The Ex Vows

by Jessica Joyce

Now, for every second we go beyond the threshold of looking, I feel that old connection in my belly, the secret thread I haven’t been able to cut all the way through.

“You’re more beautiful than ever. Isn’t she, Eli?” I let out what’s supposed to be a carefree laugh; it sounds like I’m choking. “Oh, he doesn’t—” “Yes.” Eli’s response is immediate.

I stare down at his finger just as he releases his hold. He’s not even really touching me—not the way he used to, with greedy hands—and yet it’s impossibly intimate.

In it, I hear every way he’s ever said my name, though: affectionately, through tears, in the middle of pleasure. Not the way he has in our post-breakup world, like air, something I can walk through without resistance.

I have dozens of my own in a Converse shoebox under my bed, all of them given to me first as a friend and then as a promise.

The hug doesn’t last long, but I can feel every point where Eli and I are connected, the way his fingers tighten around my ribs. I swear I feel his breath stutter against my hair, but maybe it’s the breeze. I breathe out slowly, not wanting to inhale any piece of him.

On the list of words I’d use to describe the way I feel about Eli, awkward is near the end, but every other one would expose too much.

When I pull away from the curb a minute later, I can’t help looking in the rearview mirror. He’s standing there, watching me drive away, the way he always used to do.

So familiar it pulls at the space in my chest that’s never forgotten what he meant to me.

“Well, I saw the way he was looking at you when you came in.”

“It was like you were the only person on the planet.”

It’s no wonder Eli and I loved this place so much. It was the sanctuary we both needed, the roots that tethered us to what felt like a permanent place. And each other.

“I’m just wondering why you’re willing to take that conversation on alone.” “Because I know it’ll kill you to disappoint him.”

After five years as a ghost, these twenty-six hours of Eli’s potent awareness of me and the world around him feels like a solid wall I keep running into. The newness of this Eli, how closely it echoes the old Eli, is so disorienting that I can’t focus. But I have to.

It wasn’t until Eli joined us the following summer that I started to truly feel the homelike shape of it; then it became rooted in my veins.

Or maybe it’s because it does, because we’re really looking at each other for the first time in so long, remembering things together in the same space.

I expect that to be the last of it. I expect him to nod or clench his jaw or sigh, the way he would when I’d regurgitate that line when I was very clearly not good. I expect him to walk away. But he’s not that Eli right now, and god, that’s terrifying. He stands there, his palm pressed to the door. It’s the same spot he stood morning after morning, summer after summer, waiting for me. It’s so disorienting that he’s doing it again. It’s a homesickness of its own.

He steps closer, over the threshold, and for a second I think he’s going to take me into his arms. For a second, I want it so badly I can hardly breathe.

Eli looks down at it. I look down at it. Then we look at each other and the thirteen years of memories that silly little paper ring holds settle between us.

Everything is suddenly too much—the past, the present, Eli—and I lurch back. His hand curls around the back of my head just before it smashes against the cabinet. “Careful,” he rumbles, fingers tightening in my hair.

I just know that when Eli wraps his arms around my waist following a brief hesitation, it feels like coming home after the longest time away.

“In thirty seconds, you’re not going to want this, and I can’t pull away, so you’re the one who has to.”

This was just us remembering. The memories of our last summer and what came after are everywhere, too easy to step into, and we both slipped like I feared. But with as much history as Eli and I have and how physically close we got after years of distance, it would actually be weirder if we hadn’t.

It’s not until he’s gone and I’m in the shower, replaying our charged moment, that I realize he told me I wasn’t going to want this. But he didn’t say that he wouldn’t.

“You overestimate me.” “You underestimate yourself.”

It hits me in such a tender spot that he’s letting me see him like this when no one else has, not even past me. It feels more intimate than anything we’ve ever done.

The fifteen-year-old boy I liked and the twenty-year-old man I loved, and the twenty-eight-year-old I have to keep right here, because at one point he was the twenty-three-year-old man who broke my heart.

Eli Mora doesn’t let himself come undone; for a secretly messy person like me, it was like seeing my reflection. It’s not something I’d ever run away from. It’s something I crave.

It’s so hard for me to find my place—when I do, maybe I hold on too hard, but it’s only because I know what it’s like to lose it.

“There were so many things I wanted with you. So many ways I just wanted you. It’s how I feel now,”

“Not to therapize you, but I need you to communicate your needs. I need to know where your head’s at before we do anything else, no matter how much I want it. Whatever this is, it has to be honest, because last time—”

“Wanting you again, like that summer, like—” Always. “I don’t know what to do with it.” “It’s all I can think about,” he breathes out. “Me, too.” “So tell me what you want.” “I did.” “Say it again,” he demands. “You.”

“Us.” That single word fuses me to him. A tiny voice whispers, oh hell, but I push it away. “We’re us.” He lets out a soft, slow breath. And then he says, “Then that’s enough.”

“What were you thinking about?” “You.”

“This. The way you taste and your sounds and your laugh. How well you fill my hands. What it would feel like to have you again.”

“I’ll last as long as it takes for you to beg me to make you come.”

“I love it when you beg, Georgia. You never ask for anything.”

His name rides out on a plea and I don’t even know what I’m begging for—his body or his heart, to be held on to again and forever this time, even though I know we can’t.

I did my best to cling to now, but those little flashes of further and future and forever snuck in, revealing what my deepest, messiest self wants: Eli, in every era.

Our eyes meet, that latch thing it’s always been. It’s never faded, no matter how hard I tried to shut it out, and now I let it hook into me.

“You’re the best best woman, Georgia,”

“Fuck, the way I’ve wanted you,” he breathes against my mouth. “I don’t know how anyone can look at me and not see it.”

Right now just keep doing what you’re doing feels like falling, and it makes me grip him tighter. I can’t hit the ground.

“Would you ever ask me to take care of you?” he asks quietly. “Right now, if you needed something, would you say it? Even if it’s just a cup of coffee or breakfast, I’ll do it for you.”

“I’ve never been good at stopping when it comes to you,”

And I think, this is what love is. What I’m looking at, what I’m feeling, what’s happening here this weekend. What I crave in every corner of my bones, and what I’m so scared of getting, because so often I lose it.

“I can’t say what I really want to,” Eli says hoarsely. “So right now I’m going to say thank you and hug you, because if I don’t get my hands on you in some way I’m going to fucking lose it.”

Every second Eli’s not in my room is a second I resent.

But it’s the old nickname and the way he says it—tender, with a hook to it—that finally pulls me all the way back into the home-shaped space I left five years ago.

“I counted. You were across the room with Adam and you laughed and I l—” His exhale is hard and shaky. “I wasn’t going to be able to fake it. I had to face the wall and count streamers.”