PETRICHOR 

Lila slouches at the breakfast bar, head resting against her palm, pushing the skin of her cheek up until I can barely see her right eye, idly scrolling on her phone while the coffee machine groans and grumbles in the background. The sound of my knife spreading butter on toast is deafening. Nails on a chalkboard, scraped knee on the asphalt, chewing on cotton balls, can’t pay for surgery, not in the mood tonight, why won’t you tell me, is it another woman.

  I clear my throat. Again. Again. There’s a lifetime of swallow-it-down-don’t-tell-anyones in there and I can’t get them out.Only to stand when I could stand it no more

  It began to rain. I tilted my head up, letting the droplets smack my face and slide down. The world was filled with that rich, earthy smell that always comes with a good rain—what’s the word for it? 

  Against Me! blasted through my headphones. Even if your love is unconditional, Laura Jane Grace agonized,it still wouldn’t be enough to save me.It was one of those ironic moments where every shitty thing lined up at the same time. Rain, angsty song, sitting in the park alone late at night after pissing off your girlfriend enough for her to kick you out.

  (She didn’t mean it. She called me, begged me to come home. I need a minute, I told her. I’ll come back. But I need a minute.)

  “Lance?”

  She looks up, her eyebrows furrowed in concern, the lines on her forehead starting to show like creases on a page that never quite go away—I guess that’s what your thirties and a shitty boyfriend will do to you. She leans back on her stool, sets down her phone. The display darkens like a threat.

 “You okay?” she asks. “Do you need some water?”

  No. There’s something wrong with me. My throat feels fine.

  “I need to tell you something.” Voice cracking, it’s too quiet, all but buried under the Keurig’s insistent sputtering. The butter has congealed on my toast. The air in here is freezing.

  When I was little, my mom used to take me to the park on her rare day off. Not this park—a different park, in a different state, in a different time. But the good thing about parks is they’re all basically the same. Green, green, green. Even in New York, even at night, even in the fall, even when it rains, the parks are green. And the rain smells and sounds the same, too. No matter where you go, it smells and sounds the same.

  Lila hums. She’s been asking me for a while: What’s wrong?   Nothing, everything, work, just thinking, indigestion, bad book, saw something crazy on the bus that you wouldn’t believe. She knows but lets me deflect because she doesn’t want to push, doesn’t want me to hate her, doesn’t want to scare me away after all it’s just a matter of time isn’t it until I get sick of her and she doesn’t want to accelerate it and now we’re talking about her and not me and we kiss and make up and make love and it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.

  There’s something hiding inside my brain, throat, stomach, arms, legs, fingers, toes. Behind my eyes, up my nose, under my tongue. I was in the park that rainy night because I couldn’t tell Lila. Again. I tried. I really, really, really tried. But it’s like—you keep something with you for over thirty years and it becomes precious. Fragile. My mom once told me she cried right after I was born because she felt so empty and lonely and cold. I guess it’s like that: this something is my baby, and I’m terrified that handing it over will leave me with nothing left.

  “What is it?” God, even when she’s tired, exasperated, her voice is angelic. Napping in the sun splayed across the carpet. A symphony of crickets and a crackling fire. Homemade chicken pot pie. A ring, in a box, in a drawer, a comforting secret.

  One I want to reveal. But I can’t keep lying to her, not if I want to marry her, and God do I want to marry her. So I need to tell her the truth—that I like—that I want—

  “Lila.” I start—stop—like a chainsaw not quite ready to run. Clear throat. Swallow. Pull the cord again.

  “I’m—”

  —dreaming of hands, large and calloused and hot, caressing my neck and arms and back, viscerally rough—panting in my ear—the comforting vastness of an unfamiliar body pressing up behind me, more more more

  STOP

  and later of Lila as she bites my shoulder and I love her the way she likes and I look into her golden brown eyes burdened with lust and those strange hands would brush against my most intimate place and I gasp into her mouth more more more and God I feel full and warm for the first fucking time as he and Lila

  I don’t want this, I don’t want to remember, stop thinking about being—

  “—sorry. I’m can’t. I’m sorry.”

  We don’t have a wall clock, but I can almost hear one berating me, anyway. Tick. Failure. Tock. Liar. Tick. Fraud. Tock. Coward.

  A tornado thrashes the air between us. The word I wanted to say is trapped behind a dam or under a lid or in the small, small box caught in my throat and it just—won’t—budge.Tell her. Tell her. Say it. Say it. I promised her. I promised myself.

  But how can I? How can I look her in the eye and tell her about that dream, about those hands? How would she look at me if I did?

  omething fundamental and sacred fades from Lila’s eyes as she regards me. There is a precipice, and I am hovering over the edge. Say it. Say it. Just say it.

  “Can we go for a walk?”

  Not what I meant. Not what I wanted. But—

  “Sure.” Lila sighs, pushes off the counter. “Sure.”

 It’s a start. Maybe, maybe, I can find the words and the will to say them scattered on the street.

 I pull on a sweater, and, I guess because my mind is already in that strange and distant place, I can’t help but remember—

  Lithe arms, bare chests, long legs, boy butts, the sound of clothes coming off, moans in the shower while the warm water washes away a day of strain and grime, the flash of a secret tattoo or piercing, short gym shorts, sweaty white shirts, and at home, dreams and dreams and dreams, awake and asleep, hot and fast and loud and sometimes warm and tender and soft and always coming out of it feeling right, so right, but sick, too sick, and having to start the day all over again, and—

  Lila methodically, noisily, tugs her coat closed, deigning to glance at me. I adjust my sleeves, face aflame. An apology sits on my tongue, but it’s pointless. She doesn’t know. She can’t know.

  We go for a walk. I forget my toast. She forgets her coffee. We forget an umbrella on the way out, but the rain is light this morning. The live wire between us fidgets.

  New York is not beautiful. It’s wet and gray and loud and busy and I’ve lived here for a decade and still don’t know my way around. Lila works at a law firm half an hour from our apartment—she knows New York like they grew up together and New York wants to marry her. I wonder if she knows all of New York’s secrets. I wonder if New York would be able to tell her the things I can’t.

  We round a corner—there are kids playing at the park, their parents keeping a watchful eye. I can sense Lila’s hand hanging at her side, and my desire to take it is insistent like a migraine. One of the little girls falls off her swing and begins to cry these thick, heaving sobs.

  “You know,” Lila mumbles, the first words she’s said since we left the apartment, “you don’t have to stay with me if you don’t want to.” She’s turned away so I can’t see her expression, but I’m not clueless. Just an idiot.

  I check the buildup in my vocal cords. Not a chance.

  “I want to,” I finally say instead. The girl’s father kisses her scraped knee, wipes her eyes. “I love you, Lila. I know I haven’t been acting like it, but I do.” There is not a world in which that is enough.

  She shakes her head and still won’t look at me.

  The little girl gets back on her swing, grinning all the way up. Something deep in my brain click-click-clicks into place—

 Once, while playing on the school playground, I slipped and fell off the incredibly death trap-like jungle gym. The air fled my body—I couldn’t take a breath, like an elephant on my chest weighing me down, crushing me, and my vision started to go dark and blurry and I thought I was going to die there, limbs flailing, horrific whooping sound slamming out of my lungs, the bells at heaven’s gates ringing—

  “Are you okay?”

 My eyes, clenched tight enough to burn, shot open. A boy—I couldn’t remember his name, or what class he was in, or even what grade—leaned over me, offering his hand. Shaking, I took it.

 Smooth. His skin was so smooth.

 “Wanna go to the nurse?” he asked with a little tilt of his head.

 I shook my head (which made me a little dizzy), unable to speak. That weight on my chest was gone, but there was something else there. This boy, his eyes the color of sweet, fresh snap peas, his wide grin displaying his missing front tooth, his hair like a downy-soft bird’s nest.

 Still holding my hand in his own—smooth, warm, gentle—he started walking toward the big grass field where some other boys were getting ready to play soccer.

 He kicked up the ball and passed it to me with a little smile. “Can you be—”

  “—honest with me? We’re partners.”

  I drag myself up from the deep waters of memory. We’ve passed the park. I reach over to take Lila’s hand, and—thank God, she lets me. One of us is trembling.

  Honesty. Right. Try again. “It took you years to come out to me.” Cork.

  “You’re a trans woman?” she asks with a small laugh and a sniffle.

  I don’t bother answering—she knows I’m not. Instead: “I keep trying to tell you. But I can’t get it out no matter how hard I try. It’s like that.” Inhale. Exhale. “It’s like that.”

  I know it shouldn’t be hard. I know she’ll love me even if I tell her I’m—bisexual. I know she will. And yet. The words I want to say are still stoppered up, pressurized. Eventually, they’ll burst. Right?

  For some reason, the park and the rain and the frustration remind me of that boy on the playground from a lifetime ago. Was he my first “crush”? Did I think he was cute? Were we friends after he helped me up, after he held my hand?

  Would she really mind? A schoolyard crush, a sexual awakening, a wet dream—

  Why would she hate me for any of it?

  Lila hums. The rain begins to fall a little harder. “I don’t understand,” she says after a moment. “But if you love me—”

  “I do—”

  “—and if you aren’t cheating on me—”

  “I would never—”

  “—then it’s okay.” Finally, finally, she turns to face me. Her face and hair are damp with rain and maybe something else and her eyes are red, red, like dried blood. “Well, it’s not. But I want it to be okay.”

  “I’ll tell you,” I promise. Maybe it’s a lie. The box latches shut. “Someday. I’ll tell you.”

  We’re waiting to cross the street. It’s a slow morning—not many cars are out. The walk signal turns, but neither of us moves.

  I won’t tell her tonight. I won’t tell her tomorrow. I might not tell her before I propose, or before we get married, or before we have kids. I might wait until our kids move out, until they get married, until we retire. Maybe it will be the last thing I tell her.

  “I don’t want to fight,” Lila says as we step into the crosswalk. “I don’t understand, but I will. Someday. We have time.”

  On the other side, I pull her into my arms. She doesn’t melt into them, not quite, but she doesn’t pull away. Her hands on my back are warm, warm, warm even through my sweater and my undershirt and she’s warm and soft through her layers, too, and the rain sizzles off our skin. Her eyes are still red and our hands are still trembling and I can still feel the tattered threads hanging between us. But.

  We have time.