Catch and Release

by Sarah Flick

Image credit: karl muscat on Unsplash

The architect’s eyes were deep blue glacial pools. I stared too long, fell in, started drowning and discovered that I love water. He was intrigued when he saw me flail, but kept his balance.

Me: “I feel like a fish.”

Him: “What?! You’re crazy.”

I was convinced he must be a fish too, even if he wouldn’t say. A big one. And he enjoyed my red-hot craziness, although mostly in bed during ice-cold nights. Together we dove into slippery, watery depths, sharing the kind of heightened lust that’s triggered by a power imbalance.

“Insane,” he’d murmur afterwards into my sweaty neck before rolling away to sleep, while I lay awake in the dark, trying to imagine his judgment was a compliment.

Besides his slick job and smooth bedroom skills, the architect had a deep voice, confident laugh, and wore Italian leather shoes. He called a building’s structure its “bones,” and somehow seemed sexy saying such pretentious crap.

Inevitably, my King salmon left me for one of the many women who purred like cats when they met him. Before he departed, he informed me that he’d been faithful for the entire almost six months we’d stayed together, as if this was an unusually noble sacrifice.

So, I floated in a sea of obsession gone wrong until I started remembering. I remembered the way he leaned towards other women like a fish seeking newer, cleaner waters; the way he peeked at his handsome face whenever he passed a mirror, giving himself quick grins of approval he never offered me.

The architect had seemed like everything I ever wanted, except for a small, internal voice inside me that kept saying he was just a hot-looking narcissist. I was finally unhappy enough to listen.

Lots of supposedly crazy women have a wise, internal voice. Some think it’s God speaking to them, but I’m not that type. It’s always just been me. After I heard the message, I swam long and hard against the riptides of self-loathing until the water was clear. Now I’m powerful enough to swallow the Architect whole if we meet again offshore.

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Sarah Flick

Sarah Flick lives and writes in northern Colorado. She is retired from the US Forest Service and besides technical forestry publications, she has written for: 101 Words; 50 Word Stories; Flash Fiction Weekly; High Country News; McSweeneys Lists. She also wrote a Modern Love column for the New York Times.