She arrived ten minutes earlier than the time he had specified.  Early, because her mother had taught her that nothing was more socially unacceptable or rude than to be late when someone was expecting you, ready to give you some of their own precious time.  It was a habit now engrained in toneless voices that bantered banally every night, their judgments and disappointment ringing cold in sleepless eyes.

The apartment building was unfamiliar, facing a busy street lined with healthy trees and overflowing trash bins.  Steps leading up to the door reminded her of movies in big cities where almost always, something important occurred on those porches that would be crucial later to the plot.  She counted the steps but entered without incident.

Three floors up, an old green door faded to near black opened to her.  The brass numbers reflected a warm, dirty image of her face, and for a second she had to remind herself it was the numbers that were soiled.

His hair was cut short, but long enough that it shagged around his ears like some coffee house poet.  He hadn’t shaved in at least two days, yet his face still retained the innocent quality that had initially drawn her to him.  She ignored his bloodshot, gloom-rimmed eyes, and instead took note of his dark shirt and gray jacket and below, dirty jeans that drug under bare feet.  It looked as if sorrow himself had dressed the man.

Nevertheless, his half smile was warm as he escorted her inside, locking the door behind them.  She clutched her purse close like an elderly woman at a rock concert, sniffing lightly at the scent of incense and beer.  The TV glowed a lonely infomercial promising to make her rich in thirty days while she worked from home or sunned in Cancun.  The unearthly white smile of the blonde on the screen made her uncomfortable, so she turned for the kitchen.

His table lay bare, which surprised her, though she wasn’t sure why.  Further left, the kitchen shined, but didn’t quite sparkle, as years of tenants had pounded the newness from the appliances.  There were two clean wine glasses sitting patiently near the sink.

She felt a friendly arm around her, and a large palm squeezing her right shoulder playfully, “I’m glad you came.” His voice was stained with cigarette smoke, but deep and full enough to make her shiver.  As sudden as it had appeared, the arm was gone, and he moved in front of her to pick up the wine glasses.  His pants were too large for him, she observed from this angle.  The way the gray jacket hung protectively around his thin frame gave him a startling sense of vulnerability, and in this light, she knew she could fall in love with him.

TV whispering brightly in her ears, she watched him place the glasses delicately on opposite sides of the table.  Then, a chilled bottle of red wine emptied itself for them, and was placed within reaching distance.  She waited nervously when he disappeared into the as yet unexplored regions of the apartment; he returned slowly with a notebook, and two pencils.  Patiently, he ripped two pages and placed them before the wine glasses like thin square plates ready to serve.  His placement of the pencils betrayed his guess that she was right handed.  With this finished, he stood back and stuffed his hands in his pockets, dragging his oversized pants down another inch.  His tired eyes smiled genuinely at her, and his lips soon followed.

She forced her shoulders to relax and darted a nervous glance at the living room, hoping faintly that the woman from Cancun would interrupt.  As if reading her mind, but not considering her thoughts, he abruptly shuffled to the TV and turned it off.  The silence was formidable now, thick and near visible like the incense smoke still lingering above her head.  She had taken her seat and placed her purse close to her legs before he returned.  

He sat, too, after a moment of looking down at her shy figure.

The light from the kitchen ceiling was on the sickly side, and made his face appear even more tired, half of it shrouded by a healthy shadow.  He delicately lifted his wine glass, and looked at hers until she did the same.  

“To revealing…” He said with a half smile, tilting his glass towards her.

She breathed in shallow, “To revealing.” She tipped her glass into his, and was rewarded with a clean clink; she tried to ignore the way he watched her as she brought the glass to her full lips and sipped gently.

Glasses lowered to the table.  His grinning eyes, full of amusement and anticipation, stared into hers as he told her to pick up her pencil.  He did the same.

“Everyone has secrets,” He began, “Everyone has motives for their actions that are hidden from others, and sometimes even from themselves.  Secret wants and desires that drive you without you knowing it.  These desires can break us when ignored, or when called by a different name.  They need a stage to play on, lest they consume you.”

Frozen, his voice had captivated her.  Rhythmic, deliberate, deep and soothing, it seemed capable of taming wild beasts.  He held her gaze steady, his pale green eyes unblinking.  She wanted more than anything to tear away from his scrutiny, but there was something in her mind that knew she shouldn’t.  She had asked for this; she had agreed, and had come across town to his dark apartment.  She would receive what she asked for.

His expression stayed warm, but had dropped to a serious stare as he gripped his pencil in his hand like one would a dagger. “I promised to give you a stage; somewhere you can face these desires, get them out in black and white, and thereby quiet their influence in your life.  But if this is going to happen, you have to trust me.  You have to do exactly as I say.  I know you’re frightened, but if you back out before we’re done, you’ll be worse off than you were before you knocked on my door.  Nevertheless…you know where that door is.”

His offer of escape soothed her nerves very slightly, like a rush of water from the shower over tired muscles.  Even if she didn’t tear from their agreement, she breathed easier knowing the dirty apartment numbers would present her leaving reflection without a protest.

“Ready?”

Her heart jammed into her throat forcefully.  When she looked back at him, she made herself remember the vulnerability and the jacket.  Her nod was almost indiscernible.

“The paper and pencil are for your benefit.  If you cannot say certain things out loud at first, you may write them to begin with.  But by the end of this, you will be answering everything in a strong voice.”

She immediately wondered what his piece of paper was for.

He let the silence hang oppressively for another minute, watching her fidget with her pencil.  She’d now let her eyes start wandering the room, looking for a distraction.

“Your first order,” He commanded, clasping his fingers in front of him, “is to tell me why you came today.”

She inhaled, and contemplated.  Then a meek voice appeared, “Because…you asked me if I wanted to, if I wanted to make my life less difficult…”

“You’re lying.” She had barely gotten the last syllable out before the guillotine of his voice snapped shut.  She looked at him, hurt and doe-eyed, surprised at his change of character.  The voices in her head began a chorus of I-told-you-so.

“I’m not…” She began.

“You are lying,” He repeated, this time slower.  “Tell me why you really came today, to a stranger’s apartment, across town, alone.”

His choice of words made her flush with embarrassment, and she stuttered, “I-I don’t know, you seemed nice…”

“Yes, you do know.  Tell me why you really came today,” He accentuated each word like the fire of a shotgun.

Her eyes betrayed fear as she searched her brain for an answer.  He decided to assist.

“You came here because you were hoping I would fuck you, right?” He said matter-of-factly.

Her eyes went wide, “No!  I-I hardly know you!”

“Why else would you come to a strange man’s apartment with so little effort on his part?” He quirked a knowing eyebrow.

“I didn’t come here for sex!  I’m not like that!” Her voice had filled now, grown beyond the cracked whisper it began as.

“Sure, they all say that right before the panties come off.”

“I’m not some slut looking for a lay!  How dare you, you don’t even know me!”

“I don’t need to; you’re the one who came to me with a smile and a wave.”

“Fuck you!  I’m not here to sleep with you!”

“Well, then why did you come?” He prompted again.

“I came because you’re the first guy to ever approach me in public and seem interested, alright?!” She bellowed, exasperated, “I came because I wasn’t about to pass up a chance at someone who was attracted to me!”

His expression immediately softened into a wide, satisfied grin, which gradually became more and more amused as he watched her realization, her apprehension, and then her blinking relief as she sat back in her chair, confounded.  She grabbed the glass of wine uncouthly and drank half, looking back to him with questioning eyes.

“There now.  Doesn’t the truth feel wonderful?” His eyes sparkled into her.

She stared at him incredulously, then at the pale teakwood table beneath her arms.  She wasn’t sure what had just happened, but he was correct: her chest felt lighter. “I can’t believe I just told you that.”

“I’m sure you’ve never told that to anyone, probably not even yourself.”

The voices in her head, they immediately shut up at mention of their failures.

“You ready for the next one?”  

She frowned, “You mean, you’re alright with me being so…”

“That matters so little, I can’t even measure it for you,” His voice was sure and honest, “We’ve only just begun.  And this will go faster, and easier, the sooner you surface the truth.”

A wave of comfort rolled down her spine, drowning insecurities from the confession.  She nodded to him, stronger and with more force this time, and leaned expectantly on the table.

He twirled the pencil acrobatically between his fingers, leaning back casually in his chair, “Why would you assume that I would want you to leave because of why you were here?”

He could tell she was thinking carefully, digging for the truth that escaped her before, “Because it makes me seem desperate, one of those people who become clingy and go crazy in a relationship…and most people shy away from that if they catch glimpse.”

“Are you desperate?”

She sobered. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’ve not had more than one boyfriend my whole life.  I’ve never been wanted by men.”

“Why do you think the past has any effect on the future?”

She missed a beat. “What kind of question is that?  Of course the past has effect on the future.”

“If you toss a coin, the odds it will come up heads is fifty percent.  You could toss that coin for a hundred years, and it could come up tails every time, but the odds that the next toss will be heads is still fifty percent.  The past flips have nothing to do with the future flips.”

“I’m not a coin; I remember my past flips, and they do have an effect on my future flips.”

“They have an effect on your future flips because you remember them.”

She hesitated.

He said, “The past has no power.  It is a distant shore of some forgotten dream; it cannot create or inhibit your world.  It only does so when you give it the power it needs to interfere.”

“Then why do people say if you forget your past, you’re doomed to repeat it?”

“Because people need mindless clichés to justify their decisions.”

Unexpectedly, a smile breached the surface of her face, and she reached for her wine glass.  “You honestly believe that, huh?”

He was a rock in a hurricane, and she just now realized, he always had been. “Remembering the past is only prudent if, at the time of said past events, you fail to make the necessary changes to yourself and your environment to prevent another negative occurrence.  But, that practicality can easily be lost if you use the past’s memories to make excuses, or live in fear, much like you are doing and now trying to defend to me.”

“I resent that.”

“Good.  You should.”

She said nothing.

He straightened in his chair to face her, setting down his own glass, “Don’t act like you’re doing yourself a favor by re-living all your past failures in the name of protection for the future.  I could tell when I first saw you that you were intelligent, but this isn’t one of those decisions that puts you heads above the crowd.”

She winced, almost undetectably.

“Why are you desperate enough to do what you did tonight?” His voice had softened, quieted, to a low whisper.

Her heart was throbbing angrily in her chest, and she swallowed, “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

Tears threatened to breach the borders of her eyes, so she stood long enough to reach the bottle of red wine that had now warmed with the room.  She refilled her glass sloppily and drank a third of it, hiking one foot up on her chair as if her leg could shelter her ego.

“Why?” He repeated patiently.

She finally looked up at him, her lips red from the wine, “Because I want my fairy tale.  You were cute, you were nice, and just like some fucking romantic comedy, you came up to me from nowhere, picked me out of a crowd and asked me if I wanted to spend time with you, to better my life.  Do you know how many nights I fall asleep dreaming of scenarios like that, only to have reality spit in my face?  And then it happened!  Of course I was going to say yes!”  The speech came out one long, breathless ramble, and she was shaking when she finished.

“You still believe in fairy tales?” He was refilling his own glass now.

“Fuck, I don’t know,” She moaned. “Do I want to?  Yes.  Do I actually?” She laughed bitterly and gulped wine. “They’re no good if they don’t come true.”

“But your fairy tale did come true,” He pointed out, “If all you dreamt of at night was for some handsome, suave man to pick you out of a crowd of people, ask you to spend time with him, to be a part of his life…then, mission accomplished.  You’re here, right?  So, your fairy tale has come and gone.”

Her face was angry and her eyes confused. “What are you saying?”

For the first time, he hesitated, and sipped wine before responding, “I’m saying that your fairy tale was that someone would hold you above a crowd of other strangers- whom you assume are better than you, naturally- and choose you as worthy to be in their life.  And that has happened.  And it’s probably happened many, many times before me, even if you didn’t see it.  So, since your fairy tale is now a reality, why don’t you feel better?”

She seemed truly stunned and without retort.  Her brain was pounding, swollen, threatening mutiny.

He sighed with conviction and leaned onto the table.  He wiped absentmindedly at a spot of wine that had spilled on his still-blank sheet of paper, and watched the wet fibers tear  away.  The air was palpable with her confusion, and he momentarily worried he had pushed too far, too fast.  But then the thought dissolved like the paper beneath the wine.

“The problem with fairy tales,” He began, staring at the blue lines, “is that they’re unrealistic.  Not only in the obvious senses…the dragons, the witches, the magic and the uncomplicated romances…but in that every fairy tale ends incomplete.  They lived happily ever after…sure.  Even if in your heart you know that isn’t a true, realistic thing that can happen, your mind still runs with the possibility that one single event can set you for life.  So instead of either planning out an entire realistic future in your head- or letting it go, and giving it over to destiny- you half-bake a story that you think will make you feel better and call that your fairy tale.  Didn’t you ever wonder why your story stopped at someone picking you out of a crowd and whisking you away?”

Her expression said: No, I didn’t.

“Why didn’t you plan on?  Why didn’t you think of the entire first date, or first year of dating, or your wedding, your children, your fiftieth anniversary?” He ended his rhetorical questions and said, “You only planned as far as you did because that’s what your brain thinks you need to finally feel good.  To you, that’s the only way it would ever be proven that you’re worth a damn.  But it’s happened- it’s happening right now- and you still feel like shit, don’t you?  You still feel worthless.”

Her expression said: Fuck you.

He shrugged amicably and drank, “You’re not worthless.  And no single even can define your life unless, after it happens, you immediately jump off a bridge.  This conversation…my asking you to come here…it does not dictate your worth, your future, your successes or your failures. So don’t put weight on it like it does.  You want a happy ending, then fucking write one.”

She was livid, and moved her foot back down to the floor.  She spat, “Any more of my dreams you’d like to crush tonight?”

He couldn’t hold back his chuckle, “Depends, what have you got?”

She paused, turned her face to stone, and said, “I have a dream to be the most important thing in someone’s life.  Their shining beacon and reason to live.”

“That’s the most selfish thing I’ve heard.  You don’t dream that in hopes that you can make someone’s life better; you dream that because you want their dependence to make your life better.”  He actually sounded angry, she thought.

Her nostrils flared.  She stood and leaned on the table, glaring down at him. “I’m a strong person, and my friends know it.  They can depend on me to carry them if I have to.”

“And probably at the expense of your own sanity.  You carry them half out of love, and half because you’re afraid they’ll leave if you don’t do anything they need, I’m sure.”

“Am I the only girl you’ve brought here to do this to?” Her voice quaked, “Am I the only one who you’ve sought out to rescue?”

“That doesn’t matter!” He was almost on his feet now, his hands gesturing wildly, “Who cares if you’re the first or the millionth?  This is about you!  The value of something isn’t automatically diminished just because you’re not the first or only one to receive it; if I proposed marriage to you right now, would it be less special because I wasn’t the first guy to ever fall to one knee to do it?”

She was shaking again.

He shrugged in a half-apologetic gesture, “Look, I’m not saying your dreams and hopes aren’t noble; I’m saying they’re unrealistic, and you’re going to end up disappointed and in despair if you don’t adapt them.  Sure, we all want to be numero uno in someone’s life, and you probably already are; that doesn’t mean their whole world revolves around you.  And you should be okay with that.  You should be okay with being here, even if you’re not the first girl.  People are offering you the dreams you have every damn day, but you’re not seeing it.  You’re expecting grand fantasies that are beyond human capability and then hiding under your bed when it doesn’t come true.  Is that really how you want to live?”

Her tears had escaped in the middle of his lecture, ruining her makeup and falling into her wine glass as she finished off her second helping, and immediately reached for a third.  After she poured, she sat and stared listlessly at the paper in front of her, his words resonating in her head.  He was staring at her quietly, doing his best to give no indication how badly his heart was breaking for her.  She wouldn’t look at him, her mind racing as she saw words forming on her piece of paper, fast and endless.  It wasn’t until nearly two minutes later she realized the words weren’t just being dictated in her head, but that she had picked up her pencil and begun frantically writing in a messy script, the scratching of the lead chasing away the silence.

From where he was, he could make out some of her upside-down thoughts:

…sick of waiting for the world to adapt to my view when it never…

I hate that I keep his letters, even though he was…

…why she could never hold herself up, why she took my strength for…

…I wish he would have fucked me harder, like an animal, used me like he wanted me…

…just wanted to change someone’s life and know it, have them tell me that I did…

I want to kiss death deep and then pull away to leave him cold…

…never danced, not slowly, not happily, not without worry…

…see the plates with your name on them shatter into a billion pieces…


She was writing like a woman possessed, pushing pencil hard to paper, long before abandoning grammar and punctuation.  The apartment filled with the sound of the darkest dreams spilling over walls and ceilings, releasing their pent-up energy in the form of scrapes against wood.  Soon she had flipped the paper over and began quickly filling up a second side.  

He watched her intently, watched her tears stop flowing, watched the lead shavings collect in miniscule piles where one word stopped and where another began.  The sight of watching weight literally lift from a human being was one he would never get tired of.

She had filled every inch on both sides of the paper before she finally stopped her pencil’s movement.  Quiet enveloped them, broken only by her sporadic, deep breaths.  He had poured another glass of wine and was enjoying it slowly, his own spirit lightened.

She seemed exhausted.  She didn’t re-read anything she had just written.  She just sat, and breathed, and watched the handsome green-eyed man across the table drink his wine.  

“I want to hear more of your secrets,” He asked softly.

She looked up slowly, and pushed the paper towards the edge of the table, “What kind of secrets?”

“Any that you’ve never told anyone…any you’ve hidden from yourself.”

She bit her lip.  She seemed a totally different person now; no longer tense, or apprehensive, “I’ve always wanted to be a submissive in a sexual relationship.  To be dominated by a man, and be under someone else’s control.”

He grinned in amusement and approval. “Well, if you count domination of ideas, you’ve been a slave tonight.”

For the first time since she arrived, she laughed full and loud.

“What else?”

“I’ve always wanted to beat someone to death.  With just cause, though.  I’ve dreamt of being put into a situation where in defense of my own life, I took someone else’s with nothing but my bare hands and my rage,” She said nonchalantly.

His expression didn’t change.  She felt safe.

“No one else knows it, but I hate movies.  I can count on one hand the movies I actually enjoyed watching.  I go with my friends for the company, but I could care less if I never watch another movie again,” She giggled lightly.

At this, he seemed genuinely surprised, and laughed with her, showing a full smile of white teeth.  “Never would have guessed.  How are you feeling after all this?”

She got quiet, and introspective, and then replied softly, “Better.  Thank you.”

He waved a hand as if swatting away a fly.  She smiled at him, wide and honestly.

“I’d be happy to dance with you,” He offered suddenly.

For a moment, she didn’t react.  But then she looked up with a teary half smile and nodded.  He grinned at her, and then stood and moved into the living room.  Moments later, the sound of some ages-old jazz legend- she wasn’t sure which- floated in from behind her, demanding the last of the tense silence to leave.  She saw a hand from her peripheral vision and took it, looking up at the unshaven face and exhausted eyes.  But below, his smile was beaming, and that’s all that mattered.

They danced through the entire album; slow, fast, silly, romantically, full of life and completely without reservations.  Disarming as he was, she owed him nothing, and for the first time in her life she understood exactly what that meant.  She loved this man, completely, but never felt the smallest urge to become someone else or to carry him.  She had no fear of him, or of his absence.  This dim apartment had become her sanctuary, and the gloomy eyed boy, her savior.

She passed through the green door at some point hours later, leaving the nameless man to his own demons that were eating at him, ripping his dreams from his heart and throwing them to the floor just like he had done to hers.  But she felt no worry, no need to save him.  This time, she had let herself be saved.  She left the paper and all her secrets, her horrors, her anger and her prayers with a dying man who had begged to take them.

Undisturbed she lay in the lifeboat that he had given her, bobbing on a dark, stormy sea, and instead of praying for rescue, she counted the stars.