GEORGE
Desire without promise, sustained by unshared hope
There isn’t a moment where it ends.
No single fight that explains it. No final decision that feels definitive enough to hold onto. It just… stops happening.
At some point, I notice I haven’t heard from him. At some point, I realize I am no longer expecting to.
That is how it ends.
Not with absence, exactly. With the absence of return.
And even now, I’m not sure if that feels like relief or loss, or just the quiet absence of a question that used to occupy more space than I understood at the time.
—
It starts with a glass of wine in Alta Dena.
I arrived early and order immediately. I need something to do with my hands, like if I occupy myself enough I won’t have to feel how exposed I am in the waiting. I’m drinking too quickly. By the time he walks in, I’ve already shifted something in myself. Already made myself more open than I would admit to if I were asked directly.
George.
He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t rush. He sits across from me as if timing isn’t something he adjusts for, like the moment belongs to him as much as it does to me, maybe more.
Up close, his eyes are the first thing I notice. Blue, but not soft. Not inviting. Something sharper. Cleaner. They don’t move much. When they land, they stay.
And there’s something about it, being looked at that way, that feels like being chosen while still waiting to be fully seen.
The second thing is the tattoos.
From a distance, they read as careless. The sort of thing you assume someone accumulates without much thought. But sitting across from him, they resolve. Fine lines. Intentional placement. Older ink softened at the edges, newer pieces sharper, layered over time. It doesn’t feel random. It feels like a record. Like something built, not collected.
I start talking.
I hear myself doing it. Filling space he has no interest in filling.
He watches.
He doesn’t order anything.
We don’t order food.
At some point, he signals for the check without looking at me.
I feel something then. Not rejection. Not quite discomfort. Just a small internal shift. A recognition that this is not going to unfold in a way I recognize, not something I can move through on instinct.
“Are you—” I start.
He looks at me.
“We’re leaving,” he says.
A pause.
“And then what?” I ask.
“We’re going back to my house.”
It isn’t a question.
There is space for me to say no.
I don’t.
Even then, some part of me notices. Registers it quietly. Understands I am stepping into something that offers none of the comfort of what I know.
And something in me responds to that.
—
His apartment is warm.
Not cozy. Not inviting. Just… warm. The kind of heat that sits in the walls and doesn’t move, even with the windows open. Late summer in Los Angeles, where the air doesn’t cool so much as settle.
I stand for a moment after walking in.
“You can sit,” he says.
I sit.
He stays standing for a second, looking at me the same way he did at dinner.
“You’re nervous,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
He states it as fact.
He sits next to me. Close enough that I feel it immediately. The heat of him, the heat of the room, the lack of space for anything to dissipate.
Up close, the tattoos shift again. They feel less like decoration and more like something lived through. Something that has stayed.
“Why does that matter?” I ask.
“It doesn’t,” he says. Then, after a second, “It matters to you.”
Before I can respond, his hand moves to my wrist.
Not sudden. Not hesitant.
Placed.
His thumb presses lightly where my pulse is easiest to feel.
“Stay still,” he says.
It’s in that moment, something in me settles, a quiet ease I don’t question.
Because I want to.
Because the way he moves through it makes it feel like there’s something just out of reach; something to earn, something to be seen so longs as I stay exactly where I am.
—
It doesn’t build so much as close in.
The space between us disappears without either of us acknowledging it. The heat makes everything immediate. There is no cool surface, no distance to retreat into. Just proximity.
At some point, he stops and looks at me.
“Tell me if you want to stop.”
I recognize something in myself I don’t fully examine. A willingness. A leaning toward something that feels less like connection and more like being chosen in a very specific way.
He holds my gaze longer than necessary. That same blue, but closer now. Too close.
When he moves again, it’s slower.
More deliberate.
Like he is paying attention to something he won’t name. Like he is holding part of himself back even as everything else narrows.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do.
It is unbearable, the way he stays there. The way he doesn’t look away.
My hand moves along his shoulder, down his arm, following lines I don’t understand but feel compelled to trace.
“You’re thinking,” he says.
“So are you.”
“Don’t.”
“I can’t not.”
A pause.
“Then don’t say anything.”
So I don’t.
The heat becomes part of it. The lack of space. The way everything feels slightly too close, slightly too intense, like there is no room for anything but what’s happening.
At one point, his forehead rests against mine.
We stay there.
Breathing the same air.
It feels like something might resolve.
Like something might finally give.
It doesn’t.
It just continues.
And then, just as gradually, it ends.
—
After, the quiet comes back immediately.
The room still warm. The air unchanged.
He lies back like nothing has shifted.
I turn toward him.
“Do you always do that?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“Skip everything in between.”
“Yes.”
“And that works?”
He looks at me.
“It’s not supposed to work,” he says. “It’s just supposed to happen.”
After that, it doesn’t become anything.
It just continues.
Not consistently. Not predictably.
It returns.
A message. A call. My name.
No explanation.
And I go.
—
There is something else I notice early on.
A pattern.
He says things that land harder than he seems to register.
“You overthink everything.”
“You’re not as self-aware as you think you are.”
“I don’t think you know what you want.”
“The self depreciation isn’t cute.”
Each time, there is a moment where I feel it. Where something in me tightens, reacts, wants to push back.
And then—
He smiles.
Easy. Disarming. Almost boyish.
As if nothing of consequence has just been said.
And something in my body follows it.
The reaction softens. The edge disappears.
It is disorienting, how quickly it happens.
Like I don’t quite have permission to feel hurt, because how could I possibly, looking at him like that.
And I wonder, later, if that’s part of it.
Not just him.
Me.
The way I override myself to stay inside something that doesn’t quite hold.
—
Why him.
I ask myself this, though never out loud.
It doesn’t feel like love.
It feels like something that keeps me slightly off balance.
He doesn’t give enough to settle into. So I don’t settle.
I stay alert. Interested.
There is a version of him I think I see, just beneath everything else. Something more open. Something more reachable.
And I think, if I stay long enough, if I don’t push, if I don’t ask for more in the wrong way, maybe that version will surface.
Or maybe it’s simpler.
Maybe it’s the attention.
Not the kind that is given freely. The kind that feels conditional. That sharpens you.
When he looks at me, I feel it.
When he pulls back, I feel that too.
And I don’t like how much I notice that.
—
We do fight.
When we do, it is immediate. Total.
“You don’t say anything,” I say. “You just decide things and expect me to follow.”
“I don’t expect anything from you.”
“That’s the problem.”
“You’re here,” he says. “What does that say?”
“That I don’t know how to leave.”
“That’s not my responsibility.”
The words land clean.
“Nothing is your responsibility,” I say.
“You want something I’m not giving you.”
“I want you to acknowledge that you are giving me something.”
“I’m not.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is for me.”
And there it is again.
Two versions of the same thing that don’t align.
The fights don’t resolve.
They end.
I leave.
Weeks pass.
Then months.
Long enough that it starts to feel like it might actually be over.
I meet other people.
They are easier. Kinder. More available.
Nothing is wrong.
That is the problem.
I try to stay.
I try to feel something that feels like forward motion.
And I notice I am not fully in it.
—
And then my phone lights up.
His name.
No explanation.
And I feel it immediately.
Recognition.
Like stepping back into something that never fully stopped.
I could ignore it.
I don’t.
—
Another time, we drive out west.
The road stretches beside the ocean, long and exposed, the kind of stretch that makes you aware of how little there is to hold onto. The light is too bright, flattening everything. He doesn’t put music on.
“I like quiet,” he says.
We keep going like that for a while, the windows cracked just enough for the air to move through. It’s warmer than it should be. The kind of lingering heat that sits on your skin.
At some point, he pulls off without announcing it. A narrow turnout just past a bend in the road, the gravel uneven under the tires. Below us, the water hits the rocks in slow, repetitive breaks. Not dramatic. Just constant.
There’s a small place set back from the road. Not quite a restaurant, not quite a stand. A few mismatched tables, sun-worn wood, an umbrella that doesn’t fully cover anything. The kind of place you don’t plan to stop at.
We order something simple. Sandwiches, I think. Neither of us comments on it.
I’m wearing a leather jacket that’s too big for me. Worn in a way that can’t be replicated, the sleeves slightly long, the shoulders not quite mine. It used to belong to my father. I didn’t think about that when I put it on, but I’m aware of it now, the way it sits on me, the weight of it in the heat.
We sit across from each other.
He doesn’t say much.
The ocean is close enough that you can hear it, but not so close that it interrupts anything.
At one point, he looks at me for a second longer than necessary.
Then, later, when we’re back in the car—
At a stoplight, he reaches over and brushes my hair back, his fingers grazing my cheek.
“What was that?” I ask.
“What was what?”
“That.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Then say what you mean.”
I don’t.
Because I don’t know how to say it without making something real that I’m not sure either of us wants to name.
We drive a little longer before he speaks again.
“It’s the anniversary,” he says.
“Of what?”
“My father.”
The words land flat.
“You could have told me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m here.”
He looks at me then, something sharper in his expression.
“That’s exactly why.”
“Why what?”
“Why I didn’t.”
A pause.
“You don’t get to show up for things you don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand.”
“I don’t want to.”
The light changes.
The old El Camino idles for a second longer than it needs to, the air inside thick with stale cigarettes and something older, the residue of long nights he will never tell me about.
The ocean keeps moving.
We don’t.
—
We come back like that.
After fights. After silence. After other people.
Not because anything is resolved.
Because nothing is.
—The last time doesn’t announce itself.
It feels like all the others, familiar enough to move through without thinking, until something in it shifts.
He stops.
Not abruptly. Just enough that I notice.
“I can’t,” he says.
A pause.
“I don’t think this becomes anything.”
He says it carefully, like he has already decided it and is only now letting me in on it.
I look at him, trying to find something in his face that suggests otherwise. There isn’t.
“I don’t know,” I say.
It comes out quieter than I expect.
Not defensive. Not convincing.
Just true.
And in that moment, it feels like the only honest thing I’ve said the entire time.
—
After that, nothing is decided.
There is no final message.
At some point, it just doesn’t happen again.
—
I still don’t know why I stay as long as I do.
If it’s him.
If it’s me.
If it’s the feeling of almost being chosen.
Or the fact that he never gives me enough to be done.
It doesn’t feel like love.
It feels like something adjacent to it.
Something that keeps me slightly unsteady.
And now, without it—
I notice what’s missing.
Not him.
The feeling.
