Like it's some big fucking secret that I want Justin Taylor back , next to me, now, as soon as humanly possible. He knows that, I know that, we both know that the day he walks into my goddamn office and I try to fire him on the first day because there is no way this is happening.

"I had no idea that our previous relationship was still a problem for you." He's a sneaky one; the funny thing is he probably thinks I'm fooled. I almost laugh bitterly at the many replies I could come up with for that. No, everything's fine as long as you let me get off watching you fuck guys in the back room whenever I want. Smartass. I didn't really think about it, but now I'm pretty sure he's broken up with that fucking moron. I don't allow myself to note his indifference, especially not with gratitude.

Little Sunshine does a good job around the office. He actually reminds me of myself when I was in college, slouching around looking neglectful but somehow managing to still get everything done. He's not as good at pulling off the front, though, and every time we pass each other after meetings I choose to ignore the invitation in his overly casual "Hey" which is usually laced with this undercurrent of Would you just grab me by the collar and drag me into the men's room and fuck my brains out already It's the last thing on my mind. After all, I've got a pitch at three.

It's just the same as always. Don't tell the kid that you care. Don't let him fuck around with all the barriers, the charade, "the wire", as Debbie once called it. Whoever came up with that fucking idea? It's not like I was sitting there in a school desk during sixth grade and got bored and started scribbling down my master plan on how to never be disappointed in people and end up hating myself because nobody would ever try to like me anyway. Almost twenty years of drug-addled oscillation has made me self-objectifying enough to understand that maybe the way I act with people is maybe a bit fucked, but old habits are hard to kill, especially when getting rid of them feels a little bit like losing an eye. I am increasingly aware of this, lately.

It's easier to just blame somebody else. Maybe when my mother greeted me coming home from Michael's every night during high school with a glazed glance before going back to her TV shows and sucking booze, this was merely an intricate disguise for her loving arms protecting me, eventually, from all the things she taught me would be crippling to my well-nurtured lack of frailty. Yes, protect me, sweet mother, from all the itchy suits and ties, cheesy greeting cards, wailing baby boys with my hair and eyes, women who nurture with fattening pancakes and playful slaps, unfathomably pardoning friends that save my life from collapsing on my birthday, and above all, dauntingly beautiful young men with cunning heads of yellow hair and smiles that feel to me like earthquakes roaring in my chest.

This has to stop, I decide one day. Justin has got to go. It's the not talking that gets to me. He's not making any demands or requests, not even the kind I could easily say, "Fuck off" to, he's just not saying anything.

That's where it all got fucked with him. Justin walked out on me, I know, because he couldn't really tell me why he was leaving. My whole life I've surrounded myself with people who are most conveniently unlike me, who can actually nag me with their communication and their confessions and their feelings , and I'd watched Justin become another me after some kid got into the back of his Lexus for a baseball bat in a parking garage. I could be understanding and sympathetic about that, but without him around I haven't afforded myself the sting of thinking about it a little too much. Yeah, I could maybe, possibly be taking him home tonight but I'd have to lean one hand on the burner before I could even touch him with the other. No thanks.

Tap, tap. " Orange is the new blue?"

This isn't really the kind of thing I should be thinking about while firing an intern, but I'm bending the rules in consideration of the fact that Justin was thinking of nothing other than me when he went out for this job. Now it's his turn to figure out that I'm not fooled: "You thought when your little romance with Paganini Jr. was over, you could just come running back?" It doesn't even sound like I suddenly pulled that out of my ass, because this is exactly what we've been sparring about without actually addressing the whole time he's been here. I start to clean up the table and I kind of enjoy not even looking at him, cause I can see him squirming around in my peripheral vision. Doing that thing with his hand at his forehead. The conversation is quickly turning into "My God, if we aren't the dumbest-ass pair of faggots for letting this happen"; the blaming and the whining is just paperwork and procedure and Christ, I could count the inches of his hair that I haven't even felt since it grew out.

But a minute later he throws that "You would have told me that you loved me" and I don't know who the fuck he thinks he is. If he wants to talk about not expressing the way we feel there are a lot of things we could talk about, like what it did to me when he walked out on me at Babylon with his lips all over that little suave shit just to prove that he could, when just-to-prove-that-you-can is the worst fucking reason to do something like that to someone who understands horribly, consistently, that there is always a possibility of losing. That's Plan B of the whole never-getting-hurt schematic, or maybe it's Plan C. I kind of wish I'd actually written it out so that he could have found it in my desk or something and felt sorry for me.

I realize right then that I'm actually pretty pissed off about everything that happened. I shouldn't take it out on him, but I'm so exhausted and there's no way anything useful is coming out of my mouth unless I'm pretty much scolding him and telling him he's the one who did everything wrong, and what comes out is some kind of snarly translation of the fact that I need him to grow a pair because I'm the one who's scared stiff. There's this immediate silence and suddenly I can't stand not knowing why his eyes just got really relaxed, until his hand goes up around my neck and pulls me down and holy shit we're already doing this: no one's in the hallway and we're going to clutch each other all the way to the bathroom and then I'm going to fuck the moaning daylights out of him and then I can just ignore him later until he comes back and we do the whole song and dance all over again. Only he doesn't let me off that easy and I practically fall over onto him as he backs away, and then leaves.

Fuck.

It crosses my mind that this could be it. That he's waiting for me to make the next move that I may not be able to make, mostly because I'd kind of die if I actually did something for him and it wasn't enough. As if that's never happened before.

When I get home that night I listen to my messages. It's Jack Kinney's sad wife. She needs a ride somewhere over the weekend, and I wonder if she intentionally called half-drunk to try to make me feel bad for her. One second my shoulders are bending into the fridge and then next I'm flinging the answering machine away from the table and slamming it onto the ground. A couple chunks of plastic go flying around. I go off to the bathroom to shower with my hair clenched in fists.

I'm thirty-one years old and I'm tired. I'm tired of myself, tired of the act, and yet it clings to me and I cling to it: at the slightest chance of losing anything I start again like I'm running home to mother. The word "please" is my least favorite of all sounds, it baits me and bites me in its silence like an ulcer in my stomach. Such personifications arise as I spend the evening chugging myself amok with a bottle of liquor; I pace around the loft like it's all under control until I start shaking my hands around like they're wet, laughing bitterly at myself because he got coy, he's a smart one, and now I'm in agony unless I find some way to peel myself inside-out. Even that little idea catches on wrong; I recoil at the literal image of my ugly, drug-damaged veins and organs pulsing around an unsightly exoskeleton.

Thanks, ma. Oh, fuck me.

Justin takes pity on my pathetic silence and shows up at the office, late. It's as if I'm waiting for him and it's as if he's expecting me to be there. We make this cute little show out of forgiving each other, but I make him promise me something, and it's then that we're both just waiting for the other to snap up and grab the other. So I send him to the door, inviting him to shut it and keep me in, and when he's finally got his mouth on mine and is moving to take off my clothes it seems to hit him all in a second, and he kind of keels over and he's even laughing a little over nothing.

And then there's that smile.

Later we arrive at the loft, tangled in each other and feeling buzzed on the simple fact that we will wake up with our legs tossed around together like we haven't in far too long. He's saying something that draws that smile from me, a certain grin that pulls up from my gut in a straight quick line like I seriously can't help it. I'm simultaneously exhausted and invigorated from fucking him; altogether I'm actually shaking a little, leaning back against the counter as Justin starts to get on his tiptoes and kiss my neck. In the middle of some nuzzle or another, his gaze travels down to the floor at the right. He laughs, low and mirthy. "What happened to your phone?"

This day is violently contending for best of my life, and it doesn't even matter right now, so I just throw off the bullshit and tell the truth.

"I was pissed off at my parents so I beat up the answering machine."

Justin looks at me in stunned puzzlement. And not knowing how else to react, he starts laughing. Outside, the early hints of daylight look like ten different colors and what I now have to make a day of makes me feel like a spoiled little kid, and I stop that thought from going too far, thinking of that sugary nickname Debbie calls him.

But then I think, Oh, fuck it . And I start laughing too.