​FIFTEEN

Mitch

I'm cocooned in the down comforter, and my belly is full. General Tsao's, Aaron's favorite and mine now, too. We don't eat out a lot besides the occasional birthday dinner, Elena and me, so being wrapped in the blanket of someone who calls The Dynasty Diner his “place” and who knows the number by heart lights a thrilling match down my spine. Right before the guilt comes to snuff it out.

“Thoughts?” Aaron asks me when he catches me in the hallway. He’s holding Top Gun in one hand, Risky Business in the other, and I nod my head at the DVD case with Tom Cruise on the cover, his shades pulled down and the young blond chick leaning against the hood of a car. “Legs on that one” comes hurtling like a train, and Jimmy's string of words sears a path behind my forehead.

I told Jimmy the same story: some blond that didn’t mean anything. But of course, I had to juice up the details for my sensory-obsessed friend: long legs, little waist. A smile that says she wants no one but me.

“Dang,” was all he said, and I knew it was meant as one part remorse, one part jealousy. “Is it over?” he asked, and I said it was, for Pam’s sake and for Elena’s who would probably receive the squeaky-clean version from Pam. More fudged details: I’m in a hotel room in Shiloh. I need to clear my head for the weekend. No, but thank you, Jimmy, thanks for the offer. I’d just rather tough it out on my own. Yeah, I’ve got condoms.

He did ask why I didn’t tell him about Sheila and sounded wounded like a cartoon dog. While I plucked my tongue at a strip of chicken between my teeth on Aaron’s king-sized bed, I thought up an answer: “Because you’re like a brother, Jimmy. And I didn’t want you to have to shoulder the burden of lying for me.”

“Thank you, Mitch,” he said, and the whisper of guilt formed into a full-fledged windstorm.

We agreed to take the weekend off and shore up our repairs through the week before starting St. Bonaventure’s roof leak next Saturday. It seems a world away, sitting next to Aaron in his boxers—his scar, an old friend on my mind, the little mound of flesh where past hurt braided into itself. Reformed itself.

I pad like a Greek in my white comforter toga to the living room where Aaron has opened another bottle of wine. He fires up the TV, and we drink and watch for a while—Tom gliding his white socks across the wood floor—when Aaron grabs the remote and dials down the volume. Green eyes. They’re always a surprise to look into.

“How are you really?” he asks. The wine has warmed him up. When I first called him from the parking lot of a Chevron outside of Little Rock to see if I could stay at his place, he didn’t ask any questions. Just said, “Of course,” and picked me up on his way home from work.  And we were too busy with the Chinese chicken, the first bottle of wine, the way his sheets felt as we tumbled under them to talk about it. Until now.

“Like my wife caught me cheating.”

“She caught us?” I look up, but his face isn't concerned. In fact, there's a slight smile there, and I want to point it out, but the chicken, the way the comforter is keeping me warm against the steady stream of air conditioning, the fact that tonight is my choice, and it feels pretty darn good to make my own choices stops me. And it's worse knowing what that smile means. He thinks he’s won.

“No. Well, she thinks you're a blonde with big boobs so in some insane, untrue way, yes.”

“I've always wanted highlights. The bosom, not so much.” He leans in and kisses my neck, and I close my eyes to the feel of it. You can do that with moments. Block out the dirtiest parts of your world and fall victim to the current rush of skin against skin. I've built a whole life around moments like these.

“It's serious. She kicked me out. I mean, I let myself out for the weekend. I'm not sure what I'll be going home to.”

“Then don't.” Here's another moment, but it's not skin against skin. It's Aaron in his boxer shorts wanting me to redirect my entire life down his path. Stark flashes of future me: the doting husband at the Christmas party, buying our first puppy (a Scottish Terrier because Aaron mentioned once how he’s always admired Jock from Lady and the Tramp). There's love for the future me. There's a lifetime of “finally.” But there's also quick jabs to the heart when I think of Sela and how I’ve done nothing but let Elena down.

“Wait here,” Aaron says, and it's just me and Tom in his underwear. He goes to the master bedroom, so I close my eyes. I open them when I see Elena crying against the back of my lids, and now Aaron is standing in front of me.

“I'm sorry for you, for your pain, Mitch. But I'm also not sorry because I love you.” I look again at the green in his eyes, and all I can see is honesty. There's his mother who doesn't love him anymore. And his father who doesn't love him anymore. And then there's his heart, layer after layer scalpeled away, a twist of knotted skin that proves the damage. And then there's his truth: I am his Elena.

He has a blue box, the top opened and the contents hovering in front of me. I look at them, the rings. “Brushed tungsten,” he says to say something I guess, and then I look at the one already on my finger, old and gold and inscribed with “TEAM ME,” because Elena and I were drunk the day we went to the jeweler's and thought it would be funny. Team Mitch and Elena. Forever and ever.

I take off the gold band after a few awkward tugs and wait.

But the moment's gone.

#

I leave Sunday morning with kisses on my lips and a new ring on my finger. The car ride to the Chevron station is as quiet as when Aaron had picked me up, but this time he's silent because he's satisfied, and I'm silent because I'm lying.

He thinks I'm going to leave my wife.

“Until this weekend,” he says into the dusky Sunday evening. He gives a wave because there are people around, a black woman with a tangle of children around her legs and a man who leaks a stream of gasoline down his pants and hocks a swear at the ground. I wave back, and off he goes, back to White Smoke where in his head we're together, and in my heart, we're not.

I'm not leaving my wife.

My phone is choked with voicemails, all of them Jimmy, one from Elena. She wants to try, to start over. My new ring burns my skin.

And then there's the one from Sela.

“Hi, Daddy. I miss you. Come home because Mommy says when you come home, we can have ice cream.” Then there's a crackling like Elena is taking the phone, and I hear her breath for a moment like she's going to say something, but she doesn't.

In the cab of the truck, I spot a trash can over where the gasoline-soaked man is standing, an older gentleman with a longish beard and a belt buckle the size of both my fists. I walk over, and he nods at me, and the ring lands in the belly of the barrel, rests on wadded up paper towels and the half-eaten contents of a Taco Bell bag.

Scarred skin, new rings, green eyes. I blink them all away.

Because I miss her, too.