The Rest

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I convinced her to meet me once.

Five minutes. That was the deal. A smoke break, outside her town, just so we'd both know neither of us was catfishing the other. The bus stop was a few minutes from where she lived. I was already smiling before I got off the bus and I didn't stop smiling for three hours.

I don't even remember how we got onto Pulp Fiction. I remember she said the gimp scene ruins the whole movie, and I said that's the point, and she said no — the point is the briefcase, and I said nobody knows what's in the briefcase, and she said exactly, like she'd won something. Maybe she had.

"Okay, but Marvel," I said.

"Don't."

"You don't —"

"I like the first Iron Man. Everything after is the same movie in a different suit."

"That's forty films."

"Forty times the same movie. You're proving my point."

And it went like that for hours. She'd hand me a line and it landed exactly where a line is supposed to land, and I'd hand one back, and neither of us ever reached for it — the words were just there, already in the mouth, perfectly timed, the way dialogue is timed in the movies we were arguing about. Every sentence fell so naturally it felt scripted. Like someone had written the two of us, and we were just doing the read-through, getting it right on the first take.

I lit cigarettes I didn't taste. By the time I noticed how dark it had gotten, I'd smoked most of a pack and the five minutes had become an evening. Then she had to go, and I hugged her goodbye, and I did not want the hug to end.

She was intoxicating. That's the only word for what she was, and I knew that night I would be useless against it.

What I kept telling her, over and over — when she did the thing with her face, when she said the inconvenient honest thing, when she sent me a video of herself — was that I loved how genuine she was. How she was just her. No filter, no edit, no bracing. Free to do what she wanted, with no guilt, no fear of being judged. I told her so often that it became a thing between us. Genuine. The word she heard from me more than any other word.