Chapter 10 A Reverse Benjamin Button Is Normal Aging #2
I refuse to acknowledge that he’s read a lesser-known work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, though that’s clearly what he’s fishing for. “Is this even your first time helping a woman crash her sister’s wedding or is this just another Saturday for you?”
He squints. “Third, I think.”
I sigh dramatically. “And here I thought I was special.”
My laugh starts light and playful—we’re only playing—but soon, the sound disperses into the air like a puff of smoke, because he’s looking at me with this increasing intensity.
His eyes flash between expressions I can’t decipher and others I can read plain as day.
It’s as though he’s letting me peek inside his mind.
I don’t want him to look away, but I’m terrified to keep looking back.
“What makes you so sure you’re not special, Chuck?” The tiny lift of his lips practically knocks me out of my chair.
“Ha ha. Very funny.” Self-consciousness cracks through my voice. I’m the physical manifestation of lipstick on teeth.
His eyes don’t let up, and that unfairly lovely gaze warms my skin like stepping into sunshine. “Who’s joking?”
“Don’t be that guy,” I implore him.
That little shit is still grinning. “What guy?”
“That guy who needs proof that everyone in the room is attracted to him. You’re objectively beautiful, and I haven’t felt the touch of a man since 2023.” I put on a jokey, bawdy tone that I pray undercuts just how naked I feel at this admission. “It’s not exactly an insurmountable bar to clear.”
His face scrunches. “Twenty twenty-three?” Somehow, I’ve shocked him enough that he skates right past my beautiful comment. “That’s not possible. You were still married in 2024.”
“I was still married yesterday .”
“But in 2024 you were, like, really married. You were…unavailable. You couldn’t have…” He gestures all around us as though that clears up anything at all.
“Couldn’t have what?” I goad.
He ignores my question. “Was it really that bad for that long?” he asks. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
How do I begin to explain that I thought I had nothing to tell?
I didn’t even realize something was wrong until it was over.
Sure, our sex life had been nonexistent near the end, but Rich and I were hardly sexual dynamos when we were at our best. A week would go by.
Then two. And the longer we went, the more it started to feel like an email I should’ve replied to ages ago.
Then, in a blink, it had been months, and I was too overwhelmed to press send.
I never felt bowled over by my feelings for Rich, but, to be fair, I’ve never been that way with any of my relationships. I wasn’t built for love like that.
And how was I supposed to admit this to Ethan —a man who possesses so much excess passion he has no choice but to channel it into song?
Even if I had realized something was off in my marriage, I couldn’t have told him.
A wall we don’t talk about went up the day he missed my wedding.
We were never going to have casual phone calls about the state of my relationship.
He’d made sure of that. He lost that privilege when he picked a fight at my bachelorette party and abandoned me at the altar.
But as I’m not about to unearth long-buried arguments, I respond to his question with a simple yet meaningless “It is what it is” and scoop another perfect bite of risotto into my mouth.
“And no one else since?” he asks, incredulous. “The uncles?”
“Uncle, singular. Just one. I don’t have some sort of uncle kink.” I cover myself with a hot, sweaty palm as the mortification paints my face a deep shade of red. “Why am I saying all of this? I’m not even drunk.”
“I’m surprised you’re drinking at all after this morning,” he observes. Unhelpfully.
I rub my forehead. “I was hoping the wine would help.”
“What was wrong with the uncle, then? Singular.” He’s a dog with a bone.
I sigh into my camping chair. “I don’t know. He lived in one of those apartments with vertical blinds and a balcony over a shared pool. In the parking lot, I saw not one but two middle-aged men installing car seats into Cybertrucks. I couldn’t picture who we’d be together there.”
“You didn’t need to move into his Divorced Dad apartment to have sex with him.”
To his credit, he doesn’t roll his eyes, but he doesn’t have to. The way I approach dating has always been Ethan’s number one “Could never be me.”
Back in college, I didn’t have crushes on boys so much as rich fantasies of imagined futures with accounting majors in neighboring study carrels.
I’d learn their likes and dislikes, all the while curating our every stage of life on my mental Pinterest board and presenting them with a pretty cipher: a girl who could reflect back the exact person they thought they wanted.
A girl who seemed rare . Someone they couldn’t afford to lose.
It wasn’t something I was doing intentionally.
I was addicted to feeling wrapped in the all-encompassing glow of someone’s adoration.
It was never real—they hardly knew me—but walking into a room and seeing someone’s eyes spark as they identified me as someone worth claiming was too much to resist. I longed for someone to dream about a life with me the way I dreamed about a life with them.
If I stayed distant, unknowable, they kind of did, and it was nothing short of magic.
By the time the clouds of early dating parted and the approval-seeking psychosis lifted, I’d usually decide that it probably wasn’t in my best interest to cosign a car loan with a man who operated his television with an Xbox controller and had a pile of unopened mail next to his coffee maker just because he was cute and studying for the MCAT.
Ethan hated seeing the way I’d disappear around those guys. He’s not obsessed with you . He doesn’t even know you , he’d argue whenever I brought one of them around.
With Rich, it was different. We were so similar and wanted so many of the same things that at times I’d forget that his Charley and my Charley weren’t quite the same.
Over the course of our relationship, I revealed so many pieces of the real Charlotte Beekman, not always on purpose.
She’d crack off during arguments and on bad days like shards from a broken mirror.
Brief glimpses of a Charley who might hate playing pickleball on Saturday morning and isn’t always agreeable—and, in fact, usually isn’t.
I remember the moment he first realized who he was really looking at.
We were playing Scrabble in the basement.
He was quitting smoking again and using me as a distraction from the nicotine cravings.
Rich liked to win as much as I did, so, naturally, I’d spent our entire relationship feigning disinterest in the epic high of triumphing over an opponent in a low-stakes tabletop game.
But that Sunday morning, I was tired and overworked and needed a freaking win, and he caught a glimpse of the real me.
And he knew what it meant. I knew he did, because I’ll never forget his face when he looked back at me as I preened over my triple-letter use of “K.” It was as though he’d seen something ugly.
His Charley was this beautiful, live woman and I was the Madame Tussauds wax figure taking her place.
Ethan has never understood how love and sex have a way of making me feel like I need to take cover.
I’ve kept myself behind plexiglass, hoping someone would take a hammer to the protective barrier but too scared to ask for it.
For a long time, it was easier to let people think I already was the woman I let them see.
Then I could decide if I wanted to stay that way.
But I don’t have it in me to spend another decade waiting to be discovered as the cheap knockoff of myself.
“I know,” I finally answer. “But I’m done with the whole dating thing. It’s not worth it.”
“And everything else…?” He raises his eyebrows.
“Well…I’m not going to have sex with just anyone . I’m a rare treasure.” I put on my best impression of a very serious person and to my delight, he lowers his head solemnly in response.
“Well, of course,” he agrees.
What I don’t say is that I’d love to be capable of enjoying sex with someone outside of a romantic relationship, but even after Rich left me, he continued to be the central figure in every subsequent encounter in a manner I couldn’t stomach.
This man has a mustache. Rich didn’t have a mustache. How will sex with a man with a mustache feel different from sex with Rich?
Rich left me, and yet he haunted me. The strangers I’d considered after him were, well, strangers and thus could only exist in opposition with him.
I couldn’t bring myself to share new moments of intimacy with the man who left me at the direction of a virtual rowing instructor, even if he’d never know about it.
“Charley.” My eyes flutter open at the sound of Ethan calling me by my actual name. It’s not often he uses it, and I like the way it sounds. “You’re just giving up? Because of Rich?” He ejects my ex’s name from his mouth like spoiled meat.
“I’m not giving up. I’m just recognizing the inherent flaws in relationships. You should be proud. I’m finally on your level.”
Back when I believed in weddings and commitment and joint bank accounts, I’d thought some people simply couldn’t be tethered.
I’d seen enough men leave to be sure of that.
But Rich was a cement block of a man and in less than a year, he’d floated away from me like a helium balloon.
Because in a world of leavers and stayers, anyone is capable of becoming a leaver.
Ethan—who is here, for now—reaches for my hand. “You can’t let that guy…” He swallows hard. “Rich doesn’t deserve to be the last person who’s touched you.”
My mouth goes bone-dry. I know Ethan’s not suggesting that he should be the next person to touch me, but the way he’s so adamant that someone should has my mind bursting with images I have worked very hard to suppress over the years.
Our friendship is built upon the premise that Ethan and I, in that way, are impossible.
It could never be me.
I don’t do one-off sexcapades, and that’s all Ethan has to offer. If there are “stayers” and “leavers,” Mr. I Have Nowhere to Be All Week is the leaving-est leaver who’s ever left. No matter what happens next, he’ll always drive off into the sunset, and I’ll always live to regret it.
Still, I can’t help but picture it: Ethan coming home in an Oxford shirt with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder after a day at the office to my big empty house.
We’d work side by side on our laptops at the dining room table—a new one we bought from Room & Board with AmEx points.
We’d order Hola Arepa for dinner before watching two episodes of The White Lotus and going to bed. Then wake up to do it all again.
Whenever I try to imagine Ethan in my life, I can’t help but think of my dad and the way he looked whenever he’d come back, like he was wearing a stranger’s shoes he’d stolen from the front mat.
Like he didn’t belong and was waiting for someone to call him out.
Ethan would surely be just as miserable.
Ethan narrows his eyes, and I’m certain they could chisel through my skull if he put his mind to it. “Do you—”
My phone beep interrupts his question, and I watch this moment pass us by in real time like a cloud breezing past the sun.
I lift the offending device. The work fears creeping up my throat settle when I read the notification. “It’s my alarm to put on my light therapy mask. The Iron Man mask.”
“You didn’t bring that camping, did you?” He doesn’t move.
I don’t either.
He snorts, and whatever was just happening between us deflates into something less intimidating.
“Beekman, you packed no shirts but remembered to bring a gold-plated—”
“I’m on a twelve-week streak. I’ve come too far to risk fine lines on my forehead.”
“You’re twenty-eight. You don’t have fine lines on your forehead.” He climbs into the van, tosses me my bag, and then flops back into his folding chair.
“Duh.” I unzip the bag. “Thanks to my hypervigilance.”
He puts his hand up. “Fine. Whatever you’re doing is clearly working for you.”
“I use it every night before bed. The ritual relaxes me.”
It’s at that moment that it hits me. Ethan and I will be sharing a bed. His bed.
I strap on my face mask and press the button on my forehead until a red glow appears at the edges of my vision.
“You look like a mannequin that’s been possessed by Satan,” he tells me flatly.
To whichever demon spirit I’ve angered enough to deliver me to this moment, in this van, stuck in a literal quagmire with one Ethan Powell, I wish to repent.