of me laughing. “Maybe it’s just the—” I hiccuped, pointing a little unsteadily at his waist, “The belt buckle. You can take the man out of— the man— the, uh—”
“The man outta Texas but not the Texas outta the man?”
I snorted, bumping into the front of him as someone passed by me, and he smelled like cologne, like sweet and spicy at the same time, and I couldn’t find it in myself to care how drunk I looked or sounded, because his hand was on the small of my back and I didn’t think about the last man who had touched me there. “Yeah, that.”
“Well, I’m still in Texas, aren’t I?”
“I hope so, or else my friends have some— some explaining to do.”
Tommy had a gorgeous laugh, and his hand felt nice on my back, where there was space between my top and my skirt, and his thumb was tucked in right against my spine. He waited for me to come back, shaking the water off my hands, and my friends greeted him like he was a celebrity, holding their drinks up high and shouting his name, all just as tipsy as I was. He enjoyed the attention with his hand on my thigh, and when he snuck our first kiss when my friends looked away, I felt butterflies I thought had flown away, never to return.
He came home with us that night.
He kissed me against the bathroom counter while two girls slept on the couches in the living room and one slept on the rug. I squeezed toothpaste onto my toothbrush with an unsteady hand and his lips on my neck, his hands on my waist, and he was just as unsteady as I was when we stumbled into my bedroom and hit the lights, plunging us into a darkness where our clothes were left discarded on the floor, and we fell asleep with my leg slung over his back.
It all felt very natural with him, going to breakfast the next morning and managing to maintain eye contact for longer than a few drunken seconds at a time. It was a blank slate, a person who didn’t know me in a town that didn’t know me either, and everything was new. The sun was so bright and the sky was so blue, the heat licked my skin differently than it did only a few weeks before, and it felt like fate that Tommy appeared so quickly when I came to Austin. Maybe he was just waiting for me, I thought, maybe it was all arranged so that we would meet, and the man I clung to with bloody, splintered nails was nothing but a push to get me away from my life.
And so I sat there, across from a man with shiny, dark curls and dark freckles, a mustache, a charm I’d never seen the likes of, and thought to myself that it was all meant to work out somehow, by forces entirely out of my control. I thought about that stranger in the bar months back, and the thought of him was imbued with layers of hurt, bitterness, yearning, and somehow gratitude on top of it. I learned something. Finally, a quarter of a year after we said our goodbyes and the door shut behind the sight of his broad back, I learned that some things were just meant to be a springboard, giving way to other things.
It was in some ways thanks to him that I was sharing pancakes with this new man I never knew I needed.
Tommy and I never exchanged a word on that app, but his number was in my phone and he picked me up in a black pickup truck to take me out the following Friday. There was a fair in town, the first one I’d been to since I was four feet tall, and he took my hand as we entered, he handed me the turkey leg and the stick with the spiral shaped potato on it, he won me a stuffed teddy bear — the big one on the tall shelf for everyone to see — and his eyes sparkled in the glow of the lights when we sat on the ferris wheel, barely fitting the two of us in the seat, huddled together.
I could count the amount of dates I’d been on in the last two years on one hand, and they all involved little but alcohol and smalltalk. Two lead to a second date consisting of dinner, one went straight to bed never to be repeated, and the other two disappeared as if I’d never met them at all. The thing in Arlington didn’t count — it’s not a date if he doesn’t have the decency to ask for your number, even if he doesn’t use it, right? It’s not a date if he doesn’t express a want to see you again, or if there isn’t even the illusion of a pretense that it might, maybe, potentially, turn into something more, is it? And it felt like something more, that night at the fair, with my head on Tommy’s shoulder, early as it was, barely a week after we’d met.
Lights flashed around us, music played from a band on a stage below, we looked out over Austin and my fingers were interlaced with his. He kissed me at the top of the ferris wheel, held his arm around me, and everything felt so good. It felt like clear skies, the heat of a late evening, going to a diner after, that was open twenty four hours a day. He said his friend made his dating app profile for him and he only spent ten minutes on it that night, with no intention of picking it up again.
And date after date, night after night, it felt like fate had brought us together. He made me laugh, in bed together and out on the sidewalk. He gave me the type of focused attention I’d only ever gotten from one other man, but that man was somewhere else in this city, and yet some silly part of me still hoped that he’d be jealous if he saw me now. Part of me hoped he would hate Tommy a little bit for taking what he thought was his.
It was easy to be with Tommy Miller, it was lighthearted and fun to fly down the highway in the passenger seat of his truck with his hand on my thigh and music blasting on the speakers. His hand was on my back, my shoulder, my waist, holding me close. In many ways, it was perfect — there was no other way to describe how it felt to hear his voice over the phone, to see him standing in the doorway, to feel him on me, his rough hands on my skin and the soft smile on his face whenever he looked into my eyes.
The only thing that was missing wouldn’t have marked its absence had I not soaked the sheets of that hotel room. Anyone would be lucky to have Tommy in bed with them, he was generous and kind and fun and yet when he wiped the towel across my back, I thought about him. I looked down at my sheets, damp from sweat, and remembered how it looked when they were transparent beneath where my hips were held up, and I was devoured.
It’s alright, sweetheart, don’t be scared.
August
Tommy was the laid back type, a nice reprieve from my own neuroticism. He cheered me up on my bad days, he calmed me down on those that were stressful, he brought popcorn and his Netflix account when he came over in the evenings to watch movies. On the loading screen, there were three names: Tommy, Joel, and Sarah.
My brother and my niece, he said, only one of them actually uses their account, guess wh o.
Joel was a few years older than him, he told me, only five years but had been through much more. A divorced single father before he turned thirty, a man mentioned by name but who I never saw photos of anywhere in Tommy’s bare bones apartment… The guy became quite an elusive figure. He was always at work with Tommy or at his house with Sarah, and we never crossed paths.
Sarah tagged along to the movies one night. She met us outside, still in her soccer uniform and backpack, and she had crystal green eyes, long curls and a beaming smile on her face. She shook my hand, hugged Tommy, and she rolled her eyes when he asked where her dad was off to that evening.
“I think he’s going on a date but won’t tell me,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” Tommy snickered, looping his arm around my waist as we made our way into the dark.
“Yeah, he was wearing a nice shirt and kept saying he was just ‘meeting a friend’. As if.”
He snorted, and we found our seats.
Everywhere I looked for red flags, I found none. Where I tried to find reasons for why Tommy wasn’t perfect, or our relationship was not meant to be, there was nothing.
Another month would go by before the wrecking ball would hit.