The Beauty of Us

We are lying in bed, limbs tangled and sticky with sweat, pressed up to one another so closely that I can feel Sam’s breath in the hollow of my neck, his head heavy against my shoulder.

The curtains flap as the breeze blows in the scent of creosote, a sure sign that rain is coming in the desert. Sam is dozing in and out of sleep, snuffling and mewling like a puppy and my heart squeezes in my chest, my breath coming short. I brush strands of his hair, sent wild by our afternoon in bed, off of my face and neck, annoyed slightly at the way they tickle at my nose and tangle in my eyelashes, thinking idly about how I can excuse myself without starting the sort of screaming fight that ends with us not speaking for days on end.

A clap of thunder startles us both and Sam jumps, frightened awake by the sudden noise, then settles back down at my side into our usual embrace and runs a finger gently up and down my sternum, making circles and tracing out lazy hearts. My heart stops again, just for a beat or two. A lifetime.

“I hope it storms the night I die,” Sam says as the rain suddenly comes pounding down on the roof and blowing in through windows neither of us has bothered to get up and close.

“That’s a really weird thing to say,” I reply.

Sam says nothing and I think about how I should have said something different.

This is the pattern of our relationship. We fight, we make up, I say something I shouldn’t have, Sam does something to get me riled up, something he knows will start a fight. We rage and bluster, sob and beg, apologize and kiss. Then, we do the whole thing over again, stuck in an endless loop. It’s a cycle that we neither can nor if we’re being truly, brutally honest, even really want to break.

I think about how I should just end it once and for all after every one of these fights, but I never do. Somehow, it seems simultaneously far too easy and far too difficult to do it that way. Our friends have long since given up trying to convince us each in turn that there is more to life than slammed doors and rage-filled sex.

They don’t understand the beauty of us.

“Maybe,” Sam says.

I wait for something else to follow, skeptical that is all there is to be said on the subject.

“I hope it’s a long time before I know what the weather is like the night you die,” I say and gently kiss the top of Sam’s head.

This is the correct thing to have said and I’m rewarded with a sigh and a hand that trails lower, teasing its way along my hip and thigh.

So much for an early night, I think without remorse.

I know I have only delayed the inevitable. I will have to say, at some point, what I’ve been unable to get out despite several “what’s the matter?” and “don’t be so broody”’s.

I am leaving.

Not leaving Sam, exactly, but leaving town and Sam with it. The distinction will be lost, though, I know. In Sam’s world, there is only Sam; Sam who burns as brightly as the sun and draws me in with a half-smile until I, too, live in a world that revolves around a luminous soul and effervescent laughter. I shatter a little with every tear Sam sheds. There will be many when I say what I must.

I am a coward, I think.

I love Sam, I don’t remember how not to. If the Gods have cursed me, this is their curse; I remember the shape of every left-behind lover’s face, the sleepy scent of their neck first thing in the morning, the way their hair falls. All etched into scars on my heart. Their voices may fade from my memory someday, but I will never forget how to love them.

In time, for Sam, I will become a story told for sympathy to someone who will spend an afternoon watching the sunset behind the mountains from what is now My Side of the bed.

I know this. In some ways, I almost want it, but not enough to say the words I am leaving. Soon, but not now. Not today. Not while the rain is falling on the tin roof of the shed outside our window. Not now. I don’t want to leave, but I don’t know how to stay.

Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow, you have to. It’s going to be too late soon, and you know it.

My heart lurches in my chest, I feel like I am going to die, but instead, I dip my head down and kiss lips that taste of sex and salt, and forget, just for a few hours that I’m about to ruin my own life.

Again. Forever.