26. Slowly
Twenty Six
Slowly
Our first date was coffee, which felt almost absurd given nine years of marriage behind us, and exactly right for the same reason.
“This is strange,” Sebastian admitted, sitting across from me at a small table near my studio, both of us slightly formal in a way that made me want to laugh. “I keep wanting to reach for your hand and then remembering I should probably ask first.”
“You can ask.”
“Can I hold your hand?”
“Yes,” I said, and he reached across the table, careful, deliberate, and something about the formality of it — a man I’d been married to for nine years asking permission for something that used to be automatic — undid me a little, in the best possible way.
We did it slowly, exactly as I’d asked. Coffee became dinner the following week.
Dinner became a walk through the Perry Street neighborhood, Sebastian asking genuine questions about the design choices, listening to the answers instead of already knowing them because he’d overheard them secondhand from Grace or Lucy.
He didn’t push for more than what each date offered.
He didn’t ask, three weeks in, whether I was ready to move back.
He didn’t reference the unfiled divorce papers still sitting, I assumed, somewhere in his apartment, except once, gently, to ask if I wanted to talk about them, and to accept without argument when I said not yet.
“I like this version of us,” he said, a month into it, walking me home from a dinner that had run long, both of us reluctant to end the evening.
“I don’t think I ever properly dated you the first time.
We fell into each other so fast, and then Cole Capital happened, and somewhere in there I forgot that courting someone is supposed to be ongoing, not just the thing you do before the wedding. ”
“I like it too,” I admitted. “I keep waiting to feel impatient — like I should just decide already, one way or another. But I don’t feel impatient. I feel like I’m actually getting to know you again. The real you, not the CEO managing a crisis.”
“Is there a difference? Genuinely asking.”
I considered that seriously. “I think there used to not be much of one. I think that was actually part of the problem. Now — yes. There’s a difference.
You laugh more. You ask more. You let yourself be bad at pottery in front of me last week and didn’t immediately deflect it with a joke about efficiency. ”
He smiled at that, something easy and unguarded in it that I’d started to see more often, the specific quality of a man who’d stopped performing certainty and started actually living inside his own uncertainty instead.
We told Grace and Lucy together, at a dinner neither of us had planned to make into an announcement, though it became one anyway when Lucy noticed the way Sebastian’s hand found the small of my back, briefly, automatically, as we sat down.
“You two are doing this again,” Lucy said, not quite a question.
“Slowly,” I clarified. “Very slowly. No promises being made yet.”
“I’ll take slowly,” Grace said, raising her glass. “Slowly is better than whatever speed you two were going before. Slowly might actually stick.”
We laughed, all four of us, easier than any dinner I could remember in years, and I caught Sebastian watching me across the table with an expression I recognized from very early in our relationship — before Cole Capital, before the exhaustion, before either of us had learned to mistake busyness for love.
He looked at me like I was the most interesting thing in the room.
I hadn’t seen that particular look in longer than I wanted to admit, and finding it again, slowly, carefully, over months of small ordinary dates instead of one grand reconciliation, felt like something worth protecting.
Something worth actually earning, on both our parts, instead of simply falling back into out of habit or convenience.
“Are you happy?” Sebastian asked me later, walking me home, snow starting to fall lightly over the quiet street.
“I am,” I said, and meant it completely. “Slowly. But yes.”
“Slowly,” he agreed, and reached for my hand again, no longer asking permission, the small formal gesture having become, somewhere in the last few months, simply how we were with each other now — careful, deliberate, chosen fresh each time instead of assumed.