Chapter li
li
I KNOW WE’VE TALKED BEFORE ABOUT HOW DAYS that at first seem ordinary can become extraordinary in the most unexpected ways. The next day, just as I was getting ready to figure out dinner, I got a WhatsApp message from Dax.
Hey, are you around? he wrote.
Mm-hmm, everything okay? I answered.
All good , he said. I’m actually at JFK. Just landed. I was thinking about what I wanted to do first, now that I’m home, and all I could think of was seeing you. Any chance you’re available?
I stared at the phone. He was home. I’d thought his plane wasn’t landing until tomorrow. And we hadn’t made any real plans to see each other. Hadn’t said much about what might happen once he got home, other than that at some point we’d make marshmallow pies together. I imagined him in my kitchen, his eyes smiling at me across the counter, then him kissing me as we stirred and mixed melted marshmallows. My heart yearned for that, for him. My body did, too. I knew what I should do to keep my heart safe, to keep his heart safe, but I also knew what I wanted to do. And desire won out over duty. Over fear.
I opened up my cabinets and my freezer, quickly cataloging the contents.
Want a home-cooked meal? I typed.
Marshmallow pie? he said.
We can make it , I wrote back, but it’ ll need to set, so we can’t eat it for a few hours at least.
Baking before dinner.
Sounds like a deal. You’re what, 45 minutes away?
I have to get my luggage and go through customs, so maybe an hour and a half?
Perfect.
But as I typed that, I realized it was not quite perfect. I’d have the exact right amount of time to get dinner started, run to the corner store for graham crackers, marshmallows, and whipping cream, and come back to finish dinner and set the table. But not quite enough time to reapply makeup or fix my hair, which was now thrown into a bun on the top of my head, with a few of the shorter strands falling down around my face. Somehow, though, I didn’t think Dax would mind. I don’t know if it was because I was so much older than I was the last time I’d been dating people, or because I knew I could thrive on my own, but I was okay with letting Dax see me as I usually looked at the end of the day—slightly disheveled, makeup all worn off. Though the bun was maybe pushing it.
I quickly put together a salad and the ingredients for a Boursin orzo recipe, preheating the oven at the same time. The recipe, which was essentially orzo, Boursin cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and spinach, is one of those set-it-and-forget-it sorts of recipes that I found on Instagram and love.
While the oven was preheating, I ran to the corner market to get the ingredients for a marshmallow pie and then came back to set the table and open a bottle of wine so it could breathe.
Be there in five , Dax texted.
Luckily, since the kids weren’t around that week, the house was neat. I ducked into the half bathroom off the kitchen and took down my hair, finger-combing it enough that it didn’t look like I’d been running around in a wind tunnel all day. I always felt more confident with my hair down.
Then the doorbell rang, and all of a sudden, my heart was in my throat. With all that racing around, I hadn’t had time to feel anxious. But in that moment, my palms got sweaty, my knees went weak.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then walked to the door.
I couldn’t believe I was really going to have a man in my house after all this time. I took another deep breath, then opened the door. All my anxiety faded away. Dax’s smile was warm and when he stepped in to hug me hello, my body fit into his like we had been carved that way. I closed my eyes and rested my cheek against his chest, feeling his muscles shift as he wrapped his arms around me tighter.
“My goodness, this feels good,” Dax said softly. The relief in his voice made me melt.
“It does,” I answered. I realized the door was open behind him. “Come in, come in,” I added, pulling away for a moment.
He dragged a massive suitcase and duffel bag in and pulled them to the side of the entryway. “Sorry about the enormous luggage,” he said.
“No apologies necessary,” I answered. “I’m honored you wanted to see me before even going home.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m honored you wanted to welcome me home.” Dax looked around the main floor of the house. “This place is huge,” he said. “And beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I said. “One day, when we have time, I’ll tell you how I got it. It’s a very random New York kind of story.”
He laughed. “We have time now,” he said, following me into the kitchen and then weaving his fingers through mine when we got there. “Can I just look at you?”
I looked up at him, slightly embarrassed at first, but when I saw the hunger in his eyes, the pleasure he got from looking at me, I stood a little straighter. I could feel my smile grow a little wider as I looked back at him.
It had been five weeks since I’d last seen him, and I could already see that his eyes were a little more golden than I remembered, his hair a slightly bronzer shade of brown. I didn’t think it was possible, but he was even more ruggedly handsome than in my memory.
“Look at you,” I said. “How can you be so stunning after traveling for like a dozen hours.”
He laughed, a deep throaty chuckle. “Me?” he said. “I’m nothing compared to you. You are even more beautiful than I remembered.”
“You too,” I said.
He squeezed my hand, and I leaned in to kiss him, melting again into the warmth of his body.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you so many times these last weeks,” he said against my mouth. “Every time we spoke on the phone,” he said, kissing me again. “I want to make up for all of them.”
“One more,” I said against his mouth, “or maybe two”—our breath mingled—“but then we have to get baking or we won’t have any marshmallow pie to eat.”
“How about three?” he said, kissing me once more.
“Three’s good,” I said, my body going liquid as he grazed his teeth along my bottom lip.
When he finally pulled away, my heart was racing. I took his hand and walked toward the stack of ingredients I’d left out for marshmallow pie.
“What can I do?” he asked, rolling up his sleeves and washing his hands in my sink. He washed them like a doctor, slowly and thoroughly.
“Here,” I said, handing him the box of graham crackers. “You can start by opening these.”
He complied. “So what’s the story with this house?” he asked as we crushed the graham crackers.
“Well,” I said, “a few years after Darren and I split, I was in a two-bedroom apartment with the three kids, when my friend Julia called me and said, ‘Are you ready for the New York City real estate deal of a lifetime?’ Of course, I said yes, and then she told me that she worked with this children’s book illustrator who’d never been married and never had children, but had this massive brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. It needed a lot of work, and the illustrator, Eva, wanted to sell it to someone who would let her live in her studio there for the rest of her life.”
Dax’s eyes were wide as he looked around my kitchen. “Was she sick?”
I shook my head. “She’s still living up on the third floor,” I told him. “And she’s eighty-nine.”
“Wow,” he said.
I started melting the butter and marshmallows and said, “As odd as the arrangement seemed, the idea of more space, of Liam and Sammy and Violet each getting their own rooms, of storage in the basement and a small yard it was all really appealing.”
“Of course it was!” Dax said. I handed him the spoon and he started stirring.
“So,” I said, “I went over to meet Eva, and we really hit it off. I asked her what she was asking for the house, and her answer was: ‘What can you afford?’ And so here we are. I did a lot of work on it over the past six years, and it feels like home now.”
“What a lovely story,” he said. “Julia sounds like a great friend.”
“She is,” I said, thinking about how wonderful she was to me, even when she suspected I was keeping a secret from her. I poured the melted mixture into the crust and then put our pie in the refrigerator. “We’ve been friends for a long time now. About half our lives.”
I walked over to the oven to take out the Boursin orzo, which had been warming. When I turned, he had already started wiping down my kitchen counter.
“Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “Want to be a good guest, make sure I get invited back.”
I smiled. “Dinner’s ready,” I said. “Can you grab the salad in the refrigerator, please?”
“Anything else I should get?” he asked. “Plates? Forks?”
“The table’s already set,” I said. “Just follow me.”
We walked into the dining area—when I bought the house from Eva, it had been a formal dining room, but I knocked out the walls, so the dining area was now set off by pillars that used to be the corners of the room, and the view was open to the living room. I had the moldings along the ceiling restored on the wall that remained, the one that backed the kitchen, and added a built-in sideboard along with a long wooden table and chairs.
“This house really is amazing,” Dax said.
“It was fun getting to reimagine the space,” I told him. “So how was it leaving Lampedusa after six months?” We put the food down on the table and sat opposite each other. “Please, help yourself,” I added, handing him the serving tongs for the salad.
As he served himself, he said, “Before I met Aviva, I worked with Doctors Without Borders in Nairobi, Bangladesh, and Lampedusa. Then once we got married, I stayed in New York, working in the ER at Columbia Presbyterian. This was my first time back in the field in fifteen years. After Zac died, after being on the front lines during the COVID pandemic, after getting divorced, I needed a change. And working back on Lampedusa was that change. It reconnected me with who I am when the chaos of my own life doesn’t get in the way— and why working in emergency medicine is so important to me. But an assignment like that always feels a bit like running away. And it was time to come back.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “I can’t even imagine the last few years you’ve had—personally and professionally.” I refilled our wineglasses. “Were you running from something when you first went to Nairobi?”
He took a sip of the wine and then said, “The future, I guess. After medical school, I wasn’t ready to do all the things everyone is expected to do. And I wanted to heal people, I wanted to use my degree where it was needed most, so I signed up. I’m glad I did. But I’m also glad I came back home.”
I finished swallowing the orzo. “If you had a crystal ball, is there anything you would change?” I asked. I realized after I said it that it was the kind of weird question I usually asked my kids, but he rolled with it. In fact, I’d meant it kind of flippantly, but he took it seriously.
“In my personal world,” he said, “knowing then what I know now, I would have put Zac in isolation once he started chemo. It wasn’t really an option, but if I had known the pandemic was coming, I would have pulled any strings I could to make it happen. Professionally … let’s see I would have started a committee of ER doctors to really ramp up pandemic response protocols at Columbia, but also across the whole country and the whole world. Increased the production of PPE, the stockpile of ventilators, the vaccine distribution capability— and I would have set up a mental health network for the frontline workers at the hospitals.”
“You would change the world,” I said.
He looked down at his place and gave a self-conscious laugh. “I would try,” he said.
When he looked up, my eyes were on his. “That’s … so … wonderful,” I said. “That’s not quite the right word. But I love where you took my silly question. I love what it says about you.”
He smiled and it felt like we were magnetized toward each other. We both leaned across the table and kissed softly. When our kiss ended, I looked quickly at my watch.
“It’s late for you,” I said. “You must be tired.”
He looked at his watch, too. “A bit,” he said. “But we haven’t had our marshmallow pie yet. How much longer until it sets?”
“Another couple hours,” I told him.
He yawned. “I’m not sure if I’ll make it,” he admitted. “I guess I should probably head home. And maybe … you could save some for when we hopefully see each other again?”
It’s so funny—there were points in my life when friends of mine were in tears because the men they were dating wouldn’t acknowledge the future in any way. But with Dax, I really wanted to live in the present. I was lonely, yes, I loved being with him and talking to him, but I still didn’t know what I wanted my future to look like. I didn’t know if I could handle a real relationship again, how a boyfriend would fit into the puzzle of my life.
I took a deep breath. “How about if we have it tomorrow morning, for breakfast?” I asked, taking a leap I wasn’t quite ready to take, but knowing that I’d miss him desperately if I let him walk out the door right then.
He looked at me for a beat, cocking his head slightly. I could see that he was tired, there were shadows under his eyes, but he was still so handsome, so incredibly sexy.
“I guess my apartment can wait one more night for me,” he said. “And I don’t start work at NYU for another two weeks—figured I’d give myself a reentry period—so I don’t have anywhere else to be.” He stood, taking his dishes with him. “Are you the kind of person who is very serious about dishwasher loading?” he asked.
“I let my kids load the dishwasher,” I told him, standing up and taking my dishes, too. “So, no.”
“This is getting better and better,” he said, walking to the kitchen. “You can cook, and you’ll let me load the dishwasher any way I like.”
I could tell there was some baggage there from Aviva, but I wasn’t going to probe. It was too late, and honestly, it didn’t really matter. I was just so happy he was there with me, in that moment, sharing the evening.
After clearing the table, Dax went to his bag for a toothbrush, then said, “Is it time for a tour of the house?”
I gave him a quick one of the first floor, pointed down the stairs to tell him where the rec room and laundry room were, and then led him up the second set of stairs to the bedroom level, pointing down the hallway to the left for the kids’ bedrooms and bathroom, and to the right for mine.
We walked into my room, and he paused just in front of the doorframe. “Your bed is just how I pictured it,” he said, “with all the pillows. It looks really comfortable.”
“It is,” I said, realizing just as the words left my lips how flirtatious it sounded.
Before long, we were in the bed together, under the covers.
He reached his fingers across to me from his side of the bed, so we were holding hands beneath the blanket, like we did on Lampedusa. I thought about that night together. How many times we’d both orgasmed.
“How tired are you?” I whispered.
I heard him laugh slightly. “If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, I’m not too tired for that.”
I rolled close to him and he put his fingers to my mouth and then slid them inside. Then he pulled them out, and I felt them appear lower down, warm and slick, sliding inside me. I moaned and then reached down to where I felt him throbbing against my thigh.
“You are so wet,” he said, his voice a gasp.
“You are so hard,” I answered.
“I know,” he moaned.
“I’ve been dreaming about you inside me,” I said, and felt him stiffen even more against my hand.
“I’ve been thinking about you, too,” he said. “Whenever I close my eyes.”
He reached to the night table next to him, where he’d left his glasses and phone and a few other things I hadn’t seen. One of those things, apparently, was a condom. He slid it on, and I climbed on top of him.
“My god,” I said when I felt him fill me.
I heard his breath catch as his thrusts became faster.
And then my breathing matched his, my body did too, until we both came hard and hot, the power of it moving me to tears.
He was the first man I ever slept with in that bed—in my bed—the one I bought after Darren and I divorced. But it didn’t feel strange, it felt wonderful.
We separated and lay back on our pillows, catching our breath.
“You’re crying,” Dax said, touching the tears that had overflowed onto my cheeks. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said, reaching my hand out to catch his fingers. “I think you’re healing me.”