10. Chapter 10
Christina
The buzzer goes and I think it's the grocery delivery I forgot I scheduled, so I hit the button.
I open the door with my sleeves pushed up and a dish towel over my shoulder and it's Julian.
He's in the charcoal coat. He hasn't shaved.
There's a hospital lanyard half tucked into his collar and he's standing in my hallway under the fluorescent that makes everyone look like they need a doctor, except apparently him, and my stomach does a full drop before my brain catches up to what my eyes are seeing.
"You can't be here," I say.
"I know where the line is. I'm standing just outside it."
"That's the doorframe."
"Then I'm at the doorframe." His hands stay in his pockets.
He doesn't move to come in, doesn't tilt forward, doesn't do anything that gives me something to push back against. "I'm not going to ask to come in.
I'm going to say one thing on this side of it and then I'm going to go, and you can shut the door whenever you want. "
I should shut it now. I have soup on the stove and a seating chart open on my laptop and a body that's been tired in a way that coffee doesn't fix for five weeks, and the smart thing, the rebuilt my whole life thing, is to shut this door.
I don't shut it.
"You have until the soup boils over," I tell him.
Something almost becomes a smile on his face and then he decides against it. "I left you a voicemail."
"I deleted it. We covered that already."
"You deleted it because you knew if you listened to it you'd have to answer it.
" He says. "I'm not here to relitigate the arrangement.
You set terms, I agreed to them on a curb, and I meant it.
But I've been going over three days for over a month.
I can't stop thinking about you no matter how much I try so I'm here. "
"Julian."
"I want it for real." He keeps going, because he's figured out by now that the only way past my interruptions is through them.
"Not a weekend with a checkout time. Dinner in the city where people can see us.
Me coming up those stairs to your office until Kate thinks it's normal.
The boring version of us. The slow one. Not some auction where I only get to have you for one weekend and then you go back to acting like we're strangers.
" He pauses. "I'm asking for it at your door like a regular person, because I should have asked six years ago and I didn't."
The towel is still over my shoulder. I pull it off because I need something to do with my hands, and I fold it once, wrong, and fold it again.
"Who talked you out of it," I say.
Something shifts in his face. He reaches for the thing he started to say at the lake and stopped, the it wasn't, and I watch him decide if tonight is the night for it, his weight moving forward just slightly, his mouth opening on the front of a sentence.
And I can't take it.
"Never mind." My hand goes flat against the edge of the door, not to close it, just to hold onto something. "Whatever it is. Don't hand it to me in my hallway at nine o'clock so I have to carry it to bed. That's not fair and you know it."
"Christina."
"You ended it in ninety seconds." My voice comes out steadier than anything under it is.
"On a bench. You were kind about it, which made it worse, not better.
And then I withdrew from a program I was good at, I packed up an apartment, and I rebuilt myself two neighborhoods over into someone who counts chairs at six in the morning and is good at her job and is happy.
Do you understand that? I'm happy. It took years and it actually works. "
"I'm not asking you to change your life. I'm just asking to be a part of it."
"You're asking me to make room in it for the one person who already proved he leaves when someone hands him a reason to.
" I'm not crying. I decided the second I opened this door that I wasn't going to, and I'm holding it, and the holding is its own kind of effort.
"And the thing is, if I let you in tonight, I won't survive you picking the hospital a second time.
I survived it the first time because I was twenty four and I didn't know what I was losing yet. I know now. I'm not doing it twice."
He's very still in the hallway. Down the hall someone's television laughs at something. The fluorescent hums.
"You want to be with me too," he says low. "That's what this is. Not that you don't feel it. You feel it and that's why you won't let me come inside."
"It doesn't matter what it is," I say.
"It's the only thing that matters."
"It's not." I make myself look at him, because he deserves my eyes for this part.
"You need your career and I need mine and I'm not going to be the person who finds out at thirty that she let a man on a magazine cover break her in the exact same place twice.
" I breathe in through my nose. "I love you.
You can have that. It's the last true thing you get from me tonight and it doesn't change anything. Go home, Julian."
Behind me, right on cue, the soup climbs the side of the pot and hisses against the burner.
He hears it. His eyes go past me toward the kitchen and then come back, and I watch him decide not to use it, not to step forward, not to reach for me the way I can see he wants to.
He puts one hand on the doorframe briefly, fingers on the wood, and then he drops it and steps back.
"Okay," he says. "Same terms."
"Same terms."
He looks at me for one more second. Then he turns and goes down the stairs.
I don't watch him this time. Last time I watched until a bumper disappeared around a corner and stood on a sidewalk with my suitcase, and I'm not doing that again.
I shut the door. I walk to the stove and turn the burner off.
I stand there with both hands on the counter and breathe, in through my nose and out through my mouth, the way I'd talk a bride through it backstage.
The nausea I've been blaming on bad sleep and bad coffee for five weeks rolls up out of nowhere and I make it to the sink.
I rinse my mouth. I stand there a while.
Stress, I tell myself. It's been a stressful month.
I go back to the seating chart. I work until midnight, because the seating chart has never once in its life shown up at my door uninvited and told me something I already knew.