18. Dashi #3
He chewed on his bottom lip for a moment as he looked around the onsen. “We may have that in common.” Then: “So how is Lea doing now?”
The concern in his voice surprised me. “Oh, um. Well, she lost her job, if you really want to know. And she’s struggling with Tommy—her oldest. He’s been acting out at school.”
“I can imagine. It’s not easy losing a parent that young.”
Because he knew exactly what losing a parent felt like, of course.
“How old were you when you lost your mom?” I wondered.
His eyes met mine like a bullet train. “She’s not dead, Marie.”
“I know.” Not for the first time, I wished I could reach across the pool to take his hand. Let him know I understood. “But when a parent leaves, it’s still a loss.”
He looked at me, then nodded. “Yes, she, ah, left for Arizona when I was four. Traded me for freedom, or so the story goes.”
“Whose story?”
He shrugged. “Everyone’s. I would still see her from time to time. I used to spend a week every summer in Sedona until I was twelve and left for boarding school. That was the year Winnifred conceived Daniel.”
What it must have felt like for him, being the only child of a rich man like his father, only to have both parents leave him at such a young age?
Actually, I didn’t have to speculate. I knew exactly how the last part of that equation felt.
“It is hard to lose a parent at a young age,” I told him. “It hurts. A lot.”
Our eyes met, each mirroring the painful knowledge we saw in each other. A knowledge that bonded. A knowledge that hurt.
“I’m so scared for her,” I admitted as I swirled figure eights through the water with one hand. “Lea, I mean. She’s thinking about leaving New York entirely. Starting over somewhere new.”
Lucas tipped his head as he pulled his elbows up over the side of his bench to dangle his fingertips in the water. “Why scared?”
“Because…what if she makes the same mistakes the rest of my family has made? What if she’s alone out there in a strange place, and she chooses the wrong person to depend on, or starts drinking like our parents did, or just…
disappears into whatever seems easier.” I took a shaky breath.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m always scared.
All the time. I don’t want to feel that way, but I do.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never…maybe that’s why I’m still… ”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it. Not here, sharing a bath naked with a man of Lucas’s age and experience.
“A virgin?” he offered for me.
Quietly. Respectfully.
When I looked up, his eyes were kind.
I nodded miserably. “It should have happened by now, right? Sometimes I think something is wrong with me.”
Lucas’s scowl returned. “Well, that’s insane. There’s nothing wrong with waiting for the right person. The world might be a better place if more people did that”
“Maybe. But what if I’m waiting for someone who doesn’t exist?”
Daniel’s face danced in my memory before dissipating into the image I’d seen earlier: the one with the red-tipped nose, the perpetual party boy.
And then there was the memory, the one from a year earlier, when I’d been forced to listen to him—I couldn’t call it “making love”—to that woman in his room.
No. I wasn’t waiting for that person either.
For the first time, I wondered who Daniel was inside. If the boy I’d been in love with had ever existed at all.
“He exists.”
The certainty in Lucas’s voice made me startle, wondering if I’d spoken aloud. When I realized he was answering my previous statement, I relaxed.
“You’re beautiful, Marie,” he went on. “Kind. Smart. Absurdly sweet. And not just since Paris—you always were.”
I snorted. It sounded like such a line. “You’re just saying that because you’re my employer. No one noticed me until I got back from Paris.”
He leaned forward in the water, and even though there was a solid ten feet between us, the distance seemed to shrink to mere inches.
“It was June.” His voice was soft with memory.
“The roses in the garden were beginning to bloom, and I was taking a walk after a nasty argument with my father about investing in crypto. You had just started working full-time in the kitchen, and you were carrying a basket of something from the garden. I think it was kale, but you also had a container of early strawberries. You’d been eating some too—I could see the stain on your lips. ”
My breath caught. “That’s…you remember all that?”
He smiled, more to himself than to me. “You knew you weren’t supposed to eat them, so you kept rubbing your lips together, like you were trying to hide the stain when you saw me coming.
As you passed, you looked at me through those wire-rimmed glasses you used to wear.
The sun was shining off your hair, tied behind your neck, and it looked like polished onyx.
You smiled at me before saying, ‘Hello, Mr. Lyons.’ And in that moment, I thought I’d never seen anything so lovely in my life. ”
My skin prickled, not with embarrassment, but with something quieter. Stranger. It was the ache of being remembered when you’ve spent your whole life assuming you wouldn’t be.
“I can’t believe you remember that,” I said again. “I can’t believe you remember me .”
“As if I could ever forget.” Then, with a light splash toward some phantom thought: “I also remembered to check with Ondine about your age. I knew you were still too young for me, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t committing some heinous crime by noticing you.”
He seemed embarrassed by the fact of our age difference.
I wasn’t.
“I don’t think I’m too young for you,” I said.
For that, I received a wry expression designed just for me when I was challenging him in a way he secretly loved.
An expression I was secretly starting to love myself.
“Marie. I am more than fifteen years older than you.”
I shrugged. “So? It’s just a number.”
His eyes glimmered. “I’m forty-one years old. You won’t be twenty-six until October.”
“And?”
He cast his eyes up to the stars and muttered something that sounded like, “Dear God, help me” before he looked back at me.
“Last year, a doctor put his fingers up my ass to check my prostate and will continue to do so every two years until the day I die. I have a herniated disc that gets aggravated if I don’t do an hour of core work per day.
I take my coffee black after ten a.m., haven’t changed my haircut in twenty years, and only like the bagels from one place in Manhattan.
I’m old , Marie. And you are very much not . ”
I tipped my head and looked at him, as if I could identify the things he was describing on his face. “Nope, don’t see it.”
He huffed. “Marie…”
“I mean, I’m sure all of that is true, but I don’t think any of it makes you old.
I obviously don’t get prostate exams, but women get a speculum up our hoo-ha every three years from the time we’re teenagers, so I think we win that round.
I’ve also probably twisted my ankle five times because I never exercise, not because I’m a crone.
And, well, obviously the bagels have to be from Russ and Daughters or else they’re just crap. ”
That earned me a distinct quirk on one side of his mouth.
“When I look at you, I don’t see old or young or really anything with age,” I went on.
“I just see Lucas. I see a man. A very attractive man, since we’re busy paying compliments—don’t give me that look, you just bragged about your abs of steel, sir.
Any woman would be lucky to have you. Or, um, kiss you. Whether it’s part of a message or not.”
I’d finally stunned him. His stormy gaze fell squarely to my mouth.
“Well, then,” he murmured. “I suppose that’s that.”
We sat in silence after my little rant, the steam rising around us like a cocoon that separated the ryokan from the rest of the world. It was one of my favorite things about Lucas: that he didn’t have to fill every quiet moment with words, unlike the rest of my loud, chaotic family.
There was peace in just being near him, in sharing this time without expectations or demands.
Eventually, the water felt a little too hot, and we both seemed to realize at the same time that we should probably get out before we turned into prunes.
“I’ll, ah, close my eyes,” Lucas said, though I caught him peeking slightly as I moved toward the edge.
I cast a quick smile over my shoulder. “Promise?”
“On my honor.” He threw a chiseled arm over his eyes like a cartoon character falling onto a fainting couch.
I giggled, which turned into an all-out laugh when he grinned under his forearm.
“Okay, I’m decent.” I tied my robe around my waist. “You can get out too. I won’t peek either.”
“Pretty sure you saw everything already anyway.”
I didn’t argue. He didn’t seem to mind.
After he was out and wrapped in his own robe, we stood under the pagoda, the unspoken question of “What’s next?” lingering between us.
“So…same time tomorrow?” Lucas asked with a curious, hopeful expression.
It made him look about sixteen.
Or maybe twenty-six.
Or forty-one.
Who was counting anyway?
“It’s a date.”