Chapter 17
I didn’t want to kiss Noah goodbye on Friday morning, because I knew I wouldn’t be there when he got home.
Our time had ended.
It was time to move back into my apartment.
Not that it would take much moving. I didn’t have a lot of stuff at Noah’s.
I could fit it all in a few grocery bags, and most of that stuff wasn’t even going back to my apartment.
I had my overnight bag with the clothes I’d grabbed when I’d been allowed to go home for essentials, the few things I’d bought the day after the fire, and the ducks Noah and my friends had bought me in an effort to make up for the ones I couldn’t bring from my apartment.
I didn’t have a reason to wait for him to get home, and we’d decided the night before that it was probably better if I didn’t.
Waiting for him would just prolong our sadness and make it hard to load my stuff into my car and drive back across town to my own place.
It was easier to make a clean break, to kiss him before he went to work and leave not long after.
At least I didn’t have to leave my key behind.
Instead, I’d given him a key to my place as well.
The keys were signs of our promise to discuss moving in together when it got closer to the end of my lease.
We might have miles between us, but we wouldn’t have locked doors.
It wasn’t like we would come and go from one another’s spaces, but we would have the ability.
It was just one topic from a long list we’d discussed the night before, lying in bed and trying to put off morning.
But morning came anyway, and now I was at my apartment, sitting alone.
Nothing had changed in the month I’d been gone, except there was a thin layer of dust on the entertainment center.
Even the rubber duck I’d left on the side table when I’d left the night of the fire was still there, slightly off kilter, sitting next to my phone charger.
There wasn’t even a lingering smell of smoke, and I’d been so worried that there would be.
Instead, there was the smell of fresh paint in the hallways, wafting down from the affected floors.
I kept looking around at everything, at the place that a month ago had felt so much like home, and it felt wrong.
It felt wrong knowing that Noah wouldn’t be coming through that door.
It felt wrong, looking at my kitchen and not seeing the whiteboard with our menu for the week written out.
It had been a little more than a month, and I’d gotten too comfortable.
How was I supposed to go back? Time and emotions didn’t work that way.
Even what I felt for Noah wasn’t going back in time.
It was something new and different, flavored and informed by our shared past but formed as adults. Formed as men.
I kept thinking about it as I dusted my furniture and ran the vacuum over my carpet.
I thought about the way his arms felt around me at night and the way he always tasted like coffee when he came home from work.
I thought about the box of hot cocoa packets he’d kept in the cabinet and the little tub of mini marshmallows.
He hated mini marshmallows, but he knew I loved them and he made sure I had them at his house.
I thought about the day he’d gone to the boat to get my ducks and a few small things to make me feel at home.
All my thoughts crashed down on me.
I dropped my dust rag on the carpet and started pulling out duck after duck.
I lined them up on every possible surface.
I found the bag of stuff I needed to take back to the boat and pulled those ducks out as well, positioning them so that I could look them all into their painted little eyes.
This was the biggest dilemma I’d ever found myself in, and I needed all ducks on deck.
The last duck I put down was the hand painted one.
The one Noah had given me in high school, the one I’d hung onto all these years.
I’d never been able to part with that one duck.
I sat down on the floor, and I held onto the duck Noah had given me.
I held him in my hand, and I thought about all my memories with Noah.
I thought about the memories from our time in high school, ancient and dust covered, and the newer ones we’d made since he’d moved back to King’s Bay.
I looked at all the ducks and sighed. “Okay, so here’s the problem,” I started, looking around at the assembled rubber ducks.
It was the same way I started all my rubber duck debugging, except this time, I wasn’t holding a laptop.
I was holding another duck. “Obviously, I’ve been gone for a while.
Some of you joined the duck party while I was gone.
Some of you got moved from your usual home on the boat, which you will be going back as soon as I get back down to the marina.
But while I’ve been gone, this problem has reared its ugly little head. ”
I could practically feel the painted eyes glued to me, urging me to talk through the problem. It was just like any other dilemma I’d faced.
Step one: a brief history.
“Noah and I have been dating for less than two months. Maybe two months? You know me and dates.” I chuckled to myself.
It always helped when I acted like the ducks could understand me, like they might give some kind of response.
They were a captive audience of rubber birds.
“In those months, things have gotten pretty intense. And that’s the problem, right? ”
I imagined a chorus of quacking rights back to me. It was time for step two: an overview.
“So, the problem that we need to work through is that I’m falling too fast.”
Simple and concise.
Step three: the why.
“This is a problem because Noah doesn’t feel like that very easily.
Not just for me. It’s not about me. It’s about him.
He doesn’t get romantic feelings very often, and while he says he’s feeling something for me, we’re supposed to take it slow.
Slow is not a few weeks, right? Slow is months.
Slow is a lot longer than two months.” I put the painted duck down on my knee, turning him so he could face me like his birdy brethren.
I ran my fingers through my hair. “Okay, so I’m not going slow.
I’m supposed to be going slow. Every time I try to put on the breaks, he reads it as me pulling away. ”
And our final step: potential solutions. This was the long part. This was the part where I always ended up rambling. I just hoped the ducks wouldn’t get tired of the sound of my voice.
“So, that’s where we are now. I’m falling for my boyfriend.
That’s the dream, right? You meet someone.
You go on a few dates. You become official, and things start getting physical.
That creates intimacy, and intimacy creates that emotional bond.
Or, in my case, it’s usually vice versa.
The emotional bond comes, and then I want the intimacy.
With him, it’s been vice versa, because there’s the leftover bits of emotional bond from when we dated, and we’ve been friends for years.
Maybe not really close friends, but I’ve never gone more than a few months without talking to him.
Even when we were broken up.” I drew in a deep breath.
None of this was sounding like a solution.
None of this was sounding like my usual strategies at all.
It was just an incoherent ramble.
“Every way I look at it, I can’t see my way out. I can’t see a solution. I’m falling for him.”
There. I’d said it. Except it was wrong. Falling implied that I wasn’t sure. If I was falling, there was a chance for a parachute. The truth of the matter was that the parachute was gone.
When I closed my eyes and thought about my future, all I saw was Noah.
That was the only person I wanted in my future.
It was a blurred image, none of the clarity I’d seen when we were young.
That had been youthful innocence painting that picture.
It was a future untouched by the harsh realities of life.
It was a picket fence and a porch swing and grandchildren playing in the yard with no thought of how we got to that point.
It was dancing in the moonlight on the boat.
It was traveling the world and making names for ourselves in whatever fields we chose.
When I thought about a future with him now, I wasn’t imagining grand moments.
I was thinking of the quiet ones that we’d shared at his apartment, except our hair was grayer.
I imagined periods when we were mad at each other, except now we had the communication skills to figure it out.
Back when we were teenagers, we’d been big fans of the silent treatment.
I thought about lazy evenings on the couch, watching television, before we cleaned the kitchen together.
I imagined louder nights with my friends, that then turned into quieter nights with them as we aged.
But I still saw the two of us with white hair, sitting on a porch swing, watching grandchildren play in the yard.
“If I’m being honest with myself, which is kind of the whole point of this exercise, right? I mean, it’s not going to help you guys understand if I’m not being honest with myself. So, if I’m being honest with myself, I’m not falling in love with him,” I admitted. “I am in love with him.”
And there it was: the magic moment that happened when I addressed my army of ducks.
I found the missing piece. I found the flaw in the logic.
Except it wasn’t a flaw in my logic, just in my worldview.
There were no mismatched class names or issues with syntax for this problem.
There was just the need to accept what I felt.
“I love Noah Guthrie,” I repeated. “I’m in love with Noah.”
“And what does your duck army think about that?”
I looked around at my ducks. The voice was very much not in my head, and I knew it wasn’t coming from the ducks.
It was a voice I knew anywhere. I swallowed hard and slowly turned my head toward the door.
The door where Noah was standing, holding the key to my apartment and a bag of takeout containers.
He was looking at me with this strange look in his eyes.
“When did you get here?” And how much had he heard?
Had he heard me talk through the entire process, or had he just come in at the last confession?
It didn’t matter, not really. Because the outcome was the same.
There I was, trying to take it slow and trying to handle the fact that my feelings had grown out of control, and he’d heard the whole thing.
“About two minutes ago. About the time you started talking about being honest with yourself.” I watched as he carefully maneuvered himself through the lines and clusters of ducks, coming closer with each step.
He put the plastic bag on the couch as he passed.
When he got to me, he nudged a few ducks to the side and knelt beside me.
“Why are you talking to your ducks about this?”
“Because they help me think.” There was no use lying to him. “And it was stuck on my—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Why were you talking to them about this and not me?”
I felt my cheeks flush. I felt ridiculous getting caught talking to the ducks like this and having him question my motives for it.
I felt more ridiculous for the reason I was talking to a legion of ducks instead of my boyfriend about my feelings for said boyfriend.
“Because you told me to feel what I feel at whatever pace I felt it.”
“And I stand by it.”
“I needed to figure some stuff out, and they,” I motioned toward the ducks, “help me when I need to figure stuff out.” He looked at me with that questioning look of his, and I knew I needed to explain it better.
“I was straightening up the apartment, and I kept thinking about you. I kept thinking about all the little things you do for me and the way all those things made me feel. Then it kind of just hit me. The way I felt about you was a lot more intense than I thought it was, but I needed to figure out the exact way that I felt for you, and I couldn’t talk to you about it.
I’d start editing it, and I wouldn’t get to the right conclusion.
” I would have tried to make what I felt more digestible for him.
The words settled on him, and I noticed the sad expression in his eyes.
I hated it. I hated that I put that look there. “Besides, you were at work.”
He grinned, some of that darkness fading from his eyes.
“You don’t have to do that,” he assured me.
“I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want you to edit a single thing you feel when you’re talking to me.
” He reached down and moved the painted duck from my knee to the carpet.
Once it was there, he took my hand and pulled me up so we were both standing.
“Besides, if you talked to me about it, I could talk to you, too.”
“Do you need to talk to me?”
He nodded. His arms wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me closer to him.
“You’re not the only person who’s been confused about his feelings, you know.
I’ve been combing through it too, trying to figure out what I feel about you, and it clicked.
When I came in here, and I heard you talking to your ducks, I knew what I wanted that truth to be before you said it.
” His eyes met mine, and I was powerless.
I couldn’t look away from his beautiful green eyes, shining with emotion. “I love you, too.”
“Say it again?”
“I love you, Matthew Bennett. It took me completely by surprise, but that’s the truth. I’m in love with you.” He brought his lips down to mine. The kiss was gentle, but I felt it down to the tips of my toes. “Now, can we put away the ducks and eat dinner? I’m starving.”
I laughed. We started picking up the ducks and went to the couch.
He’d grabbed takeout from a local deli, and he’d gotten my sandwich order perfectly.
Of course he did. It was Noah, and he knew me better than anyone ever had.
No wonder I’d fallen in love with him twice.
We turned on a show, and it felt like nothing had changed except our location.
I would have to miss this soon, but not tonight.
“Stay?” I asked him hours later.
He gave me another kiss, and I was no longer left facing a night without the man I loved.