The Shape of Wanting

Chapter 1 — The Return

She recognizes him before he even looks at her.

It isn’t his face. It’s the way he holds himself, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like whatever comes next is never quite his choice. She traces his outline without hesitation, like a cartographer redrawing her most often copied map. The gently setting December sun blacks out most of his features, but the shape of him causes a familiar grip to tighten around her heart.

No…not her heart…her heart is much further North than this familiar ache.

It’s winter, and the air is thin and sharp. She keeps her hands in her coat pockets so she doesn’t fidget. She notices his hands in his own pocket. Her breath fogs and she wonders vaguely if the cinnamon gum she’d bought on the way here had adequately masked the scent of acrid coffee and anxiety. The street is mostly empty, the sky a flat Texas-gray that never commits to rain.

When he finally lifts his head, he briefly meets her eyes, then looks away as that shy, dimpled grin changes the landscape of his face. In nanoseconds he has gone from solitarily shouldering the weight of a world too demanding for him, to that basement-couch boy of nineteen who had nothing but time, liquor, and her to ease his troubled mind.

It shocked her how quickly she was flung back into that time. She had spent over a decade moving on and falling out of love. She was most certainly over him, and had nothing but forgiveness for the follies of youth that split them apart. She came to him today for something tangible, hot, temporary. She had a void that couldn’t hold promises or all of the little pieces of another that one was required to hold and protect for a relationship to work. She was here, because deep down she knew he could never remain, and remaining seemed too hard a task at this point.

That’s why she was taken aback when that familiar warmth flooded her body and mind with the memories of those volatile, but passionate years long ago. When she did start feeling that familiar grip around her heart she immediately straightened, refusing to fall victim to that damn dimpled grin again.

He looks older. Not in the way people mean when they say it kindly. Thinner. Tighter. Like parts of him have been folded in on themselves. Prison has not made him solid; it’s made him careful.

“Hey,” he says, finally looking at her. The corner of his mouth pulling sideways.

There it is.

The voice.

It moves through her like it always did, quiet and immediate, like a memory her body kept without asking permission.

She is surprised—genuinely—by how ordinary this feels. How unremarkable the moment is. She had imagined something cinematic, some rush of recognition that would justify the years she never fully let go of him.

Instead, there is cold air. Asphalt. The sound of a car door slamming somewhere nearby.

They hug. Brief. Awkward. His arms hesitate, like he isn’t sure how much of her he’s allowed to touch. She notices that he smells faintly of laundry detergent and something underneath it she doesn’t want to identify.

“You look good,” he says.

She almost laughs. The word feels insufficient in a way she can’t explain. Good for what? For surviving? For building a life that didn’t include him? For still being here?

“Yeah,” she says. “You too.”

It’s a lie, but not one she feels guilty about.

They talk around things. Weather. How long it’s been. How strange it feels to be standing here. He doesn’t say prison. She doesn’t say parole. They circle the truth carefully, like it might snap if handled too directly.

She keeps waiting for the flame to be gone. For time to have done its work. For him to feel like a stranger she once knew.

It hasn’t.

It never did.

What has changed is her disappointment—soft, immediate, undeniable. This is it? This is the moment she carried with her for over a decade?

She tells herself again that this doesn’t mean anything. That wanting something doesn’t require acting on it. That she is steadier now.

And maybe she is.

But as they stand there, winter pressing in around them, she understands something she didn’t come prepared to know:

The flame didn’t die.

It just learned how to wait.

The only question left was whether or not she was prepared to douse gasoline on these embers and let the flames tear through the successful life she’s spent ten years building.

Because if there is one thing she knows about Lee…it’s that once that flame is fanned, its only a matter of time until his life and the lives of those who love him burn to the ground.