"You are glowing"

My friend walked in and stifled a laugh. "What exactly did you do last night?"
I decided I'd tell her. But only her. It was too much... too much to make it real by letting the others know.
And I was little ashamed. How much I'd felt jerked around in the past. How many times I'd been angry and frustrated. How we'd ended it and begun it and how things were so much more dignified as friends even though I'd been in love with him. Even though I'd felt like I was in love with him.
We'd been at his house the night before. He was teaching me to read music and understand music. We were clapping for credit. 123 123 1234...hear that. Thats a tango. Whats this? Clap along. It was fun. It was the most fun I'd had with him in a while and I felt good around him. Confident in the way I sometimes do when I'm with a man I'm not sleeping with but kind of want to be sleeping with. The way I feel when I can sense they are beginning to want me again.
And I'd always been so overwhelmed by him. So absorbed that I guess I wanted that as much as I had wanted him. Some semblance of returned affection. Some sense of mirrored desire. I felt a certain distance and oddly it made me want to get even closer. You know that phrase playing with fire. Yes. I see it. Now.
And I had been there and we had doing something or another after clapping for credit. I barely remember now. And for some reason I was going to stay there. It was late. I had no car. Who knows why. And I was up in his loft and he was on the floor and he'd given me the bed and then I said what I was thinking "you should join me, you shouldn't sleep on the floor"
And he said what he was thinking. That if he joined me in bed he couldn't keep his hands to himself and then we said nothing.
For a full five minutes I think.
And then a voice from the dark "either you've fallen asleep or that was an invitation."

"I'm not asleep"
It was romantic. I don't know why. It was sexy. It was. Even though I knew it was a bad idea. I could block those thoughts and actually, even now, I suspect for maybe that one night it was sort of kind of...there. It was right. Just there. Like a teenage move. Like a tiny bit of innocence. Cue in the OMD. Fade to black.

And so the next day I was glowing. So it seems. Despite myself I was feeling good. Really good in the doomed dumb way you feel when you've had sex that was a bad idea but that makes you feel real and I was wandering about on a beautiful day in San Francisco and he was home making a mix tape for me and everything was good.

It seemed to me we felt good for a full whole week that time and then I just knew. I knew it was bad. It was horrible. Ridiculous. Silly. I knew that even though he was saying things...nicer things. Things more right. That it wasn't right. How do we know these things? How does instinct tell us these things? How can someone leave the house to go to the store like they always do only this time you know it wasn't the store. This time you know they picked up more than eggs and milk. How do we know?
So I asked "exactly how many people have you slept with in the last week" and when he answered "three" I felt dumbstruck and sideswiped and yet I wasn't even surprised.

The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The feeling and not the thought. If I didn't love him so much now it would be less of a mystery how I remember these feelings so clearly and completely out of context..

I have this fortune cookie fortune from years ago. I carry it with me. It says "the best things in life are having what others tell you that you can not have."

I know what that means.