by J. R. Rogue
“Was it hard to accept those gifts?”
“Yes. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen at first. Finally, I told him that every time he left me a gift – and those weren’t the only ones, there were flowers being sent to work – I told him it reminded me of what I did to him. And it made me sad, brought no happiness. I told him it was selfish to leave them. He was trying to make me love him again. He didn’t care that all I wanted was to be happy again. He just wanted to be happy again.”
60
Two Crashing Cars
Me: You can break me open. If anyone can, it’s you.
Logan: I hope I can. I’m fucking crazy about you.
Me: Why?
Logan: Because you make me feel things I’ve never experienced.
Me: But why?
Logan: Because of the type of person you are. You’re the most genuine person I’ve ever met. Or, I’m about to meet.
Me: Tell me now. Again. I need to hear it.
Logan: I’m head over heels for you. I’ve never been so consumed with someone like this. Ever. I dream of you. Good things, not my nightmares. They’re gone because of you.
Logan: I’m drinking and I know you’re asleep but I needed you to know this.
Logan: I want you. I miss you even though we’ve never met. I can’t wait to kiss you, and I have fallen so fucking hard for you.
Our texting was foreplay, and we both wanted more. We couldn’t live without knowing what it would be like to meet in person.
When I saw Logan for the first time he was shorter than I had hoped, but the way he walked was hypnotizing. I hated the shape of my thighs, the wrinkles around my eyes. I had obsessed about every detail on the plane, nearly threw up when I landed.
I was suddenly very aware that I was seven years older than him, but God, the way he smiled as he walked toward me made my thighs ache. I was unhinged, shy.
I covered my face with my hand, listened to the sound of his Converse on the sidewalk outside of the airport. "Oh my god," I said.
He grabbed my hand and pulled me up, wrapped his arms around my entire body, pulled me from the ground.
My arms found their way around his neck. His hair fanned my face and I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t let him see it. I felt like I'd known him my entire life and everything had led to this. I wavered on the soulmate debate in the past, but this felt like the nail in the coffin, the nail in my hypothesis.
I heard his voice and it coiled around me. The late-night calls, the video chats, they didn't compare to this.
He was flesh and blood and the most beautiful man I ever laid eyes on, this walking embodiment of everything I wanted, everything I needed. I felt like I had written him into existence. I had been working on my novel for years, and everything I wanted in a man, everything Connor was not giving me, I wrote into a character. I wrote out my desires. This soft voiced man, seven years younger than his love interest. This artist. This broken human. I wrote that character, then I found Logan. The embodiment of everything I thought couldn’t be real. It seemed like a dream.
His teeth were not perfect, but there was more in that smile than I could ever write about.
I'd been chasing perfection too maybe, just like Connor, but every man who matched every little check off mark on my list, they were beneath him. I wouldn't recover from this, and I knew it would be something I had to recover from.
He set me on the ground and I saw in his eyes a warming affection, but fireworks were far from blazing. I pushed the idle inspection aside and let him take my carry-on suitcase.
My friends and I dissected everything about what the first meeting would be like. They said he would take me into his arms, kiss me immediately. I said he wouldn't. My gut told me we would be too shy. I was right. I'd been in his presence for an hour and I knew I couldn't go any longer.
We were lying on his bed, on our sides, facing each other.
His room was a mess. The same kind of frat room I'd been avoiding for so many years, but his age made me forgive it, and he had just moved in.
I ran my fingers over his forearm, over the fresh ink on his arm.
"God," he said. "I feel like I've been waiting forever for this. For you to touch me."
"Sit back," I said. He pulled himself up, leaned his back against the wall. I crawled across the bed and straddled him, but I did not kiss him.
I felt in control and it was thrilling. It was the thing I always craved, the control I could normally only find with younger men.
I grazed my lips over the vein in his neck and I felt him shiver.
It was too much. How could I keep my lips from him when he sighed like that? I wanted to play the game but he won with that vulnerable sigh. I thought then, that maybe, the games would be done, finally.
This kiss, it would go down as one of the single most perfect moments of my life. He and I could not overcome what was between us. Thirty-two and twenty-five, half a country apart.
I told myself he would be in my life for just a moment because a burning like this couldn't be real.
He would be in my life for just one moment to wreck it. To show me what belief was. The cynic in me could not compete with the cynic in him.
We were too alike. The same scars, the same mental ticking, ready to implode. Every experiment needs a control group, and we were two crashing cars. I needed someone to steady me. He needed someone to steady him.
We would be a slow-burning fire, a spark that died quickly, leaving scars. I had three more days with him and I would make sure I was touching him for every moment of those days and hours.
How can you say hello and goodbye to someone all at once, with one kiss? We had shared so much, so many virtual confessions. I wanted to confess to him with my skin for as long as I could. Before my plane took off.
I didn't believe him when he said I was safe with him. He meant it, but it was a lie. Maybe he knew it, maybe he didn't, but I determined right there and then that I would give him almost every bit of my heart. I would save the smallest, most vulnerable bit. Because I did not trust him with it.
This boy had more power in his lips than others had in their entire body to wound me.
I'd rather be wounded by a man who meant to, than by a man who thought he was there to save me. Who convinced himself he was whole enough to save a drowning woman. He could never love me the way the man I had just broken could. He was too broken himself.
61
A Coward And A Liar
“I often found myself so set on a revenge, of sorts. When a man did me wrong, I abandoned all loyalty to him. The high of Logan didn't last long. When I got back home to Missouri, I learned he wronged me before I even had a chance to see him face-to-face. His ex-girlfriend, someone he couldn’t let go of yet, had flown out to see him two weeks before I did. I silently said a prayer that I found out after my trip. The plane ticket was bought, paid for. I did not check the trip insurance box. I was going whether I wanted to or not. We didn't speak of the wrong he did after that one phone call two days after I got home. I buried it, the way I always did. A flicker of Connor flashed across my mind when the truth hit."
"Why did he come to mind?"
"He wouldn't have pulled that shit with me. Well, maybe six or seven years ago he would have. But we were long past that. His weapons had become his walls. Not deceit. Not another girl. When I landed back in Missouri, I pushed Logan from my mind for a few days. I didn't text him in the twenty-four hours after I got home. I left my phone home on purpose. When I got home from work, I found a dozen frantic texts and five missed calls from him. Wondering what was wrong. Why I was ignoring him. I thought about the tables and if they had been turned. If a guy had flown across the country to see me and then ghosted me when he got home. I wanted to feel guilty, but I had it in my gut. The knowledge that he was a temporary part of my life.
“And the saddest part of it all, was that I knew, deep in my gut, that I loved him. I loved him in a way that was completely separate from my love for Connor. From anyth
ing I felt for him. They existed in different realms of my heart. That little barren wasteland somehow had enough space for my love of two men. It had been ripping me apart for the entire year. It was only April and I knew I couldn't survive the rest of the calendar days like that. Split in two. Denying both men my wholeness. Connor’s frantic texts stopped a week after I landed, after my layover call with him, after he saw the picture I uploaded to my Instagram of Logan and me on the beach."
"That's how he learned about Logan?"
"Yes. I was a coward and a liar. He knew then, that my loneliness wasn't the only reason I left him. I wanted to drown in a black hole. My empty bedroom with no thoughts of love or longing. No thoughts of what I was turning into. I thought of Connor’s family. I could never go back. They knew who I was. The damage I had done. I imagined him telling them. Telling them it wasn't just that he drove me away. The truth was I fell for another man. I wish he hadn't let me. I wish he had held onto my whole heart." I let tears warm my cheeks, thinking of who I became three years ago. "His distance had let me turn into the one thing I hated most. The two-faced villain. The same kind of sinner my ex-lovers had been. Did I turn Avery to this kind of sin? Did he feel lonely with me?" I think of his skin under mine when he cheated on Wendy. "No. I was not him." Men cheated to feel fresh flesh. Women cheated to ease the ache of a loneliness they tried to wish away.
"But you mended things with Logan, right?"
"A Band-Aid forgiveness, the kind I was good at. After a few days, I started to warm to Logan again. But I was changed. I no longer let romance into my language. No hope of a future. Just a here and now mentality. And I felt it in him, too. He would later tell me he never wanted us to not know each other. In those words, I felt the fluttering of what I feared most. His blackout from my life. He said it because he felt it, too. That one day, we wouldn't know each other."
I look down at my hands, my shaking hands. "We savored the days. Every night at 2 a.m. I woke to his texts. Telling me about his day, calling me sometimes. I lost more weight and the bags under my eyes grew to large pools. Losing sleep for him was a drug, and I didn't care. My life was sepia and my tongue was that of a serpent. A month later, Connor called. I answered. He didn't bring Logan up. He didn't bring up the way I ruined him. He talked to me like a friend and I wondered if he was seeing someone. If someone was sleeping in the bed we bought in the house I decorated. Parking in my spot in the driveway."
"Would you have been jealous if you knew there was someone there?"
"I was filled with a mixture of emotions that moved through me fluidly. Jealousy over a phantom. Thankfulness over a phantom. I wanted his happiness but a tiny little voice inside wanted to rip it away, if he had it. I wanted to be the only one who gave it to him. He asked me out to dinner. I said no. He asked me to go for a walk with him. So I said yes. It seemed harmless. I loved our old neighborhood. I felt safe there. The old trailer park was depressing me. I would ask myself every night, as I tried to sleep after seeing Logan's name light up my phone, how I got back there. Maybe Connor knew I would want that warmth again. I loved the colors of the row houses. The shutters. My old mailbox was blue and I always felt blue when I looked at it. When I saw it again, I thought of the day Connor painted it. He said he wanted it to match the color of my eyes. I wondered if he kept the keys on the walls. All the ones I collected while we were together. I should have taken them with me but the walls of the trailer were better bare, better with boxes stacked against them. A past I didn't want to reopen."
“Why did you still talk to Logan every night?”
“He understood things Connor never could."
"What kind of things?"
"Abuse, neglect." I hesitate. Do I have a right to tell Logan's story? What was done to him? How he saw a therapist as a child. Then a psychologist. Is it my right to tell anyone about the medication he had to take, to battle the night terrors? The images of a woman entering his room, taking his heart in her red hands? "When I graduated high school, my father didn’t show. It had been three years since he and my mother had split, and his presence had been scarce when they were together as it was. Being let down by him was the norm. I was used to it, used to the pit in my stomach when waiting for him. For phone calls, for birthday presents, for any type of attention. So his absence was expected. What wasn’t expected, was the cost. A cost Logan understood."
"What was the cost?”
"My hair began to fall out in clumps over the summer. It was a strange cocktail, that year. My father was a no-show. My high school boyfriend, the guy I had lost my virginity to, cheated on me five days after I gave it up. I was living at home still, which was no surprise. I had no plan for after school. I had no interest in college and the thought of being out in the world frightened me. I developed an unhealthy dependence on the shitty boyfriend who betrayed me. Instead of kicking him to the curb, I took him back. Forgiveness is not always the answer. It's a weakness. One I own, fully.”
“That’s why you think you forgave Logan? Because you’re weak?”
"Yes. Because he was the only one I had ever been able to talk to about my family. He didn't pity me. He understood me. He knew what it felt like to want to take your life, but his thoughts hadn't been idle, like mine. When he was a teen, he tried. And I'm so thankful he failed. After living with a man for years who would show me nothing of his heart, I clung to Logan. I would take him any way I could. I would take his friendship if it was all we could share."
62
Heart In A Glass Jar
Logan's an artist. He writes poetry. He paints. He helped his father build the house he lived in as a teenager to escape the pain his aunt caused him, the same kind my father caused me. He loves to sing in the shower, in the kitchen, in bed. When I visited him on the coast we wrote together in silence, then shared our poems. We walked along the beach at night. We took tequila shots and laughed. He always calls me by my full name. He's a wonderful uncle, a passionate friend. He made love to me like I wasn’t something delicate, like I wouldn't break. Because he knew how resilient humans could be, he knew we could come back from what was stolen from us.
He had no desire to have children. He reminds me that I am still a woman, even though I no longer want to bring life into this world. The innocence we lost, bloomed bright between our palms when he reached for me for the first time.
His voice is soft, nearly as soft as his hands.
Still, I won't let my guard down. He lied and I cannot forget that. I don't care that the girl visited him before me, not after.
My mother had told me to always be the one who loved less. I failed before, and recovering was still something I was unable to do. I will always keep my heart in a glass jar. No one, no one but myself, is allowed to break me. No one can have that kind of control over me.
When Connor came to my work four weeks after finding out about me and Logan, I pulled him down an aisle, leveled him with my eyes. "What are you doing here?"
"I need new dishes; you took ours." He didn't frown or say it in a tone that sounded defensive. There was humor in his voice. He wanted me to see his heart wasn't broken. That he was moving on. Buying new dishes with the help of the ex who took his. I wanted to shove him and make him go away.
He looked good. Slim and tan. The sallow color of his skin was gone. The hollow look in his eyes was gone, too.
"Are you going to help me pick some?"
I think my mouth fell open a little. He laughed and walked away, calling over his shoulder, "Come on, heartbreaker, you owe me."
I followed him, recalling the way I followed him, for years, blindly.
We made it to the housewares section. His hands were on his hips; he had shorts on and I thought he knew what he was doing. His legs were always one of the things I loved the most about him. The years of hockey had been kind to him. The fabric was pulled taut over his ass, also made of marble. What an ass. No, more like what an asshole.
"So, what do you want?" I crossed my arms, pretended to st
are at the dishes surrounding us, but I was really looking to make sure none of my coworkers were witnessing this.
"I want you, but that's not going to happen," he said, then quickly talked again, not letting me reply. "I think this pattern looks nice."
He pointed to a black and white china pattern. It was the opposite of the dishes I had taken with me. If I moved back in, by some strange turn of events, they wouldn't match at all.
I walked away and came back with a plate. I held it in the air and he nodded, so I turned and he followed me to the display in the corner.
I started to gather them and Connor helped, grazing his fingers along mine as he went. I glared at him and he just laughed, not even trying to hide what he was doing.
We hadn't touched in so long. My skin was on fire. I thought of Logan. Of the last time we talked.
I saw a coworker walk by, eyes wide, recognizing my ex. I rolled my eyes and shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing here. I should have let one of the other girls help him.
I fell right into his trap. I felt like I was in a time warp, back to five or six years ago, when he had me wrapped around his little finger.
“Would you like to come over sometime? Help me break in my new dinnerware?"
"Is that why you came here? You could get dishes anywhere, you know."
“Oh for sure, I'm here to see you. To show you how great I look, to tell you how great you look. I haven't given up on us and I doubt I ever will. It’s you for me, that's it."
I stared at him, blinked, and started eyeing the dishes again.
"I know you can’t see it yet, but we are supposed to be together. After everything we have been through, how could we not be?” He ran his hand over the edge of a mug, inspecting it.
“We didn't work out though."