Chapter 26 Then
Alex and I haven’t talked about the New Year’s Eve kiss. I’m grateful for it, because I need our safe, familiar friendship, the comfort of our now-standard wintertime-evening hangout positions, cuddled up on the sofa.
Cuddled up platonically, of course.
Sure it’s Valentine’s Day, but we’ve agreed to ignore that.
I had an early shift at The Bookshop, came home, walked Argos, and changed into comfy clothes.
Alex picked up a pizza and tubs of gelato from Luna’s and brought them to my place for dinner.
We gorged ourselves on pizza, and now we’re working our way through our first tub of gelato and the New York Times Games.
It’s only five o’clock, but it’s been dark for an hour. It feels like midnight.
We’re lounging in shorts and T-shirts, because the heat hangs in my third-floor apartment, rising from the units below, to the point that I have my heat turned off, a window in the living room cracked to let in a frigid sliver of winter air.
I frown up at the Wordle on his screen, only two guesses left, as Alex holds his phone above us. My head rests on his shoulder. His chin nuzzles into my temple. “What the hell is this word?” I ask.
“If I knew that,” he says testily, “We’d be doing the mini by now.”
His surly response surprises me. Very un-Alex.
I turn my head and ease off his shoulder, onto his upper arm, meeting his eyes. “You okay?”
He stares down at me and sighs. “No. I’m sorry I snapped.”
“I wouldn’t say snapped,” I tell him. “Grumped, maybe?”
I turn so I’m sideways, and with how narrow Lauren’s hand-me-down midcentury sofa is, I have to wedge my leg over his so I don’t fall off.
I try to keep my thigh as low as possible, barely brushing his knee.
As far as possible from his groin. Cuddling with Alex like this is torture enough—wonderful, terrible torture.
I’d stop doing it if I didn’t feel so desperate for the closeness, the comfort of touching and being held.
I keep telling myself that I’d want this with anyone, that I’m just starved for intimate touch, for sex.
But I know why I keep cuddling up to him, even when, after every time we break apart, I walk away from it keyed up and aching, every nerve a live wire—because I want to feel this close to him.
And this is as close to physical intimacy as we can have. As close as it can get.
In part, I’m sure I’m suffering so badly because of how long it’s been since I’ve had an orgasm by anyone’s hand except my own. And also because the winter weather here is the worst; I need all the happy brain chemicals I can get, and cuddling offers those in spades.
For as lovely as I find Pittsburgh’s sunshine-while-sprinkling-rain fairy-tale springs, its grand tapestry of amber, bronze, and crimson foliage lanced by gold-sun autumns, even its summers, which, though often humid and riddled with storms, are growing on me, for how lush they turn the grass, the trees, the flowers; I cannot find a single thing to like about its winter.
Bleak, gray, frigid, weeks of hardly any sunshine, months of icy wind and tiny icebergs of dirt-streaked grimy snow clinging to parking lots and sidewalks.
To me, it is absolutely miserable. I have yet to meet a Pittsburgher who feels any differently, which makes me feel a bit better about my annual three-month-long bad attitude because of it.
But even though misery loves company, it doesn’t help me make it through any better.
I have yet to get a straight answer out of anyone here on how they make it through any better.
I’m starting to wonder if that’s because the answer isn’t necessarily something you share with a casual friend or the staff at the bookstore you’re visiting.
I’m starting to think the answer lies in how many fall birthdays belong to my StoryTime attendees.
Each StoryTime, I ask if anyone has a birthday, so we can sing to them, and then I can read one of my rotation of birthday-themed children’s books. September through November, over half those kids’ hands shoot up.
In short, I think Pittsburghers of childbearing years and child-rearing inclination make it through winter by cuddling up and making babies.
The making-babies part is off the table for Alex and me. But the cuddling, I have been wholeheartedly leaning into.
Alex shifts a little underneath me, stretching to set his phone on windowsill behind him. “I grumped,” he admits.
“What’s got you grumping?” I ask.
He stares at me. “Well, it’s February, and we’re in Pittsburgh.”
“Good point.” I brush a clump of Argos fur off his shoulder. “Anything else?”
He shrugs, setting his fingers in my hair, brushing the curls off my face. “I’m… lonely.”
“Lonely?” I ask quietly, trying not to sound hurt.
Even though I am. What he’s said pokes an old wound, a deep one, a hurt I’m trying to heal with Sue in therapy, but that’s taking a lot longer than I’d like.
You’re not enough.
“Ted,” he says, peering down at me. “I don’t mean… emotionally. I’ve got you. My family. My buddies.”
I smile faintly. I met his “buddies” early in the new year, when Alex invited me over for the birthday party he was hosting for his friend Mike.
They’re good guys, playful like Alex, friendly and warm, some of them married, some not, some of them in the food scene, others from his pickup basketball league, even some from high school.
“So if not emotionally,” I say. “You mean… physically?”
A swallow works down his throat. “Aren’t you?”
Suddenly, I am deeply aware of every part of our bodies that is touching. My leg on his, my pelvis against his hip. My breasts pressed into his ribs. Heat creeps up my cheeks. “Yes.”
He sighs, easing away from me slightly. “It’s getting distracting.”
I sit up, suddenly self-conscious and guilty.
Maybe I’ve been torturing him with all this cuddling.
Then again, he’s the one who asked for it, who set this precedent.
But even then, just because he started it, that doesn’t mean he has to want to keep going.
I can be the one who stops, or who at least offers to.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
Alex groans as he sits up, too, raking his hands through his hair. “I don’t know.”
I bite my lip, warring with myself. The thought of nudging Alex toward finding someone new, someone who’d take my place, someone he’d share everything with, selfishly makes me feel ill.
But the thought of seeing him miserable like this, just so I can keep his friendship, keep loving him in this way that’s safe and sure, makes me feel even sicker.
Maybe there’s a compromise. A middle way. A reasonable first step that will scratch the itch for Alex without forcing me to let go of him entirely.
“What about…” I reach for his phone, then mine, setting them on our laps. “The apps.”
Alex blinks at me. “The what?”
“The dating apps. I know Google pissed you off when it suggested it, but… that was seven months ago. We’re on the upswing, right? New year, new… journey? I don’t know…” I swallow my fear and dig deep for courage. “And I’ll do it with you.”
Alex stares down at his phone, then peers out the window, quiet for so long, I start to wonder whether he’s fallen into some fugue state. But then he turns back toward me, rolls his eyes, and says, “Oh, why the hell not.”
I leap up, grabbing the second tub of gelato.
While we eat, we create our accounts, make our profiles, and offer each other some mutual editing.
Opinions are given on which photo to use as our main picture, how much to say: Do we mention divorce?
Does Alex say he has a kid? Do I mention I own a dog?
We go with short, witty—we think—bios, and after rather extensive debate, decide to include the less-witty but salient details. The divorces, the daughter, the dog.
“We’re not looking for anything serious,” Alex says as he adds in that information. “But why would we want to even casually date or hook up with someone who thinks divorced people are fuckups. Or someone who hates kids—”
“Or dogs,” I add. “Which means they are soulless.”
“Or allergic,” he provides.
“Well, yeah, that, too. But even so, between Argos and some casual fling, I’m going with Argos every time.”
“Fair.”
Alex and I sit back on the couch together, legs on the coffee table.
Not cuddling.
We stare at our profiles, then look at each other.
“Well?” he asks. “Ready to start swiping?”
I groan. “I kind of feel like I’m going to puke.”
“That might be all the gelato we just ate,” he says.
“Yeah.” I stare at my phone. “But I also think it’s because I’m thirty-four and on a dating app for the first time in my life. Why don’t people meet in person anymore?” I whine.
“Because modern Americans live highly insular, digital-forward existences, and their experience of community is largely virtual, rather than in person.”
“Thanks,” I say tiredly. “That was uplifting.”
Alex shrugs. “Just speaking the truth.”
“Well, then, here we go.”
We look at each other one more time, turn back to our phones, and start to swipe.
Fate is either fucking with us or finally being kind, because in the first hour of our swiping, we both match with people who, at least judging by their profiles, seem pretty promising. It’s either a good outcome or too good to be true.
We’re about to find out.
“Are we being smart?” Alex asks, as he pulls his car into a space outside the indoor adult-only Putt-Putt golf spot. “Or are we being really dumb?”
“A little bit of both?” I peer over at him and try to bury the ache that stabs through me.
He looks handsome. Really handsome. He’s trimmed his beard a bit, put some kind of product in his hair, giving his wave-curls lush definition.
His deep-blue sweater brings out his eyes, and the stretchy camel-colored hybrid jean-chinos he’s wearing hug his thighs.
His brow furrows. “What’s wrong?”