Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving.
