My Last Crush
I walk into a bar to meet some friends and you’re sitting at a table with some work colleagues. You see me before I spot you, but when I do, the spark of recognition warms me to my core. You rise like the sun and walk toward me, your blue eyes scanning my face. “Darlin,” you whisper, “it’s so good to see you.” We embrace, holding on a beat longer than a casual hug. After we separate, we stay close enough to kiss, but we don’t, we can’t. Kissing is outside the boundary you set years ago, in another bar, on another night.
Back then, in 2006, you were a musician playing in my husband’s bar and we fell into an easy connection. I saw the light in your eyes when you looked at me and felt the current when we touched. I told my friends you were my boyfriend, in jest, but I meant it too. I watched your mouth close to the mic as you sang, and thought about how your lips would feel on mine. I saw your hand strum the guitar, and wondered what it do between my legs. I breathed in your sweat like sweet perfume when you came over to me after the performance.
The night you set the boundary, we sat at the bar and talked as always, but then you told me you were happily married. I realized you had been wanting to say it for some time, had been working up to it, felt a need to clarify this fact. I knew your wife as a casual friend, and I’d seen your two young children in the evenings sometimes when your band was playing. I had witnessed your happiness as a family, and I knew you were an honest man. I saw it in your face and heard it in your voice. I knew that was why you had to tell me. I was also well aware of my own history of being a temptress, and how my need to believe you could be the answer to everything I lacked could make me ignore what you already had. You were drawing a line, containing me in my magical world with a gentle boundary, and it was okay. You said it with a smile, then touched your knee to mine. I pressed back with mine. I paused for a moment, thinking I could say the same thing, that I was happily married too, but I would have been lying. I looked at my husband standing behind his bar, laughing with customers, flirting with his favorite employee, a bartender named Janice. I looked back at you and said “you’re lucky.”
We continued to talk every chance we could in that dark bar, about what I don’t remember. I can still feel the quiet joy of our connection, the ease of being with you, balanced by the soft understanding of the limits of our affection. Was the flame I felt with you all mine, or did it warm you too? I’ve always wanted to know, to ask if you were indulging me, in those early days. If you saw my husband’s character, his late-night activities in that bar after I went home. The ways he went behind my back and lied to me. Were you just trying to compensate for that?
In 2010, when he died, you came to the service with tears in your eyes. You said “we love you”, meaning you and your wife, and I said “I love you too” meaning you and your wife. It came naturally to say it, and I felt no expectation or revelation in the words. They came as easily as everything else between us.
Over the next several years, we’d see each other now and then. At an outdoor concert, a Mexican restaurant, another bar where you were playing acoustic guitar without your band. I had another man by then, a good one like you. Over time, I saw that in addition to your happy marriage, our 16 year age gap would make any relationship we might have less tenable in the real world. I had landed on my feet, sealed the hole of need in my chest, but the affectionate regard for you remained.
As we stood in that noisy bar, the night you called me Darlin’, we caught up on our lives, and I made a point of saying I’d just turned 65, was retired, and planning to move closer to my kids and grandkids. As you hugged me again, and called me darlin again, and told me how good it was to see me again, I thought about my next life, and how if I found you again, maybe I’d drag you off in the woods somewhere and have my way with you, but in this life, I’d leave you be.
The last time we met, in 2023 as I was on the verge of making that move I’d mentioned to you, your band was playing at an outdoor brewery. My man and I went with some friends to enjoy your music and a last night out in the town where we’d lived for years. I saw you up there from a distance and noticed the traces of gray in your hair and beard. I worried that up close you’d see me as older too. The lines in my cheeks when I smiled, my drooping eyelids. But it didn’t matter. On the dance floor with my friend, you smiled and nodded at me. When the song ended, I went to you without hesitation for the hug I knew was waiting for me. “Hey hon,” you said in my ear. My friend, who had been with me through the whole story, asked what you whispered and I told her. She thought there was a possibility for us; I said I was past thinking of you that way. I saw your wife and hugged her too. We danced together and caught up on our lives since those early days when we frequented my husband’s bar.
When the show was over, and my man and I were leaving, you ran after us. My friend watched you, told me later you practically knocked things over on your way to me. “Don’t you dare,” you said, smiling and catching your breath, “leave here without saying goodbye to me.” So we hugged again, talked about the show, and you shook my man’s hand.
It wasn’t a proper goodbye, or even an explanation as to why we might not see each other for a while, and because I regret not saying more to you, I’m offering that now. Goodbye last crush of my life, and all the fantasies I spun around you. With clear vision, I see and feel the radiance of your presence that warmed me over the years, and the unconventional love we shared. Yes, love. I want to call it that clearly. I bask in the memory of it, and because I know it was love, I can let you go and wish you the best in however many years we both have left on this earth.
-Lee Stevens
Lee Ann Stevens writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Publication credits include Bright Flash Literary Review, Straylight Literary Magazine, Good Old Days Magazine, BoomSpeak, Story Circle Network Journal and publications, the Journal of Expressive Writing, Persephone Literary Magazine, Manifest-Station, and Pure Slush Lifespan Series.