“Don’t let me go. Fuck. Beth. Please. Don’t let me go.”

I mean, they were just words, I told myself, leaning away from him, wiping at my mouth. They didn’t mean anything. Sex talk. That was all.

I just wasn’t sure I believed it.

Because in that moment – vulnerable and outside himself – he called me Beth.

Everything felt…different. My skin felt shaky over my bones, like it didn’t quite fit me.

My lips were sore. My pussy too. I was…sensitive all over.

I pushed my hair out of my face and looked at him. Really looked at him. Soaking him in as a whole and then again in pieces like he was artwork I was going to recreate.

“You okay?” His fingertips touched my shoulder.

“I wish—”

He shook his head. “Careful,” he whispered. “That’s dangerous.”

“I know. But let me wish. Just…just for this second. For a minute. Give me a minute to wish.”

He exhaled, his fingers pushing the hair out of my eyes, and nodded. “Go ahead, then. Wish.”

“I wish I’d been able to find you seven years ago.”

His smile was tight, like he was holding it in.

“I wish I hadn’t hurt you so much. I’d give anything to not have hurt you.”

“Not everything hurts,” he said, smiling and running his hand down my bare hip.

“But most of it does.” He didn’t argue.

“I wish we’d just met. That we didn’t have any of this shit behind us.”

He smiled, crooked and endearing. “How would the two of us have met?” he asked.

“We could have met at a party.”

“I don’t go to parties.”

“A bar—”

“I’m a recovering addict, Beth. I go to one bar, because they let my dog come in. I drink one beer. I’m not…a good time.”

“I think you are.”

“Don’t lie to yourself. You know you deserve more than me.”

“I wish you didn’t believe that,” I said, my heart chipping at the edges.

“We would have met at the park,” Tommy said and I closed my eyes with a painful happiness too sharp to even bear. “Pest would have gotten loose from her leash. She does that sometimes-“

“Of course she does,” I whispered.

“And she would have led me straight towards you.”

“I’d grab her, and when you come running up I would have said something very clever like “does this belong to you?”

“And I would say something really clever like, “what to get some coffee?”

“I would say yes.”

He stopped stroking my hair, and the air around us grew colder.

“Tell me,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell me why these wishes can’t come true.”

Remind me why we can’t be together; that’s what I was asking him. And he knew it.

“Because you are fucking magic, Beth. And I’m stone. You have a life to get back to. You have people counting on you. A career. You’ve got some ground to make up after the last few weeks. And there’s no place for me in that. And I don’t want to be the thing that keeps you from being what you should be.”

I pushed my face into the skin beneath his armpit where he smelled the most like him.

“And I…” he said. “I live in a shitty one-bedroom apartment in the worst neighborhood in the city. I have a really bad guy who is going to come after me at some point, and Carissa, who—if she finds out I touched you—has threatened to have my balls. Tell me what part of that life you want?”

His life made me sad. And angry.

“I just…I want you.”

“You have me. And I have you. One night.”

“And then…?”

“It’s over and you know that. Right? Beth? Tell me you know that.”

“I know that.”

We both took a second to swallow the truth.

“We’re not a fairy tale,” I said, and he nodded, his face all folded up, like all his thoughts were put away. “I used to think we were.”

“So did I,” he said and that was a comfort, at least. We’d felt the same way for a while there. And that had enough sweetness in it to last a while.

I found my underwear next to his hip and slipped it on while he pulled up his pants. Neither of us looking at each other. I hadn’t noticed how cold the room was when his body had been pressed to mine. But now my skin rose up in goose bumps.

“Here,” he said, his voice so different from what it had been a few minutes ago while he’d told me to suck his dick. I was sore, my body exhausted, my head a mess, but the memory of his voice saying those words turned something over in my body. And would for a long time. Maybe forever.

“You told me to suck your dick,” I said and then giggled. I actually giggled and he actually blushed and the feelings in my heart were sharp enough to cut.

“I did.”

“That’s going in the spank bank, Tommy. Top-shelf spank bank, right there.”

“Oh my God,” he muttered like I was just too much.

I put the shirt on, the bra gone. The leggings… in ruins. I held them up in my hands, torn in pieces.

What am I supposed to do now?

Behind me I heard Tommy getting to his feet, and I turned in time to see him standing up, his back to me. The skin of his back was so pale compared to his forearms and the back of his neck, so maybe that’s why I could see the faded scars, no longer pink but silver almost, along his spine and sides. Like stretch marks. Physical proof of growing pains.

“Tommy,” I sighed.

He turned and caught me staring, read maybe on my face what I was thinking.

“It was a long time ago,” he said and shrugged into his shirt, the scars hidden but there. Always there. I’d never not see them.

“Not that long,” I said.

He took a deep breath, and in the silence before he said something, we heard the scuttle of paper across the floor and Pest came trotting across the room with a cheeseburger wrapper in his mouth.

“Dinner!” I cried.

Tommy snagged Pest and pulled the wrapper from her mouth. “I should have warned you. Cheeseburgers are her favorite.”

“Well, she got her fair share of them,” I said, picking up the McDonald’s bag. She’d eaten two, the third one she hadn’t gotten to in the bottom of the bag. It was cold but edible. I handed it to him, trying not to laugh.

“It’s yours,” he said. “You’re probably starving.”

I was. I was starving. “You probably are too,” I said.

He picked up the other bag, which had the Doritos and carrots in it. “This will work for me.”

He smiled, showing me the teenage Tommy’s delight in Doritos and baby carrots.

Still his favorite.

All at once I couldn’t believe this was the end.

“I have so much I want to say,” I told him and he was immediately shaking his head, but I just kept on talking. “And so much I want you to say. So much I want to hear—”

“Why?”

I blinked, stunned by the question. “What do you mean, why?”

“Talking isn’t going to change anything.” He jerked his thumb back at the floor where we’d had sex and sketched out our alternate reality life.

“It might make the memories we have of each other won’t hurt less,” I said, feeling unbelievably shy considering what we’d just done to each other. “Because I don’t really think it’s our future keeping us apart. It’s the past. And how we don’t talk about it. But we’re reminded of it every time we look at each other. That’s the real truth of why we can’t be together. Because our past makes it hurt too much. ”

He knew I was right; I could tell just by looking at him. Just by the clench of his jaw and the way he kept making fists with his hands like he was holding onto something he wanted to let go of.

“We never talked about your parents. My mom. What we did to get to St. Joke’s. We talked all the time, but we never talked about that. We wrote notes and knocked on the walls, and we created these wishes we couldn’t say out loud. Everything we never put into words, it’s sitting right here in this room. Between us like walls.”

He blinked at me, those blue eyes seeing me as clearly as I saw him. My mother, the last seven years, that night, the scars on his back, the man that had him kidnap me—all those things were in our way.

And I felt, for just one second, if he asked, I’d answer. I’d tell him everything. I’d use my whole body and all my strength to clear out all the things between us so we could breathe fresh air. So we could make each other feel good, without making each other feel bad.

I opened my mouth just as he said, “I can’t.”

I nodded. “I know.”

Because I did know. It was a truth I understood down in my bones.

Our complicated future was nothing compared to our complicated past.

He shrugged at my silence, and I felt the naked length of my legs, my breasts without a bra. My hair like a sex-tossed cloud around my head. I felt every single way he’d stripped me and changed me and then…didn’t want me.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to take you wherever you want to go and it’s over.”

We just kept nodding at each other like idiots, because what could we do?

And everything we didn’t talk about cluttered the room like ghosts and monsters and animals let loose in the wilds of our lives. He saw them too, he felt them too but he’d rather not deal with them.

We’d part ways and those ghosts would vanish and the monsters wouldn’t be as scary and the animals would become our pets again, like they had been for seven years. Because we weren’t together constantly reminding each other of everything we wished we could forget.

Pest scratched at the door and whined. “I better take her out,” he said and opened the door, letting in even cooler night air. “And I’ll find you some new pants.”

And he was gone.