“Yes, Liam.” She enunciates my name like it’s hard to say, “How does he feel about you having a secret person?”
“This has nothing to do with my secret person! Why would that affect him at all?” I’m trying to keep my voice low in this tiny room outside the restrooms, but the attempt makes my words come out in a hiss.
She doesn’t respond, she just looks at me and stares, I’m not even sure she is blinking anymore. I turn and move slowly toward the bathroom door.
“You should have a conversation with him about it.” She says, and I freeze with my hand on the door. “Have youhada conversation with him about it?” Her eyes demand an answer.
“He’s fine. He… We talk about my secret person.” I’m saying the words, but my mind is trying to find replays of our conversations, trying to find the one where I’ve told him how I’m feeling. “He doesn’t care about it at all.”
Now she’s pointing a finger at me. “You mean you’ve shared with him all of your adventures and what they mean to you? You’ve both talked about this?”
I take offense at her insinuation, but also floored by the truth of it. My brain flips through every conversation between Martin and me and one thing is clear: I don’t share with him how I feel. Our conversations about my secret person are shallow and vague and he never encourages me or teases me, or... It’s almost a non-thing between us. A thing we acknowledge only on a superficial level. I’m stunned at the realization and have a strong urge to push the bathroom door open and run inside to escape it. Instead, I create a defense: “Why are you asking this? Why does this matter at all?”
“Liam,” she sighs and steps toward me. “Have you seen the way he was looking at you today? The man is lost in thoughtabout everything you say or do. And you too. Everything he does sends you into another world. Something is up.”
I can’t process this information. My brain refuses, so I don’t try. Instead, I acquiesce quietly. “I will talk to him about it.” I feel my body hang loosely with the words like I’ve accepted defeat, and I fix my gaze on the floor again. “He’s my best friend. We should talk about this.”
I feel her approaching me and I flinch a little when she leans in to kiss me on the cheek, which erases the defeat in my posture. “We just care about you both, is all.” I nod my head as a gesture of thanks, and smile at her a closed-mouth smile. “We just want you both to be okay!”
With a small squeeze on my bicep, she turns and disappears through her bathroom door with a glancing smile back at me.
“We’ll talk about this,” I find myself sighing to the rug.
After dinner and a long retracing of our steps, the sky is starting to darken and we are nearing the Village Bakery where our crawl started and Martin’s car is parked. Brad and Jeannie will follow me back to my place, so we start our goodbyes to Martin as we approach his car in the dwindling light.
“This was fun, guys,” he’s saying and we’re all genuinely agreeing and giving thankful glances to Jeannie for the idea.
Starting our goodbyes, there’s hand-shaking and Jeannie’s hugging and kissing cheeks and warmth all around. I find myself looking at the bouquet I’ve been carrying all day, their weight in my hand almost unbearable now. I hold them out to Martin instead of hugging or shaking hands. “I want you to have these, Martin. Will you please take them home and enjoy them?” He looks at me, but doesn’t reach for them. “It was silly of me to buy flowers for someone I can’t give them to.” I look over at Jeannie who has no expression, same for Brad. “I can’tpossibly take them home and have to explain that to myself all night. Please take them. I want you to have them.”
I look into his eyes, glistening in the overhead lights. His hand slowly reaches for the flowers, but his eyes never waver. Next thing I know, the flowers are in his grasp and he’s smacking me in the back with them as he pulls me in for a tight hug. It warms my core and I find myself grasping his back muscles with my fingertips. The sound of bouquet wrapper sliding against my back is immense, the soft brush of tendrils on my neck is electric. He pulls away slowly and doesn’t look away as he moves toward his car door. “Thank you, Liam. They are spectacular.”
I hear Brad huff and turn away. The flowers are still a sore spot with him, apparently.
“They’re probably a little sweaty,” I say with a fractured laugh, “from holding them all day.” We smile and chuckle together.
The moment lingers long enough for Brad to be huffing again, signaling the inevitable end of our goodbyes. Jeannie is squeezing his arm for sure. Martin climbs into his car and we’re on our way before we hear him pulling out of the parking lot.
The rest of the walk home is quiet, even free of Brad’s huffing.
My mind has a million ragged thoughts and questions, but for some reason they swirl around in my head calmly, almost peacefully. I can’t stop smiling, swinging the remainder of my sourdough loaf. Our silence is only broken when we reach their car and Jeannie turns to me for a final goodbye and says, “Now you can go read that message from your…” she enunciates her message by grabbing and squeezing Brad in a tight embrace, “secret person!” She’s beaming, Brad looks exhausted.
I smile back at her, and him, but I’m not sure what I’m smiling about.
We exchange our final goodbyes and I watch them drive off, waving.
When I get back to my apartment I’m ready to drop, but that white envelope with its blue string seems to be calling my name from the counter where I left it. I’m feeling so satiated from my full day of friends and people, and bread, too, that I’m almost overwhelmed by the thought of reading through whatever this journal might contain.
Drawing my mind back to my secret person, I flip through the journal, the familiar blue scrawl warming the pages. I flip past my last entry, which is essentially a blank page with five words. The whitespace of the page sends lonely images of coffee through my brain, so I flip quickly to the next entry. It’s nearly as empty, one line of sloppy writing.
It reads:
“No more journal; text me anytime.”
I think my jaw actually hangs open. What does this mean? I flip through previous pages again, the river of words flowing across the pages, ending abruptly in these two stubbornly short sentences. The weight of the untouched page, the empty lines, feels immense. Does this mean we’ve evolved, like our relationship has been elevated to the next level, or does it mean we’ve run out of words to say?
I flip again to the last message I sent and I feel it: the shock of loneliness that surged when I wrote it. I was ready to not be doing things alone. The memory burns in my core.
But then a thought occurs to me: my secret person senses it too. Maybe we are functioning on the same wavelength. Since I sent that written message, we’ve only communicated via text, and now the journal is no more. The realization almost seemsmagical to me, igniting a blaze in my core I thought I was too exhausted to feel at this late hour.