CAN'T GET HARD

I stare at his name, heart pounding so hard I felt it in my throat.

I decline the call without a second thought.

How can he think to call me after what he did?

A message follows a second later.

Soren: Stop sulking. It's late, come home now.

I groan and try to block out the image of of him waiting at home for me, I archive his message and try turn off my phone when my thumb taps on the gallery icon.

At the top of it is a memory it signifies from seven years ago, a video I recognized from just the thumbnail.

I held my breath and tapped it.

It's me, twenty-one, standing under a spotlight that made the whole world feel like it was finally starting. My voice fills the room, clean and bright, hitting a note I haven't tried to reach in six years. My hair is down. My face is unmarked. I remember exactly what it felt like walking out under those lights without once wondering how anyone was looking at me, chin lifted, shoulders back, no hair to hide behind. I watch myself take the final bow, flowers landing at my feet, a version of me with no idea what was waiting outside that theater merely days after.

The fire.

I close the video before it finishes. My chest hurts too much to watch the rest.

I hadn't run into that fire because I wanted to marry him. I ran in because nobody else would, because I couldn't stand the thought of watching him die when I could still stop it. It was after, in the hospital, bandages still fresh across half my face, machines beeping steady behind my head, that he knelt beside my bed and promised to take care of me for the rest of my life. His hand gripped mine so tight my knuckles ached, like he was the one afraid of losing his footing. He was the one who proposed. He gave me a reason to hold on when there was nothing left of my old life worth keeping.

I believed him. Every word of it, the way you believe the first kind thing said to you after the worst night of your life.

But that's the thing about hope, it never truly guarantees the real thing.

I walk into the bathroom and splash cold water on my burning and no doubt swollen face, tile freezing under my bare feet. My reflection stares back, eyes swollen, scar catching the harsh light in a way it never does under our dimmer bulbs at home. I press my palm flat against the glass over my own face, watching my breath fog the edges of it.

"Get some sleep," I tell myself, out loud. "You have a session tomorrow." I sniffle and force a smile. "You're going to sing again... you're going to live again."

I'm grateful I never gave up the vocal practice, even when everyone told me there was no point in a voice with nowhere left to perform. It filled the empty hours in that house, note after note bouncing off walls no one else ever heard. Now it's the only thing keeping some part of me still standing.

Lying back down, I remember the early days of our marriage. He used to come home well past midnight most nights, and worried he was working himself into the ground, I brought him dinner at the office once, still warm in its container, my hair still damp from the shower. I never made it past the hallway outside his meeting room. The door was cracked, light spilling across the carpet. I stopped before I meant to, warmth from the container bleeding into my palms.

I heard his friend first. "You just got married," he said, half laughing. "Aren't you eager to get home to your wife?"

Soren didn't answer.

"Wait." His friend's voice dropped, disbelieving. "You haven't — it's been a month. You haven't slept with her at all?"

Soren was quiet again, long enough that I almost turned and left before I heard him.

"I've tried," he said finally, flat. "I have. Every time I look at her face... I can't get hard."

That was the sentence that changed everything. The face I'd scarred saving him was the same face he couldn't stand to look at long enough to touch me. I learned that I was repulsive to him.

I threw the food away before I even reached the elevator, lid still sealed. I never went back to his office. I never appeared beside him in public again, and somewhere between that night and this one I convinced myself it had been my own choice.

Eventually I slept, heavy and dreamless, I was completely drained from crying so hard.

In the morning there are eleven missed calls and a dozen unread texts, all from Soren. I don't open a single one. I get dressed, order coffee from the lobby, and head straight to the studio, phone face down in my bag the whole ride over.

The session runs better than I expect. My voice holds through every take, steadier than it's been in years, and the sound engineer keeps glancing up from his board mid-take, eyebrows lifted. The producer tells me twice I still have exactly what made me a star before the accident — the control, the range, the presence, he calls it, like it's a thing you can hold in your hands. I feel a glimmer of my old passion and confidence return, etching a smile that feels permanent on my lips.

I walk out of the building holding onto that feeling, coat half buttoned, sunglasses pushed up into my hair, the morning sun warm enough that I almost forget about the phone still sitting untouched in my bag.

And then I walk straight into a warm, solid body.

Strong arms reach out to steady me and a familiar scent has me going tense.

I look up and its him.

Its Soren.