Chapter 6
CRUZ
I stand at the bottom of those stairs longer than I need to.
This is becoming a pattern. Me, stationary, watching the space Hannah just vacated and taking stock of what’s happening in my chest. It’s not subtle.
It’s not casual. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve felt before and I’ve been alive long enough to know the difference between wanting someone and whatever this specific, accelerating thing is.
I climb the stairs and go inside and drink a full glass of water standing at the sink like a man who has his life together.
I do not have my life together.
I don’t post anything for the rest of the afternoon.
This is notable because my posting schedule is consistent in the way that my actual meals are not.
It’s the discipline I apply where I apply it, the routine that keeps the algorithm fed and the brand healthy and the income steady.
I have content sitting in my drafts. I have a reel half-edited on my phone that would perform well and take twenty minutes to finish.
I leave it.
Instead, I sit at my drafting table with the Corolla project spread out in front of me and I work. Really work, the kind that makes two hours disappear. I don’t think about Hannah except for the approximately forty-five times I think about Hannah.
The thing she said on the beach keeps circling back: I needed to find out if I still knew how. How to be alone with herself. How to want something for no reason except that she wanted it.
I understand that more than she’d probably expect me to.
The influencer version of Cruz Jackson wants for an audience— the food fails, the beach days, the relatable disasters, all of it calibrated for reaction.
It’s not fake exactly but it’s not the whole truth either, and somewhere in the last year I’ve felt the gap between the performance and the person widening in a way that got harder to ignore.
Which is part of why I’m here. Alone. Taking a month to remember what I actually am when nobody’s watching.
And then Hannah happened.
Maya calls at five, which means she’s been thinking about our conversation all day and has reached conclusions she needs to share.
“I did some reflecting,” she says, by way of greeting.
“Of course you did.”
“The age gap is actually not that big a deal statistically.”
“Maya.”
“I’m just saying, the data on age-gap relationships—”
“Please don’t cite data at me about my personal life.”
“I’m being supportive,” she says, wounded. “This is support.”
I lean back in my chair and look at the ceiling. “She told me her older daughter is thirty. As a point of reference.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do?”
“Said good for her and moved on.”
A pause. Then: “Cruz. That was exactly right.”
“I know.”
“You really like her.”
It’s not a question but I answer it anyway. “She’s — yeah. I really do.” I pause. “She said I was beautiful.”
“She said you were beautiful?”
“I said she was beautiful. She deflected with a joke about my salmon.”
Maya laughs, loud and genuine. “I love her.”
“You don’t know her.”
“I love her,” she repeats, firm. “Anyone who can make you sound like this after two days and still keeps you at arm’s length is exactly the right kind of person for you. You’ve always needed someone who doesn’t just—” she pauses, searching for it, “—hand it over. You need the work.”
I think about Hannah at the bottom of the stairs. The two inches between our hands. The way she went up first and didn’t look back and I waited anyway.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
We talk for a while longer. Her job, her kids, the family dinner next month that I’m going to have to navigate carefully given that I haven’t told anyone about the procedure yet.
Maya asks if I’m doing okay and I say yes in the easy way I’ve been saying yes since the cardiologist appointment, the reflexive fine that I’ve gotten very good at.
I almost tell her.
It’s right there —actually there’s something I should probably mention— and I feel it in my throat, the shape of it, the relief it would be to put it down somewhere outside my own head.
I don’t.
Not yet. Not over the phone, not when she’s three states away and would immediately want to drive here and I’d spend the rest of my month managing her worry instead of… instead of this. Whatever this is becoming.
After we hang up I sit with the quiet for a while.
My chest does the thing it does sometimes. Not pain exactly, more like pressure, like a reminder, like a hand on my shoulder saying hey, don’t forget about me. I breathe through it the way the cardiologist showed me. It passes in under a minute.
I’m fine.
The procedure is in seventeen days. The surgeon is excellent. The outcome will be good.
I’m fine.
I’ll be fine.
At seven-thirty I put on a clean shirt, which I’m aware is a decision that means something, and I walk next door and knock.
Hannah answers in what appears to be her reading clothes.
Soft shorts, an oversized shirt that’s seen better decades, hair loose around her shoulders and she looks so completely unguarded for half a second before the lawyer comes back online that I feel the whole thing land directly in the center of my chest.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says, cautious, a little amused.
“Dinner.” I say it simply, the way she seems to appreciate. No performance. No angle. “Not a thing. Just dinner. There’s a place up the road that does good fish and I’ve been eating alone for five days.”
She looks at me for a long moment. I watch her argue with herself.
I can actually see it, the consideration and the counter, the yes and the careful no.
But I wait without filling the silence because I’ve learned already that Hannah doesn’t need to be talked into things.
She needs space to arrive at them herself.
“Let me get my shoes,” she says.
I exhale.
“It’s not a date,” she adds, from inside.
“Absolutely not,” I agree, and smile at her closed door.