The cars pulled one by one into the school’s small lot. The men exited and double-clicked their fobs, a chorus of chirps and flashes confirming lock status.

Someone opened the doors to the gymnasium and the crowd shuffled inside. The lights flicked on and began to hum. The men creaked open fold-out chairs and arranged themselves in a loose circle in the middle of the basketball court.

Few of the men could sit still. Arms were crossed and uncrossed, ankles stacked and unstacked, wristwatches shaken down the arm like tambourines. Various color-coded sidelines and baselines overlapped on the floor like an enlarged subway map, and a laminated chart on the far wall denoted the pull-ups, push-ups and mile times necessary to meet some arbitrary presidential standard.

Sam Irving was determined to sit stiller than the others. His fold-out chair was just as uncomfortable, just as beat-up, but he knew there was no perfectly fluid way to be. To constantly contort and rearrange was to search for a satisfaction that would satisfy no longer than a few seconds. When the pain returned, relief would require yet another reconfiguring, and the cycle would repeat until the hour had passed and all you did was run away from something you could never escape from anyway. Better to arrange the arms and legs at ninety degrees, soles flat on the floor, and wait to go numb.

The doors to the parking lot swung shut and the sounds of the city quieted.

It was Sam’s first meeting. He didn’t really belong. He felt like a layman in a room full of priests or a priest in a room full of sinners. He couldn’t tell which, or which he wanted to be.

“Phones,” a man said, and anyone who hadn’t done so tapped their screens to silence them. The same man unzipped a backpack and extracted a doll. The doll was naked. There were no genitalia, only sewing lines between the stuffed thighs and torso, but it was a male doll. You could tell. Its eyes were open, unblinking, the blue paint of the irises cracked. The man tossed the doll into the center of the group like a reluctant ante, the hand undealt.

Another man to Sam’s left, wearing jeans and a hoodie, immediately rose, picked up the doll, and sat back down with a speed that invoked musical chairs. He wore running shoes with a swoosh on the sides, untied laces tucked into the heel. His knees clapped repeatedly. He peeked at a few faces to his left and right before centering his gaze in the middle of the circle. He squeezed the doll with two hands and cleared his throat.

“So things were going pretty great,” he started. “Like the longest I’ve dated somebody in a while, and we’re getting pretty serious and she invites me home for Christmas to meet her family. I’m jazzed. My girl’s happy to be home and I’m feeling good about seeing her home. You see someone in the place they grew up and it makes you a little happy, too. The door opens and everyone jumps on my girl and she was having like four conversations at the same time, but nobody’s even looking at me. I’m standing there like, uh. Finally they turn and shake my hand. No hugs, man, and I had my arms out and everything. I’m like, what’s going on? Do they think I’m the uber driver? Then we’re sitting around the table eating, and nobody’s giving me two shits here either. Nobody’s asking about my job or where I grew up. And I’m thinking, is this a prank? I mean I’d been screwing the daughter up down and central for half a year and nobody wanted to give me the once over? But I understood quick enough. I was just the latest boyfriend to show up on the front porch. She’d brought so many guys home before me it wasn’t a big deal anymore. The fam didn’t want to get to know me when there’d be another guy to get to know in six months. Well, nah. I’m not some assembly line dude, so like halfway through the meal I stand up and I clink my spoon on my glass like it’s a wedding. And that just proved it right there. It took like fourteen clinks to get everyone to shut up. So finally it’s quiet and my girl’s looking at me all proud because she thinks I’m giving a toast or something. But instead I say that there’s been a misunderstanding. I look at her and say, I’m sorry but I gotta roll out. Then I left. My girl follows me out and she’s wondering what’s up. I tell her I’m not going to be just a guy she brings home to her family only to be tossed out with the Christmas tree. I’m not a prop. She gives me that wincing look people make when they’re confused and about to get angry. She said my attendance, that’s what she called it, my attendance, was all they’d been talking about, that they’d sent mass emails talking about me, and that they didn’t want to overwhelm me and were trying to play it cool. She says she told them to be like that. And then she says except for her college boyfriend, I’m the first guy she’s brought home for a holiday. And anyway, she says, how about you try to get to know them? She called me a self-centered prick. I was pretty shocked, you know, obviously, to hear that stuff, because it was so real, and suddenly it was like, damn, I messed up again. I said I was sorry but it was like, too late. I wasn’t going back inside and she wasn’t going to let me anyway. She was, you know, pretty upset, but admittedly I was mostly relieved it was over.”

The speaker pulled strings to tighten his hood and his knees clapped harder. He’d tucked the doll into the crook of his elbow and his arms were folded tight against his chest. “The thing about all this is that I knew when I showed up that I wasn’t just some random guy. I knew that. Our relationship was good. Her family was excited to meet me. I knew that. But that’s the thing. If it hadn’t happened at Christmas, it would’ve happened soon after, because that’s the pattern I’m all up in. I can’t help ending it with girls when things start to get real. But I don’t just end things. I sabotage, that’s what my girl, my ex-girl, says I do, I sabotage and I need a scene, because I’m afraid and I want all the attention at the same time. And she’s right.” He gestured around the room. “I appreciate you all listening and everything.”

He tossed the doll back to the center of the circle, where it lay like a corpse, unmoving.

Sam wondered what the listening protocol was, if everyone, or anyone, should get up and offer the man a hug or a pat on the back. The man had bared, if not his soul, then at least a tough story. Nobody moved, but, perhaps more importantly, nobody laughed or poked fun at him either. Nobody dismissed him by saying, don’t worry about it, man, girls just hold you down.

To Sam’s immediate right, slumped, hands in his armpits, crossing and uncrossing his legs, sat Mack Schaeffer. Sam and Mack worked together at a financial firm downtown. Mack was the one who’d invited Sam to tag along to the Heartbreakers Anonymous meeting. He said it’d be good for him.

Sam and Mack made for an odd friendship — they had little in common besides anatomy and a shared workplace — until one considered what each wanted from the other: an example. Mack, like most men in the Heartbreakers meetings, did not know how to maintain intimacy with women for longer than a few days or months. Or with men; the group had recently welcomed its first gay members. Sam, in contrast, had for years been in a healthy long-term relationship. Intimacy and persistence were all he knew.

And what was Heartbreakers Anonymous, exactly, Sam had queried when Mack invited him.

“You’ll have to come to a meeting to really understand,” Mack said, “but it’s kind of like a support group for those of us who you could say have a heavy arrest record when it comes to stealing and breaking girls’ hearts.”

Sam laughed, but Mack seemed serious. “I know the language sounds funny. Maybe it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek. But the sentiment is genuine.”

“So it’s AA for heartbreakers,” Sam continued. “I didn’t know ‘heartbreaker’ was an official condition.”

“It’s not,” Mack said. “Like I said, it’s a dumb name. It’s not like we have a good publicist. But grief, regret, the desire to change. Those are real. Look, it’s a group of men trying to recognize and work through all our bad influences, cultural, traumatic, other. And until we do, we can’t seem to stop hurting people, women, primarily, but ourselves, too, so.”

Sam held up his hands. “But why would I attend? I’ve never broken a heart.”

“You might need this more than you know.”

Again Mack seemed serious, and Sam had to wonder if Mack knew something he didn’t. “Nobody’ll be upset if I’m there? It’s not like 007? Do I need two heartbreaks to qualify?”

Mack sniffed. “It’ll be a room full of men who can’t do what they most want to do with their love lives. Nobody’s more qualified than you.”

*

Some time prior to his first meeting, on a morning that could’ve been any other morning, upon awakening, as if remembering a dream, it struck Sam Irving that the woman still sleeping on the far side of the mattress might not be the woman he wanted to wake up with for the rest of his life.

It was the first time Sam had ever thought this way about Emma. They’d been together for nearly a decade, since college. He’d long assumed that they would someday legalize their relationship and start using the word family. They’d had conversations about it, and crafted happy dreams. But that morning, the idea that their union might end was real enough to electrocute his sleepy spine with panic, as if suddenly remembering he’d left his wallet on the bus or his car in neutral on a sloped street.

The feeling didn’t last past the snooze. Sam rolled over, as if to turn his back on it, and all that lingered was guilt. After a shower even the guilt subsided, and the day unfolded like those that’d preceded it, and when Sam kissed Emma on the cheek as he left the house not a pinprick remained.

But the thought was resilient, tumorous even. It scared him that he could think like that, and it scared him further when he admitted to himself that he’d had the idea before, that the doubt and the impulse to leave went back as far as Emma did. But was natural and even healthy then – a simmering undercurrent of doubt – was more powerful now, conscious. He did what he could to hide it, and the house he and Emma shared in Highland Park remained tranquil. The pillow on his side of the queen looked light and fluffy and gave no indication of the weight of the contents of the head that rested and wrestled upon it nightly. Life still flowed forward, he with one oar, she with the other, alternating steady domestic strokes. A sheet on the fridge listed their chores and a pen in the drawer crossed them off when completed. A shelf of cookbooks proudly displayed worn pages. He loved the clean smell between her legs and the time he spent down there restored him energetically in a way he couldn’t describe; he sometimes wished he could bottle up her juices and put them in his smoothies.

She got up before he did on weekends and rolled out a yoga mat in the living room and did Pranayama and Ujjayi breathing exercises. They scrambled six eggs most mornings on a very expensive stainless steel pan they’d purchased as an investment on a shared future. She left hair stuck to the walls of the tub when she showered, and he sometimes arranged them into shapes and initials. They had real plants that they watered and rotated and fake plants that they’d bought just because. The banalities were endless, but so was the comfort they provided.

*

As a freshman, she’d lived on the girls’ third floor. He’d lived on the boys’ fourth. Early in the semester, their respective hall counselors arranged a nighttime mixer. The boys ventured down a flight to read to the girls a bedtime story. Sam was assigned Richardson 308. He knocked, entered, and drifted to the bed on the left, where Emma lay half under the covers. She looked far too pretty and painted to be ready for sleep, but that was the point. Sam at eighteen had hair that grew too fast for his haircuts to keep up with. He still had another inch and a half to grow. He’d never had sex. The book was Thomas the Train Engine. They giggled through the story, laughing at every page like it was comedy. When they weren’t laughing Emma would stare softly at him, following his lips as he read. Something unfurled in them both. When it was over Sam set the book on her desk. He smiled and stood up. He asked if he could come back another time, just to talk. She said yes.

They learned each other’s shitting habits, cousins’ birthdays, and spice preferences. They observed and harbored like surrogates each other’s fears and insecurities, hopes and joys. They knew each other wordlessly, without instruction, whether Sam wanted toast or oatmeal with his breakfast, whether Emma wanted to watch a movie or read, what they should do with their fingers and when.

They knew each other to such a degree and for so many years it was impossible Emma hadn’t by now intuited the debate in Sam’s head. If she was aware but hadn’t called him out on it, she was either hoping he’d go ahead and do it or was working up the courage to do it herself.

Their dinners quieted with self-consciousness and they watched more TV and in the privacy of their skulls they bickered with justification for and against. Despite their decade together, despite sharing political lean and dietary bent and movie preferences, they’d drifted to separate shores no longer traversable even with commitment and effort. The years had seen them switch lanes and jump fences, from phase to phase, career to career, dress size to tie knot. They were very different at twenty-nine than they’d been at eighteen.

They’d maxed out. They couldn’t squeeze any more out of the tube. Even mostly successful relationships, like Sam and Emma’s, had term limits. Now, even sharing the same bed, he had to shout across the rooftops to reach her, to reach her, the part of her most essential to the most essential part of him.

The arguments in favor of staying together were the same as the arguments against. They were respectful and accommodating and supportive. They slept worse when the other was away. They were good and sometimes excellent listeners. That they were different at twenty-nine was as it should be; they’d given each other room to grow. They knew what they had was more grounded and mature than what they saw in their friends, even in the ones who were already married. They’d built a city together. It was too much to tear down.

*

A man on the far side of the circle lurched to the front of his chair. He wore chinos and an army jacket and a buzz cut. He leaned further forward, balancing a forearm on both knees like an athlete on the bench. He looked left and right as if about to cross the street, then stood and plucked the doll from the floor.

Reseated, the man opened his mouth but quickly closed it again. He issued several additional false starts until at last his voice gained traction and volume. He paused between sentences, struggling to translate from head-speak to spoken English.

Outside, Pittsburgh balanced on the cusp of cold weather. Multi-colored leaves clung to curbs, awaiting the terror of a leaf blower. Late-migrating birds cackled and tweeted and complained about the busy highways south.

“Here’s the thing about me,” the man began. Pause. “Here’s the thing.” Longer pause, fiddling with belt buckle. “Here’s what it is. When I do something, I go hard. I’m all in. I put my whole heart into everything I do. It’s just the way I am. Dating women, no exception. I go all out. I go all out and that makes me all in. I get real focused. I get obsessive-like because I’m putting my whole heart into relationships right from the start because that’s just how I do things. The girl thinks I’m falling in love and that’s why I’m throwing so much attention at her. And for a hot minute it just might be love and things are like, revolutionary.”

His inhalations sucked in air sharper now, his uneven speech sapping his wind. “Chronic dissatisfaction.” Sharp sucked air. “I heard it called that in a movie once, chronic dissatisfaction. I don’t know why it happens. One day it’s just gone, the love, the revolution. Just like that–” he clapped suddenly and Sam contained the urge to jump. “Just like that, and I really do mean like that, nothing is left and I can’t even remember yesterday when I was supposedly thinking about marrying this girl. Look, I’m talking within a day or even an hour. That fast, it all just fades, and all of a sudden I feel trapped and even kind of played, like I got tricked into loving her. So I move to end it, and the girls get hurt because they don’t understand, and there’s nothing I can say because I don’t understand either. And then it’s on to the next one. I feel awful for hurting all these girls but I can’t help it so what can you do?” He raised his hands as if surrendering, then slapped them back down on his thighs. “What can you do?” he repeated.

The pause in speech released around the room a wave of ankle rotations and knee cracks, a nose blown, a neck rolled, a scalp scratched. The man set the doll on his shoulder, as if to burp it. When it got quiet again he continued, “I don’t want to be alone when I’m eighty. I see old couples sometimes and even if they don’t look happy, they don’t look alone, either.” He shifted suddenly, as if realizing he was rambling. He nodded to the group, shutting up. He walked the doll to the center of the circle and laid it gently on its back.

Nobody ventured supportive comments or critical barbs. Everyone seemed occupied with buttons or zippers or their fingernails. Sam thought it was better like this, the silence that followed. Sick people don’t fix sick people.

Someone else quickly snatched the doll and set it by his feet. He wore a dress shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned and folded back once, revealing a garish oversized watch. His tie was checkered and his hair parted smartly.

“I used to be a pretty anxious guy,” he said, fingertips tapping frenetically. “But I was mostly anxious with women. I fretted about what they were feeling and how those feelings might relate to me. I was that guy who was always asking, what are you thinking? But I’m not that guy anymore, at least not with girls. And I know why. A few years out of college I was at this party and I started talking with this girl who wasn’t my girlfriend because my girlfriend wasn’t even there. So me and this new girl were flirting and she was touching my arm and I ended up getting her number. And then we made out a little when we said goodbye. The next day I thought I’d feel guilty and I did, but it wasn’t that bad because here’s why. I still loved my girlfriend and cared about her, but the worry of it was less consuming because I had just met this other girl. Which, I know, is totally contradictory in multiple ways but that’s just the way it happened. It was like the girl I met at the party mitigated a lot of the anxiety I normally felt for my girlfriend, and also reinforced why I loved my girlfriend to begin with. So anyway the new girl and I kept texting, and I kept meeting new girls and getting their numbers, not because I was starved for sex or attention or anything like that, but because the stuff on the side stabilized me with my real girlfriend. It’s not even like I was dating any of these other girls. I just needed someone to text with, not even hook up with, not all that often, just every now and then someone to remind me that there’s more than one woman in the world. I’ve done the same thing with every girlfriend I’ve had since. I find someone else to share or shed a little of the excess energy with, and it works man. I’m telling you. I mean, I’m a great boyfriend as a result. I know how to do healthy and happy and supportive, all the stuff we work on here. It obviously sucks because I know I can’t marry a girl if I have to go behind her back to make it work. So I keep breaking up these otherwise pretty good relationships just because I’m doing a little texting with other girls on the side. Not even sleeping with anyone, not all that often. Just texting mostly, and alright I guess occasionally we meet for coffee or a beer. Sometimes I think that if the system works for me, if it makes me a great boyfriend, is that wrong? How is relieving my anxiety this way any different than popping a pill? Is loyalty the most important thing? Or is being a great boyfriend the most important thing? And it’s just sad because it’s also exhausting and I don’t have a definition of honesty anymore.”

The man coughed, checked his fancy watch, loosened his tie further. He stacked ankle on knee and ran his fingers through his hair without disturbing the part.

Again the silence. Sam thought the group needed a professional therapist to facilitate discussion. Someone who could get them to stop describing the pain and start fleshing and flushing out the source. Nobody here was a heartbreaker the way they were six-feet tall. They were heartbreakers because someone, at some point, had broken them first.

Sam’s preferred self-vetting method over the years, in questionable circumstances, was to imagine what he’d think if Emma were doing the same thing. He pictured her in a mirror group for women, training for the assassination of their relationship. He eyed the doll in the center of the circle. It lay like a fumbled football, unpossessed. He would barely have to move to get it. He could side-lunge and extend an arm and scoop it right up. He wanted the chance to share. He wanted to stand up for himself, to defend like a dissertation the decade of his life he’d comfortably spent with “just” one woman. He felt his muscles spasm with near action.

But he was too late. Another man held the doll. Sam hadn’t seen him rise to retrieve it. It’d been there and then it wasn’t, like a trick of photography. Sam scooched back in his chair, not realizing he’d slid so far forward.

*

The hour passed. The group rose and donned jackets and scarves. Several flung their arms high over their heads, stretching, as if just waking up from a nap. They folded the chairs and stacked them on a rolling trolley. As Sam did the same, he noticed the doll once again at his feet. Its proximity frightened him, as if any second it would detonate. He picked it up anyway. It was heavier than expected, like an actual child with tiny veins and a little heart. He waited for an alarm to sound, for the doll to self-destruct in five seconds. He stared into the doll’s eyes. He squeezed at the torso. He was debating his next step, whether or not he might take it home for a night, when Mack stepped over and gripped the doll’s neck. “I’ll take that,” he said. A moment lapsed, a moment where Sam didn’t let go, until Mack started to pull.

A curious thing happened as the men stepped back into the night. The curious thing was this: as the heartbreakers punched open the double doors and fanned out into the parking lot, their shoulders lifted and their postures straightened and creases between the brow stretched clear. A new vitality glowed in their expressions, as if someone had turned on their eyes. They were a little taller, better looking, and better dressed than they had seemed inside. Keychains were removed from pockets and twirled twice around the finger before smacking into the palm. Phones clicked on, messages checked.

It was like plugging in the cord all the way. Sam hadn’t realized he’d been getting them at half-power all this while. As the transformation unfolded, he felt increasingly intimidated. He’d pitied them indoors, yet now could not deny envy. He did not feel any taller outside than inside. His shoulders did not feel broader. He did not feel more confident.

He reminded himself that he had something these men wanted, or something they claimed to want. He had a real relationship, one brokered with the heart, not doomed by it. He had Emma.

He snapped the buttons of his coat and stuffed his hands in his pockets, watching the line of tail lights disappear into traffic. Disappointingly, he felt just as unsure about Emma as he had an hour before. If anything, breaking up now seemed like a terrible idea. He vowed to act one way or another soon. It was unfair to Emma otherwise, and to him. Maybe as early as tonight, he’d ask Emma to marry him or he’d ask her to move out. He didn’t know which.

He didn’t know how he’d decide in the seventeen blocks and thirty minutes it would take him to walk home, either, so a few blocks along he turned into a bar. And froze. Mack was seated on a stool, looking back at him in a way that suggested he was checking out everyone who entered. Sam thought he should probably turn back around – if Mack had wanted a drinking buddy, he would’ve said so at the meeting. But Sam opted for awkwardness over rudeness. He wiped his feet, brushed something imaginary from his lapel, and sat down beside Mack.

Mack wasn’t leaning on the bar like everyone else. He wasn’t slouched or trying to blend in. He sat up straight as a bottleneck, hands stacked in his lap, eying a basketball game on one of the overhead TVs. He nodded at Sam.

Sam ordered what Mack was having and the bartender brought him a beer.

A creamy woman occupied space further along the bar, her fingers playing with the stem of a watermelon-colored drink. Another man sat to her left, his arm draped over the back of her chair. He spoke quietly into her ear, as if telling her a long secret.

Sam realized Mack had said something. “What was that?”

Mack said, “I asked what you thought.”

“Of what?”

“Of earlier.”

“I’m still processing.”

“Come on.”

“Okay fine,” Sam said, shifting his weight on the stool. He was drinking his beer too fast. “I’m not sure I get it. You guys show up once a month, dump your guilt on that poor doll, mutually excuse and forgive each other, then go out and keep doing the same old shit.”

“That’s your takeaway?”

Sam held up his palms. “Am I wrong?”

Mack clenched his bottle but didn’t drink. “Love isn’t like alcohol. You can’t just go cold turkey.”

“Maybe, but not beginning a relationship with a woman you know you’re going to hurt is something you can actually decide not to do.”

“Like the way you could stop being with Emma if you actually wanted to?”

Sam felt his cheeks grow warm, embarrassed at his transparency. “You guys should’ve been talking about your childhoods, your parents, the influences that shape your attachment styles.”

“Who says we don’t?”

“Or the stereotypes of men perpetrated by the media, what it means to be masculine, stuff like that. It’s all changing now, you know. In some circles it’s cool to be vulnerable, like actually vulnerable, as opposed to just speaking the language.”

“Come show us how.”

“All I’m saying is that admitting your problems is not the same as fixing them.”

“Nobody said we’re perfect, man.” Mack looked up at the game and Sam involuntarily followed. A set of tall, elegant millionaires executed choreographed movements, while another set tried to disrupt them. The ref blew his whistle. The coverage jumped to a fast food commercial.

Mack lowered his gaze. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“Go ahead.”

“How come you guys never got married?”

Sam looked away and pretended to consider, as if this was the first time he’d been asked, as if his parents and siblings and friends hadn’t been asking the same question for years. He swallowed and said, “I actually wanted to elope.”

Mack raised an eyebrow.

Sam didn’t know if he felt like divulging, but Mack’s gaze was insistent, and the words spilled out. “I thought she did too. We talked about it now and then, but for whatever reason she thought she owed it to her parents to have a traditional wedding, like with a caterer and a guest list and what have you.”

“Elope,” Mack repeated.

“Yeah.”

Sam had always liked the idea of eloping, preferably somewhere in Europe, but Cleveland would’ve been just fine too. He and Emma had attended dozens of weddings over the years, holding hands in pews and on garden benches as their friends and colleagues had one by one taken the plunge in a storm of online registries, color-coordinated outfits, and gluten-free buffet options. A wedding was never about the bride and groom, whereas eloping was only about the bride and groom. That’s what he wanted.

Mack’s eye contact didn’t waver. “If you guys love each other, what does it matter how you do it? It’s one day.”

“A day that symbolizes the entire relationship.”

Sam had loved Emma romantically for about a semester. By sophomore year, they’d let out most of the air and replaced it with something more sturdy. The foundation had only grown thicker since. He made this clear to Mack now. “It’s not about love, man,” he said. “We’re bigger than that.”

Mack’s expression grew confused or angry. “I don’t get it. Whatever it is, you’ve got what those guys back there would kill to have and you just want to walk away?” He glanced back towards the entrance, as if any second now the rest of the Heartbreakers would riot in to beat him up.

Sam crossed his arms. “And what is it, exactly, that I’ve supposedly got?”

Mack didn’t hesitate. “A chance to really be with someone. To cultivate life with a partner. To not feel lonely most of the time. We’re not wired for loneliness. Older single men are the unhealthiest demographic in the world.”

Sam said, “Did you know up to three-fourths of long-term couples have affairs, maybe more? That percentage would be higher, but the ones that don’t cheat are just too scared. They would if they could.”

Mack shook his head. “I’m not talking about sex at all. You have a chance to be best friends with someone for life and you can’t even tell me what’s wrong.”

“Wrong with what?”

“With your relationship. Why you’re thinking about breaking up.”

Another wave of defensiveness quickened Sam’s pulse. “There might not be anything wrong. But not much feels right about it either. Not anymore. It’s possible to outgrow someone, you know.”

“Do you really think you’ll find something better?”

“You know what,” Sam said. A second beer was before him, another red napkin playing host to another brown bottle. “You know what,” Sam repeated, his temples tingling just so, his eyes darting every few seconds to the creamy woman across the way, “I’m actually pretty sure I know why we haven’t gotten married.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because we’re planners.” He stop-signed his hand to prevent Mack from butting in. “Me and Em, we love making plans, but we never seem to arrive at the point where we can actually enjoy the plans we’ve made, because by then we’re already making new plans.”

“Not totally following.”

“I mean like during college all we did was plan for life after college. Then after college all we did was plot timelines for jobs. Then we planned and saved for the house. Plans. And it was always kind of like, I’ll meet you there, someday.” He grated a fingernail on the bottle’s label and small metallic flakes fell to the napkin below. “Which is another way of saying, we can’t really be present with each other. Not really. I think we’re finally starting to realize it.”

Sam pushed his empty bottle forward and raised his hand for another. A strange attractiveness radiated off guys like Mack. They were flawed in the heart, but charismatically so. Most women, Sam knew, were somewhat flawed themselves, and therefore at least partially attracted to a similar quality in men. A respectful, emotionally available man. willing to commit, sounded good on paper, but few women were attracted to such a man beyond the margins. Men like Mack refused to pop the hood, but revved the engine just enough to give you an idea of what was there, and in the resulting ambiguity women were more than willing to paint the canvas with the colors they, and their subconsciousnesses, wanted to see.

“Actually, you know what it might be?” Sam said, looking down the bar. “The whole break-up impulse? I might just miss the thrill of the unknown.”

“Go on.”

Sam couldn’t stop staring at the creamy woman. “But whether I sleep with one woman or a hundred, I’m missing out either way.”

Mack shook his head. “Don’t fool yourself. It’s not about sex.”

“Try dating someone monogamously for ten years. It’s at least partially about sex.” He watched the creamy woman order another drink. “You know,” he continued, “I’ve never asked you why you’re a part of the group.”

Mack spoke flatly and without deliberation. “I don’t know how to be with someone who actually likes me.”

Before Sam could ask any follow-ups, the bartender appeared and popped two tops in succession. They were drinking too fast, but a conclusion beckoned and they would swim for it.

“Did you know I was the one who started it?” Mack said. He spoke to his bottle. “I rented the space. I recruited the first members. I brought the doll.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Look, I’ve dated some really fantastic women. But I push them all away once they really start to like me.”

“How so?”

“Women love how emotional and sincere I can be. They love my range, man, and they love how thoroughly I fall in love. But then it gets to a point where I realize how good it is and I bounce.”

Sam arched an eyebrow as Mack had done earlier. “I don’t know. I have trouble seeing confident and well-adjusted girls feeling heartbroken over you. No offense.” This wasn’t true. Sam could easily see how all manner of women would fall for Mack, but didn’t want to think Emma might be among them. He thought he’d stay with Emma simply to keep her off-limits to guys like Mack.

Sam and Mack put down their beers and stopped talking. Their friendship had officially begun, or was now exhausted for good.

The creamy woman was alone. Her suitor had disappeared unnoticed into the night, a foam-bottomed mug the only evidence he’d once sat at her side, and Sam reexamined his domestic dilemma in the fresh shadow of temptation. It would not be tragic if he stayed with Emma, and nor would leaving her be. The real tragedy, he knew, was paralysis, the constant drudgery of indecision.

Suddenly, Sam ripped his attention away from the creamy woman and fished his phone from his jacket pocket. His fingers fiddled on the screen, pulling up United Airlines’ website and typing in various details.

He opened his wallet, removed a twenty, and slid it under his unfinished beer. Mack, observing mutely, nodded once. “Do what you gotta do, man.”

Sam stood and swung on his coat, but his hands had trouble navigating the sleeves. For several paces he walked with his arms raised above his head in a V, unable to shimmy them through. Off-balance, he slammed into the wall near the door, jarring loose a photo of the bartender with his arm around some celebrity. The photo fell and the glass of the frame shattered. Everyone quieted and looked at Sam, including the creamy woman. A few people applauded sarcastically, but there was no time for a bow. He turned and exited and ran the remaining blocks home.

Once outside the front door, their front door, he paused and waited for his breathing to slow. A welcoming light crept around the edges of the curtained front windows. He pulled out his phone again. The screen prompted him to enter passport and credit card information. In the upper right, just beneath the United logo, was a timer. Twelve minutes. The airline would hold the tickets for twelve minutes before releasing them again. He had far more than twelve minutes at his disposal. He had twelve hours or even twelve days. Maybe weeks. But he liked the urgency. In less than twelve minutes, depending on what came out of his mouth, he’d be packing for an impromptu trip to Paris with Emma or for a night spent alone at a Liberty Ave hotel.

It was his house. His name was on the mortgage, next to hers, but he knocked anyway.

Emma swung open the door. “Hey,” she said. “Lost your key?”

The creamy woman was pretty, but this was real beauty. Emma’s bare feet, the shape of her legs, her face.

They’d gone to the same movies, where occasionally he would kidnap her hand and hold it in his own for a scene or two before releasing it back to the armrest. They’d opened presents under the same tree, ate stuffing pulled from the same turkey, read the same articles, argued the same points, drew money from the same accounts, dreamt about and planned for the same future. It should’ve been impossible to grow apart when so much for so long had been so similar.

And yet, was it really her that he no longer really knew?

“Hey,” Emma repeated, as plain and beautiful as he’d ever seen her. “Earth to Samuel. You alive?”

The curve of her earlobes, the pink of her lips, the blink of a loose eyelash.

Looking at her now, he remembered something she’d said to him the day they’d moved in. As they sat on the floor against the wall of the empty living room, unpacked boxes strewn around them, eating take-out from styrofoam tubs, she’d halted her fork mid-scoop and said, “Do you think it’s inevitable that we’ll one day be complete strangers? Like to each other?”

He hadn’t known what she’d meant. He thought she might’ve taken the line from a movie or a book. He’d laughed it off, but now here he was, years later, standing at his own front door as if to reintroduce himself.

Emma stepped outside, bringing her arms to her chest to brace against the bite of fall, fists tucked under her chin. “Sam? You okay?”

The loose eyelash rested near her nose. A day ago he wouldn’t have hesitated. He would’ve reached out and with a gentle brush brought it to his fingertip. He would’ve held his fingertip to her mouth and bid her blow and make a wish.

Sam could feel the weight of his phone in his pocket, the airline timer demanding cancellation or confirmation. He removed the phone and tossed it in the house behind Emma. It clattered across the hardwood and went limp. He set his hands on Emma’s shoulders and vacuumed in what breath he could. He could feel himself readying to speak, and was relieved to hear what those words would be. “Emma,” he said, “The answer is yes.”

She nodded slowly, trying to catch on. “Yes to what?”

Sam gestured in multiple directions. “Yes to this. All of it. Me and you.”

“Ah,” she said. “We’re going there now.”

*

She ushered him indoors and they took positions in the living room and months of internal dialogue spilled out. The drama of his big moment on the porch quickly expired, as did the countdown on the United website.

Emma’s talking points were fluid and clean. Sam interrupted, “Wait, so this conversation isn’t a surprise?”

Emma shook her head. “No, and don’t pretend like you expected it to be. You knew I knew.”

This was true, but to hear it voiced aloud still shocked him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She pointed a finger. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

They kept talking, and Emma made the decision for the both of them. She didn’t have a timeline in mind, but their future together would be limited to the weeks or months it would take to sort out what needed sorting, and then she would leave.

There was the sudden knowledge that, once single again, Sam would go looking for a girl just like Emma. “I don’t think it’s too late,” he said.

“If it’s not too late, then I don’t want to do this anymore, which is the same thing,” she responded. She tightened her hairband and looked off to the side. “You were right. We’ve outgrown each other.”

“I was right? Did I tell you that?”

“Didn’t you? Hmm, maybe not. But it’s true.”

He saw her then as other men would soon see her, her intelligence, her physicality, her ambition and maturity.

He craved her anew.

He would never have her again.

*

Sam arrived early to the next meeting. He hurriedly creaked open his fold-out chair and his foot tapped the half-court line as soon as he sat down.

Mack sat beside him, and, even though he hadn’t told him, Sam knew that Mack knew what had transpired. They’d avoided each other at work, their friendship needing more time to incubate.

The double-doors closed and Sam inched forward on his seat. Phones clicked off and were pocketed.

Mack removed the doll from his bag and handed it to Sam. Sam squeezed the little guy. It smelled like detergent.

The attention in the room settled on Sam, waiting. He didn’t know what to say. Memories of Emma were still too raw for a coherent narrative to emerge. But he didn’t need fluency. He just needed to talk. He looked the doll in the eye, briefly, and opened his mouth to speak.