Kimmie
He fills my doorway the way he fills every room he’s ever walked into.
“You came,” I say. “I didn’t mean…” I trail off, because I’m so glad to see him.
I look at the doormat for a second, and swallow down the words that I know would come out wrong anyway. “Come in, please, or before Mrs. Horace at number nine spots a man your size on my step after midnight and starts a group chat about it.”
He steps past me and my hallway turns into what I imagine a corridor on a submarine feels like. There are four boxes by the stairs I’ve been meaning to unpack since I got the keys. He moves around them like he already knows the floor plan of my house.
The kitchen still has the evidence of my evening on the counter. And my journal open to today, which I expected to fill with memories from the opening and instead is brief notes about that and all my feelings about Natan.
I quickly flip it closed and push it to the back of the table.
“Sit down,” I say. “You’re making my kitchen feel like a dollhouse.”
He sits. The chair says something about it. He puts his forearms on the table and waits, and I fill the kettle so my hands have a job.
“I’m going to talk for a while,” I warn him. “It’s how I get to the point. There’s no shortcut. I’ve tried.”
“Go ahead.”
So I do, with my back to him, watching the water start to move in the little window on the side of the kettle.
“I sold nine pieces today in the end today. Nine. Daisy’s running us on page five with a photograph in which I appear to be shouting at a man about stoneware.
Two people asked to go on the list for Tobias’s next show, and Mrs. Vasey, who has spent weeks telling anyone who’ll stand still that the green was a mistake, informed me this afternoon that the green has grown on her.
” I turn around. “It was the best day of my working life and I felt like something scraped off a shoe for the whole of it, because I stood between a mop and four rolls of bubble wrap and threw out the person who came to support me.”
“You asked me to leave. I left.”
“Please don’t be reasonable about it. It makes it so much worse.” I make two cups of tea, not knowing if he even drinks tea. He waits.
“You said I was ashamed of you.” I place his mug in front of him. “I told you that wasn’t fair, and then I stood there with my mouth open because I couldn’t tell you what it actually was. Well, I’ve worked it out, and I need to say all of it, so let me get to the end before you’re kind about it.”
“All right.”
“I’m not ashamed of you. When you came through that door and the whole room dropped its voice, I panicked, and I put that on you because you were standing right there and you were the easiest, and biggest, thing in the room to point at.
That was cowardly and I’ve hated myself about it since roughly the moment you picked up that box. ”
His jaw moves. He says nothing.
I sit down opposite him, which puts us at approximately the same height, an experience I intend to savor.
“We had sex on the floor of my gallery. I loved it. I’ve never felt anything like it in my life.
And then you told me you’d wanted me since the café and that you’d been lying awake thinking about my hands, and I got dressed like the building was on fire.
Because I don’t know you, Natan. I know your first name.
I know you’re Eduard’s cousin. I know you hit me hard enough between the shoulder blades to leave a bruise I can still feel, and I know you can carry five trays of pastries without looking at them once.
That’s it. I woke up at three in the morning thinking, what kind of woman does that, and then I thought, what if that’s just what she does now? ”
“Okay?” He is looking at me like he did last night. When we were alone in the gallery, and that’s when it hits me that we are alone again right now.
“It’s me,” I blurt out. “I’m ashamed of me, and I couldn’t say that, so I let you take the worse version instead.”
He looks at me for long enough that I nearly start talking again out of pure reflex.
“I never wanted you to feel that way,” he says. “Not for a second.”
“I know.” I shake my head from side to side and take a sip of my tea.
“I came on too strong.” He turns one of his hands over on my table like the answer might be written in his palms. “That’s mine. I’m sorry.”
I’ve been apologized to by a number of men. It’s usually a sentence with a hinge in the middle of it and my name at the end. “That’s the best apology I’ve ever been given,” I tell him, “and you did it without once saying the words ‘if’ or ‘but.’”
“I’ve never wanted to know anybody before,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s done slowly.”
“Can I tell you about Craig?” I ask, eyes on the steam curling from my mug.
“Who’s Craig?”
“My ex. Two years of him, from twenty to twenty-two. He moved into my apartment in the city because his lease ran out, and then he stayed because it was cheaper than not staying, because I paid for everything. Once, when we were…you know… he told me I was a lot. Not a lot of fun or a lot of what he loved. Just a lot. He had opinions about the things I did in bed and none of them were generous, and he made wanting things feel like I was needy. Or greedy. When I lost my job he decided we weren’t on the same page, and he left me. ”
Natan nods and exhales slowly through his nose.
“Where is he?”
I laugh because I can’t help it. “I’m absolutely not giving you that information.”
“I’m only asking where he is—”
“And I’m saying that in the fullness of time I might tell you, when I trust that you won’t kill him.
” I fold my arms. “The point of Craig is what came after. Two years on my own, and everyone I know has an opinion about it. I’m twenty-four, I should be out there, I should be having fun, I shouldn’t take anybody seriously.
” I shake my hands from side to side and make my eyes wide.
“And I don’t want that. I don’t want to spend a year finding out whether four different men are kind.
I’d rather have one person and actually know him.
I want to know where he grew up and whether he has siblings and what he does all day.
So if this is you seeing what happens, tell me tonight, while I can still exit with something like dignity. ”
“I don’t want to date around either.”
“You say that now, but I’m told that men in your general category tend to have a great deal of opportunity.”
“Category?” he asks, and actually raises an eyebrow.
“You know what I mean,” I wave my hand in his general direction. “I bet you own clubs or something and you have women, pretty women, throwing themselves at you.”
The laugh that rumble from him doesn’t seem real at first. I’m so used to seeing his surly face that I already believed I’d imagined his smile yesterday.
“Kimmie.” He says my name the way other people put a hand up. “There’s been nobody since the day I first saw you. I’ve crossed that bridge most nights for weeks to stand on a street in the dark and look at you through a window. I know how that sounds. I’m telling you anyway.”
“That does sound alarming,” I agree. “It’s also the single most romantic thing anybody has ever said to me, so we’re both going to have to live with what that says about me.”
He reached a hand out and strokes a lock of hair behind my ear.
“Then we do it your way,” he says. “Ask me anything you want. I’ll answer it.”
“Starting now?” I ask.
“Starting now.”
I look at him across my small kitchen table with his forearms on my wipeable placemats, this enormous quiet man who drove over a bridge at night because I sent three unhinged texts in a row, and I decide that the questions can wait eleven more seconds.
“Would you kiss me?”
He’s up before I’ve finished asking. His hand comes to the side of my neck, his thumb along my jaw, tilting my face up, and he kisses me carefully, like a man checking his own work.
I get a fistful of his shirt and pull. I’m out of the chair without any memory of standing.
He makes that low sound in his chest that I’ve been hearing on a loop since last night.
“Ask me something,” he says.
“Do you want the last cinnamon roll?”
“No.”
“Good answer.” I reach up and pull him back down to me.