Lost and Found  

She spies it on the coat rack a few weeks after he’s gone. His scarf, the one his mother knitted for him. The one that’s the same shade of green as his eyes, when the sun hits his face at a particular angle. The one that’s long enough to wrap around the two of them. Would have been.  He’d left it behind, forgotten in the flurry of a hasty retreat.

She retrieves it, considers putting it in the lost-and-found box; but really, what’s the point? For a brief moment, she thinks about sending it to him, with a note that says: You probably didn’t remember this when you were packing in May, but I hear it gets cold in Stamford. How’s the new job? Take care! Casual. Like they were friends. Like he hadn’t left without saying goodbye. She wouldn’t write: Where are you? Come back. I’m sorry. I love you. Come back. I love you. Come back. Like he had left without saying goodbye.

She stuffs the scarf into her bag instead. It feels clandestine, like shoplifting. It makes her a little queasy, but she kind of likes it being a secret too. She doesn’t know what she’ll do with it. His scarf. She just wants it.

When she goes home that evening to the apartment where she lives, does everything, alone, she takes the scarf out and holds it up to her face. It still has his scent. Like simple soap and something vaguely herbal and musky. Like boy.  A few unruly golden brown hairs still cling to the woven wool. She wraps it around her neck, even though it’s eighty-five degrees with the sun already setting.

It becomes a ritual. Each night, she changes out of her work clothes, turns up the air conditioning, although she can’t afford it, and puts on the scarf. Sometimes she even falls asleep wearing it. After the company picnic, which is boring and hot and full of mosquitoes and mediocre potato salad, but would have been full of possibility if he had been there, she comes home feeling especially lonely. She winds the scarf around her hands and pictures his. How everything would be different, if his fingers were wrapped around hers right now. She wouldn’t have to do crazy things like wear wool scarves in August.

A few times in bed late at night, when she’s too exhausted to pretend the ache low in her belly is about anything, anyone, other than him, she slips off her nightshirt and drapes the scarf over herself. It feels soft, but slightly scratchy against her skin, like wool can. She closes her eyes and sees his eyes, as she tugs on it.  It glides slowly over her thighs, her stomach, her breasts. She thinks: this has coiled around his neck, touched his cheek, maybe brushed his mouth. So.

Finally, she bunches the scarf into a pillow and rests her face against it. Before she goes to sleep, she imagines it’s a talisman to make something, anything, happen. He could come back. Or she could forget. Anything. But when she wakes up the next morning, it’s still there under the sheets, tangled around her. It’s not a magic scarf at all. It’s just his.

 ******************************** 

Then, he does return. But not to her. There’s someone new. Someone who perches on his desk and laughs at his jokes and smiles like she knows things about him. Things like how long his eyelashes look against his cheeks when he sleeps and how he sounds and feels when he… suddenly, there’s just not enough oxygen in the room to go around. She makes it her business to act like a friend, but that’s hard to do when you can’t even breathe.

Work becomes an endurance contest. She begins wearing the scarf as she drives in each day, taking it off and shoving it in the glove compartment when she arrives. At least it’s winter now. People wear warms scarves when it’s cold out. People are always happy to see an old friend.  

By noon, her temples throb from the contortion of smiling and saying pleasant things. At lunchtime she flees. She drives around going nowhere, the scarf tied so tightly around her neck that some days it feels more like a noose than a comfort. She doesn’t smile and she doesn’t speak until her hour is up and it’s time to go back for another round.

Then, as unexpectedly as she arrived, the other one is gone.  And suddenly everything is in flux. He seems sad and relieved and friendly and not and distant and just beyond reach and raw and resigned and angry and everything and nothing. She wants to scream that he just has to say the word, but he might have a whole new vocabulary now. And then what? Maybe it was better when he was off-limits. At least then she’d memorized her lines, even if she didn’t mean them.

When she leaves the office that night, the sky is just getting dark. The air has the snap and weight of threatening snow and she hopes it does. She’s tired of dingy late-winter vistas where everything looks neither here nor there.  It would be a relief to wake up to a glistening white blanket.

She’s already in her car, key in the ignition, when she remembers she left her sketchbook on her desk. If she’s snowed in tomorrow, she’ll want it at home. As she crosses the parking lot to go back and collect it, she sees him emerge from the building’s shadow, headed for his car. He’s just a few feet away when he looks up and notices her. His eyes go directly to her neck, and it’s only then that she realizes she still has the scarf on.

‘That’s…’ he begins, looking a bit startled.

‘Yeah, it is…’ she stumbles. ‘I’m sorry. I found it after you left and I meant to, I mean I should have…’

Her face and ears burn with embarrassment.  Like she’s been caught, doing a very, very bad thing.

‘No. It’s okay. It looks better on you anyway,’ he attempts a smile. ‘I just thought I’d lost it, so…’

He abruptly stops speaking.  She sees him focus instead on her fingers as they instinctively begin loosening the scarf. Before she can slip it off, he quickly steps forward and clutches one side in each of his hands to stop her. For a moment, she’s only aware of his fists, barely resting against her chest, and the ragged steamy bursts of their breath, hanging in the air between them.  He just stares at her, frowning slightly. It almost looks as if he’s struggling to place her.

But he hasn’t mistaken her for someone she’s not. Not this time. She’s sheer impulse as she reaches up to take his face in her hands, pulling him towards her. She kisses him, tenderly at first, and then with a ferocity she never imagined in a moment like this. And she’s imagined a moment like this often. He might be stunned, but he doesn’t hesitate. He just opens his mouth over hers and lets it be real.

When they part, he’s still grasping the scarf so tightly that she’s held flush against him. He pauses to catch his breath, then lowers his face, burying it in her hair just below her ear.

 ‘Invite me over,’ he whispers.

‘I’m in love with you,’ she replies.

It’s a non sequitur, but it’s all she’s got. It seems to be the answer he’s looking for anyway.

 ****************************************** 

Later, as he hovers above her, his lips are everywhere, soft and warm like cashmere.  When he grazes them over her thighs, her stomach, her breasts, his cheek feels a little scratchy against her skin, like stubble can.  

And then he is so deep inside that it almost hurts, but it feels so good, because it’s him and they fit. When he moans her name, his mouth hot and urgent against her neck, it sounds like pure relief. Like he’s waited so long just to say it.  Like she’s waited so long to hear it. She concentrates on moving just right so she can hear it some more. She presses her nails into the small of his back and pulls him in even further, until everything else is obliterated.

Afterwards, and before again, he holds her hand and holds her and she knows she doesn’t have to do crazy things anymore like wear wool scarves in August. Because he came back and he tells her he loves her and he loves her and he loves her.

First morning light is beginning to sneak into the room by the time they finally succumb to sleep. As she drifts away, her head lying on his chest (not on the scarf,) she can see out her bedroom window. It’s been snowing. Everything looks brilliant and white.