Unsent Letters

My life, at twenty-three, was a machine I'd built myself, and every gear in it turned exactly the way I wanted.

I know how that sounds. Bear with me.

I was a mailroom clerk at the university. The whole job title was mailroom clerk, and I loved it more than I'd loved any class I ever took. People think sorting mail is mindless. It's not. It's a puzzle with a rhythm. Four hundred envelopes a morning, and my hands knew where everything went before my brain caught up. Then I'd come home to the little house I shared with Dani and Sally, eat something, watch something, sleep, repeat. No drama. No entanglements. Dani called it "Imani's hermit era." I called it peace.

My last real entanglement, if you could even call it that, had been a crush I never acted on. Senior year of college, a guy named Cliff Grainger, and I'd graduated two years ago still keeping that crush folded up in a drawer somewhere. Never told him. Never did anything about it. That was the point of the machine, right? Nothing leaks out, nothing breaks.

That Tuesday I came home around six, and my car, a tired old Corolla with a clutch that had been threatening me for weeks, finally made good on the threat in my own driveway. It ground, it shrieked, it died. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and said a word Dani would've charged me money for.

And then I turned around and there was a man sitting on my front steps.

Not just any man. A man holding a bundle of letters tied with a rubber band, looking up at me with the patient, forgiving expression of a dog that had been waiting all afternoon and wasn't mad about it.

"Imani?" he said. "Imani Hicks?"

My brain did a full system reboot. "Cliff? Cliff Grainger?"

"Yeah! Oh man, okay, this is going to sound completely made up." He stood up, still holding the letters like a shield. "I'm twenty-four now, by the way, in case you were keeping track."

"I wasn't," I lied, and my voice cracked on it, which was embarrassing. "Why are you on my porch?"

"Right, so. My mom's house is two streets over. Beechwood? I'm visiting her for the week, I'm a courier now, which is a whole thing, and a chunk of her mail keeps getting misdelivered here. She finally complained, and the postal service said, and I quote, 'someone will address it eventually.'"

"So you became the someone."

"I became the someone. I've been sitting here for forty minutes trying to decide if this was fate or just really bad postal routing."

"And which did you land on?"

"Honestly? I landed on 'Imani Hicks is going to come home and see me sitting here and think I'm a stalker,' and I almost left three times."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. Two years, and he was exactly the same, that same apologetic slouch, same way of talking with his eyebrows doing half the work. He'd filled out some, but the face was the face. The face from the drawer. Great.

"Well," I said, "you're not a stalker, you're a mail hero. Give me those." I took the bundle. All of it addressed to E. Grainger, Beechwood Lane. "Yeah, someone transposed the house numbers. I'll call the carrier supervisor tomorrow, I know the number by heart, it's the one power I have."

"Mailroom?"

"University mailroom. I sort other people's love letters and bills all day. It's great, I love it."

"That tracks," he said, and then went pink, like he'd said more than he meant to.

Before I could ask what that meant, I tried the Corolla one more time, because apparently I enjoy punishment. Grind. Shriek. Death.

"That's the clutch," Cliff said, leaning on my fence like an expert. "My company car did the same noise last month. It's not going anywhere tonight."

"Fantastic. Wonderful. Great day I'm having."

"Do you have roadside?"

"I have Dani's AAA card, and Dani is in Cancun." I called anyway. The friend-with-a-tow-truck situation, as it turned out, resolved to: morning. Earliest slot, seven a.m., no exceptions, ma'am please stop asking.

"So you're stranded," Cliff reported, having watched the entire call from my fence.

"I'm stranded. On my own driveway, which is somehow worse. At least if I was stranded in a ditch I'd feel dramatic."

"Come on, no. You've got your mail delivered by a personal courier and a free evening. That's a good day."

"It's a Tuesday."

"Best kind of day. Nothing expected of you."

I looked at him. He looked at me. And here is where I should tell you my machine threw a rod, because what came out of my mouth was: "Do you want coffee? I have coffee. My roommates are gone for the week so the house is a disaster, but there's coffee."

"That would be great," he said, way too fast, like he'd rehearsed it in the car.

"Fair warning, it's Dani's fancy coffee and I make it wrong."

"Imani, I drank mailroom coffee for a summer internship. I have no standards left."

The house was only mostly a disaster, honestly. Sally's shoes in the hallway, coffee table buried under sorting trays I'd brought home to work on, the worn couch that sulked if you sat in the wrong spot. Cliff perched on the good end like a guest on a talk show and looked at the trays.

"Those are the actual university trays?"

"Company property. I'm a very bad employee."

"You bring work home?"

"I bring puzzles home. Same thing. Okay, wait." I handed him his mug and sat on the opposite end of the couch, a full cushion of diplomatic distance between us. "Catch me up. Two years. Go."

"Two years. Um. Okay. You know I'm a courier."

"You've mentioned twice. Medical supplies?"

"Medical supplies, yes. I drive a van around and people sign things. It's exactly as thrilling as it sounds. Before that I did a year at a lab that shall not be named."

"The one that had the fire?"

"There was not a fire. There was a small incident."

"There was a news article."

"There was a small, contained incident," he said, grinning into his coffee. "Anyway. You? Still sorting?"

"Still sorting. Promoted to 'senior clerk,' which means nothing except I get to yell at the new hires about bin weights."

"Do you yell?"

"I have a whole speech. There's a laminated card."

"I missed this," he said, and then looked startled at himself, and I looked startled at him, and we both took a big sip of coffee at the same time like two people in a commercial.

"What about, um." I waved a hand, playing it casual, nailing nothing. "Are you seeing anyone?"

"Deleted." He said it so fast it came out one word.

"Deleted?"

"Dated someone last year, briefly, ended fine, she's great, we're deleted. You?"

"Nobody. By choice. I have a system."

"A system."

"The system is that nobody gets in, Cliff, keep up."

He laughed, that same laugh, and something in my chest that I'd filed away very neatly two years ago rattled its shelf. Dangerous. This was exactly the kind of thing the machine was built to prevent.

"Okay, but real talk," he said, turning toward me, mug balanced on his knee. "Senior year. Physics lab. Tuesdays and Thursdays. You sat next to me for an entire semester."

"I remember."

"Do you? Because I have thought about that lab approximately nine thousand times, and I want to know if you remember it the way I do, which is: I was so shy I basically communicated in nods, and you were so funny I couldn't concentrate on pendulums."

"You couldn't concentrate on pendulums because you got a C on the pendulum exam."

"You remember my grade?"

"Cliff, I proofread that lab report. Of course I remember your grade."

"You proofread my lab report?"

"Everyone proofread your lab report. You drew a little cartoon of the pendulum committing a crime. It was worth it."

"That cartoon took me forty minutes," he said, deeply wounded. "That was my masterpiece."

"It was a stick figure with a rope. Forty minutes."

"Art takes time, Imani."

I was laughing so hard I almost spilled Dani's fancy coffee, and he was grinning, and the sun was going down through the big front window, painting the whole messy living room orange, and I thought, very clearly, over the noise of my own machine falling apart: oh no. Not again. Or maybe, finally.

"So," he said, into the laughter, casual as anything, "how long does a clutch take to fix?"

"Day or two, probably. Parts and labor, it'll be a whole ordeal."

"Day or two," he repeated, like that was excellent news, and I made myself not smile, and then I smiled anyway.

He set his mug down and leaned over the coffee table, actually lifting one of the trays like it was an artifact. "Okay, wait. These are sorted by department. There's little labels."

"Don't touch those, they're alphabetized within category."

"There's subcategories?" He peered closer. "There's *color coding*. Imani, what is this, is this a hobby?"

"It's the system I built, and it's beautiful, and if you put that tray down crooked I will end you."

He put it down exactly straight, which was somehow worse, because now he was being careful about my stuff and that did something warm to the whole room. "You realize what you are, right? You're the gatekeeper of campus secrets. Every love letter, every rejection letter, every 'please reconsider my financial aid' letter. All of it passes through your bins."

"It does not pass through my bins. It passes through the machines and then the bins, and I don't read anything, that's a federal thing."

"Everyone knows that's a myth. You could tell me which professors are sleeping together."

"Cliff."

"I'm joking."

"A chemistry professor and someone in the English department use *way* too much glitter stationery, and that's all I'm saying."

"That's all you're saying but it's so much," he said, delighted. "The gatekeeper of campus secrets."

"You're the guy who can't read addresses, don't get smug. Two streets over, Cliff. Beechwood Lane. There are three digits and a street name."

"The van does the sorting, not me."

"The van does the sorting."

"It has a very dumb routing system, I've complained."

"You've complained to me, in my living room, twice."

He held up his hands. "Okay, fair. The gatekeeper and the guy who can't read addresses. That's our superhero team name, if anyone wants it."

"Nobody wants it."

"Nobody wants it," he agreed, and we sat there grinning at each other like idiots while the sun went down for real and the room started going blue at the edges. I got up and flipped on the lamp Dani bought because it was "a vibe," which meant it made everything look like a wine bar. Cliff looked around at the mess like he was memorizing it.

"What?" I asked, because he was doing the thing where he almost said something and didn't.

"Nothing. It's just, Dani and Sally, right? You mentioned them. It's weird seeing where people ended up. Last I knew of you, you were walking across a stage in a cap."

"You were at graduation?"

Oh no. He went still, the way you do when you've said more than you meant to. "I mean. Everyone was at graduation."

"Everyone was not at graduation, it was ninety degrees and the gym had no air conditioning. You were there?"

"I may have been there," he said, examining his coffee. "My mom had a thing near campus. I parked near the gym. It was a coincidence with legs."

"A coincidence with legs walked to the gym specifically."

"I don't know what to tell you, the coincidence enjoyed the ceremony."

I should have let it go. The machine said let it go, you've been down this road, the road has a toll and the toll is months of thinking about a boy. But he was on my couch, and the room was wine-bar blue, and the system was failing.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, before I could pick which way to go. "And you can absolutely not answer it, and we'll talk about bin weights instead."

"Ask."

"Senior year. Was there ever a moment where you thought, even for a second, that maybe..."

"Maybe what?"

"Come on."

"You have to finish sentences, Cliff, I can't do all the work