30
H Y P O T H E T I C A L L Y Y O U R S
Touch me with your eyes.
Let me taste your kiss once more.
IT HAD BEEN ALMOST A month since I last saw Andy.
I was beginning to think maybe she wanted more than just space. Maybe she realized she didn’t want a relationship at all. I knew she was doing well through the updates Josh gave me in between training for law enforcement. He told me she quit her job at the bar and was working freelance on something special.
I didn’t ask what though. If she wanted me to know, she knew how to reach me.
I scrolled to the page of the current novel I was editing and tried to focus on the sentences. More and more, I found my mind wandering to her and everything that had happened, unable to stay on task. Unable to recall the exact angle her mouth took when smiling, or the exact note her laughter hit.
I kept my hand on the mouse, willing the disquiet in my head to stop. The words just weren’t singing to me like they used to. I read and read sentence after sentence, trying to make sense of it, but it was no use.
Without her, words were just that—words.
Sighing heavily, I pushed away from my desk, leaning back in my chair as I dragged my hand up and down the back of my head. I should call her. Just to see how she is. She won’t mind. You know she won’t. She’s probably just waiting on you.
A packet was dropped on the center of my desk.
“This came for you. Looks like someone decided to go old school.” It was the new intern, a young man who reminded me a lot of myself when I first started.
I picked up the large envelope and opened it. Based on the outside label, I knew it was from a local publishing house. Probably another project I’d be fussing over, pushing it to the edge of my time limit.
They usually submitted their pieces through email.
This was a first.
Pulling the chunk of papers out, I sat them on the center of my desk, eyes roaming over the title page.
Hypothetically Yours
By: Andrea Hale
My heart began to beat faster as I read it again, just to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. Heat built inside my palms as my fingers found the corner of the page and lifted, ever so carefully, turning it over to reveal the opening page.
You and I exist within these words,
I find the stanza in your smile.
Discover the meter in the way you touch me.
Come find me inside these pages.
Bleed your thoughts onto them and into me.
I looked up, eyes wide, and then back down, devouring every word. Taking my time to read them thoroughly for all their meaning.
“What’s that?” Manny asked as he leaned on the edge of my desk.
“A piece from an up-and-coming author,” I said as I flipped the page. I couldn’t peel my eyes away to look at him.
He knew the language, because he moseyed off to leave me to it with a short chuckle.
IT ONLY TOOK ME TWO hours to devour her words. I was that hungry.
She wrote about our love affair, chronologically, starting with some of her older poems… the ones I’d read from the tree, but she’d cleaned them up. Then she transitioned into what she wrote while we worked together on her manuscript, telling secrets of falling in love with a boy too young.
My heart raced, dancing with her as she carried me on a journey I never wanted to leave. I felt her desire. Her confusion. Her pain as the words evolved into the lonely side of love. Of endless days without a single touch.
And when I neared the end, she moved into poems I knew nothing about. Recent thoughts about forbidden love and abandon. About tragedy and hope.
When I came to the last page, my pulse was going crazy. My fingers shook as I flipped it and there, in black and white, was what I’d come to think of as my poem, only she’d added a line. A line that made my palms sweat and my knees weak.
I found you in between heart beats,
Inside a caught breath,
Hiding behind a cage of bone.
Dance with me, you said.
Find our rhythm home.
I’m ready if you are.
She still loved me. Still wanted what we’d only just begun. I opened my drawer and put the manuscript in before locking it.
“Where you goin’?” Terry, my desk neighbor, asked as I stood from my desk.
I looked over at him. “I’m going to find my rhythm home.”