Page 397 of Face Off

“Charm.”

The room offers nothing back, so I lower my eyes to the page.

That wasn’t subtle, and I am finished being subtle.

I miss your hands. I miss your mouth. I miss the weight of you behind me and the sound you make when I stop behaving. I miss discovering exactly how much filth one brilliant man can fit between two beautiful languages.

I miss waking beside you with no clothing, no distance, and no desire to be anywhere else.

I want that again.

I want you again.

That isn’t a demand, a strategy, or an attempt to turn desire into forgiveness. Wanting you doesn’t obligate you to come back, and remembering what your body does to mine doesn’t erase what I did to your heart.

It is only the truth.

You asked whether I would answer.

I will.

I would answer tonight.

If you call, I will tell you I love you. I will tell you I am still fighting for the possibility of us.

Then I will tell you exactly what happened to me while I read about your hand wrapped around your cock, and you can decide whether letters still feel safer.

Charm

I read the final paragraph again.

Then I return to the first.

By the third time, I am no longer sitting on the couch. I pace the apartment with the letter in one hand while every controlled, reasonable thought in my head burns alive beneath the voice I haven’t heard since I left New York.

This is fucking torture.

For months, we have used paper because it gives us time. I can read her fear without reacting to it. She can hold my anger without trying to escape. We can choose our words, cross out the cruel ones, and examine every confession before trusting it to the mail.

The letters have given us something we never possessed before.

Patience.

They have also become another fucking distance.

Charm has spent months showing me she can respect a boundary without interpreting it as abandonment. I have learned to sit with anger long enough to understand what remains beneath it. We have written the truths that would have destroyed every spoken conversation we attempted before now.

Paper carried us this far.

I don’t want it tonight.

I can’t sit at my desk and construct a literary response while imagining Charm reading my letter with her thighs pressed together. I can’t spend three days selecting words, two more waiting for her to receive them, and another week wondering what her face did when she read them.

I asked whether she would answer.

She said yes.

“Enough of this shit.”