What We Devour

The papaya sat between us like a small, soft planet, its orange flesh glistening in the overhead light of the empty restaurant. You brought it to my lips with your fingers, and I tasted sweetness and something metallic underneath—maybe the spoon, maybe the residue of everything we hadn't said.

"You're like a fox," you told me once, early on, when you still found my evasion charming. "Always slipping away before I can pin you down."

I wanted to tell you that foxes don't run from nothing. They run toward survival. But I took another bite of papaya instead and let you believe whatever made it easier.

The bull came later—your stubbornness, my silence, the way we locked horns over nothing and everything. The way you charged forward while I danced away, both of us too proud to admit we were performing ancient choreography we'd learned from parents who taught us that love was supposed to be difficult.

Now I watch you across the table, your water glass sweating onto the white linen. I remember you underwater in Mexico last year, how you looked like something mythic and drowning, how I reached for you and then pulled my hand back. Some part of me always thinking: let's see what happens if I don't intervene. Let's see if you surface.

You did surface. You always do.

"Are we still friends?" you ask, and the word lands between us like a stone.

I want to say that friendship is what people call it when they're not brave enough for enemies, not greedy enough for lovers. I want to say that I loved you best when I wasn't sure if I'd ever see you again. But the papaya is finished, and the check is coming, and I've spent three years learning that words are the things that ruin everything.

So I say yes, and watch something small and essential die behind your eyes.

Outside, a fox darts across the road—quick, rust-colored, gone before I can be certain it was there at all.