Page 75 of Returned Mail

‘Do I get scared?’ Hell yeah, I do. More often than I'll ever say out loud. I answer her carefully. Not because I want to lie to her, but because there are truths you don't hand someone all at once. And she already knows far more than I tend to share.

Yeah, I get scared.

Anyone who says they don't is lying or stupid. The trick is not letting fear convince you that you're alone.

I’m still working on that part.

Writing to you helps. More than I expected.

I sit with that for a long time. Then I fold the letter before I can take it back.

Her reply comes almost two weeks later.

That meant a lot to me, probably because writing to you helps me too.

I read that sentence too many times…

Today is the day I realize I’m starting to think of her when I shouldn’t, and about things I shouldn’t think about either.

I start imagining what her laugh sounds like when she isn't writing it onto paper. Whether she reads curled up on the couch or sprawled across the floor. How she looks standing at the window. The shape of her body when she's backlit by that seven o'clock light she writes about. Whether her skin is pale or warm.

What her hair looks like when she wakes up. Messy, probably, falling across her shoulders or tangled against a pillow. Whether she bites her pen when she's thinking. Whether she makes the same face she draws in the margins of her letters when she's annoyed. What her mouth looks like when she smiles.

I know all of those are just small, human things, but they are dangerous, because they make her real.

This last letter was funnier and more relaxed, like she’s finally showing me more of herself. She wrote three separate paragraphs about nearly fighting a self-checkout machine. She told me all about her day and her grocery shopping list.

Then she mentioned that she was in bed writing this letter, and all of a sudden I caught myself wondering what she sleeps in, if she sleeps in anything at all. I put the letter down immediately. “Absolutely not.”

Jackson looks over. “What?”

“Nothing.” He nods and goes back to his book.

I don’t want to think about Mia in bed.

Except I do.

I think about her stretched out on the bed I used to sleep on, her body warm and soft in a way I have no business imagining. I think about the curve of her hip. The line of her neck. Whether she'd look at me the way she writes…careful at first, then braver.

Whether her skin would flush if I touched her.

“Fuck.” I say it under my breath.

This is a problem. She’s a twenty-six-year-old woman I've never seen, and I'm lying here in a tent five thousand miles away thinking about what she'd feel like beneath my hands.

It's pathetic, but it's not stopping.

I'm thirty-six years old. I should have better control than this. So, I fold the letter and shove it under my pillow like that will help. I roll onto my side and close my eyes.

This has to stop.

Her next letter comes with a bit of a spark.

Maybe she’s teasing me.

The guys in your unit probably think I'm a ninety-year-old woman with twelve cats.

Please tell me you've told them otherwise.