8. Leah #2
Jacket hooked over his shoulder. Sleeves still rolled. The top button of his dove-gray shirt was undone. The collar was open. He had his free hand in his trouser pocket. He stopped at the corner of my desk. He put his free hand flat on it.
"Long day. I'm going to go eat. Come with me."
The yes was right behind my teeth.
It sat there. I could feel the cab to a small place with low light, the wineglass in his hand, the question he would not ask out loud, and the answer I would give him with my body if I went.
I made my mouth move.
"I'm sorry. I have a prior engagement tonight. Something I can't move."
The grin slipped.
For half a second.
Long enough for me to see what was under it. He recovered. The grin came back. He nodded.
"Of course. No problem."
He turned to walk away.
He stopped two steps in. He turned back.
"Thea's birthday gala is on Saturday."
"I know. I've been handling logistics."
"I don't mean as my assistant. Come with me."
He said it without the grin.
I opened my mouth.
"You have to say yes, Claire. You can't reject me twice in a row."
His mouth was smiling. His eyes were not.
"Okay."
"Okay."
Our gazes remained fixed on each other. Soon, he looked away, then turned to the elevator.
I sat at my desk with my hand still on the strap of my bag and my other hand flat on the keyboard.
I told one man no and another man yes, and the man I had said no to knew my name.
The restaurant was on Spring Street.
I changed in the bathroom. The blouse and trousers went into the bottom drawer of my desk.
I pulled out the dark blue button-down I kept in the same drawer for the rare nights I needed to be a person between the office and home.
I left the watch on the inside of my left wrist. I put my hair down in the mirror and let it fall heavy and dark against my shoulders for the second time in two days.
I took the train downtown. I walked the four blocks from the station, my hands in my pockets, the early-summer night warm against my face, the smell of cut grass rising from the planters along Mott Street.
The restaurant had red leather booths, a chalkboard menu over the bar, and a basket of bread on every table. The air smelled of wine, garlic, and warm bread, with a woman's voice singing low in Italian from a speaker behind the host stand.
Torres was at the booth at the back.
He stood when he saw me.
He was taller than I had let myself remember. He was in a charcoal button-down with the top button open and dark trousers. The dark hair was shorter than it had been at the Mayflower. There was new gray at his temples I had not seen before, and the line of his jaw had filled out.
He looked good.
He looked like the kind of man you grew older with.
He hugged me.
His arms came around my shoulders. My arms went around his back. Through the cotton of his shirt, my left hand came up against the long ridge of the scar, where it started at the top of his back, under his shoulder blade, and ran down across the line of his spine toward his hip.
I had put it there.
I held him for a second longer than I had planned to.
I let go. I sat. He sat across from me. The waiter came.
Torres ordered the carbonara, that was his favorite Italian meal.
I ordered the cacio e pepe because I did not have the energy to read the menu.
The waiter went away. Torres poured wine for both of us.
His left arm moved a little stiff when he tilted the bottle.
I noticed it at the Mayflower last year.
I watched that arm in the parking garage too, before, when he was reaching for the keys to the unmarked.
"You look tired, Cal."
"You said that on Wednesday."
"It's still true."
"Don't call me Cal."
"Sorry."
He set the bottle down. He picked up his glass. He looked at me across the rim.
"How are you, Leah?"
"I'm fine."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true."
"It's never true. That's why you always say it."
I did not answer. I picked up the bread. I tore a piece off it and put it on my plate and did not eat it.
He let it sit. He drank his wine. He set the glass down.
"You shouldn't be here, Rafael."
"I know.”
"You shouldn't have been on that sidewalk Wednesday and you shouldn't be here tonight. You know what I am doing."
"I know what you're doing."
"You know what showing up at my embed site looks like."
"I know what it looks like."
"I could file."
"You could file."
"I should."
"I know you should."
He picked up the wine again. He turned the glass on the cloth a quarter-turn. He looked at me with a patient face.
"For old times' sake," I said. "I won't."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me, Rafael."
He nodded once. He took a drink. He set the glass down.
The food came. We ate. He told me about his case in Boston.
Three weeks of paperwork on a financial fraud.
I asked the right questions. He answered them.
He asked me about my dog, the one I had not had since I was twenty-six, and I told him I still did not have one.
He smiled. He remembered I did not have a dog. He asked anyway.
Halfway through the carbonara, he set his fork down.
"Why did you end it, Leah?"
"I didn't end it."
"Leah. You stopped answering my calls. You moved apartments. You transferred units. You faded me out."
"I didn't."
"What would you call it?"
I did not have an answer.
I had never officially broken it off. I just stopped.
I stopped in the hospital, a little, when I sat by his bed for forty-eight hours, and the surgeon said the words severed and liver and grateful.
I stopped more in the weeks after, when he came home and could not lift his left arm above shoulder height, and I had to help him put on a T-shirt.
I could not look at the long pink line that would become a scar.
I stopped completely six weeks later when I put in for the transfer to long-term embeds.
I stopped calling him on Sunday mornings, and he stopped calling me back.
One day, I moved out of the apartment we had not officially moved into together, and he had not been at the new address.
I disappeared.
I let him become my past tense without telling him.
My throat closed.
"I don't know what to call it."
"It's okay."
"It's not okay."
"It's okay, Leah. It was a long time ago. I'm not asking you to call it anything."
He picked up his wine. He took a small drink. He set the glass down.
"I'm not angry. I was, for a while. The anger burned out. What's left is simpler."
"Rafael — "
"I missed you. I still do."
I looked at the breadbasket. I could not look at his face when he said that.
He waited.
He was very good at waiting. He had always been very good at waiting.
"I forgave you a long time ago, Leah. You haven't caught up. Not even close."
The bread blurred a little in front of me.
I did not let it go further. I made my breathing go where it was supposed to go. I picked up my own wine. I took a drink. I set it down, and I did not look at him.
"Eat, Rafael."
"Okay."
We ate. The waiter came back and cleared the dishes. We did not order dessert. He paid. I did not argue because I did not have the energy to argue with him about a check.
We walked out.
The street was quiet. Spring Street at 10:20 p.m. on a Monday in June. A couple walking a small dog. The smell of garbage and exhaust and a cigarette from a doorway down the block. The yellow light of the restaurant window threw itself in a long rectangle onto the sidewalk behind us.
He turned to face me.
He had his hands in his pockets. The streetlight caught the new gray at his temple.
"Can we do this again sometime?"
"Rafael."
"I still love you, Leah."
I looked at him.
I looked at the man who had bled for eleven minutes on a parking-garage floor because I had vouched for a witness who lied.
I looked at the scar I could not see through the shirt that ran from his shoulder to his hip.
I looked at the fact that he had come back fourteen months later to tell me he loved me anyway.
The only thing he had ever asked of me in the whole of our life together was that I let him love me, and that I had not, in the end, been able to do even that.
My chest ached.
I did not lie.
"I don't, Rafael. I can't revisit that. I just can't."
He nodded.
He did not look away. He did not look down. His face did the small thing it always did when he was absorbing a hit — the jaw a quarter-inch tighter, the eyes a quarter-inch steadier, no other change.
"Okay, Leah."
"I'm sorry."
"You don't have to be sorry."
"I am."
"Okay."
I left him standing on the sidewalk.