Chapter 3
Lauren
The wings were long gone and we were somewhere in the middle of our fourth round when I stopped counting. It was clear I didn’t care about my flare ups, so I just needed to brace myself for Bane and my tweezers again.
The spot he chose had thinned out around us without us noticing. The conversations we had made time disappear. We had a few empty baskets between us. Bane sat across from me looking like the most comfortable thing in the world. He was leaned back with his beer in his hand, but his eyes were on me.
I was warm and loose and laughing at something he had just said when my phone lit up on the table between us.
I glanced at it without thinking.
Malcolm texted me.
I picked it up without a care in the world. The alcohol must’ve smoothed out whatever hesitation might have shown up sober.
Malcolm: I know it’s late. I just want to talk. I’m willing to come to Atlanta if that’s easier for you. Just say the word.
I stared at it for a second.
Bane was watching me. He didn’t ask what it was. He already knew from the shift in my face, the way he always knew things from my face before I offered them.
I set the phone down and looked at him.
“He wants to come here,” I said.
Bane took a slow sip of his beer.
“Okay,” he said.
I blinked. “Okay?”
“I said okay.” He set his bottle down and looked at me evenly. “Tell him he can come.”
“You —” I tilted my head. “You’re not going to say anything else about that?”
“I got a lot to say about it,” he said. “But none of it changes the fact that you need to close that door properly or it’s going to stay cracked forever and neither one of us needs that.
” He turned his bottle slowly on the table.
“So tell him he can come. All I’m asking is that when he does, I’m with you. ”
I looked at him across the table and tried to find the angle, the possessiveness underneath the calm, the jealousy that should have been there and wasn’t presenting itself the way I expected.
“Why do you want to be there?” I said.
“Because you’re my wife,” he said simply. “And I’m not sending you into that conversation alone. Not because I don’t trust you — I do. But because he needs to see with his own eyes what the situation actually is. Some things don’t land until they’re standing in front of a person.”
I picked up my beer and looked at it.
“You’re serious,” I said.
“When am I not serious?”
“Bane, what does that even mean for us if you’re talking about me meeting with my ex while you stand next to me like —”
“It means I’m being honest with you.” He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, voice dropping.
“I know you, Lauren. I know how you love and I know how you close things and I know that if you don’t get the conversation you need with him it’s going to sit in you.
And I’m not asking you to choose me in front of him — you already chose me, you just haven’t fully let yourself know it yet.
” He held my gaze. “All I’m asking is that I’m there. ”
I rolled my eyes but the warmth in my chest had nothing to do with the beer.
“You want to come and intimidate that man,” I said.
The corner of his mouth moved. “I want to accompany my wife to a meeting with a man who thought he had access to something that belongs to me. Those are two different things.”
“What do you want, Bane?” I said. “From this. From me. From whatever this is that we’re doing. What do you actually want?”
He looked at me for a long moment, long enough that I almost took the question back.
“I thought I made myself clear,” he said.
“Say it again.”
“You,” he said. “All of it, the whole thing. The hard parts and the easy parts and the parts that are going to require us to sit down and build something real this time.” He picked up his beer.
“That’s what I want. I’ve always wanted that.
I was just young and stupid the first time around and I didn’t know how to hold it right. ”
The table was quiet.
Outside the music shifted to something slower and the few remaining people in the spot moved around us and I sat there across from this man with four beers in my blood and my whole chest open and thought about how absurd it was that this was my life right now and how I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
“Okay,” I said softly.
He looked at me. “Okay what?”
“Okay I’ll think about letting you come.” I picked up my bottle. “Don’t make it weird.”
He smiled slow and wide and real and said nothing, which was the right answer.
We drove with the windows down.
He had grabbed four more beers from the store, and tucked them in a brown bag. When we got to the truck he held his out and popped the cap off with his back teeth, then took mine and did the same before he handed it back to me.
I looked at him. “You’re going to crack a tooth doing that one day.”
“Been doing it since I was nineteen,” he said, starting the truck. “Still got all my teeth.”
“That’s not the reassurance you think it is.”
“Stop worrying.”
He pulled out of the lot and I put my feet up on the dash.
He turned the music up as we cruised down the road.
I leaned my seat back and let the Atlanta night come through the window.
It was so warm, and smelled like summer and cut grass.
You could tell something was blooming somewhere nearby.
The city moved past us at an easy pace while Bane navigated the streets.
He drove us to the spot near the south end where you could park and watch the planes come in close enough to feel the air shift when they passed over. We had found that spot by accident years ago, driving nowhere in particular late one night.
He parked, and we sat with the windows down with the cold beers in our hands. A plane came down low, close enough to make out the landing lights blinking against the dark sky.
I felt him looking at me.
“What?” I said, eyes still on the sky.
“Nothing,” he said. “Keep talking.”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“You were a minute ago. You were talking about your residency.” He leaned his head back against the seat. “Keep going.”
I looked over at him and he was watching me with his beer resting on his knee. The quality of his attention, genuinely interested in every word, made me want to give him all of the details.
So I kept talking.
“It feels crazy to say,” I said. “I worked so hard for that residency, and when I finally got it, it didn’t feel the way I thought it was gonna feel.”
He took a sip. “What you mean?”
“I think I built it up so much in my head that it turned into an expectation instead of an accomplishment. So even though I was proud of myself, and I still am, the expectation got in the way of actually feeling it. Like I had already lived the moment so many times in my imagination that the real thing couldn’t compete with it. ”
He nodded slowly, letting me get to the rest of it.
“And it wasn’t just me either,” I said. “Everybody around me already expected me to do it. My parents, my professors, even people I barely knew. Nobody ever asked what would happen if I failed. It was just assumed I wouldn’t.” I shook my head. “That’s a lot of pressure to carry alone.”
He was quiet for a second, looking at me.
“You would’ve figured it out,” he said. “Because you put your heart into everything you do. Failing wasn’t ever really on the table for you, Lauren, not because people expected you to win, but because that’s just who you are.
If you weren’t a doctor, I don’t doubt you would still be helping people. ”
I smirked. “Thank you.”
“I mean it.”
I looked out at the field for a second, the next plane still a ways off, just a low hum building somewhere in the dark.
“I’ve been thinking about telling my job I’m not coming back,” I said. “Maybe… finding something down here instead.”
I caught the smirk break across his face before he tried to hide it.
“I don’t wanna pressure you,” he said.
I started laughing. “After you rolled up on me the way you did, you don’t wanna pressure me now?”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “Nah, I’m serious. I want you to be happy with whatever you decide babygirl.”
“I appreciate that, Big Bane,” I said, and I meant it. I leaned over and kissed his cheek before going back to my view of the planes.
“But for real,” he said, “tell me about this residency. What’s the actual work behind it?”
“The nitty gritty?”
“Yes. What does an optometrist even go through to get to that point?”
I smiled, because nobody ever really asked me that part, they just assumed the title and moved on.
“It’s intense,” I said. “You’re not just learning how to check vision and write prescriptions.
You’re trained on identifying systemic disease through the eye, things like diabetes and hypertension and even certain cancers, because the eye is one of the only places in the body where you can actually see blood vessels and nerve tissue without cutting anyone open.
You learn to manage glaucoma, treat eye infections and injuries, handle pre and post surgical care for things like cataracts and LASIK.
Some residencies specialize even further into pediatric vision, ocular disease, and low vision rehabilitation for people who are losing their sight and need to learn how to function with what’s left.
” I shrugged. “People think it’s just glasses.
It’s a whole world in there that most people never think about until something goes wrong. ”
He was looking at me the way he’d been looking at me the whole night,none of it was too much information, he wanted every single detail I was willing to hand him.
“That’s incredible,” he said. “For real. You built something most people couldn’t even survive trying to build.”
He warmed up my body with his affectionate words.
“Tell me more,” he said. “I want to hear all of it since we got all night.”
“Actually I would love to know more about your custom car shop.”
“Really?”
“Yes, show me what you've been working on.”