Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
I’m waiting for her.
Nothing matters to me but her.
On the counter, there’s a shallow bowl of Marcona almonds that Simone adores, and an artful pile of gluten-free crackers so as not to disturb her sensitive digestive system. The kind of thing you’re supposed to offer a guest, even when she’s already spent the night here numerous times, even when you’ve memorized the way she arranges her shoes in the entryway, or the way she likes to drink orange juice with a straw even though she’s technically an adult.
It’s her influence, this urge to present some vision of “home.” After a decade of a dying marriage, and years spent ricocheting from office to classroom to bar, I had stopped bothering. But now I care. Simone makes me care. I want her to see this place and imagine it as her own, to believe she could stay and never leave, that it would all be as easy as walking through the door and putting her bag down.
I swipe a few crumbs from the island with the side of my hand and stare at the clock. Fourteen minutes until she said she’d get here. My stomach is tight as a drumhead, and I try to tell myself it’s anticipation, not the old, stupid anxiety that’s been waking me up at three AM for as long as I can remember.
The truth is, I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about me.
Every day with Simone is a gift, which is the kind of phrase I used to mock before I became the guy who says it and means it. She’s light. Unedited. A walking contradiction, part brain and part animal, and I never know which one I’m going to get. When she laughs, I forget what decade it is. When she cries, which has happened exactly twice, I want to set the world on fire. I should be happy, and I am, but there’s a streak of dread under the surface that I can’t seem to sand out. Something’s going to ruin this, and that something is me.
My phone pings, and I glance down at the screen:
On my way. Traffic is terrible. Also I forgot the wine at home, so don’t judge me.
There’s a photo attached: her in the car, mouth in a cartoon pout, seatbelt cutting across the pale slope of her neck. I smile and type back:
Wine is overrated. I want you sober.
She replies in three seconds:
Lol are you gonna drug me instead?
I type: Already in the food.
A heart emoji, then nothing. I pocket the phone and exhale. The fear is still there, but it’s quieter now, drowned out by the knowledge that she’s real and she’s coming.
I walk around the table, aligning the chairs like a maniac. I fill a glass with filtered water, set it by her usual seat. The sun is nearly gone, and the only light in the room is from the lamp above the kitchen island, a golden oval that softens the sharpness of everything it touches.
I lean against the counter and try not to think about the past, which of course means that’s all I think about.
The narrative everyone knows: I was married once, to Sandra, a woman so competent she made CEOs look like high schoolers. We lasted almost eight years, but the truth is we were both gone by year four, our bodies just haunting the same rooms until one of us had the decency to pack a bag. The divorce was clean, mutual, like the splitting of a cell. She moved out, taking our retirement accounts with her; I got the house, my books, and a recurring Tuesday night custody of the dog, which died three months after the papers were signed.
After that, I spent a while drifting. There were women, yes. It’s the privilege of a certain kind of man—in my thirties, tenure, a gym rat with a sculpted bod, and a brain to boot. I could have played the tragic, brooding professor bit forever. But the women were a rotation, a blur, and I liked it that way.
Until Lyra and Natalie.
I still have dreams about that night, if you can call them dreams and not just some exquisitely drawn-out panic attack with better lighting. I was thirty two, they were both twenty-five, graduate students getting their MFAs, each brilliant in a way that should have terrified me. We met at a conference, shared a bottle of bad hotel bar bourbon, and ended up in my suite before midnight. It was fun, at first—giddy, chaotic, everyone pretending they knew what they were doing.
But the problem with alcohol is that you lose your inhibitions. I didn’t even think because I was so fucking drunk that night. So yeah, it was a depraved threesome with two beautiful, nubile women at a poetry conference. Doesn’t this shit always happen? Doesn’t everyone go crazy when away from home? But there were consequences because we didn’t use protection and both of them got pregnant from that fateful sexual encounter. What was supposed to be nothing became two women, two pregnancies, and one disastrous night as the common denominator.