We were like the idea of a family to him—more than we were real people.
It was fine. It was funny at this point.
“Don’t worry about it,” my mom always said. “He’s a good provider.” Then she’d wink at us and say, “And you hit the jackpot with your mom.”
We’d hit the jackpot with Grandma Dodie, too, who was seventy-eight years old and feistier than the whole lot of us put together. She lived with us now, and she was cultivating antique roses in the side yard, and taking an art history class on the Impressionists, and baking her own sourdough every week. She’d founded an old lady workout group called the Screaming Mimis that walked three miles every day. She had a whole crew of travel friends who had nursed their husbands through long, final illnesses and were “ready to have some fun”—and they went to see Broadway shows, and took riverboat cruises, and spent random weekends in Marfa, Texas, drinking Tito’s and tonic at the hotel where they’d filmedGiant.
Even right now, walking the aisle, Grandma Dodie was moving faster than I was.
“We’re supposed to go slow, Dodie,” I whispered. “Mrs. Richmond wants the processional music to finish.”
“Nonsense,” Dodie said. “I’ll be in a coma in the nursing home before we’re halfway there.”
I didn’t argue. The sooner I got out of this gown, the better.
Which prompted me to notice, a little late, that the whole time I’d been talking to Cooper… I hadn’t been itching.
Like, at all.
I’d totally forgotten to itch.
But now, as I walked the aisle like a plank, the itching was back—times ten.
By the halfway point, I had to lock my elbow and make a fist to keep from scratching my neck. You know when something itches so bad you would happily claw off all your own skin just to make it stop?
It was like that.
Down at the end, a million miles away, was Pearce. Waiting. In a tux. A tux he owned. Because he was the kind of guy who owned a tux—and the studs and cuff links to go with it.
Pearce had been a math major like me. We got together in collegeafter a blind date where we ate sushi, talked about math all night, and then walked back to my dorm. Never underestimate the power of talking about something you love with a fellow lover of that same thing. I honestly think he seduced me by talking about differential equations.
Even though, looking back, we came at math from different angles. I liked the challenge of how to make the complexity of it more accessible. Pearce, I think, was the opposite. He liked how the complexity of it made him look smart. So much smarter than everybody else.
Our shared language was math—but we spoke different dialects.
Either way, though, it felt a lot like love.
Pearce did not kiss me when he dropped me off that first night, but he did say, and this is verbatim: “I really enjoyed our time together. Let’s do this again sometime.”
Who talks like that? Right?
I agree that it doesn’t seem to add up. Why would a winsome young mathematician like myself embark on what turned into aseven-yearrelationship that started with such a whimper?
Because of my fraught relationship with my absentee father, obviously. Pearce turned out to be the perfect man for all my unresolved issues.
And when I say “perfect,” what I mean is: He was the perfect ratio of interested to disinterested. He liked me enough to make me chase him, but not enough to let me catch him.
And that’s the whole trick to dating me, it turns out: Make me want you, but don’t let me have you.
As soon as you’re mine, I will lose interest. Guaranteed.
It’s a problem.
I’d dumped every boyfriend I’d ever had—except for Pearce. I was always the dumper, never the dumpee. But then Pearce came along. And he was so minimally interested in me that I had no choice but to get obsessed with him.
At dinner, he’d check his phone. At movies, he’d fall asleep. Texts were responded to sporadically. Invitations were deferred. Frequencywas infrequent—because, for Pearce, seeing each other once a week was more than enough.
If he stayed over, he was out the door by sixAM.
