Mark

Sometimes I like to rewind my life to this spot. Because I'd like to know if I could start it over, how would I do it differently so that next time the ending would change?

By the time I was thirty, I decided I ping-pongged across the country enough times and it was time for me to return to my homeland, the place of my birth: Milwaukee. I got a job in the local independent bookshop. It was determined that my section would be remainders. The leftovers. The discards. The overstock. Too much. No longer worth it to us. We're clearing it off. Bargain bin.

The morning I was supposed to start, there was a guy standing at the IBID terminal. Thick dark hair, casually dressed, freaking out about numbers. "Mark? This is Tea. Go ahead. Train her."

He paused his freaking out. Started from the beginning. Went slow. Slow enough for me to catch on because everything he said was important. Important that I get it. "I saw your resumé," he said. "You can handle this. This isn't difficult." Then he admitted, "When I saw your resumé, I was jealous. You're way over qualified. You're smarter than me." I wasn't, though. But he didn't know that.

Every time I was at work, he'd eventually find me somewhere during my shift. Drop what I'm doing, this is important. Come here, I want to show you something. It was a flurry of books. Us unboxing and marking and receiving and stacking. Pulling apart piles. Rearranging and moving around. "You've got a natural knack for this." "Do you know anything about cookbooks?" "What about music?" "Do you like cooking?" "What kind of music do you like?" "Who are your favorite artists?" "Why?" "What about it turns you on, gets your mind going, set things clicking in motion in place?" Firing one question after the next. Us opening up books, showing pictures, holding one up, "Tell me what you know about this."

"What do you love?" "What do you love?" "What do you love?" You.

Not in thirty years of my life has any one single person ever asked me so many questions, wanted to know so much about what I thought. We talked about everything. Fluidly.

It was November. It was snowing. Something about Lake Effect caused the glory of the snow blowing upward from the ground. My first snow since Boston before Atlanta before this.

I went outside for a smoke break. I went for a walk. Wearing my vintage teal coat and the boa-like scarf that I referred to as "The Sea Monster." Mark was standing on the bench outside the front door. He turned and saw me walking toward him. He caught his breath and said, "It's you."

I was the most beautiful, breathtaking thing on the planet. I was what he was waiting for. What his eyes were looking for. Exactly everything that was in his head popped up right before him and it was me.

We went inside and he said, "I suppose you'll be leaving soon."

"Why's that?"

"You move around so much."

"I guess I'll be going at some point," I said. "Maybe within a year. Unless something really important happens or something in my life changes."

Stacks of books. Piles and arrangements. Receiving, unpacking, stickering. "What are you doing here on a Friday night? I mean, I have to work, but you—"

"I've got nothing better going on," he said.

Finally in December, he got around to asking me out for a beer. To exchange some software. We met inside the warm part of a snow globe. Soaked in honey, and giving off light other people eavesdropped on our conversation and nattered in when one or the other of us went to the bathroom. Which he did a lot. Nerves. He stood three feet away from me when we said goodnight.

The next time, though. That was the time he told me he couldn't stop thinking about me for the whole previous month and he didn't believe I was really there with him and I said I couldn't believe a guy like him would be interested in a girl like me because I thought he'd be into someone a little more tailored and then he said, "Oh, Tea." His face went soft, his head tilted under the weight of the string his heart pulled. He framed my face with his hands in the air between us. "When I look at you, it's like there's a glow around you."

On the drive home, he put his hand on my knee, said he knew it was probably too much of a demand on my time, but that he'd like to see me at least twice a week, which was more than agreeable to me. This was the night when he got out of the car to give me a hug before I went in. This was the night I employed my secret tactic. I kept my cheek close to his, slid it slightly backward and he fell right into the kiss. Exactly inevitable. If it didn't happen, I could brush off the cheeck as a mistake. But he landed. And then stars exploded in my knees and my wrists. Plate tectonics shifted. I didn't know that a guy so shy and reserved and bookish could kiss like this.

And it went on like that, the intensity increasing from there. When I was at work, my body knew when he entered the building. My ears were tuned to the gait of his footsteps, the way he cleared his throat. There was in invisible thread, a beam of light connected between us so that I could echolocate him anywhere throughout the store. I could almost sense which stack of books he was moving while I unpacked boxes on the other side. I knew which discarded coffee cups were his, scattered around the counters. After he left, I'd feel responsible for disposing of them. I wanted to cook for him, wash his dishes, clean his house, vaccuum his carpets, do his laundry. Curl myself into his ribs. He was mapped to my DNA.

After that, it was nothing but me looking forward to the next time we could make out. The night I stayed over. New Year's Eve. Him slamming me up against the wall in the hallway, my sweater slipping off to the ground. Him not having sex with me. Because, by the way, he just broke up with his girlfriend of three years three days before our first outing.

And so. Two months later I'm not sure why I was surprised that he went back to her. By the way, I forgot to mention that she hit him—punched him in the face. Slashed his tires. Other things. I felt awesome. Two days after that, he broke up with her again. Two weeks after he killed me, I collapsed when I found out he was dating someone else and two months after that, the ex again. And two years after all of this, after three or four other women and a million hers in between, stabbing me wholly anew every time, I'm not sure why I still held onto my job, kept working down the hall from him. Things flipped. Then it was me asking all the questions, "how could you...?" "why did you...?" "why don't you...?" "why can't we...?" He didn't have any answers for me, but I kept asking. Asking until he was mute. And then until I was. And then I just waited for him to come to me. Us drenched in thick amber of held breath, unspoken words, dead silence. We don't speak.