Chapter 3: Thursday
1128 Words
He made it four days.
Four days of normal. Four days of Zara and work and the gym and Thursday morning coffee in the kitchen of their apartment in Crestfield, the one with the broken tile by the sink that he kept meaning to fix.
Four days of being fine.
He broke at 11:43 a.m. on a Thursday, in a stairwell at work, for no reason he could point to. Nothing had happened. Nobody said anything. He had simply been walking to a meeting, passed the stairwell on the second floor landing, stopped, leaned against the wall, and picked up his phone.
He typed before he could build a case against it.
'You were right. It didn't fix it.'
He pocketed his phone and walked into his meeting.
The reply came eleven minutes later.
'I know.'
That was how it started.
Not with anything dramatic. Not with a decision anyone actually made. Just two words landing in his chest like something that had been waiting to land there for four days, and Marcus reading them in the middle of a conference room while his colleague Drew talked about drainage schematics for a development project in Halton Grove.
'I know.'
He typed back under the table.
'I don't understand what's happening.'
Damon replied: 'Neither do I. I've been with Jade for seven months. Before her there was Claire. Before Claire there was Sasha. I don't have a version of myself that looks like this.'
Marcus looked at that message for a long time.
He typed: 'Same. I've never. Not once.'
'Not once' was doing a lot of work in that sentence and they both understood what it was carrying.
Damon replied: 'So we're just two completely straight men who apparently cannot stop texting each other.'
Marcus almost smiled. He caught himself. Drew was now asking him a direct question about load tolerances and Marcus answered it correctly on pure muscle memory and hated himself a little for how easily the performance came.
After the meeting he sat in his car in the basement car park and they talked for forty minutes. Not about anything important. That was the part that scared him the most. It was not loaded conversation or negotiation or two men trying to make sense of an anomaly. It was just talking. Damon had a dry, unhurried sense of humor that arrived without announcement and landed clean. He had opinions about architecture that were wrong in interesting ways. He had a story about his brother and a rental car in Westmere that made Marcus laugh so suddenly he hit his knee on the steering wheel.
He drove home with his chest full of something unnamed.
Zara made pasta. He set the table. They watched a show she liked and he kept his phone in his pocket and said all the right things at the right times and she fell asleep against his shoulder on the sofa at nine-thirty, and he sat there in the quiet under the warm weight of her and stared at the ceiling.
He thought: this is my life. This is the actual structure of my life. This woman. This sofa. This apartment with the broken tile.
He thought: I am not someone who does this.
He thought: I have been texting Damon for forty minutes today and I cannot locate a single part of myself that wants to stop.
He moved Zara gently to a cushion. Covered her with the blanket from the arm of the sofa. Turned the TV off.
Went to bed.
Picked up his phone.
Typed: 'She's asleep.'
He sent it before he understood what sending it meant. What intimacy it assumed. What line it crossed, quietly, in the dark of a room where the other side of the bed was still empty and warm from earlier.
Damon replied three minutes later.
'Jade too. She has a six a.m. Pilates thing.'
A pause.
'You shouldn't have texted that.'
Marcus looked at it.
'I know', he typed.
'Stop doing that.'
'Doing what.'
'Saying what I'm thinking before I can say it.'
Marcus put his phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling. His heart was doing something functional but annoying. He was twenty-six years old and his heart was behaving like a teenager and he had no framework for this whatsoever because nothing in his life had ever required one.
He picked the phone back up.
'Can I ask you something.'
'Depends', Damon replied.
'When did you know. That Friday wasn't nothing.'
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
'When I was driving home and Jade was talking and I realized I hadn't heard a single word she'd said since we left the restaurant.'
Marcus read it.
'For me it was the parking lot', he typed. 'I found a spot on the first try. I thought it meant the night was going to be easy.'
'That's a lot of faith to put in a parking space.'
'I'm reconsidering my entire system.'
A pause. Then Damon sent a single punctuation mark.
A period.
Just a period, sitting alone in the message bubble. Marcus stared at it and understood that it was not a typo. It was a man on the other side of a phone holding something in and letting the smallest possible piece of it out, and Marcus understood it the way you understand something that bypasses language entirely.
He typed: 'This has to stop.'
Damon replied immediately: 'Yes.'
'I mean it', Marcus typed.
'So do I.'
'We can't keep doing this.'
'Agreed.'
'So this is the last time.'
A long pause. Longer than the others.
Then: 'Okay.'
Marcus exhaled.
'Good night', he typed.
'Good night.'
He plugged his phone in. Put it face-down on the nightstand. Zara came to bed at some point, slipping in beside him, cool and quiet. He did not move. He lay in the dark and thought: that is finished. That is done. Two men who got confused and talked it into the ground and agreed it was nothing and are now going to proceed with their actual lives.
He believed it.
He fell asleep believing it.
He woke up to a message sent at 1:16 a.m. from a man who had agreed forty minutes earlier that it was over.
'There's a place in Crestfield. Corner Tap. It's quiet. Nothing open that early but they do coffee.'
'Saturday. 8 a.m. Before anyone is awake.'
'Just to talk. Once. And then we're done.'
Marcus read it lying on his back in the grey early light of a Friday morning with his girlfriend breathing beside him and the broken tile in the kitchen three rooms away and the entire clean structure of his life intact around him.
He typed back at 6:02 a.m.
'I'll be there.'
- Writer
