20. Wanting You Was Never the Problem
Twenty
Wanting You Was Never the Problem
Sebastian called on a Sunday, not to ask for anything, just to ask if I’d meet him — neutral ground, he said, a walk in the park near the apartment we used to share, nothing more complicated than that.
I said yes. I told myself it was closure. I’m not certain, even now, that was the whole truth.
It was late October, the kind of crisp afternoon that makes the whole city look freshly rinsed, and we walked without much direction for a while, past a version of our old life — the bench where he’d proposed, the café where we used to get coffee on Sunday mornings before either of us had learned to fill every hour with something that felt more urgent.
“I’ve been keeping a journal,” he said, apropos of nothing, a little sheepishly, like the admission cost him something. “Dr. Okafor suggested it. I feel ridiculous saying that out loud. I run a private equity firm and I’m keeping a journal like a teenager.”
“What do you write in it?”
“Mostly things I notice. Small things. Today I noticed the barista at the coffee shop remembers my order now, and I felt absurdly pleased about it, and I wrote that down, because six months ago I don’t think I would have noticed at all.
” He glanced at me, something careful in his expression.
“I’ve been trying to practice noticing things.
Since I clearly went a very long time not doing it. ”
We ended up back at his apartment — my old apartment, technically, still half-familiar in a way that made my chest ache in a manner I hadn’t expected.
He made tea, because I’d always liked tea better than coffee in the afternoons and he’d apparently remembered that, and we sat on the couch, close but not touching, talking about nothing consequential until the conversation, gradually, wasn’t about nothing at all.
“I miss you,” he said quietly. “I want to be careful about how I say that, because I know it’s not your job to fix how much I miss you. But I miss you, Claire. Not the idea of a wife. You. The way you laugh at things before you mean to. The way you talk about color like it’s a moral position.”
“You remember that.”
“I remember everything. I think I always did. I just stopped acting like it mattered enough to show.”
I don’t know which of us moved first. I’ve turned that question over more times than I want to admit, in the months since, and I still don’t have a clean answer.
What I know is that somewhere in the quiet after his last sentence, his hand found my jaw, gently, nothing like Vanessa’s certainty, more like a question than a claim, and I let him.
The kiss was slow, and it was familiar in the way that undid me more than any unfamiliarity could have — nine years of knowing exactly how he kissed, exactly the small sound he made low in his throat when I pulled him closer, exactly the way his hand slid into my hair like it had never once forgotten how.
For a long moment, I let myself want it. All of it. His hands finding the curve of my waist, the heat building slow and certain between us, his mouth moving from my lips to the line of my jaw, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world to relearn me.
“Claire,” he said against my skin, low, “tell me to stop if—”
“Don’t stop,” I said, and meant it, and for several long minutes I let myself simply feel — his weight, familiar and new at once, the particular ache of wanting someone you’ve grieved as much as loved.
Then, somewhere in the middle of it, with his hand warm against my ribs and his breath uneven against my throat, I stopped.
Not because I didn’t want him. That was the thing I needed him, and myself, to understand clearly.
“Wait,” I said, and he stilled immediately, pulling back to look at me, his own breathing unsteady, his eyes searching mine for what had changed.
“Did I—”
“No.” I sat up slowly, pulling my shirt straight, my own hands not entirely steady either. “Wanting you was never our problem, Sebastian. That was never what broke us. We could do this right now, and it would feel incredible, and it still wouldn’t fix the actual thing that’s broken between us.”
He absorbed that, and I watched him do something I hadn’t seen him do in the earliest days of this process — he didn’t argue. He didn’t reach for me again. He didn’t say but you kissed me too, didn’t try to use the last ten minutes as evidence I’d already decided.
He just nodded, slowly, and put a careful, respectful distance between us on the couch.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Not for wanting you — I won’t apologize for that. But for letting this happen before we’d actually earned it.”
“It’s not about earning, exactly.” I straightened my hair, steadying my own voice.
“It’s about time, Sebastian. Real time. Not this — not us falling into bed because it’s easy and familiar and feels like relief after a hard few months.
If we do this again, I need it to be because you’ve actually become someone new, consistently, for long enough that I trust it.
Not because desire got the better of both of us on a Sunday afternoon. ”
“Okay.” He said it simply, without wounded pride, without pushing. “I can wait for that. I want to wait for that, actually, if it means doing this right instead of doing it fast.”
I gathered my coat, my chest still unsteady, my body still humming with the ghost of his hands. At the door, he didn’t try to kiss me again, didn’t ask for anything more than what I’d already, carefully, offered.
“Thank you,” I said, “for not arguing with me just now.”
“Old me would have,” he admitted. “Old me would have found six reasons why you were wrong, or offered you something to change your mind. I’m trying very hard not to be him anymore.”
I walked home in the cold October evening with my whole body still aware of his hands, and my mind entirely clear about the fact that wanting someone and trusting someone were two very different arithmetic problems, and I wasn’t finished solving either one.