The Trip The Way I Wish It
Had Gone, Part Seven
Published early on our
Previews
page on Sunday,
August 16, 2026.
Official publication date for the main page of our
site: Monday, August
24, 2026.
This story was submitted by Jack
aka lkngjst@yahoo.com
To read the 1st part of this
story, go to "The
Trip The Way I Wish It Had Gone, Part One".
To read Jack's 1st story, go to "Love Affair With A Shoe".
"The Trip the Way I Wish It Had Gone"
Series. Fantasy framed as "what I wish had
happened."
---
## Part Seven
Last night of the trip. We did it right the actual restaurant, the
good wine, a table by the window. Not hiding, exactly. Just two people
who'd run out of reasons to pretend they were only colleagues.
The conversation we'd both been postponing came somewhere between the
entrιe and whatever we were drinking by then.
"So," she said. "What is this."
"I've been asking myself that since the lobby."
"And?"
I set my glass down. This was the part I'd have gotten wrong at
twenty-five, and probably at forty-five. "Here's what I
don't want it to be. I don't want to drive home Friday and start
texting you good morning every day and need to know where you are.
I'm two years out of a marriage that taught me what it costs when
two people need each other to fill every hole. I'm not looking to do
that to you, and honestly I'm not sure I'm built for it anymore."
She nodded slowly, and I couldn't read whether that landed as relief or
disappointment.
"But," I said, "I also don't want
to pretend this was nothing, because it wasn't. You're not a
work-trip story I tell. The thing I keep coming back to isn't even
the stockings, as much as I'll think about the stockings for the
rest of my natural life." She
laughed, wet-eyed and surprised by it. "It's that for a few
days we each handed the other the thing we'd kept locked away and
neither of us flinched. You gave me the part of myself I'd spent
twenty years apologizing for. I got to give you a closed door you'd
been standing outside of since you were nineteen. That's rarer than
you know. I'm not going to be careless with it."
"So what does that make us?"
"I think," I said, "it makes us two
people who found something real and don't have to ruin it by forcing
it into a shape it doesn't fit. We see each other on these trips.
We're honest. No claims, no score keeping, no performance for anyone
else. And when we're in the same city, you have a man who's going to
pay attention to you in a way the kids your age won't figure out for
another twenty years."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "That's the most
attractive thing anyone's ever said to me, and I hate that it took a
fifty-five-year-old to say it."
"We're a patient generation."
"You're a patient generation. I ordered stockings online forty-eight
hours after meeting you for the second time."
We laughed, and it broke something loose, the last bit of tension
neither of us had wanted to name. She reached across the table and laced
her fingers in mine, right there by the window where anyone could see,
and didn't let go.
"For the record," she said, "the
professor never would have said that. He'd have panicked and given
me a B-minus."
"His loss. And a generous grade."
We'd gone warm and loose on the wine by then, and she did something I
didn't see coming. She held her hand out across the table, palm up. "Here."
I put my hand beneath hers, and she turned it over and let something
slide into my palm soft, sheer, still warm from her. The stockings.
She'd worn them again tonight, under the dress, a second time, so they'd
carry a little of her.
"These are yours," she said. "Take
them home. Don't argue." A small smile. "We'll
get new ones next time."
I closed my hand around them. Of everything that happened that week,
real or invented, that's the piece I'd keep not for what they were,
but for what it meant that she knew exactly why I'd want them.
"For what it's worth," she added, tucking her
hand back around her glass, "I'm not looking to tie myself
down to anyone right now either. You're not the only one who likes
their own life." A beat, that easy smile. "Which
is exactly why this works. We don't owe each other anything but the
truth."
We didn't make promises after that. We didn't need to. There'd be
another trip her city next time, maybe mine and that was enough to
leave sitting on the table between us, unspoken and easy.
The last night was slower than the others. Less to prove. We left the
curtains open again out of habit and the city kept its quiet watch, and
at some point I grabbed one of those little tubes of lotion the hotel
leaves by the sink, warmed some between my hands, and worked it slow
into one of her bare feet. Not worship this time, not a performance
just absentminded, the way you touch someone when you've stopped trying
to get anywhere. There were undertones, sure; there always would be with
me and her feet. But mostly it was quiet. TV off, the city doing its
thing, her sinking back into the pillows while I rubbed lotion into her
arches and neither of us said much. She watched me with an expression I
didn't have a word for. Wanting, and being wanted, and both of us
knowing exactly what it was and exactly what it wasn't. Turns out that's
its own kind of intimacy the honest kind, with the lights of the
Valley on and nothing pretended.
In the morning I flew east and she flew north, and there were no tearful
gate scenes, because that wasn't us. There was a text somewhere over
Nebraska: *Next trip is in five weeks. I already looked it up. Bring the
patience. I'll bring the stockings. You bring office hours.*
None of this happened. I want to be clear about that one more time. I
came home from that trip with nothing but expense reports and a head
full of what-ifs, same as always.
But this is the version I'd have written if I got to write it. And the
reason I wrote it down isn't the stockings, or the pool, or the
thirteenth floor, or the night I got to be somebody's closed door, or
even her feet, gorgeous as they were in my imagination.
It's that somewhere in the fantasy I figured out what I'm actually
looking for. Not a wife. Not a hookup. Someone who lets me be all of
myself at once and doesn't flinch and is honest enough to want the
same thing back, no more and no less. It has to go both ways. That's the
part I finally understand.
If you've read this far, maybe you know exactly what I mean. Maybe
you're looking for it too.
Howdy.
*The End for now.*
---
_That's the series. If it landed, I'd love to know tap love,
drop a comment, or send a message. And if what I described at the end is
something you're looking for too... Howdy._
