'This Is the Part I Skip In My Fantasy' by Valerie Hughes

After three years of nothing, I crossed the street, looked up, and his eyes were there so we had to stop because when we knew each other, we hadn’t known each other in the city and then there we were, smoke spiraling out of manholes, and we tried to politely hug because as kids we found any reason to touch—a chin on a shoulder, a tracing of the bones in our hands—and there was the time too that I laughed until I gagged when he puppeteered the frog we were dissecting or when I dumped a bag of chips on him—all jagged crumbs—but instead of talking about that at coffee, (days paused via work emails with apologies of lateness or a lie of food poisoning in my case) we talked about the sex we’ve had and the cities we’ve slept in so at first we were a bright liquid pour of honey but then he was brusque to the barista about his burnt matcha and I mentioned the crush I had on the chemistry teacher and I showed too many pictures of my dog because he said, “You’re still pretending to be happy” and his smugness brought us back to the old things—that last fight of defiant accusations—and the honey turned hard in the jar, resisting anything sharp and our intensity was met by the same onlookers in high school, all of them consumed by the urgency that yes, they are in love, but with him I was a kid in adult clothes and the honey jar’s amber was hardening and we looked at each other with a nauseating knowing: one of us needed to break the glass