Desperation

His messages came just before midnight, when my apartment was a nest of blue light, and the kettle hissed in soft bursts like it could hear me think. I scrolled through his photos. He had two of the same photo in a row, one slightly more cropped than the other: a man half-wedged against his truck, with a smile that wanted to be easy. His bio seemed like it had been created in a haphazard plume of a joint. We messaged for a while. He said the right things quickly, and the wrong things even faster. I stared at the screen until the screen was staring back into me.

It's probably fine, I thought, as I responded to his date offer. He just talks like that because he's nervous. My thumb hovered over the send button. Wanting to be wanted felt heavier than a couple of red flags.

I took a screenshot and sent it to Maya: This feels off, right? She called me immediately and laughed the tension loose from my bones. "Pass. We'll go out for brunch instead." I unmatched him, blocked him, and poured myself a warm mug of tea. The quiet filled with a sense of peaceful relief.

He offered to pick me up so I "wouldn't have to walk alone." Gentle, considerate, maybe a touch protective. I told myself: see? Green flag. He sent a winky face reaction and an uncomfortable message that I pretended not to notice.

A different match a week later. Daytime coffee, my train, my rules. He wrote "Sounds good. Do you want me to wait outside? I want you to feel safe," and he didn't add a winky face.

We went to a bar that pretended to be classy by dimming everything. He ordered for me, acting like it was a kindness. "You're not like those other girls," he said, which felt like a compliment until it didn't. He talked about his ex the way people talk about the weather that ruined a picnic outing. "Stormy," he said, smiling. "You wouldn't be like that."

We met at a coffee shop that smelled like cinnamon and printer paper. He waited by the door, hands in his pockets, leaving the air around me open and free. "Do you want to sit by the window?" he asked, like the question itself was proof of care. He told me about a niece obsessed with dinosaurs and a basil plant he couldn't remember the name of. "I'm nervous," he admitted, and then laughed. I felt less alone in my own nervous energy.

He liked my lipstick until he didn't. "You look better without all that fake, cake face bullshit," he said, and I smiled small so he wouldn't see my teeth clench. When my phone buzzed on the table, he flipped it face down and pulled it closer to himself. "No distractions," he said, as if we were in a meeting. I told myself it meant I was interesting. He wanted my attention. I told myself so many things.

When my phone buzzed on the table, he asked, "Do you want to get that?" I texted Maya a green circle emoji: the symbol we had agreed on to let her know that everything was going well. He picked up his phone and sent a message to his brother. "He worries," he said, shrugging. I placed my phone back down on the table, feeling more at ease.

He insisted that he drive me home. "It's late," he said. "Don't argue." The car smelled like pine and something sweet underneath. The locks thunked down like a joke that the car door was in on. "Shortcut," he said, when the road narrowed and the streetlights thinned and the playlist got louder and happier. It was like the bass was trying to drown out my racing heart, like if the car shook enough, I wouldn't be able to feel the adrenaline coursing through my body. "You're safe with me." He said it like a fact, a rule even.

When it got late, he walked me to the curb and called me a car. "Text me when you get in, okay?" he said, like he was passing me a thread that I could hold onto all the way home. I couldn't help but watch him until the taillights faded, sweeping him into the darkness of the evening. "You're safe with me," he'd said when a cyclist almost clipped me. It sounded like a promise.

The house looked staged, like it didn't know that anyone lived there. No pictures, but a group of candles melted into themselves on the counter, sweet and chemical. "Come in for a second." I did; I'd already spun the story of who he was for myself. The floor was spotless. The air had that sterile smell that makes your eyes water. "You're special," he said, stepping closer. "Let me prove it."

The second date was a morning farmer's market. He brought a thermos of the tea he remembered I liked. He knew the tomato guy's name, asked the egg lady about her daughter, and tipped like it mattered. He didn't touch me until I touched his arm. He looked back to check with a smile, like consent was a language we both spoke.

"I don't want to," I said, which used to be enough. It became a negotiation he wouldn't allow. A shove that knocked me into the wall, a sharp ringing as the world tried to steady. "Look what you made me do," he said, gesturing at the wall. The sentence solved nothing, certainly not the dent in the drywall I had most certainly left.

His apartment had scuffed baseboards and a plant bravely hanging on to life in the kitchen. A corkboard hung in the hall with pinned photos: his niece with the dinosaur hat, a blurry photo of a sunset with a caption that made me laugh because it was trying and failing to be poetic. "Do you want me to walk you to the station?" he asked, even though it was noon, having just finished a lunch he made for me. "Yes," I said, and the word fell easily from my mouth.

He blocked Maya from my phone. "Accident," he said, and my protests sounded tiny in the tidy house. He lifted his hands like a referee and smiled wide enough that I could see old, filled cavities. "You're always overthinking," he said. Overthinking became another word for overreacting, another word for not listening. I apologized, even though I didn't know what for.

I sent Maya a picture of his corkboard: proof of living, no curated facade. Maya responded with a string of heart emojis and a knife emoji, which was our inside joke about women in a world that requires constant vigilance. He told me about an open mic night where he had messed up his poem, and he made fun of himself so well that he still got the room on his side.

The drive to the outskirts didn't take long "Shortcut," he said again, when the road dipped into cattails. "I want to show you my favorite place to think." Headlights skated over a road sign with no words left, only bullet holes. The radio chattered cheerfully as though nothing bad happened in the world anymore. Locks clicked again by themselves, or because he told them to. "Just talk," he said. "We're just talking."

We walked a loop in the park with little lights along the path like breadcrumbs. He stepped aside for a jogger without making a performance of it. He asked about my grandmother's dumpling recipe, and when I didn't answer quickly, he let the silence be a comfortable chair that I could rest in. "I don't mind slow," he said. "I like taking my time to choose."

"I'm choosing no," I said, not that it made a difference. The first shove wasn't hard, but it was deliberate. The hit came harder. My head rang like a bell, trying to teach me to listen. "I thought I told you, you're not like the other girls," he said. "Don't become like them." Now it sounded like the worst thing to be.

I met his sister, who had the same laugh like windchimes and sunlight, and the type of protective stare that made it clear that I wasn't the only one with dealbreakers. His grandmother pressed leftovers into my palms and called me "light," which felt like a kindness. At home, my apartment felt like a home, not lonely. I put the key back on the hook and didn't check my locks twice.

He drove along, and the world opened into water. It wasn't a lake or a river, just a low place with ancient memories of being one or the other. The reeds leaned in like they were eavesdropping. He cut the engine. "Come on, we had a good night," he said. "Don't make it ugly." When I reached for the handle, the lock held me in place. The moon watched everything, but said nothing.

Sunday dinner became a comfortable habit, and the habit turned into a story told without rehearsal. He kept a spare toothbrush for me in its packaging, just in case. Not a claim; an invitation. "We can take as long as you want," he said. "Or never, if you change your mind." He knew the value of an open door.

In the moonlit swamp, every sound was a sentence. The heron spreading its wings to lift away, the shift of the reeds, my breath trying to learn a new shape in my chest. I ran a straight line, though there were no straight lines when the dark turns the wet soil into a resistor. He was faster. He was practiced. When the water took me at the shins, then the knees, to a place I couldn't name, the stars blurred. His hand on the back of my head wasn't dramatic; it was practiced, even by the land itself. Things sink. That's what they do here.

We planned a trip to get away and rest: a cabin with a leaky kettle and a dock that was debating falling into the lake. We watched loons cutting water and practiced tiny fires. "You want to?" he asked one night, and I knew what he meant, and it wasn't sex or moving in or forever. He meant the larger question that people choose each other with. I curled into him. "I want to."

They will say I should have known. They will say that I did know, and I went anyway. Both can be true in a world where rules bend like rubber. Under the water, cold wasn't a shock. It was a decision my body made without me. The mud welcomed me like a host. My bracelet caught a sliver of moonlight, then took the hint and disappeared.

He kept asking at every turn. "Do you want this?" A ring in a teacup, not a spectacle but a cozy kitchen. "Only if you want," he said, his hands shaking like the cup might burn him. I laughed, then cried, then laughed because I was crying. "Yes," I said, because yes was a bridge between two steady shores. "Only if we keep choosing yes," he said back.

They will say I was carefree, or kind, or free-spirited, and all three names will mean the same thing. The reeds closed like a curtain. The heron returned to its nest. The water remembered the shapes and secrets it was good at keeping. The last breath had tasted like iron and winter.

We called Maya first, because some stories need to be screamed aloud to become true. She screamed and then screamed again and then cried and laughed with me. We toasted with tea and let the kettle whistle its joyful serenade. The window held the morning like a parent's hand holds a child's.

He slid on the ring, a fairytale come true, and my breath came home like a migrating bird remembering its favorite perch. We stood there long enough that we could have made a ceremony from nothing. "Say yes," he whispered again, not because he needed the assurance, but because the word felt so good in the mouth that it could have been sorbet. I said it twice so the walls could memorize the feeling. Say yes.

Somewhere, the road sign with no words is absorbed by another winter. Somewhere, a playlist keeps cheerfully trying to pretend. Somewhere, the reeds memorize a shape and meld it in with the others. If you listen long enough, water will tell you the secrets it learned to keep. In the dark of night, a small sound moves through the cattails like a question of what might be beneath. "Say yes," I think, and the water answers in its own ancient language. Say yes.