I

In the wintertime, I am forced to hike for an hour and a half to the next town over approximately three times a month. There, I sit in a cramped diner drinking overpriced coffee while my ex-husband tells me unimportant stories about his work before handing me an envelope. I repeatedly tell him he should give me the envelope before we order, but he gives me a side-eye glance, knowing it just means I can make some excuse once the waitress disappears towards the kitchen. Then, I would be free of him for another three or so weeks. The idea alone of this frequently makes my ex-husband depressed.

​

In the booth, trying to make myself comfortable against squeaky plastic, I keep my head down and focus on the surface of the coffee. Dark, but far from black—a mud pit for little piggies to squelch in. When I was in the third grade, my class went on a school field trip to a sort of petting-zoo farm. In the corner, a sow and two piglets were almost submerged in their puddles of mud, the colour of this coffee from the snout down.

            My ex-husband makes a soft sound, like an intruding oink, and I glance up at him in case I’ve done something to offend him. Other than be distant, of course. He smiles, although I worry these are the forced smiles. The ones I am supposed to feel some concern for. Makeshift rung smiles, a ladder made out of bedposts and fractures of the laundry door and old man’s canes. My ex-husband asks if I wanted anything to eat, like a warm stack of pancakes oiled in maple syrup, or what the menu describes as the Postman’s Regular, but I offer back, ‘I’m not hungry’.

            I haven’t eaten since I left the house, but I don’t remind him I don’t always take the best care of myself. I remind him I need this envelope. He nods, potentially sighs, although at this point in the conversation a couple saunters past us noisily discussing what Freddie needs for an upcoming camping trip with the Boy Scouts. Hiking boots for a young kid…gloves, and a warmer sleeping bag. A torch with enough batteries to replicate the sun.

            My ex-husband, Rickie, and I were married for under a year. Ten and a half months. We’d known each other for four years and he made me the happiest little queer man in this suburban nothing town the day he proposed when we were out hiking together. Nights in bed had been spent reminding him I hated when things became too complicated, too fanciful and overdrawn. People with more energy and more demand had engagement parties and pre-wedding festivities but I wanted to focus on the love we had between us. Somewhat of a gag, now, with us living separate and me wishing I’d have said no instead.

            Rickie swallows a mouthful of his coffee and reminds me if I’d have ordered something to eat, he would have paid for it. The waitress had scribbled down his order—the Postman’s Regular, which she innocently described to be the local postman of 1993’s actual typical order every single day of the year except Sundays and Christmas. Rickie listened to her intently as if he were waiting to flirt with her, but no matter what we finished these breakfasts with him sidling up to me, asking me to give him a second chance.

            Those ten months with Rickie could not be described as the worst months of anyone’s life. He was passionate, shoving me against the wall when we’d start making out after getting only slightly tipsy at the local bar. Here in town it is The Goose Leg, an aptly-named place where you might step in shit if you don’t look down. Rickie would cook for me, ignore the dishes for me, and bring home a packet of glazed donuts when he was texting me and I told him I was feeling in the dumps.

            But then the envelopes started in the wintertime.

                Rickie kicks my foot underneath the table. ‘What’s going on in there?’ I know he wants to lean forward and tap my forehead, something he would do while we were together, but he restricts himself.

            Rickie watches me. I go to say, ‘Nothing,’ and he immediately shakes his head the moment my lips form the letter n. I shake him off, the expected routine. It must drive him insane, to be boiled down to tradition and expectation and the delivery of a white envelope and the dismissal of the waitress.

            ‘I’m doing alright, I swear,’ I cough out, and Rickie gives me a cursory glance as if I am a child who has disobeyed him in this exact way countless times over. ‘The hike is exhausting.’ There was a time, after the divorce, when we discussed alternating, or, quite frankly, for Rickie to drive in his car from one town to another. But there was an unsettled frown on his face at the suggestion and I chose not to stamp on his heart another time by repeating that. In the wintertime, I brave the cold, get some fresh air in the woods, and shake some dew off my coat when I step into the diner where my ex-husband is about to dig into The Postman’s Regular—one too many eggs, in my opinion.

            ‘The hike is exhausting,’ he repeats, without a hint of sarcasm or satire. Following this is a heavy sigh and the clink of a plate against the tabletop as the waitress cautiously sets down his breakfast. Three eggs, fried in the pan, but only two slices of toast and one half of a tomato. Stringy bacon. Complimentary sachets of ketchup. Specifically sachets. I wonder for a moment the historical accuracy of the dish, but consider that maybe a little theatre is enough to entertain the patrons. Rickie is holding his knife and fork like an advertisement. Don’t let me try you, let me try the eggs.

            While Rickie carves out a sliver of the toast, a sliver of one of the eggs, I carefully avoid knocking his foot as I reposition myself in the booth seat. My ass is sore, maybe from some sense of residual discomfort from this diner. Consider for a moment, I think, us sharing the wealth of responsibility equal to the wealth of these envelopes. White, untampered with envelopes I never unseal, only deliver. When Rickie came to me with this, I was hesitant. Is this a drug thing? Rickie, fucking be honest with me here—are you delivering goods and services for the mafia or something now, I don’t get it. He gave me the sort of expression I knew from him meant this needed to be honest, this needed to be something good. No puppy dog eyes, big and overexposed, and no corner of the mouth drooping down.

            We split up and I hoped the envelopes would stop.

​

            Rickie taps the table with the end of his knife and flashes his teeth.

            ‘It’s good, what the postman would’ve ordered,’ he says, skewering the halved tomato with his fork. He threatens to shove the half down his throat without a bite, making a piggish show to the tiny handful of people also in the diner this wintery morning. I usually leave the house at eight o’clock when I need to come collect the envelope from my ex-husband. Everyone is off to their day jobs by the time I wander into town, out of breath, hopefully frost-bitten despite the layers. Rickie lingers outside of the diner with a pom-pommed beanie in his hands, wringing it more often than not. He kisses me on the cheek, and I sigh, thinking, this whole trek for an envelope and an alluring but potentially regrettable kiss.

            Rickie offers me a streak of bacon and I do strangely feel somewhat hungry. Not by any means starved, despite the weather, but I accept and chew down on the grease, the oil, the pig meat. Thinking again about the sow and her piglets off in the corner, attempting their best camouflage.

            ‘I was thinking,’ he says, smiling. ‘We should catch a movie together again sometime.’ In the five years, I suppose, of knowing one another, Rickie and I frequently went to the cinema together. At first, we saw whatever blockbuster was on show—broadly-hyped spectacles draped in millions of bucks, with stars and moons and the cosmos plugged into the projector. But, eventually, he wore me down into showing an interest in the indie films we’d drive out of the way to go see. Sometimes we would take an entire day off work just to drive a couple hours to see a movie and eat steaming-hot meat pies in the car and makeout as the credits rolled. On the car ride home, Rickie would suggest all of these fun-branded detours we could take to delay pulling into the driveway and settling back into what being at home looked like. Doing chores, washing underwear, thinking about every single unknown. The envelopes.

            Rickie waits for my response, and I stare at the remnants of bacon on his plate, suddenly starved for it. Give me that bacon, I think. ‘Maybe.’ Rickie stares at me. I cannot commit to anything, not while I think about walking back in the cold with the envelope in the jacket pocket, snugger than I am. Not while I hold onto the regret of our relationship ending, not while I think about eating his bacon without remorse, not while I go back and forth in my head over whether it is even entirely the correct decision to be sitting here with him, knocking knees, still delivering envelopes.

            I am not allowed to know what is inside the envelopes.

            Rickie has almost finished his plate of food. The diner is somewhat busier—not for any particular reason, but because a small cluster of women have trudged into the establishment wearing thin coats and talking at a polite volume about what a gorgeous morning it is we’re having. They take seats furthest from the door and start equally-polite conversations with some of the other patrons. These conversations I can no longer hear, and I attempt to pull my focus back to my ex-husband. He looks at me with peaceful contempt. I bother him. I refuse to fall dreamily back in love with him.

            He offers me the last strip of bacon and I greedily accept, giving one last salute to the sow mother. The other children on that field trip paid little attention to the mother once she shielded away her piglets, but I was less interested in trotting off to see the clucking chickens. The sow looked on the verge of passing out in the mud. Bloated, somewhat. I remember wanting to lie down beside her as if she were my own mother. In the third grade, I couldn’t have hated my parents already, yet a squeaky oink came out of my mouth when one of the teachers called out my name to round us children up for a lunchtime snack over on the benches by the alpacas. Oink, oink.

            Rickie pays the bill and thanks the plain waitress.

            If I complied, if I went and saw one of his blockbuster movies and let him place a hand on my waist again, he would smile at me like that.

            But I keep on hesitating.

​

​

Outside, in the whisk, Rickie shuffles around in his inner coat pocket for the white envelope. As long as it is delivered to a post box in my town before 6pm, no harm will come to either of us—this is the decree, as if the both of us are working indeed for the mafia, who potentially have some family member of either of ours held hostage in an abandoned cupcake factory. We are punctual, always. After the separation, I moved specifically to that neighbouring town when I realised there was no outrunning obligations. The envelope was not getting posted. Someone more important was collecting it.

            He slaps it into my hand and moves as if to walk in the opposite direction without another word, and I think, I’m the worst kind of asshole to my ex-husband. But Rickie doesn’t want an apology from me, or for any grovelling, or another argument about how our relationship has divulged into whatever this is based on this shared responsibility between us.

            ‘Rickie, wait,’ I say, and he pretends as if he wasn’t moving from his spot to begin with. I consider all these options, true multitudes: walk me home, give me a lift, have dinner with me, take me to some indie arthouse flick in a cinema a three hours’ drive away, be with me, force me to be present. I hesitate. In him, I do still see the man I was once in love with. My once-husband, once-lover, someone I spilled all of life’s secrets to in the hopes he would seal them in the crack in the wall with plaster and the anti- of mixed emotions. I did not say: wait with me, Rickie.

            I could have stared at him forever, an eternal symbol of the hyperbole of lost love, losing love. The dying out of his hope, the rotting carcass of mine. ‘See you in however many days then.’ This I said sharply, before averting my gaze and getting distracted by a drying-up puddle in the middle of the road.

In the summertime, or perhaps the spring, this laborious hike, oftentimes on the side of the road without a path, is somewhat more pleasant and enjoyable. During the winter, frostbite creeps in and your fingers go numb unless you wear thick gloves or keep them shoved into your pockets. Walking this alone, walking this out of duty, is meandering and heightened with only tiny morsels in my stomach. I want more of the bacon, seeing swirling images of it in my head. Sometimes it squeaks, oinks, with a poorly-formed snout at one end of the streak. I should have eaten more, but Rickie often pushes to pay for anything I order, and the weight of me owing more to him settles with a stench upon my shoulders. Argue less, be happier more. Qualms can rot. These, ides of a marriage sewn into the very lining of your suit jacket when you settle on what to wear for your wedding day. I remember ours.

            How monumental and over the moon I was.

            We got married in a rotunda in the backyard of an old friend of Rickie’s. Furthest thing we could find to a church or a chapel. The rotunda was not overly large, and could only fit the happy couple, the officiant, who was advised to avoid anything problematically-religious or contentious to our love, and a groomsman on either side of us. Guests stood down from the stairs, circling the rotunda, clasping their hands together, shedding the occasional tear. So I am told. In the past, someone would have thrown the rice.

            We were so in love then, so helpless and naïve. Every marriage is constructed with some semblance of naivety. Folks stumbling together into a union where they promise absolutes, promise to not make decisions without consulting the other. Promise not to aim spanners. Promise not to throw.

            I don’t want to be delivering the envelopes anymore, and I remind Rickie of this, in great repetition, every chance I see him. The envelope, tucked in the jacket pocket, weighs me down to one side. Physically, it is light, seemingly void of contents. Not a large stack of money, someone’s inheritance doled out in these haphazard instalments. Although, it could be the business of gift card fraud—contained between paper, the gift card might be unnoticeably thin.

            Sometimes it is apt to contemplate what the mystery could be if it were not an envelope, but a parcel, the famed confusion of a box without label or warning. Body parts, sums of money, a porcelain vase hiding baggies of crack cocaine. Videotapes or DVDs of snuff pornography or ransom clips or a cult ritual in which a half-naked man wearing an enlarged head of a goat slits his own wrist and sings out to the Great Beyond, wondering why on earth he commits to this and not to his own marriage.

            I keep walking, unable to stop thinking over Rickie.

            Hands in pockets. Trudging through the walk. Tired, cold, horny.

​

The drop location is on my left on the other side of the road. Traffic is minimal now, closer to midday, normal people bustling with work and other priorities. Me, on one of my days off work, somehow sweating from the exhaustion of a heart not stopping for a breath. The envelope getting fingered every so often. Check for it to be there, check for the confusion and the excitement to be present. There is no fear or terror with a white slip. Open the lid of the post-box. Slide it down.

            Is this nervousness?

            I cross the street, checking both ways once, twice, maybe three times. A black car the colour of soot approaches from my right, but stands no chance of colliding with me in the short time it takes to jaywalk. I have the envelope now in my left hand, fearful I could damage the paper if my grip becomes any more aggressive. What if some wind blew in from nowhere and lifted it away? Unlikely.

            Unlikely with me around.

            The post-box is an awful maroon colour and looks faintly like a trashcan, almost unlabelled. Siding which once would have indicated it belonged to the Postal Service has been stripped by the sunshine, or otherwise by the kids in town who prefer to graffiti unintelligible words like Bouf or Skian down the side. Invariably, it returns to ugly, morose maroon.

            Standing there, clasping the envelope, I try to remember what Rickie says about receiving it. He is vague, purposefully so—I’m trying to protect us, Alden, he said once, during a particularly heated discussion where I accused him of signing us up for a lackadaisical pyramid scheme. It isn’t a conversation over breakfast in a diner, talking to another ex of his, perhaps he has a secret ex-husband I have no knowledge of. I couldn’t care. Assumptions, I make them about every step of the process. When Rickie and I were married, these were the assumptions: things we said to one another meant something, as did the metal encasing part of the finger, the rings. Rickie would not hurt me, betray me, violate me. Set me adrift without a sail, a compass, a small pail of something to eat, and a vessel for water. A flint and steel, or I could make do with the wedding band, smelted down somewhat, somehow. When Rickie and I divorced—and I still do feel too young to say I am divorced—these were the assumptions: I just take the damn thing and deposit it into the post-box.

            It should not be so complicated to deposit it into the ugly maroon post-box.

            My fingers refuse to let go of the envelope.

            I remind myself as long as the envelope is delivered to this ugly maroon post box before 6pm, I have done whatever constitutes a duty. There is power, I wonder, in holding the envelope to my breast and going about the day with a secret of my own.

            Rickie never kept secrets. He would tell me his periodically, when some part of our conversation sparked a realisation in him—the mention of doing the laundry might remind him of the time he hid the baby, his youngest sibling, inside the washing machine when they were all little and playing around and his mother was in the kitchen on the telephone to Misty down the street. Misty, he explained, almost exclaimed, was prone to sleeping with her direct opposite neighbour’s husband when she was whining about forking out more of her ‘hard-earned cash’ at the dentist. She was lax on brushing her teeth, apparently, and the reverse-of-a-habit propelled itself onto her children. Misty insisted, then, on all of the punishment and none of the routine. Pleasure from the man, true.

            The baby didn’t go for a tumble in the sheets in the washing machine, but Rickie remembers the pushed-up face against the glass wheel. His mother didn’t find out, or else she would’ve killed dead the secret. This mystery, tiny and petite, the size of an infant. Potent, potentially. If it could have spun.

            Rickie whispered his secrets—fucked a boy once when I was in high school in the music room, him using all his might to cling onto the sheet music stand; got caught pantsless by housekeeping in a hotel; we have to start delivering envelopes.

            I slipped the envelope back into the inside jacket pocket and took a tentative step away from the post-box, imagining someone to be observing this segment of the street fervently over the course of this very day. Not quite waiting—Rickie swore on the life of his youngest sibling, the baby all grown up, that their punctuality was restrained to six o’clock. Perhaps the collector got off work at five and drove abiding by the speed limits to get here. Perhaps a past experiment of this crazed errand proved no person without the threat of death hanging over them was going to like a time penalty too severe.

            With the envelope, still, I walked away, breathing out anxious energy. What if someone tackled me down, what if someone sniped my head, what if Rickie pinged my cell and wondered why I was acting strangely, whether it meant I was second-thinking everything. I calmed myself, by heading to the bar, at midday.

​

The bar’s a well-established spot for daytime alcoholics who are bitterly forced to be at home in the evenings to smile at their wives and say goodnight to their children. I’ve never been here during daylight—Rickie and I would sometimes do the trivia nights here, or otherwise have a drink and be observed by the older men who might not have appreciated the shoulder-touching, the noticeable flirting.

             Golf is the sport of the day; soup is not offered. A pencil-thin white man is teeing up an unmissable shot from the green, with all the tension and pressure of open-heart surgery. Camera-cut briefly to a small audience wearing breathable fabrics and pastels. The golfer a delicate ballerina, but the celebration is cut short, obliterated. I realise I am standing awkwardly by the door, watching the television. The bar is half-empty, predominately dotted by men, but there is one woman in the back corner, clutching to her glass despite it resting on the table in front of her. She’s unknown to me—could be a tourist, a trucker, most likely someone passing through or stopping for shelter. A stranger in the mist. Cold, too, likely.

            Jamie bartends during the day—this is the first time I’ve seen him on the job, although we talk frequently enough, him passing along the war stories of working there, me commenting something ambiguous about Rickie when he asks. The two of them were once inseparable friends. While Rickie and I were married, they would go out, stay out late, bring home souvenirs—Rickie would bring his passion, wasting away without me; Jamie would bring a bottle of alcohol in a paper bag and a hickey on his neck. He’d pass out on the sofa, shirtless, and in the morning I’d feign an attempt to move him by dragging his arms. Jamie would act like I was trying to tear the limbs from their sockets, yelping in faux-agony, and he’d chuckle the moment I let go. Our version of routine.

            Those nights ended when Rickie and I started the tennis matches, the golf tournaments, around these envelopes. I feel mine pressed against my torso. Little secret, little lie, little hidden totem.

            The time is 12:13pm and someone is noisily enjoying golf inside The Goose’s Leg.

            Jamie nods at me as I slip out of the jacket and sit down on a barstool, the wordless greeting of men.

            ‘Alden without Rickie,’ he says, albeit his tone is lacking in disrespect. I want to clobber him over the head for mentioning it, regardless, but this was and is always his sensibility around things. The same Jamie, painted differently in this light, illuminated by a trickle of sunshine from the outside world and the expected lighting of an alcoholic’s establishment. ‘You don’t come here during the day, and that’s just my observation, mate, don’t shoot the messenger on it.’ Jamie pauses, but he isn’t afraid of the tiptoeing he must be doing to have this conversation. ‘He fucked up again?’

            I shrug the question off. ‘He wants us to go see a movie together.’ Jamie is the sort of straight man who only watches whatever makes a tonne of money at the box office—he won’t sit for two and a half hours unless there’s a lot of excitement, thrill, men acting heroically, women looking gorgeous in practically anything. Rickie and Jamie never saw anything together. They would have grumbled at the other’s suggestion, but caved for their friendship. Jamie would have left the cinema confused, unsure of what he witnessed, feeling a tad psychologised. Rickie would have thought Jamie should be fucking me.

            And that was his sense of humour.

            Rickie would stumble back into the house with his souvenir-lust and mope, jokingly, how something Jamie said reminded him of me. The one at home. He was never attracted to his closest friend, not then, but I always wondered whether he had secretly hoped to convince Jamie into slipping under the sheets with the two of us. Perhaps that was loneliness.

            An attempt to excite, an attempt to delay.

            ‘I usually cut all my exes off,’ Jamie says, leaning on the bar top.

            He smirks, as if he had not suggested I cruelly exile my ex-husband from my life. We have no children together, no shared property or wealth, no yapping dog. Just the remnants of a love. Just the envelopes. Jamie knows nothing of the envelopes, or at least I hope he doesn’t. I could imagine the two of them instead having morning coffee and parting ways with the trouble of a delivery.

            Jamie would just drive.

            I can no longer afford a car.

            Rickie promises me more of an allowance if I keep delivering the envelopes, as if I am one of his children instead of his ex-husband. As if I would accept any money from him regardless.

            He says this like he runs a bank, the Bank of Rickie Sebourn, where a simple loan could be handed out, signed for, accepted, and I would feel more comfortable about our situation, about mine. I would have accepted money from Rickie when we were married—and I did, small little sums I could arrange within my head, knowing I would pay him back x amount or rearrange it, purchase him something he was frugal upon. He acts as if the envelopes benefit us.

            He craves having me in his arms again, craves it without falling to his knees to beg.

            Jamie pours me a shot of vodka and tells me to tip my head back.

            With a smile, a wink, he watches me down the vodka and feign that sense of refresh. The alcohol isn’t laced with citrus-lemon, or frosty-chilling. It doesn’t cut to the mind and soothe the filming-in-progress imagination. But Jamie looks eagerly glad, gratefully impressed in the potency of his so-called wares. I tap the glass for another. Two will do.

            I scan the other patrons of the bar—the woman-trucker in the back retrieves a cap out of nowhere and moves to leave, the heel of her boots thudding down against the hardwood of the floor. There are several older men, mid-forties-fifties, in clusters or sitting comfortably alone. Two men around my own age sit together in a booth, splitting a packet of pretzels. They aren’t interested in a golf tournament, or the world surrounding them. Unlike me, who is nosy.

            I tell myself to stop gazing around, stop staring, but for a brief moment I make eye-contact with one of the men in the booth, and instinctively, I smile at him. Nothing overtly flirtatious. A smile, rare as they can come sometimes. Jamie ahems and I swallow down the second shot. Any adrenaline comes from the envelope, not the alcohol—this much power, this much excitement and thrill from an unexplainable fold of paper would confuse the hell out of any ordinary man. Our eyes drift. I want him to notice me, to give me more attention, more than a passing glance. Look at me.

            I’ll look at you.

            ‘Not my business,’ Jamie interjects, polishing a glass as if he wants to pretend he’s more of a show pony than he is. ‘But why do you still keep in touch with him? You two are still in love, that’s it? This divorce was a mistake, that’s what some of the blokes in here say. I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have gone off with some other woman who doesn’t want to live a free life with me, she wants children, and quickly, because like everyone she’s ageing out of the time where she can confess she’s prim, prime, right for him.’ Jamie says this without aggression, without the tongue of a straight white man scorned. But regardless, he looks moody and brooding. Passionate. Friendship needs a doppelganger spark.

            My intention waning from the boys in the booth, I give Jamie a sympathetic smile and attempt to reassure him on a few things. Rickie and I are not clinging to our relationship, desperate to reverse its fate. I think he just wants my love back.

            ‘It’s not your business,’ I respond first, with a laugh I hope sounds earnest and not brewed out of a cauldron. He grins, and I remember how severely avoidant of an argument he can be. Everything is a conversation, a friendly comedic roast, for Jamie of the bar. ‘But I could never abandon him, even with me having to put a password lock on the wedding photographs because if I look at them I want to…I don’t know what I want to do when I see them anymore. Not kiss him, or repeat the moment.’ I want to say: being married to Rickie was never a mistake, but there is a small hand, like a child’s, clutching onto the corner of my shirt, tugging me backwards. Reminding me: you’re in a bar in the middle of the day, cut the emotional chatter and go do something about your freedom. My freedom. The anti-gravity of feeling. One of the men in the booth, the one I was eyeing, excuses himself to the bathroom and I wait a few beats. Jamie is leaning his stomach against the bar-top.

            ‘Excuse me,’ I say, clicking back the bar-stool so I can wiggle out of my seat.

​

​

In the restroom, there is an immediate odour of urine. I should be distracted, turned-off, but this is a common scent for The Goose’s Leg. Stiff urine. Not unlike some of the drinks.

            The man from the booth is at the urinal, his jeans down underneath his buttocks. Grey underwear. He has a noticeable ass, and for a split second I see Rickie in my head slapping mine. Holding it like a hand. The way men hold an ass in public, something grotesquely possessive about the way they will want to show their love and affection. But with Rickie it was never possessive, never attaching-and-running, stealing. Childhood sweetheart hand-hold. Grabbing my ass, only dirty and seductive in private, when he wanted to bend me over and thrust into me. I try to, even for a moment, imagine Rickie as the type of elderly man to seize control over someone’s rear end, place the centre of focus on one cheek or another. This is distraction.

            Beside him at the urinal trough, I unzip my own pants and take out my cock. It flops around disobeying, until a stream of piss splatters against the steel. Masculine, brutish men, do they grunt and nod when they pee in unison? I wouldn’t know. The stranger beside me hardly acknowledges me except for the brief moment our eyes lock. Strange coincidence, getting drawn to each other at the exact moment. Curiosity making a killing.

            He’s around my age, as mentioned, with light hair the colour of straw. His clothing is dark and moody, but he could be dressed in black to attract the heat. I used to hate walking outside in the summer in anything black, fearing the reaper from a drop of sunlight burrowing into my skin through the colour of the clothes I wore. Black, bringer of body heat and sweaty skin and a trickle down the back of your leg. I make sure I’m not pissing on my leg, and we break eye-contact.

            I think about pushing him against the tiled wall of the restroom and pashing him. There would have been no idea of push-back, no fear, in wanting to fool around again with my lover-boy of an ex-husband, but this is the excitement, the thrill, the thing I want to tide me over while the envelope sits unguarded in the jacket slumped over the rise of the bar stool’s back. I want to make love to him, but nastier, without so much as a compliment. Rickie only liked when I bottomed for him.

            The man from the booth flicks his cock, droplets of his piss splattering without sound on the metal of the urinal. He begins to zip up his jeans but I stop him, a rush of confidence, as I grab his dick and start stroking it. He’s taken aback for a moment, but relaxes into it, clearly finding pleasure. In some bar restroom during the brighter hours of the day he likely didn’t expect to be jerked off by a complete stranger. He groans out, nodding his head in tune to some non-existent beat, maybe something playing in his head. It only serves to make me hornier—I play it like rhythm and feel his cock stiffen in my hand. Ordinarily, with Rickie, I would have seen his penis standing to attention and wanted him to fuck me no matter the time of day. The passion and the pleasure felt the best around midday, especially if both of us were supposed to be at our jobs, slaving away. The naughty escapism of fucking when you should’ve been getting fucked over, it made me orgasm loud enough for the neighbours to type out, print, and deliver into the mailbox a note asking us to be more respectful.

            He reaches with a free hand to begin stroking mine, and the tangle of our arms is somehow satisfying. Skin brushing against skin, the friction of arm hair. I begin not merely jerking him off but brushing up against his arm too, like when you drag a blown-up balloon against the top of someone else’s head. Staticky. I pull down my pants. The man from the booth fidgets with his jeans with his other hand and they tumble down to the floor, too, exposing his tanned legs. He’s not from around here, I think, and having hardly heard a word from his lips I give him a thick American accent and make him mispronounce the word cum.

            We don’t even kiss, not once. He exposes his ass, his furry round cheeks, and I pray to a god I do not believe in that he at least anticipated maybe getting fucked today to douche even a little. But what is a little mess. A little disorder. My dick is throbbing in my hand and he’s moaning soft enough to not be heard. Field mouse moans. The tip of my cock presses against his hole. We’re using bathroom hand soap for lube. It’ll do, I think, overwhelmed not by the pressures of logic or this-or-that but the want and lust to be inside this man. To overwhelm him, only sexually, consensually. He is nodding like a patient, studied game show contestant. I slowly begin to fuck him, remembering the way Rickie would fuck me. Not aggressive, never aggressive. Trained, because he wasn’t virginal when we first started dating, he’d been in other relationships, had sex when he was a teenager because he had the confidence for it. Looked right for it too. Beautiful eyes. I didn’t know him until he was in his twenties.

            The man from the booth is leaning on his forearms against the tiles, but he doesn’t care about whether the tiles are sticky or what he can smell coming from one of the toilets. He moans out the further in I insert my dick, pushing his ass back, making it known he is overqualified for this. Sex in The Goose’s Leg. Overqualified, but he craves it—Rickie doesn’t know how to take dick, but he said if someone else did, they would love mine. Long, but lean, hardly curved. A telephone pole. Pushing up inside this stranger’s ass.

            Back and forth. The dynamic of a man and his bottom. Not his butt. I still don’t know the name of the man from the booth, the man I am having sex with in a bathroom, seemingly unafraid someone could walk in and be outright disgusted. The nerves fight against the adrenaline. My hands rock against his ass. Intense pleasure, and I feel myself edging towards ejaculating inside of him. We moan in harmony. Jamie might overhear, but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

            I cum.

            Sticky white stains the opening of his butthole and I wipe the remnants of my seed on his butt cheeks—he’s excited more than anything, grinning at me, still stroking his own erect penis. This state of euphoria has yet to escape him, because he’s yet to cum, or because he’s jammed with more energy and passion than I am. The beauty of being horny has flicked off like a light and I clean off my dick and pull up my pants and glance over at him thinking about what you learn when you just do something.

            He shimmies back into his jeans, squashing his cock against the underwear and the denim, and bears his name. ‘Hunter.’ We don’t exchange phone numbers, although I don’t particularly want to. What would we have in common with one another? Goodbye Hunter, I think, as he shoves open the restroom door and the scene resets. Luckily no one spurted onto the tiles.

I should have fucked him with the envelope pressed against my stomach. The jacket would have been too bulky, too stuffy, but I would have felt the thrill of having and knowing of something that which gave me more power, more freedom. Jamie is hovering at the bar, idling, bored out of his mind, and he winks as I wander back to my stool, back to my jacket.

            ‘You gave him a stiffy,’ he says, nodding down to the shot glass.

            I laugh, either at him or myself. ‘I don’t need more alcohol.’

            Slipping my arms into the sleeves of the jacket, we hold eye contact—he certainly knows I just fucked some stranger in the bathroom, but he doesn’t seem to mind or care. It’s something he would do. Be sleazy with someone he’s attracted to, make a slight fool of himself, go home alone. Jamie would hurl an insult at me for calling him weak, slovenly, but neither of us is in any healthy, stable relationship. I am a gay divorcee.

            Outside, in the wind, I duck down the side of the building, tear the envelope out of the jacket pocket, and stare at it. White, unmarked, noticeable in a post box. No stamp, no little handwritten address to someone’s grandma. A temptation. I want it. I want it. I fucking want to tear into it and know why I have thrown away a marriage for envelopes.

            Without caution, I tear down the lip. Brutal, sharp, chaotic.