Gold Digger – Story 32 – HIS CLOTHES ON THE FLOOR
I got him out of the jacket first.
Practical.
That’s what I told myself.
Purely practical – the man was soaked and cold and standing in my hallway making a puddle and the practical thing was the jacket, then the shoes, then figure out the rest.
He let me.
Stood there and let me peel the jacket off him like he didn’t have the energy to argue and maybe he didn’t.
I dropped it on the floor.
It landed with the specific wet sound of something that had absorbed a significant amount of weather.
“The rest of it too,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You’ll get cold,” I said.
Still looking at me.
“D.”
He pulled the shirt over his head.
I did not look.
I looked at the wall.
I looked at the floor.
I looked at his shirt which was also on the floor and also completely soaked and also somehow not the thing I was thinking about.
I got him a towel.
Then a t-shirt from the drawer where I keep things that aren’t mine.
He took both without saying anything.
I went to make tea because making tea is what I do when I don’t know what else to do with my hands and I needed something to do with my hands.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Dry now.
My t-shirt.
Hair still damp.
Looking more like D and less like whatever had been standing in my building ten minutes ago.
I handed him the tea.
He took it.
We stood there.
“Six weeks,” he said.
“I know.”
“Nothing.”
“I know.”
He looked at his mug.
“I kept -” He stopped.
Started again.
“I kept not texting you.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you know why?”
I looked at the counter.
“D -“
“Because every time I picked up the phone -” He stopped again. Jaw tight. “There was someone.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Not someone. A -” He put the mug down. “You were – I could feel it. That you were -“
“D.”
“I’m not asking you to -” He turned away. Hand on the back of his neck. The specific D gesture for I have run out of ways to manage this. “I’m not asking for anything.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Silence.
Long enough.
“I missed you,” he said.
Quiet.
No performance.
Just true.
The way D says things that are just true.
I looked at him.
Standing in my kitchen in my t-shirt with his wet clothes on my floor and six weeks of saying nothing finally said.
I missed him.
That’s the part I haven’t written in any spreadsheet.
That I missed him.
Constantly.
Specifically.
In a way that had nothing to do with columns or timelines or any of it.
He was looking at me.
I crossed the kitchen.
The rest of it I can’t tell you here.
What I can tell you is his clothes were on the floor.
And then mine were.
And the tea went cold.
And I didn’t think about the spreadsheet once.
Not once.
Spreadsheet status:
D → [row does not exist]
He said: I missed you. his clothes were on the floor. then mine were. I don’t know what this means. I know exactly what this means. – Mila