Chapter 20
I watch you over the rim of my coffee cup.
It’s Saturday, and we sit in my favorite coffee shop together, working on a crossword puzzle.
I told you that I need to go into the office for a couple of hours to review my exhibits for a trial scheduled to begin Monday.
You were good about this—you’ve been good these last few months about giving me space.
Neither of us has brought up your suggestion that we move in together.
I never said no, but I never said yes, so that’s really the same as no.
And yet our relationship has continued. Paradoxically, your pulling back, your offering me space, has brought us even closer.
We spend nearly every night together, and every single weekend.
We stay in my condo, and when we don’t go out to restaurants, I make you dinner.
You always compliment my cooking and tell me sheepishly that you’re awful at it.
You suggest that I teach you sometime, but in a vague way. I don’t think you mean it.
The truth is, I received a settlement offer on Friday that my client is going to take. The trial won’t move forward on Monday, so there’s no need for me to work today. But I don’t tell you this. There’s something else I must do, and I don’t want you to know.
“Bummer that you have to work on the weekend,” you said, although you often do so yourself. “If you want to do something afterward, let me know. I might grab lunch with some friends.”
This intrigued me. Why have I never met your friends?
Why haven’t I introduced you to mine? I’ve talked about you, of course.
It took me a month to tell Zoe about you.
We went out for drinks, salty margaritas, cloudy with lime juice, and warm tortilla chips that shimmered with oil in a basket on the table between us.
“He sounds perfect,” Zoe said. She was happy for me.
Her engagement and wedding rings glittered on her hand.
She kept it to a single drink because she still wanted to be able to nurse her daughter during her overnight wake.
Baby Daphne was only four months old, sleeping better than expected, and Zoe’s nanny was a dream.
She was blissful and so full of love; your perfection didn’t scare her.
Rather, it was expected that I would eventually find someone like you, that I would meet “the one” and “settle down.” And I always hated those expressions. I still do.
I’ve filled Zoe in on the progress of our relationship. “I’m so happy for you,” she always says as I stare at her, studying her face, searching and pleading that she will read the skepticism on mine, that she will hear the hesitation in my flat tone, in everything I do not say.
What are your friends like, I wonder? For some reason, I can’t picture you with other men your age, drinking craft beer and eating food-truck tacos. I can only picture you with me because you’ve made me feel like your sun, the everything around which you orbit, whether I want to be or not.
“What’s three across?” you ask now, your brows creeping together, forehead furrowed.
I glance at the clue, roll my eyes, nudge you playfully. “‘Swift,’” I say. “Everyone knows that.”
You shrug and fill it in.
I finish my coffee, and my thoughts drift to the blood in my underwear a few weeks back, to the blood that should be there again today but is startlingly absent, to the tenderness of my breasts.
“I should go,” I say. “Get my work over with so I can enjoy the rest of my weekend.”
I lean across the table so that you can kiss me, and you do. “Have fun,” you say. “I’m going to stay here, finish my coffee and this puzzle. But I’ll be lost without you.”
“I’m sure,” I say, and I think we both know that your words aren’t a joke. I have become your compass. You’ve made that clear. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes, still, I cannot breathe.
I leave the coffee shop, and I walk back to my condo building.
But I pass it, instead turning the corner and stepping into the CVS a block away.
People with baskets, with arms full of things, running Saturday-morning errands, move idly through the store.
I move quickly to a section I’ve never before had occasion to visit.
I buy two tests, knowing that whatever the result, I’ll need a second opinion.
I am thirty-five years old. I have been prescribed a birth control pill since I was seventeen, and I’ve taken the dosage religiously, every single day since.
Swallowing that little pill at the same time I brush my teeth in the morning is as automatic to me as breathing.
The packet of pills sits next to my toothbrush, a visual reminder I can’t miss.
I’m too old, too careful, too regimented to become pregnant without trying to.
Yet after I get home, shut myself in my bathroom, tear into the box, and hold the stick beneath me while I pee, two pink lines appear.
Once, and again, and urine pools on the bathroom counter, and I stare at it, stomach churning, because this isn’t what I want.
And you know that. You agreed, insisted that you want what I want.
Don’t tell him, I think.