by Marcia Middleton

Created on: November 18, 2009

UNNECESSARY GUILT

I can't believe you'd think such a thing, I laughed at him, shocked at where his tired mind could go. He thought that maybe I was secretly lusting after his friend; desiring the gaze of deep chocolate instead of icy blue, warming innocence over clearheaded knowledge. I denied it in the moment, but the wheels in my head began to work overtime like little commissioned salesmen at the end of peak buying season. He could have a valid, verifiable point. There are secrets in the locked musty storerooms of a woman's heart, reachable only by labyrinthine hallways twisting and turning in on themselves until nobody could map the way. I did not want to consider that his amused, innocent prodding could have been a deft and accidental pick to my subconsciously locked secret.

My man was a hurricane, sweeping through the land, blustering powerfully, pouring down rain, battering the brick defenses of my thoughts. His friend was a stream, imperceptibly flowing unregistered in the back of my mind. He innocuously and slowly wound his way into my life. He stood on the outskirts of conversations, smoking his clove cigarettes lazily and occasionally catching my eye. When he did, he'd smile like it was the first time in years and I'd been sorely missed. At first I thought he was this way with everybody.

I noticed that he touched me for no reason. He would sling an arm around me casually and leave it there a fraction of a second too long. I didn't think anybody noticed it. I had hoped nobody noticed that I smoldered when he touched me unexpectedly; not the burning my man enticed, but a sweet, vaguely uncomfortable warming like a blush spreading across a school girl's delicately formed cheekbones to redden her ears the first time a boy kisses her cheek. I liked it mostly because it was secret, known only to me. I had always liked hidden things. This was harmless, made of nothingness.

If that was true I wouldn't have woken that night with need screaming in my head at such a fevered pitch after a dream of my River. I looked at my Hurricane in the barely breaking dawn light creeping around the bent edges of the bedroom blinds and as beautiful as he was, I refused to touch his sleeping form, having had been so recently betraying him with another man, if only in my unbidden thoughts. I felt guilt reach into my heart with freezing fingers. It squeezed the blood from my veins and cut off the arteries. I had done nothing wrong, but the secret was no longer amusing.

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