CHAPTER 86
THE SECOND YES
They did not decide that night. They made dinner, badly.
Miles burned the garlic because he kept looking at the legal pad.
Serena over-salted the sauce because she was reading Vivienne's email from across the room as if the words might alter when viewed from a different angle.
They ate at the kitchen island and pretended not to notice that neither of them had much appetite.
Afterward, they walked through the neighborhood under a sky washed clean by rain. The sidewalks shone beneath the streetlights. A dog barked from behind a fence. Somewhere a television audience laughed behind closed curtains, ordinary life continuing with almost insulting confidence.
Serena slipped her hand into Miles's coat pocket and found his hand there. 'Do you remember our first yes?'
'To marriage?'
'Before that. To dinner.'
He smiled. 'You made me ask twice.'
'You asked badly the first time.'
'I said, do you want to get coffee sometime?'
'Exactly. Badly.'
He laughed. 'What was wrong with coffee?'
'Nothing. But you looked like a man asking permission to escape if I said yes.'
They walked past a row of wet hedges. Miles remembered that version of himself: younger, nervous, pretending not to be. Serena had seen through him immediately. It was one of the reasons he had loved her and one of the reasons she had always frightened him.
'So I asked again,' he said.
'You said dinner. Friday. Seven. A place with actual chairs.'
'And you said yes.'
She squeezed his hand inside the pocket. 'That was the first yes.'
He knew what she was doing now, turning the enormous thing into a lineage of smaller choices.
Dinner had been a threshold once. So had moving in.
So had marriage. So had the night they admitted they were lonely in the same house.
A life was not built by one yes but by thousands, some spoken with joy, some with fear, some only understood later.
'And this?' he asked.
'This would be another one.'
They stopped beneath a sycamore tree. Water dropped from the branches in soft, irregular taps. Serena faced him, her cheeks pink from cold, her eyes unhidden.
'I am not saying yes to Julian instead of you,' she said.
The name moved through him.
'I know.'
'Do you?'
He looked down the empty street. 'I am trying to know it with more than the part of me that wants to be noble.'
'I do not need noble.'
'What do you need?'
'Present.'
That word had followed them from the vineyard. Present. The opposite of efficient. The opposite of polite absence. Miles took both her hands now and brought them between them.
'Then I need to say something ugly,' he said.
'Say it.'
'Part of me wants to go back because I want to see what happens when he wants you and you know I am watching.'
Serena's breath changed. Not fear. Recognition.
'That is not ugly,' she said.
'It feels ugly.'
'Because you were taught that wanting something complicated makes it dirty.'
He almost answered, then did not. She was right enough that arguing would only waste the courage it had taken to speak.
'Part of me wants it too,' she said.
The street seemed to recede. Miles heard the dog bark again, farther away now, and the wet drip of the tree. His wife stood in front of him and did not apologize.
'Then we do not decide tonight,' he said, though the words had changed shape.
'No.'
'But we admit there may be a second yes.'
Serena nodded. 'There may be.'
He kissed her beneath the wet sycamore, careful at first, then less careful when she rose into him. The kiss held no audience, no sommelier, no bottle, and yet everything from the vineyard lived in it. When they walked home, the invitation had not been accepted.
But it had stopped pretending to be impossible.