She grabbed me hard, and I never saw it coming.

We had redefined and intensified the very nature of “suddenly.” Even with tell-tale shadows and the sensation of important presence. Even when the heavy breathing you so acutely hear doesn’t match the rhythm of your chest rising and falling below your untrustworthy eye-line.

Still there was “suddenly.”

I was blinded to so many parts of her in an effort to ignore most of my own. Though her features as they actually were began to come into view as I witnessed her fight to forgive, then lose. Still, I never saw it coming though it had been coming and coming like an insistent train on a downward track all afternoon.

I was staring at the bottom of a suitcase, allowing the reality of all that I had done and lived to cover and embrace me from rattled head to steady toe.  I had lived without freedom for so long that the idea of captivity and imprisonment felt to me like the allusive “home” that Spencer used to talk about at night as we wrapped ourselves warm in my lies and slept in the entitlement I had believed only falsehoods could provide.

I was staring out the window with pointless purpose, because now that something had finally happened—and I knew it would—there was no one else to look for and nothing else to look at besides myself.

It was time for repentance.

She grabbed me like a waiting book from a dusty shelf and read me with her eyes on mine and her hands searching the pages of my body. Maybe it’s always the case that a touch we never expect to feel again bears such intense significance. But her hands felt as if they were imprinting themselves in my skin.

And it frightened me.

Me.

The liar.

The murderer.

Her touch frightened me despite my nouns and even my verbs in that present position.

“Ashley, why?” she asked, bringing her forehead to rest on mine, “why would you not want this?”

She moves my hand to her heart. The rhythm is aligned with the breathing I’m so aware of, finally. I envy it. Because it hurts so much to breathe with her so close, waiting for so much.