Chapter Twenty
AVIANCE
After the finalization, Carla takes me to lunch.
We sit at a window table in a restaurant that Carla picks because she knows the chef, and we eat good food and drink sparkling water and she tells me about the first time she ever won a dissipation motion, which was eighteen years ago, and how the client called her six months later to tell her she'd started a bakery.
"What about you?" Carla says, over the fish.
"What about me?"
"What are you starting?"
I think about the Lantern project, which is now fully underway and beautiful in progress. I think about two other clients who came through the Lantern connection — a boutique hotel in the Gulch, a restaurant in Germantown. I think about the website I've built and the name on it: Calloway Design.
"I already started," I say. "I think I started the night I left."
Carla looks at me with the expression of someone who has been in this work long enough to know when something is true without qualifications.
"Good," she says. "Keep going."
That evening, Jayceon and I take a walk along the Shelby Bottoms path. The light is long and gold and the river is doing the thing it does in summer where it looks almost lazy, moving without apparent effort.
He has his hand in mine.
We've been doing this — the walks, the dinners, the studio mornings, the nights at my apartment or his — for nearly three months now.
We've had difficult conversations and easy ones.
We've talked about what we want long-term with the particular honesty of two people who have each, in their own way, learned what happens when you let things go unspoken.
"I want to say something," I say.
"Okay," he says.
"Not a warning. Just — something I want you to know."
"Tell me."
"I am not afraid anymore," I say. "Of this.
Of being happy. Of wanting something and naming it.
" I look at the river. "For a while after I left, I kept waiting for the other shoe.
I kept thinking: this feels good, which means something is about to go wrong.
Because that was the pattern. Things felt good and then I was the one who wasn't chosen. "
He squeezes my hand once.
"I don't feel that way right now," I say. "I feel like I built something — not that you built for me, but something I built, that I'm standing in, that fits. And you're in it, and it still fits." I turn to look at him. "That's what I wanted you to know."
He stops walking.
"Aviance."
"Yeah."
"I love you," he says.
It is not an explosion. It is not a declaration designed to make me cry. It is delivered the way he delivers everything — directly, fully, without performance.
I look at him for a moment.
"I love you too," I say.
He pulls me in and kisses me in the long gold light by the river and a woman jogging past says awww without breaking stride and we both laugh against each other's mouths.