Page 9 of Brash for It
Brian:Christ.
Q:You promised me Tuesday.Don’t make me wait until Friday like last time.
Brian:I said I’d try.She’s around and I have obligations to her.
Q:She always is.
Brian:You jealous?
Q:I don’t share well.
Brian:I know.;)
The winky face blew me away because he’s never sent me any kind of flirty text.The next thing is a video I don’t play, because I’m not made of stone and I’m also not made of anything that can survive that.The one after is a text:
Q:You left your toothbrush beside mine.I’ll keep it in that spot on the vanity for you, lover.
Beside mine.She will keep it on the vanity.Not a hotel, then.Not a random.Not a one-off.Something with roots belonging to her.Something that has a place to hold his spare things.The realization is physical.It grabs at my sanity and has me struggling to breathe.
I swipe up to older messages because I want to inflict damage, apparently.I can’t stop.Two weeks ago, a private joke about a waiter.Three weeks ago, a photo of a bracelet—a thin gold thing with a tiny charm—and Brian’s comment:Looks good on you.A month ago, “Happy for you” when she got some job thing I didn’t know he cared about.If I scroll back far enough, will it hit where he and I overlap?I don’t try.My stomach has limits.
The water in the shower shuts off.
The silence slams like a door.The fan whirs on, then off.The subtle shift of the air in the house as the bathroom door opens just a crack and steam slips under.My heart fumbles and drops, then scrambles after the beat like it got startled except it’s shattered so all the pieces are everywhere inside me and I can’t get them back together.
I exit the screen, lock the phone ,and flip it face-down the way he left it.I set it gently on the nightstand with the precise angle he always puts it at, like it’s a compass and true north will only find him if the black rectangle is pointed toward it just so.I force myself to stand there and breathe until my hands stop looking like they belong to a person in a horror film.
The door opens.He steps out with a towel slung low on his hips, hair wet and pushed back.He looks like someone else’s fantasy.I blink though and he looks like my partner, my person, and that makes me angrier.
“You want the shower?”he asks, like nothing has shifted on the axis of the earth.His eyes pass over me like he’s searching, but finds nothing wrong and keeps moving.
“I’m fine,” I say, which is the kind of lie you train yourself to tell when fine is the price of entry.I want to rush to the shower and wash every bit of him off me.Then the part of me that loves this man wants to cling to his smell on my skin, the way my body still feels him inside me.
He rakes a hand through his hair and drops the towel to step into fresh boxers, pulling them up like we’re just doing the regular routine of bedtime.The phone sits quiet, innocent, and black as a closed eye.
He heads to the dresser, grabs a T-shirt, pulls it on.He checks his watch.He doesn’t check his phone.Not yet.He will.He always does before he sleeps, scrolling through emails and finance apps and whatever else keeps him in rooms with men who speak in numbers and shake hands that feel like decisions.
I watch him watch himself in the mirror, adjust the shirt so it falls a little better on his shoulders, tug it down.The man in the reflection smiles at the man he thinks he is.
“Kristen?”he says, finally catching my stillness.
“Yeah.”
He tilts his head.“You okay?”
There it is.The tiny door opening.He offered it without meaning to.He will hate that in thirty seconds.
I pick up my dress and step into it, because the armor feels better than the exposure.The zipper rasps up my spine.“I’ve got a question.”
He frowns, mild.“Shoot.”
I look at the phone.Then at him.My voice is steady when I don’t recognize it.“Who’s Q.?”
The name floats between us, light as a balloon.Then it pops, and the air in the room changes.Not invisible.You can feel these shifts if you live with a person long enough—pressure dropping before a storm, static prickling before lightning strikes.
His gaze flickers, one microsecond to the nightstand and back.If I wasn’t looking directly at him, I’d miss it.His mouth twists into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Is this what we’re doing?”he asks, lazy, like I’ve brought him a menu he already knows he hates.
