writingsample

" ...You suppose I know her better, and have a means of getting to her that you do not."

He says it pensively rather than accusingly, mending the break in A's sentence rather than drawing attention to it. He, too, has been transported to a different time and place — a summer evening in 2016, a tree in Central Park, G leaning against the bark opposite him as she spoke at length on matters he could no longer remember. He remembers little before the actual confession but the roiling of his stomach and the sweat on his palms, the way he had trembled as though he'd been caught in a blizzard mid-July. And then he'd opened his mouth, the truth had come spilling out, and...

He grimaces and hangs his head, not from the memory, but the subsequent gaps in it. He had been drunk most of August, lost in a desperate desire to deaden the pain; a month had elapsed before he could bring himself to face her again, her or the friends she had undoubtedly told about his affliction. Beyond a tense conversation at Brooklyn Bridge Park, they hadn't discussed it, filing away their respective shames in an implicit agreement to let things go back to the way they'd been, at least to the extent that it was possible.

Yet that brought with it other concerns. As the months passed and their courtesy calls remained almost the same, his fondness toward his young friend, rather than abate, only seemed to grow, even when others had the means of capturing his attention. The urgency of passion settled into a quiet, diffident tenderness, the kind that was content to remain at her side without betraying itself, and he had guarded it, the glowing ember in the pit of his stomach, from either rekindling or dying completely. Pride and remorse, he had allowed himself as he watched her grow away from him; jealousy, such as he might have felt at an earlier time, stung him only occasionally, like the bite of an inconsequential mosquito.

Perhaps this is why, as he looks at A, looks and looks at him, he comes to the mild epiphany that he, too, loves G. With that epiphany comes a thrill of envy — not at the potential relationship he sees between them, but at A's willingness to intervene, something L himself has always lacked. He had been able to calm her in her darkest moments, offering a port in a howling storm, but no more than that; more had always seemed too intrusive, and he had never tried. Part of him wants to tell A he's recruited the wrong man, that G's issues, as ingrained as they are, can't possibly be solved with /his/ pathetic attempts at reconciliation — but then, not even to try would be the greatest insult to them both, leaving A alone and their mutual friend abandoned.

He can't abandon anyone again. So despite his reservations, despite wringing his hands and sighing a little, he nods to A again, his tone solemn as he talks.

"Herr Sharifi... I can't... I won't guarantee any... any success. After all, we have indeed been estranged, but..."

He looks down at his shaking hands, shoves one into his pocket, and crumples the other against his chest, as if doing so will calm its laboured thumping.

"...I am not... intractable. For... for your sake."