Sexting The Priest

The dress is still on its hanger, tags on, four hundred dollars of black silk I bought for a reservation at Corbin's that never happened. Three days before our anniversary dinner, Reid Marsh decided eleven years wasn't worth one more.

I'm not wearing it to dinner tonight. I'm wearing it to sit on my bathroom floor with a bottle of Cabernet I opened around nine and finished somewhere past eleven, tags still swinging against my spine every time I move, which feels like either the saddest or the most efficient thing I've done all week. Possibly both.

It's also the only room in the apartment he never really settled into — Reid was a kitchen-and-couch man, claimed those two rooms and left this one mostly to me — which might be exactly why my body dragged me in here tonight without asking permission first.

He broke up with me on a Tuesday. I've had three weeks to find that detail more insulting than the actual breakup, and somehow I still do. Not a fight. Not a slammed door. Just Reid, in my kitchen, making coffee in the mug I bought him our first Christmas, telling me — gently, so gently, like gentle made it kinder — that he didn't think he was built for forever.

Like forever was a jacket. Like eleven years, four apartments, and a ring he talked about but never actually bought was something a person could just decide didn't fit anymore and hang back up in the closet where he found it.

Three days later he texted: *hope you're doing okay.* Like he hadn't spent a decade learning exactly how not-okay I'd be. I didn't answer. I also didn't stop reading it, on and off, for the better part of a week, looking for a version of those four words that meant something other than what they meant.

I didn't cry until he left. I want that on the record, even if the only one keeping the record is me, sitting on cold tile in a dress no one will ever see me in.

That same night, I deleted his contact. Watched my thumb hover over the button for a solid thirty seconds, like the decision needed witnessing, and then did it anyway, because I'd read somewhere that deleting an ex's number was step one of Getting Your Life Back, and I was desperate enough to take advice from an Instagram infographic.

Nineteen days later, that decision is the single most inconvenient thing I've ever done to myself.

Because here's what a breakup doesn't take from you, no matter how mature your coping mechanisms are supposed to be: eleven years leaves grooves. I know that number the way I know my own birthday. I could recite it half-asleep, or — as tonight is proving — half a bottle of wine deep, sitting on a bathroom floor, scrolling through a version of my own phone history that no longer includes him.

I open a blank thread instead. White. Empty. Waiting for me to make a decision I will regret specifically and thoroughly by morning.

*Don't,* says the eleven percent of my brain still operating in my own best interest.

*Noted,* I tell it, and start typing anyway.

My first attempt is honest, which is exactly why I delete it: *Was I really not worth trying for?* Too raw. Too much like begging.

My second attempt is angrier: *Hope the freedom's everything you thought it'd be.* I get as far as rereading it before I delete that one too — not because it's untrue, but because it sounds like something I'd be embarrassed to have said out loud in daylight.

My third attempt is worse: a screenshot I almost send of the reservation confirmation from Corbin's, still sitting unopened in my email, like proof of a future he cancelled without taking a vote. I get as far as attaching it before something in me — pride, probably, or what's left of it — makes me delete that too.

What I actually want isn't honesty and it isn't anger and it definitely isn't evidence. It's smaller and uglier than any of that. I want Reid to lie awake tonight the way I've lain awake for nineteen nights. I want him to feel one percent of this.

So I type his number in from memory, one digit at a time, careful as a woman defusing something, and then I write the kind of message I would never send in a state where my judgment was intact.

*I put the black dress on tonight,* I type. *The one you always said you couldn't handle.*

I read it twice. It's petty. It's humiliating. It is, I decide, exactly what he deserves, and I hit send before the sober eleven percent can talk me down.

No dots appear. It's midnight on a Tuesday; he's probably asleep, unbothered, dreaming about whatever men dream about after they've spent a year deciding to leave and somehow still get to sleep fine the night they do it.

That should be the end of it. One petty message into the void, the kind of thing I'd wince about for a week and never confess to my sister.

Except I'm three glasses in and constitutionally incapable of leaving anything alone once I've started, so I keep going, because apparently tonight is the night I locate a rock bottom I didn't know I had.

*Thinking about your hands tonight,* I type. *About the last sound you made before you couldn't manage words anymore.*

*I hate how much I miss you touching me,* comes next, faster, less careful. *I hate it so much I could scream.*

I send both before I can talk myself out of either one. There's a strange, reckless relief in it, the kind you get from throwing something breakable just to hear it shatter. I set the phone face-down against the tile and tip my head back against the tub, and for almost a full minute, I feel something close to powerful.

Then the guilt shows up right on schedule, and I grab the phone again, already composing the *ignore all of that* text I'll need to send to walk it back.

That's when I actually look at the thread.

There's no photo. There should be a photo — Reid squinting into the sun at his cousin's wedding, the one I never bothered to change even after we broke up, because deleting the contact card entirely had felt like enough violence for one night. Instead there's just a number, unlabeled, sitting at the top of an otherwise empty conversation.

My stomach drops in the specific, cold way that means my body has understood something before my brain caught up.

I pull up the real thread — the one from before, still saved in my message history even though the contact card itself is gone — and hold the two numbers side by side, squinting until my eyes adjust enough to actually read them properly.

One digit off. A seven where there should have been a two.

Somewhere in this city — or possibly nowhere near this city, I genuinely have no idea what area code that is — a stranger's phone just lit up with a very specific description of exactly how much I miss being touched.

"Oh, no," I say, out loud, to my empty bathroom, to the dress that's about to have a very different story attached to it than the one I bought it for. "No. No, no, no."

I sit there with my pulse going too fast for a Tuesday night, phone gripped in both hands, waiting for — I don't even know. A read receipt and nothing else. The mercy of a stranger who sees a message like that from a number they don't recognize and simply, wisely, ignores it, the way any reasonable person would.

The three dots appear instead.

I watch them pulse, vanish, start again, like whoever's on the other end genuinely cannot decide what a person is supposed to say to a text like that from a woman they've never met. I can't blame them. I don't know what I'd say either.

Then the reply lands, and it is so much worse — so much more interesting — than silence would have been.

*I think you have the wrong number.*

I stare at those seven words until they stop making sense as English.

It's polite. Almost formal. Nothing like the response I'd have braced for from most men — no joke, no *wrong number but tell me more anyway*, none of the obvious opening a stranger like that could have taken and, statistically, probably would have, if he were anyone else.

Just a fact, stated plainly, leaving the next move entirely up to me.

I should apologize and put the phone down. I should turn it off, actually — put it in a drawer, forget tonight ever happened, wake up tomorrow and be the kind of woman who learns from her mistakes on the first try.

Instead I sit there on my bathroom floor, in a four-hundred-dollar dress meant for a dinner that never happened, staring at seven polite words from a stranger, and feel — underneath the horror, underneath the wine, underneath nineteen days of grief I haven't finished having — something I haven't felt once in those nineteen days.

Curious.