Maybe in Another Life

Trigger Warnings: Sex, Substance Use: Cannabis, Swearing

I nearly pee when I see him. Not because of him. Three rounds with my water bottle this morning, and a bad habit of holding my bladder is the culprit. Seeing him doesn’t help.

Under the glass-panel ceiling of the Eaton centre on a random Tuesday afternoon, he appears at a store entrance, taller than I imagined, with strong shoulders and thick hair braided straight back into five neat cornrows. His grey Nike sweatpants leave nothing to the imagination and a matching long-sleeve compression shirt hugs the ridges of his biceps.

My body reacts to him while I search for his name in the archived files in my brain. When I find it, his head turns like he heard me call him. Glance. Confusion. Recognition. I’m flattered he got from A to B so quickly.

There’s still time to duck into another store. Weekday afternoons don’t bring in enough traffic to get lost in, but I’m not too proud to hide inside a garment rack if need be. The least he could do is grant me the curtesy of pretending he didn’t see me.

It takes too long to decide and now he’s close enough to count the hairs along the sharp lining of his beard and smell his peppermint aftershave.

I tighten my bladder. I imagined running into him a million times at a concert, or a chance introduction through mutual friends. Nope. The Eaton centre, ladies and gentlemen.

My stomach settles. The details don’t matter. I spent an embarrassing number of months practicing for this moment at night in the purgatory between consciousness and sleep, where his face could linger without my ego banishing it to the nether regions of my mind.

“Hey.” The single syllable inflects with a Southern lilt. He lives in Texas, but he’s from Alabama. I wouldn’t hear the difference; he told me before. His voice reminds me of Sunday morning chores with Barry White and dumplings frying on the stovetop. It triggers a twang between my legs.

***

We were so different when we met. Him, accomplished, settled, knowing what he wants from life. Me, still having panic attacks about scheduling dentist appointments.

We agreed on this part.

“I can’t wait to fly you down here,”he’d say. “Take you out. Spoil you. Fuck you good.”

Each panting breath makes our arms slip together. My fan spreads his scent around my teeny apartment with a choppy buzz and embeds it within the threads of the $4 curtains I got for a steal from Value Village. One side hangs open and golden light streaks across his chest and face and lightens his deep brown eyes. He monologues about the heat outside and the traffic on our way here and the price of milk compared to back home and every other inane topic he can grasp to fill the silence. For his benefit or mine, I can’t tell.

I roll off the bed. “I’m going to get you a towel.”

“Thanks.”

The mirror isn’t my friend today. I don’t want to see my swollen lips, curls in frizzy disarray, pubic hairs glistening from what just happened. My hand twitches at the closet with the impulse to cover the fat on my waist and stretch marks that run the length of my thighs. He’s seen it all anyway. Even before today.

The bathroom door gets a cursory nudge closed and I sit on the toilet. A breeze from the window chills my hot skin and gives me goosebumps. When I finish, I wash my hands and grab a towel from the closet. I run one corner under water and squeeze out the excess. The years in my apartment made me immune to its imperfections, but padding back to him, I notice the paint chipping near the ceiling and the uneven bumps that spatter the wall. I think about the cracks in my headboard and remember my sweaty gym clothes carelessly tossed in the general direction of the laundry basket. His apartment is much nicer than mine. I’ve never seen it. I just know.

“You’re still so fine.” His accent emphasizes the “i” in fine. It lulls me. Makes me want to rest my head right where the sun blesses him.

I give him the towel instead. “Where is the concert?”

“Downtown at Massey Hall. Tyler’s banking we’ll make a killing on merchandise sales. I heard the place will be packed. There’s only a few backstage passes left.”

“You still play with Tyler and them. They made you permanent bassist.”

“Yeah. You didn’t ask about it.” He folds the towel with the soiled corner on the inside and drops it on my night table.

“I thought you’d want to tell me. You told Twitter.”

“So you saw I got it and said nothing.”

“Did everyone find out from Twitter?”

“What kind of question is that?”

I tug my jeans on, facing away from him so he doesn’t see my eyes roll. Before, I would have let it go, but our relationship ended. Abruptly. And not really. Maybe if we lived in the same city, we would have gotten a real breakup. One where he screamed his frustration, and I cried my anger, and I would say I can’t take this anymore with my shaky voice and rueful expression that foreshadowed my next words. We never got the I hate yous and the slamming of doors for effect. Our goodbye was silent, no words accompanying its passing or acknowledgement that we had ever been. A dissolution of potential between two people who didn’t care enough to stop it.

Whatever, it’s done. What does it matter now?

I button up and face him again. His gaze drops to my breasts, but I’m irritated enough to push past the twang.

“Did your mom and brother find out from Twitter?”

“Are you serious?”

“Did Marissa?”

“She’s my friend.”

“That’s not the point. Everyone who mattered heard about it from you. The rest of us got the social media announcement.”

He stands quickly. Dammit, I forgot how tall he is. I stumble against the corner of my vanity mirror. This fucking teeny apartment. He catches me before I land on my ass and grips my arms tight. I’m not light, he’s just strong.

“I wasn’t going to fucking hit you.”

I snatch my arms back. “I know that. You startled me.” I grab my bra and shirt and stride to the kitchen. While I dress and catch my breath, my amp stutters on. He found my bass nestled between a wall and the junk shelf where I hoard the treasures of my life I never visit but can’t bear to throw away.

He turns the volume low, but the swinging melody fills the space, and I follow it to where he sits, dressed, on the edge of the couch with the guitar perched on his lap. His slender fingers wrap around its neck and dance up and down the strings with a skilled, imperfectly improvised 8-bar. The last note hangs in the air.

“This is a solid machine. Where did you get it?”

“I bought it second-hand from a guy in Mississauga.”

He nods like he knows where Mississauga is. I don’t tell him I bought it on a whim after he said he couldn’t stop thinking about me. When I saw him, I would ask him to teach me to play because his guitar was an extension of him and learning it felt like learning him. Now he’s here, but the guitar is condemned to a corner I don’t look at even though I chose it because I’d want to look at its pretty blue body every day.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” I ask.

“Yeah.” He turns off the amp and takes my hand.

***

He holds the stripping front door of my building open for me. “Do y’all have actual food here, or is it all just poutine?”

A laugh sputters out of me before I can stop it. “Get out of here.”

Women stare at him as we walk past aging shopfronts on our way to the Chinese place. They scooch past him in the dark interior to grab takeout menus, taking advantage of the cramped desk in front of the kitchen window where we watch the chef cook our food over a two-foot flame. Women my age sway their hips and aunties giggle when he flashes his 90s R&B smile. I get it. He’s pretty. He pulls me against his side when I lag and mumbles stories from the road against my cheek while he pretends he doesn’t notice the attention.

We cut through an indigenous-style mural-painted alley, past the orange bike rental station. Then under the pirate ship jungle gym and onto the path that parallels the lake shore. Bringing him to my spot feels like a breach somehow, but I want him to see it.

A ledge of rocks that form a stone bench along the cliff overlooking the lake. Large wayfaring trees on each side render the spot invisible until you’re right above waves that crash against jagged rocks and make it impossible to hear anything except each other.

Some days I wish for the inimitably blue sky to swallow me up so I can live in it and absorb nutrients through my skin like a giant amoeba. Being on this ledge under the sky and above the lake that stretches as far as I can see is the closest I can get. He stares over the water, then tilts his head up to meet the sun with closed eyes. He gets it.

When he has his fill, he sits on the ground with his back against the rocks and tugs me between his legs. We used to talk about holding each other like this. When winter winds whipped against my windows, I would fall asleep with his voice in my ear, imagining the warmth of my duvet came from his skin.

That fantasy was nothing compared to the rise and fall of his chest against my back or the tickle of his lips feathering the nape of my neck.

“Do you smoke?” I pull a joint from my pocket. “You don’t seem like the type.”

“What type do I seem like?”

“The type to choose edibles because they’re better for your lungs.”

His laugh is a booming thing that scares the birds. “They are better for your lungs.”

“I don’t have edibles.”

He takes my wrist and guides the joint between his lips, pressing a kiss against my fingers. The flick of my lighter is a comforting sound and I shield the flame with a cupped hand as it catches, then crawls up the twisted end of the joint. The opening notes of woodsy citrus when the flower first burns are my favourite. It doesn’t smell the same once the smoke touches my lungs.

“Tell me about your concert tomorrow,” I say when he passes it.

He trails his fingers over my stomach. Not to instigate anything, but absent-mindedly, like a habit. “Toronto is the 18th city out of 26. I didn’t think it would feel this long.” He pauses for a puff. “We’re reworking the bridge in Don’t Call Me Tonight because Tyler is on the tail end of a flu, and he can’t hit the D5. He thought I should riff through it like that will hide anything if his voice cracks into the mic.”

He’s told me about his music before, over the phone or in our Whatsapp chats. Even live-streamed one of his concerts so I could listen back when he was still a substitute. But this is my first time seeing how serious he gets about the technicalities in his work. And even though I’m only half following his venting about undertones and triplet chords, the twang is back.

“This concert is really important. A guy from the RedStar Record Label will be there and if it goes well, it could turn into a deal for us. Seven figures.”

“You sound nervous.”

“Nah.” His smile is fleeting. “You weren’t talking to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re mad because I didn’t tell you I got a permanent offer—”

“I didn’t say I was mad.”

“You weren’t talking to me.”

“That’s not true.” I skin my knee when I turn sideways to look at him, but I don’t feel the sting. “You weren’t talking to me.”

“I messaged you and you never responded.”

“You had the last word, so it didn’t matter that we never spoke again? You scolded me for that once, remember?”

“I never scolded you.”

“Yes, you did. Should I pull up the message?”

“For fuck’s sake.” The whispered oath cuts me sharp.

I turn so he cannot see my face anymore and hug my thighs. More than a year without contact, but he can still hurt my feelings with three words of dismissal. Three blood droplets trickle down the outside of my leg. The middle one is winning. Below us, mallard ducks bob their green heads beneath the lake’s surface. On another day, their skyward tailfeathers would make me smile. We pass the joint back and forth until it’s an ash-stinking nub. One is plenty for me by myself, but splitting it doesn’t feel like enough.

“Do you have another?” he asks. I pull it from my pocket and hold it to him with the lighter. He takes both without touching me. Seagulls shriek their grating calls and glide with the breeze that sweeps my curls into my eyes. We’re halfway through the second joint when he ambles a finger down my spine.

The white flag.

If I were smart, I’d ignore it, but the twang lingers, and there’s no telling how long this will last, so I don’t want to think about him. I want to feel him. I tilt my head against his shoulder to give him access and he obliges with his lips on my neck. They’re soft and when his hands, calloused from two decades of plucking bass strings, running under my shirt, I get my wish and my interminable thoughts quiet. His other hand unhooks my jeans and slips beneath the zipper, and my legs open without a conscious thought.

Because this is the part where we always agree.

***

My kitchen is too small for both of us, which might have made me claustrophobic if I wasn’t high and salivating at the smell of General Tao chicken permeating the room. His presence fills the limited space when he comes back from the bathroom with a bottle of antiseptic and a wet rag. If he tried to sit, his knees would knock the bar, and he could grab the lentils from my vegan phase off the top of my shelves without effort.

In a series of movements too fast for my inebriated mind to follow, he tips me onto the black leather bar stool, crouches in front of me, and peels off my damp sock to rest my foot on his thigh so he can clean the dried, cracking blood from my leg.

Our untouched food spins in the microwave at a low hum and his brows furrow in concentration while he works. I brace for the sting when he soaks a clean corner of the rag in antiseptic, but still hiss when it touches my knee.

“Shh,” he murmurs and blows against the cut.

“I was depressed,” I say. He doesn’t ask me what I mean. We’re past that now. “I isolated myself from everyone. Not just you. But you didn’t care about my presence in your life either way.”

“Of course I cared.”

“I was supposed to interpret that from your silence?”

“You were supposed to know that from everything that happened before. Why would I suddenly stop caring?”

“You were already pulling away.”

“I never pulled away from you.”

“You were losing interest. I felt it. You talked less.”

He grips my foot so tightly that his fingers dig between my toes. “I was depressed too.”

“Two, three weeks without a word from you. Then I saw your tweet, your good news. Should I have liked it like everyone else or congratulate you in the comments like your other groupies?”

He scoffs at groupies and drops my foot but doesn’t deny their existence. The women who throw themselves at him in the comment section under his thirst traps. Not everyone goes for the lead singer, and it’s anyone’s guess how many of them have seen him like I have. How many other DMs did he enter like he did mine? Please forgive me if I’m crossing a line here, but I had to tell you you’re gorgeous.

He dumps the trash in the bin under the sink and turns his back to me to wash his hands and I think the conversation has ended again.

“I wanted you to reach out to me,” he says, so low I almost don’t hear him over the running water.

“The phone works both ways.”

“Yes, it does. But I didn’t unfollow you.”

“Why would I continue to follow you when the relationship was over?”

“You decided that by yourself. You left me.”

“You did nothing to stop me.”

The microwave goes off with three blaring beeps, and it’s like a reset buzzer. We’re too high for this anyway. He opens and closes pantry doors until he finds the shelf with plates on it and hands me mine. We eat, we fuck, we watch Fresh Prince reruns until the high trickles down like the sun toward the horizon.

“I guess I should get going.” His voice vibrates through my jaw where it rests on his chest.

“Sure.” My couch creaks under our weight when I sit up between his legs to give him space to move. He only watches me while his thumb rubs a path on the back of my hand then he grasps the nape of my neck and guides me down into a kiss. The tip of his tongue urges my lips apart, and I comply. He presses his forehead against mine and his lips hover open and it seems he will say something, but he changes his mind.

Then he is on his feet. He pulls his clothing on slowly. I feel him glance at me every so often, but I don’t meet his eye because I will cry.

“Bye.”

I nod. “Bye.”

The sun completes its descent, and the streetlights bathe my apartment in a soft glow. I pee and brush my teeth. Crawling back into my bed feels like the hardest thing I’ve done. It’s the only thing I want to do. Because my sheets smell like him.

Then my pillow is wet.

Fantasizing about him in my bed was agony; remembering him here is worse.