Salvation by Noelle Adams

were turning into them. That’s why you feel so guilty about me—because you’re afraid you were like them in some way. So, until you open up to me about how you really feel about all of that, then you can’t expect me to open up to you . If you think that’s the way it’s supposed to work between us, then it has to work both ways.”
    I was breathing heavily when I finished, and I was consumed with a dark satisfaction. I’d silenced him. I knew it. I could see it in his face. Because I knew as far down as my bones that he would never open up to me about that. This friendship or relationship or whatever it was had always been one-sided. I was his little project—one he was obviously committed to, but a project nonetheless. He was in it to fix me, and he’d never let it go the other way.
    He left not long afterwards, and I tried to feel vindicated about that.
    As soon as I saw his SUV disappear down the drive, I turned on the opera, ran into the bedroom, hurriedly put on my shoes, and scrambled up onto the elliptical trainer.
    I rode it until my body felt as bad as my heart.
    ***
    D espite the way we’d left it that evening, Gideon called following day, and our conversation was mostly normal.
    He stopped by unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon and caught me in the middle of a session on the elliptical. I’d just been going about an hour though, so he thought it was simply a hard workout and didn’t seem suspicious.
    I told him, as nicely as I could, to call before he came by from now on.
    That week, I skipped my appointment with Dr. Jones, since the sessions were starting to upset me too much, and I was already upset enough by the argument with Gideon.
    He came over for dinner the next Friday evening, the way he did every Friday night. I felt bad about the fight we’d had the week before, so I bought good steaks, which I knew were his favorite, and grilled them up with salad and French fries.
    Maybe we could have a nice evening, and things would return to an even keel between us again.
    He obviously appreciated the gesture, and we had a decent time over dinner, since he wasn’t secretly analyzing me and he kept the conversation light.
    We were cleaning up when I said something stupid.
    It was really my fault. We were both trying, and the evening probably would have gone fine if I hadn’t let something really stupid slip out.
    I was washing the second dish and handing it to him to dry—there was a dishwasher in the cottage but I hardly ever used it since it took so long to fill up with just one person—and we were talking about an annoying colleague he had at work.
    I was actually laughing a little at his description of the argument he’d had with the bossy, obnoxious guy that afternoon.
    “It was all I could do not to dump the coffee all over his lap,” Gideon said dryly, still wiping the dishcloth over the plate, even though it was already dry. “You might have noticed that I don’t take well to people telling me what to do.”
    I laughed again—just a little, not uninhibitedly, but any laughter is better than none. “I might have noticed that particular characteristic,” I told him, turning off the water and drying my hands. “Although I tell you what to do sometimes, and you haven’t yet dumped coffee on my lap.”
    “True,” he said, still drying the already dry plate. He seemed to have forgotten about it. His eyes were resting on my face, and they were unusually warm. As warm as his voice. Strangely warm. “But you’re a special case.”
    I tore my eyes away from his, suddenly jittery and uncomfortable. There was no reason for me to feel that way. It was just a casual conversation. Nothing intense or personal or deep. But I didn’t like it. And it was because I didn’t like it that I ended up saying something incredibly foolish.
    I took the plate out of his hand and turned my back to him in the process of putting it back in the cabinet. “Special cases? Is that what you’re calling your