I still had the ticket stub. November 14, 2016, Boston, seat 14C. The ink had gone brown at the folds and the paper had softened into something closer to felt than paper. It lived in the back of my wallet behind my insurance card, which meant I saw it every time I had to prove I existed to a pharmacist.
Ten years. Three cities. One letter I wrote and never sent, still in the drawer of the desk he built out of a door and two sawhorses — the desk I claimed for my thesis, then left behind with everything else.
The train was forty minutes late. Track maintenance, the announcement said, in that flat Amtrak cadence, a man reading a warning label.
I bought coffee because the platform was freezing and because standing still with empty hands felt like waiting. I had promised myself I wasn’t waiting.
He was on bench three. Under the peeling paint, black coffee, no sugar. He blew on it three times before he drank — one, two, three — and I stood there with my cup going warm in my hands and thought, absurdly, that I had rehearsed this in nine different cities and never once rehearsed him being early.
“You kept the stub,” he said.
I hadn’t shown it to him. I hadn’t taken it out. It was in my wallet, behind the insurance card, and he couldn’t see it, and he said it anyway.
“How,” I said.
“You’re doing the thing with your thumb.” He nodded at my hand. “You do that when you’re holding it.”
I looked down. I was doing the thing with my thumb.
“Sit,” he said. “It’s forty minutes. Maybe an hour now.”
“I’m not —”
“I know.” He moved over. Not a lot. A foot, maybe. “I know what you’re not.”
I sat.
The bench was cold through my jeans, the same damp cold I remembered, and for a while we didn’t say anything. The platform filled up and emptied out. A kid dragged a suitcase with a wheel that squeaked, and the squeak went all the way down to the end and then came back, which meant the kid had given up and was coming back. Two women in matching coats argued quietly about whose fault the tickets were. A man sold pretzels out of a cart with a hand-lettered sign and no prices.
“You look the same,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“No. You don’t.” He turned the cup a quarter turn. “I was trying to be polite.”
“That’s new.”
He laughed. It was the same laugh, which was the unfair thing, the thing I had spent a decade not thinking about. The laugh line by his eye had deepened into something permanent. Three strands of gray at his temple, right where the hair went back. He was wearing the same detergent, the unscented kind his mother used to buy in bulk, and it hit me somewhere under the ribs.
“The bakery’s still there?” I said.
“Still there. I’m upstairs now. Above it.” He took a drink. “The rent’s insane and the whole place smells like yeast by five in the morning, and I’ve stopped noticing, which is its own kind of sad.”
“Your mother?”
“Gone four years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” He blew on the coffee. “She liked you. She used to say you were the only person who ate her fruitcake without making a face.”
“I did make a face.”
“I know. She liked that too.”
The announcement came again. Further delays. We appreciate your patience. Half the platform groaned and started calling rideshares, phone screens lighting up one by one in the dark like a second, sadder set of windows.
Neither of us moved.
the platform · later that night
“I wrote you a letter,” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “I know.”
“You don’t know.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” He set the cup down on the bench, balanced on the armrest, and turned. “I know you wrote something. I know because you always wrote things down before you could say them, and I know you didn’t send it, because nothing came. After that I just had a lot of theories.”
“They were all probably right.”
“Some of them were generous.”
I laughed, which surprised me. The cold had got into my jaw and it came out cracked.
“It’s in the desk drawer,” I said. “In the apartment. Unless you threw the desk out.”
“I kept the desk.”
“You kept a desk you built out of a door.”
“I kept the desk,” he said, “and the drawer sticks, so I know what’s in it, and I haven’t opened it in ten years, so.” He shrugged. “It’s a whole thing.”
“I’m not asking you to open it.”
“I know what you’re asking.”
The train came in at last, slow and wrong, the doors opening with that wheeze. People got on. A woman in a puffer coat dragged three bags on and stood in the doorway blocking it while she found her ticket, and everyone behind her made the same face, and the conductor said ma’am twice.
“You’re going to Boston,” he said.
“I was.”
“Was.”
I looked at the train, then at him.
“Did you ever stop?” he said. “Not — I’m not asking if you still. I know that’s not how it works. I’m asking if you ever stopped. Once. For a while. Any of it.”
The doors chimed. The doors closed.
“Not once,” I said.
The train pulled out without us. The yellow windows went past, one after another, blurred, and then the red tail lights, and then the platform was empty except for the two of us and the pretzel cart closing up.
He kissed me. His hand came up to my jaw like he was checking whether I was still there, and I got a fistful of his coat and pulled, and the coffee went over on the armrest, both cups, and neither of us cared. He tasted like black coffee and ten years. The scar on his chin was under my thumb. It had healed wrong, like I remembered, a little raised.
“I’m not leaving this time,” he said into my mouth.
“I know.”
“Say it back.”
“I’m not leaving.” I kissed him again, harder, because saying it out loud had done something to my chest that I didn’t have a name for. “Neither am I. Take me home.”
his apartment above the bakery · that night
His apartment was two rooms over a bakery, and it smelled like yeast and butter and the cold coming off the river. He got the door open one-handed. He was already pulling at my coat before the light was on.
“Wait,” I said.
He stopped. Completely. Hands off, one step back, and I remembered that about him too — how he’d never once made me ask twice.
“I want to,” I said. “I’m saying I want to. I just need a second to be in the room.”
“Take the whole night.”
“That’s a lot of seconds.”
“I’ve got them.”
I got my coat off. Then my boots, one at a time, sitting on the floor with my back against the door. He watched me from the doorway with his hands at his sides, and the wanting in his face was so plain and so patient that I had to look at the rug.
“Come here,” I said.
He came. He knelt down and kissed me where I sat, and his hands went into my hair, and I got my fingers under his shirt and found his back warm and a little damp from the walk. He made a low sound when I dragged my nails down.
“Bed,” I said.
“Say please.”
“Please.”
“See,” he said, standing and pulling me up with him, “you always could be taught.”
We didn’t make it to the bed the first time. We made it as far as the arm of the couch, my jeans around one ankle, his hand flat between my shoulder blades, holding me bent over it while he got himself out and then paused — actually paused, the bastard — and said, “Yes?”
“Yes. God. Yes.”
He pushed in and I stopped being able to make jokes.
It was slow at first, and then it wasn’t. The couch arm creaked. Somewhere below us the bakery’s walk-in compressor kicked on with a shudder that went through the floor. He had one hand in my hair and one on my hip and he kept talking, low, half of it nonsense, my name a few times, and I put my forehead down on the cushion and let it happen, ten years of not letting it happen, and when I came it surprised me so badly I swore into the fabric.
He followed a minute later, pulled out, and sat down on the floor with his back against the couch like his legs had stopped working.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Give me a year and I’ll do that properly.”
“Give me a night and I’ll believe you.”
We got to the bed an hour later, after half a sleeve of crackers and a glass of water each, because neither of us had eaten since lunch and the adrenaline had gone and left us both shaky.
He undressed me properly this time. One button at a time, which took forever, and I complained about it, and he said, “You said you needed a second to be in the room,” and kept going. By the time he got my bra off I’d stopped complaining.
He put his mouth on my throat, then my chest, then lower, and he went down on me with a patience that was either devotion or a point being made. I got a hand in his hair and my heel against his back and said his name twice, the second time louder than I meant. He laughed against me and didn’t stop.
“Come up here,” I said. “I want — come here.”
He came up. I got him on his back and straddled him and took his cock in my hand and slid down onto it slow, and we both made the same stupid noise. For a second I just sat there, full, his hands on my thighs, the compressor going somewhere under the floor.
Then I moved.
He watched me the whole time. That was the thing about him — he watched, and it made me want to be worth watching, and I rode him until my thighs burned and my hair stuck to my neck and I had one hand braced flat on his chest. He got his thumb where I needed it and I came like that, sitting up, his name in my mouth, my nails in his skin.
He came a minute after. Pulled out and got it hot across my stomach and said sorry, and I said don’t be, and neither of us moved for a while.
his apartment · the next morning
The residue was this: my toothbrush in his bathroom cup the next morning, next to his, leaning the wrong way. Croissant flakes in his sheets, and he brushed them off with the flat of his hand and then didn’t get up. Four small bruises coming up on my hip in a row, where his fingers had been, and I kept pressing them under the table while we ate, the way you press a bruise you paid for. Coffee for two, black, and he blew on both cups three times before handing me one, one two three, which is either a ritual or a tic and by then I had stopped needing to know which.
I watched him throw the ticket stub away. He did it in the kitchen, without ceremony, into the bin with the coffee grounds, and I felt the loss of it in my chest like a pulled tooth.
“We could keep it,” I said.
“It’s a stub.” He put the lid back on the bin. “You’re here. I’d rather have the thing that’s here.”
Three weeks later I signed a lease with two names on it, and my handwriting slanted the way it does on anything official, and his sat above mine, steady and a little too large for the line. The key that came with it was brass and already worn smooth at the edge from somebody else’s pocket. I put it on my ring next to the car key that doesn’t work anymore.
The letter came out of the drawer on a Sunday. He didn’t read it. He put it on the table between us, and I put my hand over it, and we left it there through two cups of coffee and most of the paper, and then I put it back and closed the drawer.
It still sticks.
