Winter shows up early this year, cat-quiet, coating the grey in shimmering white. From nine stories up, the world looks like it’s trapped in a snow globe, waiting to be shaken again.

Jaime’s apartment is a relic, one bedroom, slanted floors and drafty windows, inherited from a grandmother who wore fox fur and Revlon “Cherries in the Snow” until the day she died. Her presence still haunts the vents and upholstery with clove smoke, the benevolent ghost of rent control and accidental wealth.

The night feels softer here, like it took off its shoes at the door and decided not to be cruel.

We sit cross-legged on the warped parquet, backs against an exhausted corduroy couch, a green glass bottle of cheap Côtes du Rhône between us. The downstairs neighbor plays the horn. “St. James Infirmary” seeps through the floorboards like smoke.

“My last girlfriend,” Jaime says, tone even, almost clinical, “left because I didn’t want to fuck her.”

The last girlfriend. Safiya, bright, pretty, the kind of person who buys two bakery croissants because she knows you’ll want one too, even if you’ll never ask.  Warm, like he is.

Jaime is good in the way rain after a drought is, and that goodness mirrors itself in the women he loves.

I inventory my own history.

 Julian, who saw me as Galatea, ready to be shaped into the image of his choice.

Alejandro, who called my career plans ‘cute’ and a ‘good hobby to keep me busy until I had kids.’

Charles, whose lies bred like fruit flies in a humid June.

And one-night strangers, some of whom forgot my name while using it.

Sometimes I wonder what their sum says about my quotient.

“She was nice about it, but-” Jaime sips the wine. “I think it made her anxious. Said I treat my body like the TSA.”

I once watched Jaime feed swans from his hand. It’s hard to imagine him making anyone anxious; he wears gentleness like a second skin. “Can’t bring in anything bigger than 3.4 ounces?” This wins a laugh.

Below us, the tune changes to something unfamiliar, sadder, sweeter, older, loving and grieving a time long gone.

“It wasn’t her. It was me. I don’t want to sleep with anyone.  I don’t enjoy it, not really. Don’t want it. People assume I’m gay, or traumatized, or extremely Catholic. Another girl blamed my dead mom. It’s not any of that. It’s just…indifference.” He shrugs with the helpless grace of a gull rearranging its wings in crosswind. “Nobody likes that answer.”

Indifference terrifies people; they’d rather hear about repressed childhoods than a shrug. We want everything to have a reason, otherwise life feels like a freefall.

The first time I had sex, I expected it to be transformative. An awakening. A girlhood filled with books and movies talking about losing your virginity as a life-changing rite of passage, and I, freshly fucked and thinking I was in love, was still me – awkward, unwise, immature.

I’m 25 now, 26 in a month, and those three words still apply. I stretch out my legs. Jaime stretches his out over mine, and I rest a hand on his knee.

At brunch, at galleries, at parties, everyone talks; who’s secretly gay, who’s still single and why, who’s having an affair, and whose fault it is.

Even when it’s not about sex, it is, on a psychosocial level.

I liked sex with Charles, with Alejandro, with Julian, until I didn’t, until it became a chore rather than an indulgence.

I like Jaime more than I liked the other three combined, like his hands, his honey gold hair, the chip on his front tooth and the plain way he says things, yet the idea of naked collision never occurred to me. 

Alejandro and I used to fight about Jaime. I could never prove that I wasn’t sleeping with him, though that was the truth, and when asked if I loved him, I couldn’t lie.

Loving, and being in love, are not one and the same.

“Maybe you’re asexual?” I suggest, a card on the table rather than a label slapped on his forehead.

Jaime shrugs again. “Yeah, maybe. I know I’m not ‘waiting for the right person’ or some corny shit like that. I have the right person, I just don’t want to bump genitals.”

“Scandalous,” I gasp, eyes wide in an expression of faux horror, then lean against him, shoulder to shoulder. “Get thee to a nunnery, sir.”

He grins, then turns his face towards my hair, murmurs into it. “I feel like, as a man, I’m supposed to want it all the time.”

“You don’t owe the world any hunger.”

Men are supposed to want sex. Women are supposed to want kisses and rings and babies.

All I’ve ever wanted was a soft place to land.

Two years prior, when Charles and I were still good, I collapsed. Ruptured ovarian cyst, an internal grenade, and a doctor explaining everything in a calm and even voice as I bled inside myself. It was Jaime I wanted to call when I was put under anesthesia. It was Jaime who was there, green eyes impossibly tender, when I woke up. 

People act like romance is a grand accomplishment, that a significant other is the most significant thing you can have in your life, and any other relationship is a consolation prize or a stepping stone.

Who are you dating?

When are you moving in?

When are you breeding?

Check each step off the to-do list and win a certificate of adulthood.

“I have the right person,” Jaime says again. “I love you, you know. Not in an I want to get married way or an I want to get in your pants way, but in an I’d ride into battle with a lock of hair and your handkerchief, or stand vigil outside your tower type of way.”

The Sir Galahad of New York. Devotion without conquest. A lighthouse rather than a port.

A soft place to land.

“I love you too,” I tell him, and I feel like I’m coming home after a long day at work, slipping out of society’s uniform and into something more comfortable.

The horn player pauses, a siren wails somewhere far beyond our little world, and then the music picks up again. “Summertime” plays in the dying days of autumn.

For a long time, I didn’t know what I wanted my future to be, only what I didn’t want, only that marriage and motherhood weren’t the answers to what I asked.

Now, when I think of the future, I think it will be very much like this moment. Jaime and I, not in love, but loving.

“Stay?” He asks, and it doesn’t matter if he means for the night or forever.

“Always.”

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Millie Sullivan is an MFA candidate whose work has been published in The Penman Review and Flash Phantoms, with upcoming publications in Fjords Review and UnleashLit. A New York native, she currently resides in the Pittsburgh area with her two cats. You can find her on tumblr @millielisbon.