His mouth is the deepest impact crater on this side of entropy. His hands are dispassionate and his patience is dissipating. You never leave the house without your eyes shimmery as an August evening, but he always finds an almost, a not-quite;the bread you made his tomato and mayonnaise sandwich with tastes soggy, the fabric softener you doused his socks in smells like cough syrup, the iced tea you brewed is much more bitter than his mother's.

A boy like this does not love you. You may think he does--hell, he might think he does, but love does not live between retrograde and reason. Love cannot exist as an annuity with compound interest.

Maybe you're not a child anymore, but the lesson of "seen and not heard' lingers longer than conversation Spanish or french verb tenses; you speak in subjunctif, the relation between the probable and possible, the risk of telling someone else what you wished.

Maybe his grasp never grazes too close to the carotid, but you flinch when he says your name like a lozenge, thinning under the tongue, dissolving into a scarlet called caution.

Maybe he compares you to girls whose names you'll never know, or your best friend with eyes visceral as the Venus Rover. Maybe he tweets about you while you're at work, or tells his friends you're too uptight at every opportunity. Maybe he breaks up with you for another minutiae, and then begs you to take him back within the next 3-5 business days.

Maybe he doesn't put his hands on you, but that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to open your palms, show him your throat, and let go.