The Bluffing Game by Verona Vale Page A

can’t be with someone who thinks I’m so perfect that he suffers in silence and lets me think I’m doing fine when I’m not.”
    I could tell that pained him to hear, but it was true. I would compromise for the sake of a relationship, but only for the sake of a healthy one.
    I made my voice more gentle. “You want to give this a shot?”
    He met my eyes again. “You know I want to.”
    “Are you willing to, then?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Then don’t say yes.” I picked up my briefcase and stood from the table. I was starving, but I wouldn’t be able to eat with him just then. “Think it over,” I said. “You know where to find me.”
    And I left the restaurant with something I hadn’t felt in a long time and had trouble naming at first. It was warm and soothing and yet firm, unyielding. A foundation, sturdy, strong, and ready to support whatever load it needed to bear. I had felt a twinge of it when I decided to pursue Victor, but now that I was trying to give it a go with Nick, it was unmistakable. I knew what I wanted, and now I knew what I had.
    Clarity.

 
     
     
     
    Eight
     
     
     
    There’s a feeling of accomplishment in opening yourself to possibility. Like I imagine a fisher must feel when she casts her line into the surf, not knowing if any of the multitude of factors that would need to align for this to be a good day will actually come together and make it one. But swinging that pole, letting the line unwind and the hook glide across the air and make its little impotent sploosh into the water, it still opens you up. Suddenly you’re secure in the knowledge that you gave it a shot. And the feeling of security, that’s what gives you strength to try again if it doesn’t work out. The fullness of knowing you did all you knew how to do to make this one time a worthwhile attempt. If you can revel in that, let it pervade your whole body, live in it, breathe it in, then it doesn’t matter if you fail. It doesn’t matter if no fish takes the bait, or even if one does but it’s so small you have to throw it back. If you can attach yourself to the process rather than the outcome, then trying itself becomes the success you so badly wanted. Every attempt itself becomes the fulfillment. Maybe you come home at the end of the day with no fish, but you don’t come home with nothing. You come home full to the brim, ready to rest and fill yourself again tomorrow.
    Three days went by, three long mornings and afternoons full of paperwork and meetings with smaller clients about smaller cases, stacks of papers packed from top to bottom with facts and citations of precedent, with technicalities of contract, with claims and litigation spun into rugs from the long, yarn-like innards of American law. I was the tailor, the seamstress who could see where some filament had been poorly stitched or sewn so weakly as to unravel. I could see where too much breathing room was left, where hems and panels needed to be taken in until the finished piece suited its purpose flatteringly. When I let the lawyer part of my brain run the show for a while, I never noticed the time. Three days was insignificant if you spent them weaving row after row of a tapestry.
    So when Nick finally called me on the evening of the third day, I was surprised at how nervous he sounded, as if I was a tomato he’d kept simmering in a slow-cooker of doubt the whole time and I was almost completely dissolved.
    “I’m fine, Nick. Just tell me why you’re calling.”
    “I talked to my therapist. And I think I managed to decide.”
    “Great to hear. So what’s the verdict?”
    “Jeez, June, you’re so nonchalant. This is a big decision for me.”
    “You’re right. I’m listening.”
    “I’m willing to give it a try, if we can really be cautious and open. Listen to each other. Speak up when we need to. Call each other out when we could do better. Stand up not only for ourselves, but for each other, and for the sake of the