On Second Thought

by C. Spencer

  What am I doing?

  I was doing something. Hoping to slice a few last-minute berries, some potatoes in no particular order. But now I feel jumbled. Hurried, unnerved, unraveled, petrified. My heart rushing. As if she and I were back along that trail with the sun on our backs warming my skin, flushed as we reached the peak. As her fingers slipped and weaved through mine, her arms subtle around my waist, holding me back, my toes braced at the ledge of a cliff that felt so high, dizzying. I felt high. It felt unstoppable, rushed. Out of control. I could slip at any moment. Fall. Or maybe I already had fallen. Where were the warning signs? Where were the cautions that whispered to me, You’ve gone too far.

  As I scrape ends, stems into the compost bin, then back to the water rushing down my hands at the sink, while she’s telling me about someone. I don’t know. That tree swaying outside and its kaleidoscope of leaves swirling past, nearly indiscernible now.

  And I could shut the blind, but I don’t.

  I could skip this song, as well. But I don’t do that either. I remember she played it the night we met, driving me back to my car as the wind blew in, but I didn’t care. She was lip synching. She was breathtaking as her thigh flexed to press the brake, block after block, with headlights shifting along her face.

  I like the way she thinks.

  Not only that, I like the way she looks when she thinks and that air that she has, how she’ll gaze off mindfully at—what? I never really know. Just some thoughts, I guess, as if thoughts were tangible objects shifting or splintering off—one into the other, into the next—while she tries to figure it out or piece it all together. She’s doing that now.

  And I like the way, in the midst of all this, in the midst of her thoughts, her figuring it out, she’ll settle on the only thing she can’t fix or understand or pin down or wrap her head around. Or let go.

  Then glance across the room at me. As if I could.

  And how that makes me feel—brilliant and helpless and hopelessly inept at life.

  Like this. Rae sitting at the edge of the dining room chair pressing palms against one another before they’re squeezed between lean thighs, and she’s grinning up past lashes in that way she does.

  A gaze that triggers such a rush. Such amnesia.

  Wondering if I’ve ever felt this much, this wanted or heard, needed.

  Needed for sex, sure. Or for company. For someone to bring along, to brag about, to show off. To take out or take home. To hold this, while they went over there. To appreciate intermittently. To look at from afar. To kiss before rolling over. To pay the bills.

  But not like this. Not for me.

  Not this intimately.

  “So what would this be?” she’s asking. But she’s leaning in now, and I’m too nervous.

  “Just nothing,” I say.

  “You’re something,” she says. “Will I like it?”

  “I hope so,” I say.

  But she’s smiling at me. “I know so.”

  About the Author

  C. Spencer grew up in Southern California during the ’70s and ’80s, where she spent two years as an art major in college only to switch midway to English literature. She’s worked as a copywriter and editor since 2001. In 2013, she began writing fiction on the side. She and her wife currently reside in Western Massachusetts.

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