Page 59 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

She comes with my name on her lips, dragging me down with her, and when I do let go it’s with a force that turns the whole world white for a full ten seconds.

That’s the night. That’s what I still want, every goddamn day, the absence of it chewing holes in my chest.

I lie there in my old bed, the ghost of her scent alive in the fabric of my sleeves, and try to remember what it was like not to need her.

My hand moves faster, thumb dragging over the slick head the way she used to with those clever, patient fingers, and I can almost hear her —that's it, right there, don't you dare stop— bossing me even breathless, even wrecked, and the memory tips her over the edge.

I feel the phantom clutch of her, and it's too much yet not enough?

It's five years of a locked drawer opening at once.

I come with her name in my teeth and no one to hear it.

"Amber baby," I breathe, into the dark, into the empty, breaking clause nineteen where the only witness is my own ceiling.

The knot swells after, thick, useless, and furious, throbbing for a body that isn't here.

I sit up and work it down with both hands the way I've done alone in eleven cities, gritting through the ache of it.

It was supposed to be hers.

We swore that.

All three of us holding back for a wedding night that never came, saving the lock, the bond, and the whole ceremony of it for the one woman we then abandoned in a ballroom with a note.

What a bunch of cowards we are.

The room smells like sex, salt, regret, and the faint, phantom apricot my own mind supplied, because she isn't here.

She isn't here because I got in a car.

She's stronger without you,my mother's voice says, from this morning, from the truth.

And I'm still here, thirty years old, jerking off to a ghost in my childhood bed like the coward who drove away from the future we could have had.

Where she’d be here, riding my cock, as we make love and I enjoy the blissful peace that comes with hearing your Omega laugh at your crazy, not-so-funny jokes.

I clean up, lie back down, but can’t sleep.

Around two, I stop pretending I'm going to and I pick up the proposal instead, because the one honest thing I know how to do with this much wanting is turn it into work she can use.

I go to The Driftglass the next night, because Renzo asked and because a man can only stare at a security schematic for so many hours before he needs a room with a pulse.

Theo's onstage when I come in, halfway through a slow one, and he catches my eye over the neck of the guitar and doesn't miss a note.

The bar's the old sailmaker's warehouse, colored glass set into the walls catching the last of the sunset, and it's warm in here in a way the Hollywood decks never managed with all their bourbon lighting. Local. Lived-in. Iris Moon runs the stick with the flat competence of a woman who has never once been impressed by fame, and she nods at me like I've worked here for years.

Renzo finds me at the rail with a whiskey I didn't order and a look I don't like.

"So," he says. "I'm selling."

I turn.

"The Driftglass?"

"Forty-eight and my knees are shot. I've been touring one bar for twelve years instead of the world." He says it lightly, theway you say the thing you've decided not to grieve. "It's a good room, Cade. It just needs somebody who wants to stand in it." He lets that land, watching Theo. "Somebody who knows drinks, crowds, and obviously this town. Knows and protects it might I add.” He pauses and smirks my way. “Somebody who's tired of living out of two suitcases and calling it freedom."

He's got no idea how close to the bone that cuts.