Chapter Nine
The summer rain hasn't stopped since noon, and I'm sitting in the passenger seat watching the water slide down the window in long, uneven lines.
"You've gone quiet," he says.
"I'm always quiet."
"Not like this."
I pick at a thread on my leggings, unraveling it slowly, giving my hands something to do so they don't have to be still. "My mom's going to ask me about you."
I feel him go a little more alert behind me, not tense exactly, just present in a different way, like he's decided to actually pay attention now instead of just enjoying the quiet with me.
"Okay," he says carefully. "And how do you feel about that?"
"Scared." The word comes out smaller than I mean it to. "She's going to know, Calvin. She's going to take one look at me and know."
"Know what, exactly?"
I turn around to face him because I can't say this to the window.
His face is doing that thing it does when he's decided to be patient with me, jaw relaxed, eyes steady, like nothing I say is going to be too much for him.
I don't know how he does that. I don't know how he always looks like he has more room in him than I could ever fill up.
"That I'm not the same person who left for the summer.
That something happened to me. That someone happened to me.
" I pull my knees in tighter. "She's going to see it on my face and she's going to ask who, and I'm going to have to either lie to her or tell her that I've been sleeping with a man old enough to be—"
I stop myself, but he finishes it anyway, low and even. "Old enough to be your father."
"Yeah."
He doesn't flinch. He never flinches, and it makes me feel unhinged sometimes, like I'm the only one in the room who understands how strange this is.
"I keep doing the math," I admit. "Like it's going to change if I do it enough times. Twenty-one and fifty-four. Thirty-three years. That's not a gap, Calvin, that's practically a generation."
"I'm aware of the math."
"I'm serious."
"So am I." He reaches out and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world to get to the rest of what he wants to say.
"I've done that math more than you have, Karissa.
I did it the first night, lying awake after you left, telling myself all the reasons I should put a stop to this before it started. "
"And you didn't."
"No. I didn't." His thumb traces the line of my jaw, slow, grounding. "But that doesn't mean I haven't thought about it. I think about it more than you'd guess."
I want to believe that means something good, but my mind is already three steps further down the road, to the part that actually scares me.
"You should want someone else," I say, and my voice cracks a little on it, which annoys me, because I wanted to say this clearly, like an adult, not like a girl about to cry.
"Someone your age. Someone who's already figured out her life.
Someone who could give you kids if you wanted them, or at least be around long enough to grow old with you without you having to explain to everyone why you're with someone who could be your daughter. "
"Karissa."
"I mean it. What happens in ten years when I'm thirty-one and you're sixty-four?
What happens when your friends' wives are all women who've had careers and mortgages and hysterectomies and I'm still figuring out what I want to do with my life?
You're going to look at me one day and realize you picked the wrong person because you were lonely and I was convenient and young and—"
"Stop." He says it gently, but it's still a stop, and I do.
"I didn't pick you because I was lonely," he says. "I've been lonely before. I know what that feels like, and it doesn't feel like this. Loneliness makes you settle. It makes you take whatever's in front of you because the alternative is silence. That's not what happened here."
"Then what happened?"
"You did." He says it so simply, like it's obvious, like it's the only true thing in the room.
"You happened, specifically. Not a younger woman, not company, not something to fill a house with.
You. The way you argue with me about things you haven't fully thought through yet and then go quiet for twenty minutes and come back with the better argument.”
"It's not just fear."
"Some of it's fear. I'd bet the vast majority of it, actually.
" His voice stays soft, no judgment in it.
"But even the part that isn't fear — even if I take every practical concern you just listed completely seriously — it doesn't change what I want.
I'm not confused about what I want, Karissa.
I've had thirty extra years to get less confused than you, if nothing else. "
I laugh despite myself, wet and short. "That's not funny."
"A little funny."
"What about kids?" I ask, because it's the thing underneath all the other things.
"We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
He lifts one of my hands and presses his mouth to my knuckles, unhurried.
"I'm not a young man making promises I haven't thought through.
I've been married once. I know exactly what it costs to want the wrong thing and pretend it's right because it's easier than being alone.
I'm not doing that with you. If anything, being with you is the least easy, most examined decision I've made in a decade, because I've had to ask myself constantly whether I'm being honest or being selfish.
And the answer keeps coming back honest."
I look down at our hands, his so much bigger than mine, and I think about my mother's face, the one she'll make when she puts it together, and my stomach still knots at the thought of it. But some of the panic has drained out of me, replaced by something quieter.
"She's going to hate this," I say.
"Probably, for a while."
"You're not going to try to convince me it'll be fine."
"No. I don't know that it'll be fine. I know that it's real, and that I'm not going anywhere because your mother has feelings about it, and I know that you're allowed to have a life she doesn't approve of on the first try. That's different from fine. But it's something to actually stand on."
"I'm not too young for you," I say, testing the words out loud, seeing if they hold.
"No," he agrees. "You're exactly the age you are, and I want exactly the person you are. That's the whole equation, Karissa. I stopped doing the other math a long time ago."
Outside the summer storm keeps going, but in here it's just his heartbeat under my ear, steady, unbothered, like he's already decided this is settled even if I haven't fully caught up yet. I let myself believe him.