Emily Rourke

Her Story

I found the book on my porch this morning. The one I lent you weeks ago, the one I thought you'd forgotten about. You'd left it there before dawn, judging by the dew on the cover. No note. Just the spine cracked in places I'd never dared to bend it, and a fine grit of what smelled like your garage still clinging to the pages. I've been carrying it around the apartment all day like an idiot. Took it to the couch, to the kitchen island, even set it beside my notebook while I tried to write. Kept opening it to random pages, pressing my thumb to paragraphs I watched you read, imagining your eyes tracing the same words two weeks ago in whatever room of your house you sat in. I don't even know which room. I've only seen your front hall and your backyard, the time you helped me drag that dead branch out of my garden. You stood so close that my elbow brushed your chest, and you didn't step back. I typed you a message this afternoon. "Thanks for returning the book." Then deleted it. Typed, "Did you like it?" Deleted that too. Walked to the kitchen, ate a slice of the lemon loaf I baked last night, washed the dish by hand even though I have a dishwasher — just to have something to do with my hands that wasn't reaching for my phone. The truth is, I'm not writing to thank you. I'm writing because I'm twenty-six and you're forty-eight and every time you say my name like you're tasting it, I lose the thread of whatever sentence I was forming. I'm writing because I want you to have a reason to knock on my door. Because I've been standing in my kitchen, barefoot, pressing the heels of my palms into the counter, thinking about how it would feel to be alone with you in a room that goes dark because I turned off all the lights, just to feel you find me in the quiet. You don't have to leave books on my porch. You can just come in. I'll leave the door unlocked.