28. This Is A Diner #2
“He said he didn’t love me, Dina. I don’t know how to get past that.”
“Why is it that you believe what you heard him say once, but you can’t believe when he says he loves you every day, five times a day?”
I flip her the finger and turn on the television.
We watch the second season of The Night Manager and agree that Tom Hiddleston is the bomb, and then she says that Fox does look a little like him.
Christ on a crutch!
Week four, things get worse.
And that’s because Fox doesn’t leave. He stops going home.
It starts one day when he comes up to the apartment, sits on the couch with me while I read a book, like we’re back at our place, where I would read a book and he watched a game, and then, depending upon how we were feeling, we ended up making love on the couch or the floor and then again in bed.
We can’t do that because Dina is at home, and I think that’s the only thing that’s stopping me from climbing my husband like a tree, like Annie would like to do.
“I don’t feel like driving home. I’ll sleep here,” he announces.
“No way.”
“Dina, you okay with me sleeping here?” he calls out.
My traitorous bitch of a friend, who is in her bedroom, pops her head out. “I don’t care.”
“You’re not sleeping in my bed,” I assert because I want him to sleep in my bed, make love with me, and hold me.
I think again about Dina’s question: why am I being such a hardass about this?
I don’t really know, but it feels wrong to give in.
How can he go from saying he can’t love me to saying he loves me?
It makes no sense, and it’s hard for me to believe it, and then I get afraid that if I do believe him, I’m going to get my heart broken again.
I can’t go through that again—the devastation was so enormous and crushing.
“Fox can take the couch. It’ll be fine.” Dina sounds a bit too cheerful as she stands in her doorway, watching us with the same fondness she shows pheasants I order during hunting season.
“It’s not going to be fine,” I retort.
“The couch is fine,” Fox assures me, from the other side of this conversation, where I have a feeling he has been invited by Dina without consulting me, because Dina has fully defected. “I’ve slept on worse.”
“You have not slept on worse,” I grit out. “You grew up in Belle Meade.”
He gives a careless shrug. “There were camping trips with the Bennett men. I slept in a lot of terrible conditions in the service of masculine tradition.”
“That’s not—“
Dina walks out of her bedroom and heads straight to the front door.
“Lucy.” Dina picks up her keys. “I am going to Annie’s to watch a movie. The apartment is yours. Figure it out.”
She goes out the door and down the string-light staircase.
Fox and I look at each other.
“She’s very decisive. I like her,” he says.
“She’s a traitor,” I retort.
“She loves you, “ he insists.
I sleep in my bed.
He sleeps on the couch.
It can’t be comfortable, I think, when I come out at six in the morning, and he’s still asleep.
The couch is too small and his feet are hanging off the end and his expression in sleep is the unmanaged one, the real one, and I stand in the doorway of Dina’s living room and look at this man—this difficult, morally flexible, complicated man who is showing up for me in a way no one ever has—and I feel the thing I have been not-feeling, fully, in my chest, with no armor.
I make coffee in the kitchen instead of in the diner.
The noise plus the smell wakes him.
He comes into the kitchen, a lazy smile on his face.
He kisses me.
See, I’d be mortified to do so without brushing my teeth. Fox doesn’t care. He helps me not care, so I kiss him back, just for like a half a second.
I hold out the coffee for him, and he takes it. “Thank you.” He’s saying that not just for the coffee but for the kiss and for letting him sleep here.
“Don’t make it a thing,” I warn him.
He grins cheekily. “Sweetheart, it’s already a thing.”
Two nights later, he manages to get into bed with me.
“What are you reading?” he asks, lounging against my bedroom doorway in sweatpants and a T-shirt.
I hold up the cover of Madame Bovary.
He straightens and pushes off the frame, coming into the room. He leans over to look at it. “Is it good?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it about?”
“You know what it’s about.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“It’s about a woman who makes a series of risky decisions that have reasonable consequences,”
I snap.
“Can I read it with you?”
“What?”
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s read Madame Bovary together and see how Emma convinces herself that Léon is a good idea.”
He gets under the covers with me, and we read freaking Madame Bovary together for fifteen minutes before my ribs make their opinion known and I shift, trying to find the right angle.
“Here.” He adjusts the pillow without looking up from his page, and I settle against him because it is the position that works, because the angle is right, because my body has its own memory even when I am trying to be principled about getting too close to my husband.
“You done?” he asks.
I nod.
He turns a page.
I read three paragraphs, absorbing not one single word.
His arm comes around me at some point—slowly, with the quality of something offered rather than taken, and I let it, and his chin comes to rest on the top of my head.
“Fox.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“Softening you. Is it working?”
I push him off of me.
He laughs as he falls onto the pillows.
Then, he lifts up, and his eyes hold mine, earnest and sincere. “I want to hold you tonight in bed. Let me.”
How am I supposed to say no to that?