▪️Saturday, January 23rd, 2018▪️

▪️Phoenix, AZ▪️

Take it or leave it, he said. And listening is pointless. Because I'm leaving the magic. I wrap the sheet tighter around me, forget about posing, and lift my eyes to his.

I see patience.

His chest rises and lowers with slow breaths. I see the damn tenderness again. The hollowness inside me grows, and I have no meds to help me this time. One of us is going to crack, and today I'd rather it be me, if Mike gets to live his perfect life and achieve his dreams in Chicago, far away from my broken body and mind.

"Angela Fisher." He pinches the bridge of his aquiline nose and puffs out a long breath. "Before I ask anything of you"-another slow breath-"I'm gonna explain my baggage. Why I am where I am. And why I am who I am." Mike runs his hand across the stubble on his cheek and drops his hand on his lap as if his face burns him. "You've seen parts of me no one else knows about, but I wanna come clean. There are things I'm not proud of. Things that are valid reasons for you to order me out of this room."

His words fall into my emptiness, and I don't hear them hit the bottom. The eerie silence drags. My pulse moves from my throat into my stomach. Did he accidentally kill a man? I know there are incidents in MMA when fighters get severely injured doing a match. Or is he going to tell me his dad is a mafia boss? Maybe I should've asked him more about that side of the story. "Is it your dad?"

"My father didn't directly cause it, although I do blame him for his absence. If I grew up with a father, if he were in Chicago, if he were a person I could've called. . . but that might be my resentment talking. Truthfully, there is no one to blame but me. I was younger and dumber, but that is not an excuse." Mike runs his thumb against the tips of his fingers. I know their texture. My skin remembers the grooves of them. My lips part, but I clench my teeth and don't speak.

So not his dad. Does it matter though? None of this matters, because I'm the problem, not him. And my problem is unsolvable. The hollowness spreads and numbs the parts of my body it reaches. That's why taking an extra pill now and then is worth it. I welcome the numbness, as cutting the string between Mike and me will be so much less searing if I pretend I'm under full anesthesia. No past. No future. No pain.

My mind will never be okay with a future. My body will never forget the impact of the other car slamming into ours. The pain is a reminder that comes and goes, and on a good day, week, month, I might believe it's a thing of the past, but it's always back. I regroup and restart and retake whatever ground the ache and swelling take from me, but it's not a journey someone should go on with me. Especially not Mike. Mike, whose eyebrows are drawn together. His usual baritone slides into bass. He sounds scratchy, off, but I listen.

"When I got to college, no one knew me as a nerdy Math Olympics Mike with braces and obsession with Bruce Lee. Over the summer I grew taller, I worked out every day, helping Master Chang. No braces and a stylish haircut Mom supplied me with before orientation...I was Mike 2.0. And when the guys invited me to join their frat and the girls were looking at me in a completely different way, I saw what a carefree life could be like." He squeezes his palms together, and his forearms and biceps bulge with pressure. "They didn't worry about the same stuff as I, the scholarship kid, did. But their parents or trust funds were paying for them to have the college experience. I could not catch up with their money, yet I didn't want to go back to being the odd one out." He throws a sharp glance my way. His eyes are hooded and hard. My hollowness reflects in them. Or is it his hollowness I see? I blink, and he stares back at his battling palms.

"The fucking ease with which they spent the money on going out, how they got lost in the parties, how rules did not exactly exist for them. They were aware of them, but more as suggestions than restrictions. And since our move to Chicago, my life has been about nothing but restriction, control, and I. . .I lost it." Mike abandons his battle of the palms, wipes them off on his legs, and we both watch the hair on his thighs stick to his skin. He's smoothing himself, but every pass turns rougher, and I see red streaks appear. I hate seeing him like this. His visible discomfort shrinks my concerns. His pain transfers over the air and jolts my numbness out of the stronghold it set up in my chest. Mike rises. He walks over to the window and splays his palms against the glass that must be freezing.

"Living at the dorm was nothing like living at home. Sharing a room with someone was not new: my brother Louka and I have done it for most of our years in Chicago. But I did not have my little brother I had to behave for, and I didn't." Mike's breath fogs the window. "I joined the fraternity. I stayed until dawn and fell asleep in the back of the room during lectures. I didn't show to more and more classes. I tried all the drugs the campus had to offer. I went through a series of girls who were never friends and whose names I don't remember." His back is to me: long smooth muscles I can write songs about. His strength is not in the powerful span of his shoulders, but in the vulnerable openness of whatever he's trying to confess. I'm feet away, but I'm also inside his skin, surrounded by the hurt he's reliving to make me...what? My throat constricts. I can't love him. I shouldn't. And not because of these things he is saying.

"You would not've liked the Mike at eighteen."

I scoff and dislodge the feelings that are strangling me. He's describing most teenagers. "Mike at eighteen sounds...normal."

"Maybe." Mike leaves the outline of his hand on the fogged up window and in two steps he's sitting by me. Too close. "And maybe I that's what I was going for. Anything not to be the responsible person I was for the five prior years."

Solid. Reliable. Uber-responsible. Yes, these are the words I'd use to describe him, my opposite. Nothing like me. Everything I want. What I can't, should not have. I don't risk touching him, so I push with my words. "Part of college, of growing up." If he thinks that's something to hide, most kids would have to erase their college years.

Mike throws himself backward and hits the messed-up covers. The fall expels from Mike a grunt, or a sob? He shields his eyes with his forearm, and I could swear he's hiding tears. None of what he's mentioned so far is worthy of tears. Not in the world I live in.

"That was the beginning." I hear the tears in his words. Unmistakable. And a chill runs down my spine not because I'm cold but because he is undoing me. Staying away, not plastering my body along his, not kissing the trail his tears make from the corner of his eye, and around his ear is using up the rest of my willpower. His reactions are not fake, and the only time I've behaved like this was not when I was hurt, but after I hurt others.

"What happened?" I clamber onto the mattress tangled in the sheets and in my anguish. For him. For me. For whomever we wronged. "Just tell me."

Mike removes his hand from his face, and I see the liquid sorrow in his eyes. He stares with unseeing eyes into the space between my head and the ceiling. "I remember little. Of what I did. Just the consequences. I was drunk and high, and who knows what else. Either I ran out on my frat brothers, or they left me, but there were these men, three, I think, and I was in an alley, I think. It could've been a street. I'm a big guy, martial arts training; I was not afraid. But they knew what they were doing. When I came to, I was on the dirty blood-spattered snow, my face messed up, my phone and wallet gone, and but I was still wearing the stupid Santa suit. Freezing. December in Chicago is not the weather for lying outside."

I prop my shivering body on my outstretched arms. Holding myself up and pushing away from Mike.

"I've no idea how long I was out, but I found a bar that let me use their phone and I called home. My brother answered. I don't remember our conversation, but I thought he'd get Mom and come pick me up. He didn't." Mike sits up, and we face each other. He's still beautiful, but his damage cracks the magic that drew me to him in the first place.

"Mom was working. He was worried about me, so he came to get me. Himself. He was thirteen." Mike wipes at his eyes. His voice is back to steady powerful baritone. "But while I was partying at college, he fell in with the wrong crowd. And they taught him how to hot-wire cars." He puts his palm on the top of my hand. "I promise you I had no idea, but I also did not care. Not then." Mike squeezes my hand. Gently. With tenderness. With regret. "So, my brother stole a car, drove to pick me up, and I was out of it so much that I didn't object when he piled me into the passenger seat and headed home. I should've said no, but thinking was not something I was capable of." Our eyes lock. He's looking at me, but I can see he's watching the replay of that night on the screen of his retinas. "We didn't get home. A police cruiser stopped us, because the owner reported the car stolen. My little brother got arrested. Because of me trying to be free of obligations, he got a record and a stain on his reputation, and Mom had to spend our savings and get into more debt to pay the lawyer she could not afford. I ruined what my father didn't get to destroy. I forgot my responsibilities. So I vowed to never forget, to do things right, to do them as perfectly as I can. For Mom and for Louka, because the only thing I was good at doing for myself was destructive."

His fingers curl around mine. The pressure mimics what my heart is going through. I lean my forehead on his shoulder. Solid and no longer perfect. I'm not going to compare the pattern of the cracks of our wounds etches into our souls. We are both damaged. Damaged in different ways, but the fissures that break the aura of perfection around him let the air into my lungs. He's not perfect. I don't have to break us up. We are already broken. Maybe being broken together is what I was after. Maybe this could work.

"So, now that you know..." Mike's hand lands on the nape of my neck and massages the knots that are permanently stationed there. He hides his nose in my hair and whispers into it, "Let me ask you something."