Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-one
Morning sunlight streamed in through the top of Iris’s half shades, casting lemon squares across the ceiling.
But Iris had been awake since the morning was still blue.
Not Ben, who remained deeply asleep, snoring.
Iris stretched like a starfish, reminding herself she could wake leisurely, without a care for whether the perfume had lasted the night.
She didn’t need it for Ben. He loved the real her.
But other than that, Iris didn’t feel as happy as she had expected.
The room felt stale, all shut up with the air conditioner never quite cycling on the ideal temperature, condensation clinging to the unit like a cave wall.
The rumpled bedding needed changing, doubly so after last night.
She rested her face on her hands and observed the man whose absence had felt so acute over the last six months, and whose presence now took up more room in the bed than she’d remembered.
She noticed the little things she had missed: his charming bedhead, his long lashes knitted like a toddler’s, the freckles across his shoulders that disappeared into his appealing chest hair.
But also things she had forgotten: the funky scent of his scalp in the morning, with an inexplicable note of rubber bands; the small, crusty hairs inside his nose visible from this angle; the occasional rumble in his stomach that made her think unpleasantly of his bowels.
She scolded herself for being so hard on him.
Ben was human! He’d made mistakes and learned from them, as Iris had too.
There was a comfort now in knowing, maybe for the first time, that he was as imperfect as she.
But something remained unsettled within her. She wondered if it was discomfort that the clock had been wound back so easily—did she want more from Ben? In her gut, her answer was clear.
Ben stirred with a long zip of a sniff in, squeezing his eyes shut before opening them like a hatchling. When his focus found her, his face softened into a sleepy smile. “Hello. It’s so nice to wake up to you again.”
Her heart felt heavy. “Your lip looks better.”
He yawned. “Last night was so wild. I ate your ass. ”
“You don’t have to whisper, and it was for like a second.”
“It was several seconds, maybe even half a minute. I was into it! I didn’t think I would be, but I was.” Ben looked so proud of himself.
Iris covered her face with her hands and laughed.
“See? That’s why I know you’re the one, because look how long we’ve known each other, and there’s still more to discover.” He squeezed her butt. “Unplumbed depths. We can try that next time.”
Iris hit him with a pillow. She wasn’t sure he had surprised her, really, aside from showing up. Though she certainly had surprised herself.
Suddenly Ben pushed back from her, looking down at her belly with concern. “What’s this bruise? Did I do this last night?”
Iris realized he was talking about the bruising around her injection sites, a new development. “Oh, no, it’s nothing.”
“There’s another one. Iris, be honest. Did somebody hurt you? I’ll kill him.”
“No, the truth is…I recently started the process of freezing my eggs.”
“What, why ?”
“Asks the guy who dumped me in my mid-thirties.”
He cringed. “So you’re trying to have a baby?”
“Not this instant. But after we broke up, I didn’t know when I’d be in a relationship to start trying, and I don’t want to miss my chance. I want to give myself options.”
Ben pushed himself up to a seated position and raked his hands over his head. “I feel horrible. This is all my fault.”
She had longed for this remorse, but hearing him apologize now, her anger was spent. “Don’t. I’m doing this for myself.”
“Have you gone through with it yet?”
“I started the hormone injections, hence the bruises, and I have a little over a week more until my retrieval procedure.”
“Can you cancel?”
“Ben, no.” She gave an irritated laugh. “I’ve invested a lot in this. The train has left the station.”
“But I’m back. You’re back on track again. We can do this the right way.”
“There is no track. There’s no right way.”
“So, what are you saying? We’re back together, but you’re freezing your eggs in case we break up again? I know I have to earn your trust, but—”
“No. What I’m saying is…” Iris took a deep breath. “Ben, I don’t want to get back together. I’m sorry.”
Ben stared at her slack-jawed. “Is this about the other guy—?”
“No, that’s…already over.” Her voice caught.
He threw up his hands. “Then I don’t get it! What the hell was last night?”
“I didn’t know last night. I needed last night to figure it out.”
“So last night was some kind of test that I failed?” Ben shook his head bitterly.
“I thought it was a test for you. But it was a test for me.” Iris scooted up to face him directly and put a hand on his knee.
“Ben, you were right not to propose. We fell in love and we had something real and special for a long time. But somewhere along the way, that love stopped growing. We stopped growing. Back then, all I wanted was your love and your approval, because I couldn’t feel any of my own.
I made everything about whether or not you would choose me, whether I was worthy of you and your family, like our whole relationship was a yardstick for me to measure myself.
So when you didn’t pick me, it broke me. ”
Tears filled his eyes. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know. It wasn’t fair of me to put it all on you, because something was holding me back too.
I couldn’t see it then, or maybe I just didn’t want to—because any woman would be lucky to have you and sorry to lose you, and I was both.
But you were right, something is missing, and we both deserve to want more. ”
Ben seemed frozen, processing everything, then rebooted with a long, shaky breath. “This is all I wanted you to understand last winter.” He looked mournfully up at her. “Your timing sucks.”
Iris laughed through her tears. “I’m sorry. Better late than never?”
He snorted and gave a nod. “I’m sad, but part of me feels relieved. I’ll still miss you though, and Hugo.”
“We can be friends. For real this time.”
They shared a sincere, tearful embrace. And for the first time in years, Iris and Ben were in perfect sync.
—
Ben turned down her offer of coffee; they simply dressed quietly, he in his clothes from the night before, Iris in underwear and an Eagles T-shirt, and hugged one last time.
When she finally heard her exterior door latch shut, she fell back on her bed like a squashed bug, and something cold poked her in her back.
Iris reached behind her and felt Ben’s belt buckle.
Not wanting him to have to come back, Iris darted to the window to call to him, but who she saw on the sidewalk below knocked her backward like a punch.
Gabe .
Gabe had locked his bike to the parking sign outside her building and was pacing in front of it, holding a paper-wrapped bouquet of flowers in front of his chest. It looked like he was talking to himself.
Iris craned her neck to see the building’s awning outside the lobby, and to her horror, Ben had moseyed from beneath it while making unbothered small talk with her doorman, Sammy.
With Ben walking backward and Gabe lost in some inner monologue, the two men collided on the sidewalk.
Iris dropped from the window as if ducking gunfire. Then remembered the men were strangers. They knew of each other, but neither knew what the other looked like. She peered over the windowsill and saw the two men already walking away from each other. Iris was in the clear. Except:
Why is Gabe here? Duh, to see her. And he had flowers, so he probably was not there to say, “I think we should open our relationship and I encourage you to have sex with your ex-boyfriend.” She did a quick scan of her bedroom—it looked obviously postcoital. It smelled that way too.
Iris whipped the bedclothes off the bed and crammed them into her hamper. Looking like you hadn’t done laundry was better than looking like you hadn’t been faithful.
Her buzzer going off made her jump. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in her full-length mirror and the thatch of tangled hair at the back of her head. She lunged for an alligator clip and gathered the hair within it— not bad, she thought, why could she never get volume like this on a normal—
Buzzzz!
Fuck . She stumbled over her shoes in the hallway and lunged for the telecom.
“Gabe’s here,” Sammy’s voice crackled, his tone professionally flat, betraying nothing. She made a mental note to up his Christmas tip.
“Oh? Thanks, Sammy, tell him I’ll be a minute.”
She darted to the bathroom, yanked on a bathrobe, and rushed to open the door.
But it wasn’t Gabe standing in her hallway, it was Sammy, holding a newspaper-wrapped pot of purple orchids.
Sammy thrust the flowers in her direction. “Gabe left this for you, there’s a card.”
She took them, thanked him, and closed the door, leaning against it in relief. Was it relief, or deflation? It felt the same.
Iris pulled the pot out of the box and unwrapped the newsprint to reveal a round ceramic vase painted a rich lapis blue but cut through with veins of gold.
She ran her hand over its cool, elegantly curved surface and found that the precious metal had melded perfectly to every seam.
The vessel appeared even more lovely and organic than the delicate fuchsia blooms it housed.
She opened the card, a postcard from Brooklyn Gather, and read what Gabe had written in his boyish scrawl:
Dear Iris,
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with real gold, which I learned from a white lady in Rhode Island.
More importantly, I’m sorry I was an ass this weekend.
You did everything you could to show me that you were proud to be with me, and somehow I convinced myself of the opposite.
I didn’t feel worthy to be with you, and the more I felt myself falling short, the more sure I was you thought that too.
My cracks were showing, so I did what I always do in the hot shop—smash it and start over.
But I don’t want to start anything that doesn’t end with you.
I’m not perfect (clearly!) I carry all kinds of baggage and my communication sucks. But next time it gets hard, I promise to stay and fix it with you. If you give me the chance to make it up to you, I’ll heal every crack with gold.
Your Kintsugi lover,
Gabe