The Bluffing Game

by Verona Vale

  Well, if things were already not going smoothly, I might as well throw in the towel and be honest.

  “Because you’re still attracted to me,” I said, looking at him now.

  “That surprises you?”

  “No, it doesn’t surprise me. I just thought we had a different understanding.”

  “We did.”

  God, it was pulling teeth getting him to say things out loud. “Are you saying it’s not working?”

  “I thought it was. Until yesterday.”

  “Why was yesterday so different?”

  “You called me after a breakup.”

  “It wasn’t a breakup. It was a fling.”

  “You made it sound like a breakup.”

  “It felt like one.”

  “Then call it breakup. Why argue semantics?”

  “I’m an attorney. Just doing my job.”

  “Very funny.”

  A moment passed.

  I said, “I’m just trying to sort things out.”

  “And I’m saying things never needed quite so much sorting before.”

  “Sometimes things change.”

  “My point exactly.”

  I felt like we were talking in circles. “And why is that a problem?”

  “I wasn’t sure how much things might change. And I didn’t want to get convinced into doing anything I might regret. Or that you might.”

  He looked at my eyes now. Unwaveringly. Finally. And then it was so clear, so inevitable. I could read like a book just how much he still wanted me. It would be so simple to take advantage of this, and yet I couldn’t bear to let myself use him or hurt him.

  The menu sat longingly on the table, waiting to provide us with something. “What if we agreed ahead of time not to regret it?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning we understand we can’t get back together, and that nothing long-term will come of it, and that afterward, we’ll still just be friends.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  His eyes were misty. I was offering him something he knew he wanted, but that he also knew he couldn’t handle emotionally. He knew himself well. And I was making everything harder. I might as well have been rubbing in his face how weak he was to be unable to sleep with me without wanting it to be more than sex. But I didn’t think that was weak of him. That was what I wanted. Exactly what I wanted.

  “Then what if we try again. For real.”

  He shook his head. “It won’t end well.”

  “It might. We’re different people now.”

  “I don’t feel like I am.”

  “So it would be on me to be different?”

  “Yes. And that wouldn’t be fair. Which is why we shouldn’t do it.”

  “So you’re not willing to work with me on anything, then?” That would certainly kill my picture of this being what I wanted. It dawned on me suddenly that all of these words were ones I could never take back, and that like it or not, this conversation was really happening. I felt a sting inside and hoped I wasn’t unwittingly pushing him out of my life forever.

  “June, I would do anything for you. That’s the damn problem. I would let myself stay in an unhappy love with you all my life. I would let you walk over me. And then I would resent you, and get angry, and break it off again, and then I would hate myself because I’d lost you again. You’re like a drug, and I’m trying like hell not to fall off the wagon.”

  “Why would you have to hold it in, if you were so unhappy?”

  “You didn’t used to be able to compromise.”

  That hurt. It burned hot and hard. All the more because it had been true. But it had a time in my life when such an uncompromising attitude was necessary if I was to achieve the things I wanted.

  And now I had.

  Maybe now was the time to be more compromising.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I was rigid. Immovable. Obdurate, even. And I don’t regret that. But I’m willing to be someone a little different now.”

  “How much do you really mean that?”

  “Have you been talking to me this past week? Haven’t I been telling you I want a change?”

  “Up until now, if you wanted something, you worked until you got it. You didn’t change for it.”

  “I know. What I’m saying now is, I’ve gotten everything I can work for. Except the thing I suddenly want the most.”

  “And what if you get tired of it? What if you change back?”

  “I can’t predict the future. You’re right, I might decide I’ve had my fill of being compromising after a while, and change my mind again. But I’ve spent the past eight years being uncompromising, and I’m tired. I’m willing to give a little if it means getting what I really want in return.”

  “And what if a relationship stops being what you really want?”

  “You’re going to get hurt, Nick. Whether we give this another try or not, whether it last three days or three years, you’re going to get hurt. I’m not perfect. No two people have ever been able to spend years together without hurting each other in some way, big or small. The question is whether they can work together to help each other grow, so that they both do it less often. So that the good moments outweigh the imperfections. And if you’re willing to try that, so am I. But if you’re putting me so high on a pedestal that you can’t stand up for yourself if I make a mistake, then you’re right. It won’t work out. Because I can’t be with someone who thinks I’m so perfect that he suffers in silence and lets me think I’m doing fine when I’m not.”

  I could tell that pained him to hear, but it was true. I would compromise for the sake of a relationship, but only for the sake of a healthy one.

  I made my voice more gentle. “You want to give this a shot?”

  He met my eyes again. “You know I want to.”

  “Are you willing to, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then don’t say yes.” I picked up my briefcase and stood from the table. I was starving, but I wouldn’t be able to eat with him just then. “Think it over,” I said. “You know where to find me.”

  And I left the restaurant with something I hadn’t felt in a long time and had trouble naming at first. It was warm and soothing and yet firm, unyielding. A foundation, sturdy, strong, and ready to support whatever load it needed to bear. I had felt a twinge of it when I decided to pursue Victor, but now that I was trying to give it a go with Nick, it was unmistakable. I knew what I wanted, and now I knew what I had.

  Clarity.

  Eight

  There’s a feeling of accomplishment in opening yourself to possibility. Like I imagine a fisher must feel when she casts her line into the surf, not knowing if any of the multitude of factors that would need to align for this to be a good day will actually come together and make it one. But swinging that pole, letting the line unwind and the hook glide across the air and make its little impotent sploosh into the water, it still opens you up. Suddenly you’re secure in the knowledge that you gave it a shot. And the feeling of security, that’s what gives you strength to try again if it doesn’t work out. The fullness of knowing you did all you knew how to do to make this one time a worthwhile attempt. If you can revel in that, let it pervade your whole body, live in it, breathe it in, then it doesn’t matter if you fail. It doesn’t matter if no fish takes the bait, or even if one does but it’s so small you have to throw it back. If you can attach yourself to the process rather than the outcome, then trying itself becomes the success you so badly wanted. Every attempt itself becomes the fulfillment. Maybe you come home at the end of the day with no fish, but you don’t come home with nothing. You come home full to the brim, ready to rest and fill yourself again tomorrow.

  Three days went by, three long mornings and afternoons full of paperwork and meetings with smaller clients about smaller cases, stacks of papers packed from top to bottom with facts and citations of precedent, with technicalities of contract, with claims and litigation spun into rugs from the long, y
arn-like innards of American law. I was the tailor, the seamstress who could see where some filament had been poorly stitched or sewn so weakly as to unravel. I could see where too much breathing room was left, where hems and panels needed to be taken in until the finished piece suited its purpose flatteringly. When I let the lawyer part of my brain run the show for a while, I never noticed the time. Three days was insignificant if you spent them weaving row after row of a tapestry.

  So when Nick finally called me on the evening of the third day, I was surprised at how nervous he sounded, as if I was a tomato he’d kept simmering in a slow-cooker of doubt the whole time and I was almost completely dissolved.

  “I’m fine, Nick. Just tell me why you’re calling.”

  “I talked to my therapist. And I think I managed to decide.”

  “Great to hear. So what’s the verdict?”

  “Jeez, June, you’re so nonchalant. This is a big decision for me.”

  “You’re right. I’m listening.”

  “I’m willing to give it a try, if we can really be cautious and open. Listen to each other. Speak up when we need to. Call each other out when we could do better. Stand up not only for ourselves, but for each other, and for the sake of the relationship.”

  I smiled. “I concur with all of those terms.”

  “Can you stop with the legalese for a minute?”

  “You’ve gotta admit it’s clear.” But he was right. I didn’t want to turn this into a no-strings contract like Sterling had with Andrea.

  Nick said, “I just want to hear June the human being right now, not June the attorney.”

  “Well, they get hard to parse sometimes. But I’m here. And I’m happy we’re giving it a shot.”

  “Do you want to meet for dinner?”

  I let openly myself flirt with him for the first time in years, guilt-free. It was a full and fulfilling sensation. “How about dessert? My place.”

  ~

  If you’ve ever been on an extremely strict diet after a lifestyle of freedom, you know about temptation. There’s always the memory of that one thing you miss so badly, whether it’s chocolate, a juicy hamburger, or just a steaming slice of crispy white bread slathered with butter, the smell of it so overpowering you can taste it. Getting back together with an ex after eight years usually goes one of two ways—either you revel in the illicitness of sucking forbidden fruit, only to kick yourself in the morning and remember what it really does to you inside, or, on the other hand, you finally taste again that thing you’ve been wanting for so long, and not only is it every bit as scrumptious as you remembered, you also can’t believe you ever thought it was worth it to live without it.

  Sometimes the initial rush of just doing the deed, breaking the abstinence, lasts so long that it takes a while to figure out which way it’s going, and the morning after, you don’t scold yourself, not for breaking your streak and not for waiting so long to break it. That’s how it was with Nick. A hug between close friends, even friends who were once together, is far, far different from the hesitant, exhilarated touch of lovers. Even the small act of putting our arms around each other right inside my front door, and letting ourselves feel, freely, everything we’d always wished we could feel forever, was like floating on a bed of air, letting it carry us in unconditional trust through whatever course it happened to take.

  Our desire for one another came in like a long, slow wave, and we rode it, letting it lift us up, and up, and somehow further up. We loosened ties and unbuttoned shirts and unclasped belts and forgot to step out of our shoes, all with the nervously quivering hands and shortness of breath of teenagers secretly exploring for the first time, the adrenaline jolt that thumped our hearts almost too much to bear, almost painful, but by the time we were both topless and running our hands up and down each other’s familiar backs and tasting each other’s soft necks again, finally, finally wrapped in each other, the nervousness slowly but inexorably subsided, and the rise of the second wave rose up underneath us.

  We left our clothes in a pile on the hardwood foyer, and in the living room lay on the couch, taking turns feeling each other’s weight on top of our own, re-introducing ourselves to every inch of each other’s skin, rubbing hands over arms and feet over legs and lips over chest and stomach. We kissed, gently, forcefully, penetrating with tongues one second and sliding back into soft grasping of lips the next. We felt each other’s wetness and firmness and readiness, and wordlessly we slid into closeness, him stretching deep inside me, me consuming and enveloping and squeezing him. We brought out old routines and rhythms as if asking each other how much we remembered, and then left them behind as if to say, let’s be something new.

  This second wave took blissfully longer to crest, and we floated on it, rose toward the sky on it, blurring and dissipating into each other’s heat and strength and gentleness, our bodies sharing one taste, one smell, one touch, merging from the hips upward until, as if our minds could not rest until they became one as well, we climaxed together and moaned in each other’s ears, held each other by the back of the head, and held onto the peak of the wave until it crashed all around us and left us rocking on the couch and crying.

  We held each other, damp with each other’s bodies, glued together head to chest, hand to neck and back, wetness to wetness, leg to leg. We breathed. We welcomed each other home.

  ~

  I woke in the middle of the night, Nick heavy and slumbering beside me. I hadn’t woken with someone else in my bed in longer than I wanted to admit. When I’d lost myself in Victor on the beach, we had woken in the sand. He had never come into my bed there, though technically he had owned it. The whole affair felt like a dream, and whoever named the resort knew that what people came there for was to live, for a brief time, as if they had everything they could dream of. For Victor Sterling, it was neither brief nor even a dream. He really did own all of it.

  For my part, having left that so-called paradise behind, I found myself deeply comforted by the sound of Nick breathing beside me, asleep. I was content to let my dreamlike affair with Victor be exactly what it was. The one thing I loved most about the island, I already had here in Cape Cod: the sea. I slid my legs out from under the sheets and stepped light across the carpet, robed myself and opened the door to my balcony.

  The moon had already set, so the sky was dark, and though I couldn’t see the ocean, the wind off the water lifted my hair, and the sound of the waves came with it, like the breath of some sleeping, peaceful giant. The hiss of each wave so much like a slow exhale. I leaned on the painted wooden railing and imagined the undulating expanse stretching to the invisible horizon. I didn’t know what moved me so deeply about the presence of the sea. It was impossibly large, untamable, dangerous. I was insignificant next to it. I was like one grain of sand on the beach.

  Maybe it was that next to the sea, I couldn’t help but accept my smallness, make peace with it, admit to myself that I couldn’t survive without the land, and that this was okay. The sea might rise, might storm, even someday destroy my house, but If I needed to, I could go inland. If the sea was one sleeping colossus just waiting to wake up, the land was another that was content, more often, to hibernate. What an odd place to be, the boundary between them. The long line of sand dividing the wet from the dry, the immovable from the unstoppable. In a moment of what must have been sleep and delirium creeping back, I felt an insatiable urge to drink down the whole ocean and bury myself in the sand. Become filled up with water all through my body, both held and insulated by the ground. I wanted to be part of the shoreline itself, both land and sea, and have that eternal breathing of waves be mine.

  When I came back in from my balcony, I noticed my phone blinking on the bedside table. I’d set it on silent much earlier in the evening, and before I picked it up I had a feeling about what I was going to find. There was a text message from Sterling’s housemistress, Andrea.

  “Get on a plane back here. Now.”

  Nine

  After years of everyon
e telling you that everything all the time is urgent, you start to learn the difference between urgent, extremely urgent, and actually-drop-everything-now urgent. Sadly, this was the latter. While Nick lay like a giant, warm sleeping dog in the bed, I did my best to quietly pick out some traveling clothes without bothering him—the room being dark certainly didn’t help. I took the outfit into the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light, and decided a quick shower was not something I could skip. I got clean and dry, put on my clothes, and worked just a touch of makeup in while I used my phone to confirm the flight Sterling had already chartered for me, to secure a cab to the airport, and to start a pot of coffee downstairs using the most helpful app I ever purchased. Sooner or later, coffee notwithstanding, my lack of sleep would knock me over, but if I could manage to get on the plane before then, it wouldn’t have to be a terrible night.

  Something else you learn when midnight flights are more common than you’d prefer is to always keep a bag packed. For Sterling, I had two—one with clothes and one with the details of his case. I didn’t even remember packing it, but there it was on a chair by the bedroom door. You start to be very grateful for your good habits and thankful to your past self when you think ahead. It’s a good feeling.

  Now that I was ready to leave, I had one last decision: wake Nick now, leave a note, or message him in the morning. Had I been in his position, I would have preferred a quick goodbye kiss and a speedy return to sleep, but I tried to remember the way Nick felt about such things. The memories of these kinds of little intimate details were there, buried somewhere, but my mind toiled, so full of planning and hurry that I couldn’t dredge the memories up from the depths. I leaned over him, ran a hand through his hair, and kissed his head. He didn’t wake up.

  Yes, that was right. He slept so deeply, how could I have forgotten? I would call him once the sun rose. I shouldered my bags and left him there, sorry to be gone when he would wake in the morning. A wave of dark familiarity rose in me as I descended the stairs. I ignored it as I made a quick detour to the kitchen, grabbed my travel mug full of steaming coffee—thank God for modern devices and their synchronization—and headed out the door.