Chapter 24 – Unfinished Arguments.

We broke up on a Wednesday. By Friday I was at his door. Not because I'd forgiven him I hadn't, not entirely. Not because the argument had been resolved, because it hadn't been, not really. The things we'd said were still sitting in the air between us, still had their edges, and we both knew it. But he'd sent money for food with a message that said eat something, and I'd looked at the message for twenty minutes telling myself I wasn't going, and then found myself on the way there without fully deciding to go. That was the thing about us. The decisions happened in my body before my head caught up. He opened the door when I knocked and looked at me the way he always looked at me when I'd been away even briefly like he was checking that I was still whole. Like absence made him want to inventory me. "You came," he said. "You sent food money," I said. "I was hungry." He stepped back to let me in. Didn't say anything about the fact that I could have bought food anywhere. Didn't say anything about the argument. Just let me in and went to the kitchen and came back with actual food he'd already made, set it in front of me like feeding me was a completely normal and not at all pointed thing to do after three days of silence. I ate. He sat across from me and watched me eat with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral. "Stop looking at me like that," I said. "Like what." "Like that."He looked away. Looked back. "I'm just sitting here." "You're doing the thing." "What thing." "The thing where you look at me and think I can't tell what you're thinking." A pause. Then, almost to himself: "Can you?" I put my fork down. Met his eyes across the table. What he was thinking was the same thing I was thinking, which was that we were sitting here pretending the argument was the whole story when both of us knew it wasn't. The argument was just the surface. Underneath it was everything else the distance, the cycle, the way we kept arriving back at each other no matter how many times we tried to walk away. "I'm still annoyed with you," I said. "I know." "I haven't forgiven you for what you said." "I know that too." "So why did you send money." He looked at me for a moment. Steady. That particular steadiness of his that I had never once managed to rattle properly, no matter how hard I'd tried. "Because you needed to eat," he said simply. "And I needed to know you were okay. Those two things don't stop being true because we're fighting." I stared at him. Said nothing. Because what do you say to that. What argument do you make against someone who, even in the middle of a broken up period, is still thinking about whether you've eaten. I picked my fork back up. Looked at my food. "Your food is actually decent this time," I said. Something shifted in his face. Not quite a smile more like the decision not to fight one. "Experience," he said. And I laughed. Couldn't help it. It came out before I could catch it, real and sudden, and he laughed too, and just like that the worst of the tension broke open and fell away like it had been waiting for permission. We ended up on the couch after. Me on one end, him on the other, a movie playing that neither of us was watching. The physical distance deliberate we both knew that proximity had a way of making decisions for us and tonight wasn't supposed to be that kind of night. Except. He shifted at some point. Not toward me, just shifting, getting comfortable, and his arm ended up along the back of the couch behind me. Not touching. Just there. I was aware of it the way you're aware of something warm near your skin in cold weather. I kept my eyes on the screen. His fingers, after a while, found the back of my neck. Light. Almost casual. The kind of touch that could be nothing or could be everything depending on what happened next. "We're not doing this," I said. To the TV. "Doing what," he said. Innocent. Entirely unconvincing. "This." His thumb moved slowly at the nape of my neck and every nerve in my body registered it at the same time. "I'm just sitting here," he said. I turned to look at him. His expression was calm and patient and completely aware of exactly what he was doing. We looked at each other for a long moment the argument still between us, the unresolved things still there, the three days of silence still present in the room. None of it mattered as much as it should have. "You're terrible," I told him. "Mm," he said. I closed the distance between us. The argument didn't get finished that night. The unresolved things stayed unresolved. But somewhere between the couch and the bedroom and the late hour and the particular way he said my name in the dark, I stopped being able to remember exactly what we'd been fighting about. That was the problem with us. We were better at this than we were at anything else. Better at bodies than at words, better at the language of skin than the language of sitting across a table and saying the hard things plainly. It kept saving us and it kept failing us, in equal measure. And I couldn't tell anymore which one it was doing tonight.

Forbidden Love Story

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