It didn’t matter that he didn’t want kids, or that he was considering moving into his van, or that he was always in the hole with money, or that he spent so much of it on beer and malt liquor. It didn’t even matter that he shit in a bucket in his backyard and left it there for the winter. It mattered a little, but not as much as it should have. I should have wanted more from a partner by my thirties—I have been told this plenty. But Alex was the boy I’d wanted as a teenager—the one I’d wanted to want me and sometimes just wanted to be. The adult me was powerless to resist the teenager’s
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