Wiley's next date

Wiley nodded, almost grateful, and waved a hand in my general direction. “Thanks,” he said, and then he was gone, messenger bag bumping his hip as he navigated the door with exaggerated delicacy, like someone trying to avoid tripping a burglar alarm. The latch caught with a click that felt both anticlimactic and epochal, as if the universe had just closed a parenthesis, I didn’t even remember opening.

And then it was just me and Sarah and the dawn, and a silence so thick it could have doubled as insulation.

For nearly an hour, the house became a mausoleum for everything we hadn’t yet said. I sprawled on the sofa, arms folded over my chest like a corpse in a low-budget horror film, staring at the stippled ceiling and watching the slow, forensic progress of a single fruit fly trapped under the lampshade. The only sounds were the fridge’s indigestion, the faint sweep of Sarah’s feet across the linoleum as she navigated the kitchen, and the distant, aquatic hum of traffic waking up on the main road.

I could feel her moving behind me, a gravity well in oversized pajamas. She rinsed something. She wiped something twice, then three times, like she was cleaning up the residue of an invisible spill. Once, I heard her open the window above the sink and take a deep, trembling inhale, as if the world outside might offer a more breathable brand of oxygen.

I considered leaving to go wondering around town, just quietly slipping out and letting the universe sort itself out in my absence. But I couldn’t move. It was as if my nervous system had elected to go on strike, leaving me a limp sack of bones and memory. So I waited.

Eventually, Sarah drifted over and lowered herself to the sofa’s edge, careful to preserve an inch of respectful separation between us, as if even our molecules had entered mediation. She sat there for a full five minutes, hands cupped around her knees, her breathing so measured I could count the seconds between each slow, deliberate exhale. Finally, she leaned her head against my shoulder, the weight tentative at first, then firmer, and I caught the scent of her scalp—shampoo, stress, and something faintly metallic, like the air right before lightning.

Her ear was so close I could hear the blood snaking through it, the soft thud of her pulse keeping a separate, anxious rhythm from my own. She didn’t speak for a long time, but when she did, her voice was so small it seemed as if it belonged to a child holed up inside her, talking through a tunnel in the dark.

“You hate me, don’t you,” she whispered, barely shaping the words.

I exhaled, feeling my sternum ache with the effort. “I don’t like what you did,” I said, choosing each word as though it might shatter on the way out, “but I love you for being so caring, and you only did it because you’re so caring. So, I can’t hate you for doing what I love you for.”

nearly six our later, Sarah had long since been worried, as his blind date was only supposed to last four hours, and neither he or his suppose date answered her texts. He came into the house with a giant smile on his face causing me to joke “Well it looks like your stupid date when well.”

He ignored me and ran right to Sarah “My date went Great.” I nearly spilt out my drink when he said “She want another one next week. Thank you so much!”

I glared at Sarah “Where did you find someone stupid enough to want to go on two dates with this pig.” The words burst out of me before I’d thought through the fact that they might upset Sarah if she heard them—before I’d even registered that Sarah and Wiley were already lost to their own orbit, their own post-date celebration. I might as well have been a background character in a sitcom, limited to single-line heckles that never once derailed the leads. It was the first time in years I’d felt completely invisible in my own house.

“That's great,” Sarah said, eyes shining for Wiley with an almost maternal pride, her tone generous and unguarded as a playground swing. They high-fived. I watched their hands touch and separate, watched the ripples of laughter that followed, Wiley beaming so hard he looked like he might levitate. I nearly sloshed whiskey down my chin.

I revisited that moment later, sitting on the porch steps in the cool dark, the taste of defeat souring the back of my tongue. I wondered if I should have said more—something sharp, or at least memorable. But I had nothing left in me but the sense of having been hollowed out and filled with packing peanuts.

The next few days blurred together with my ass of a supervisor giving me all the shit duties. At home Every hour felt both urgent and pointless, spent mostly trying to avoid the kitchen and, by extension, Sarah, who now moved through the house with the relaxed buoyancy of someone released from a burden. It was as if she’d been granted a temporary reprieve from gravity. She sang along to the radio. She chopped onions for dinner and didn't flinch at the sting. She even started sorting the mail again, lining the envelopes up on the counter like a general returning discipline to a neglected battalion.

Wiley, meanwhile, had fully re-infiltrated my father’s old company and, with it, my daily life. He’d underestimated just how much help the place needed, so he started spending more and more time at the office—most of it, by design, in or around my orbit. At first, he tried to play it cool: a little small talk here, an awkward inside joke there.