“Anything,” he said. “Something no one else here knows. Not that they’re bad—just true.”
It felt intimate and honest, an odd palimpsest over the erotic clamor. I thought of the nights I’d spent awake, the list of small longings that had grown into something that now stood before me. I touched the scar on my knee because it was a story I could tell without exposing the most dangerous parts. “I once hitchhiked half the state when I was twenty to see a band,” I admitted, smiling at the memory.
He laughed softly and told a story about a fishing trip that went wrong and ended in a very old car and a very new understanding about patience. We traded truths like talismans, each revelation stitching us closer in a way words hadn’t before. The intimacy of confession was its own aphrodisiac.
When
