I smell your skin, and I’m immediately drawn in. You apologize for having to get close to me
as if it wasn’t by design. Your thick warm hands leave a sweat print on my desk, and my slender yet agile fingers chase yours into the pheromone pool as we dance around the mouse. We take turns both being the cat and the mouse. We discuss everything but our feelings.

Some days it’s like we jumped ahead to three years into the relationship, and other days it’s obvious you won’t commit. I’m just waiting for you to pull the trigger, to start the race, and you haven’t even tied your shoes! In these moments, as we play pretend, pretending to be a couple, pretending we are not a non-couple couple, we live a breath, a sound, a touch away from biology taking over. Your essence is all consuming. It comes over me like waves strong and powerful. A force to be reckoned with. The break hardly long enough before I am consumed again drowning in the magnetic pull of your eyes, yet there are moments like a slow merciful ebb that are so gentle and tender that the only response is a misty-eyed smile. These moments only broken by the people working around us, cursing out customers under their breath, as they furiously clack notes out on their computers sitting at their corporate islands.

One of them is the man with four names Francisco Lauren Javier Jack, I call him Buttercup and you call him Captain. “Oh, captain! My captain!1” He is stoic and guarded always watching us, studying us, trying to determine what we are. He swoops in when you are away and upends my life saving me from camouflaged danger. Like Tarzan, he swings away just as fast. Like Tarzan, we have had to learn to communicate and build trust where none was to be had. Like Tarzan, the thought of his jet-black long bouncing hair, his dark sun soaked skin, and muscular body makes me gasp as my brain sends shivers down to my toes. At first, I thought him more animal than man biting at me when he was stressed by deadlines or bosses, but he listens, he hears me, and sees me, and supports me in a way no man has. He has an old wise soul yearning to be seen for those he deems worthy, and he deems me worthy. He is both savage and the distinguished captain, and I am utterly fucked! Though I am sobered by the unnamed woman. The one by his side in a photo I saw once that he never mentions. Is she his sister or niece, a friend or the love of his life? She remains unnamed, but her presence overshadows us like a fog rolling in changing the tides of our relationship.

I am torn by the fact that he is your friend, and I am jealous that you both know each other so well. I am only beginning to know the both of you. As such friends, neither of you want to cross swords and as such men, neither of you want to give up the treasure. This is the very reason we find ourselves at work in the Bermuda Triangle. I am deathly afraid of being the siren that ends your friendship, but I am afraid more of not knowing the depths of love. I must choose either one or none. My choice is loss because if I choose one, I lose the other; and if I choose to lose both, I have lost two friends forever. What friends? I’ve always wanted both of you to be my lovers, one my present and the other my future. I am the selfish death spiral. I am the irresistible song that speaks to your heart and captures your soul. I am the reason we are in this triangle. I am the siren, and I must go against my nature to save us all because neither of you will.

*1 Whitman, Walt “Oh Captain! My Captain!” Poet’s.org, https://poets.org/poem/o-captain-my-captain