Chapter 4 #2
That was the whole trouble with Carter Michaels, I was beginning to understand. I kept handing him easy ways out — of the conversation, of the complication, of me — and he kept, calmly, refusing to take a single one of them, and looking at me like the offer itself was the most baffling part.
"For the record," he added, reaching across the table and turning my hand over so my palm faced up, tracing one line of it with his thumb in a way that made it very difficult to remember what we'd been talking about, "I'm not confused about which of us is the grown-up.
I know exactly what you are. It's not a problem I'm trying to solve.
It's the whole reason I made the reservation. "
I had walked into that entire exchange planning to be the reasonable one.
"Okay," I said, a little unsteadily.
"Okay." He smiled. "Now — I just like you. I wanted to say it out loud."
I looked down at my wine glass. "I like you too," I said, which felt inadequate for what I actually meant but was the most I was willing to hand over in a candlelit restaurant in Wicker Park on a Saturday night.
It was enough. He didn't push for more.
We walked back to my brownstone through the warm June evening, his hand finding mine somewhere along the way, easy and unhurried, like it belonged there.
Rosa had Justin tucked in upstairs, the house quiet by the time we got back, and we sat on the porch swing with the last of the wine and talked until the street went still around us.
And then we went inside.
He kissed me in the hallway — properly this time, nothing held back, his hands in my hair and mine gripping the front of his shirt, and I felt the full force of weeks of phone calls and wanting and not quite letting myself have this all come loose at once.
He walked me backward until my shoulders met the wall and kissed me until I forgot what city I was in, his mouth at my jaw, my throat, coming back to my lips like he couldn't stay away from them.
"Carter—" His name came out unsteady and he responded to it immediately, hands sliding under the hem of my shirt, warm against my skin, and I arched into him, helpless to stop and not wanting to.
We moved to the couch in a tangle of hands and mouths, his weight settling over me, and for a long stretch of time there was nothing else — just his hands moving over me like he had all the time in the world, mine pulling him closer, both of us breathing hard and neither of us in any hurry to stop.
And that was where we stayed. No conversation about it, no negotiation — just two people who both somehow understood, without saying it out loud, that this was exactly enough for tonight. He held me and I let him, and we talked in low voices until the house went completely still around us.
He left late, long after the neighborhood had gone quiet, and I stood in the doorway and watched him walk down my front steps and thought about how different it felt to watch someone leave when you already knew he was coming back.
I went to bed that night restless in a way I hadn't been in years.
Not unhappy. The opposite. I lay in the dark with the whole evening still humming under my skin — the weight of him, the warmth of his hands, the low certain way he said my name — and I felt something I'd genuinely forgotten I was capable of feeling.
Wanting. Simple, physical, insistent wanting, the kind I'd quietly written off years ago as something other people got to have.
It startled me, honestly. I'd built a life so full and so competent that I'd stopped noticing the shape of what wasn't in it. And now here it was, wide awake at midnight, reminding me it had never actually gone anywhere. It had just been waiting for a reason.
He'd be back in the morning. That was the part I kept turning over. Not the wanting itself, but the strange new luxury of it — wanting someone and knowing, for once, that he was coming back.
Sunday morning he was back at eight, coffee in hand again, and Rosa made enough eggs for everyone without being asked.
Justin appeared at the table in his pajamas with Carter Junior under one arm and immediately began a detailed recap of a dream he'd had about dinosaurs, which Carter listened to with complete attention while Rosa caught my eye across the kitchen and said nothing at all, which said everything.
After breakfast Carter helped Justin practice the Flip in the backyard with a plastic stick and a tennis ball while I cleaned up, and Rosa stood next to me at the sink and watched them through the window.
"Mija," she said quietly.
"I know," I said.
She nodded, and went back to drying dishes, and neither of us said anything else because neither of us needed to.
The distance was the only thing.
That was what I kept telling Anne, in the phone calls that had become their own rhythm that summer — the late ones, the ones where we talked about the real things instead of the easy ones.
"Everything else is — it's easy, Anne. In a way I didn't expect. In a way I don't entirely know what to do with."
"Easy how?"
"Easy like I don't have to explain myself. Easy like he remembers things I said and asks about them. Easy like—" I stopped, then started again. "Neither of us pushed for more this weekend, Anne. It just — stayed where it was. And neither of us had to say anything about it. We just both knew."
"Jess."
"I know."
"That's not nothing."
"It's really not." I looked out at my street, at the familiar summer evening settling over Roscoe Village. "He lives in St. Louis. That's the only problem. Everything else is — I don't know what to do with how easy everything else is."
"Maybe you don't have to know yet."
"That's not really how I operate."
"I know," she said, and this time there was a smile in it. "Maybe that's the point."
I sat with that after we hung up, on my porch swing, in the warm July evening, thinking about a man three hundred miles away who called every night and booked his own hotel and understood, without being asked, exactly how much was enough for tonight.
Yes, I was just like Cinderella after she'd left the ball.
The difference was — the prince knew who I was and kept calling.