Hold on…
I say inside my head to no one in particular, to the muscle doing its imperfect work behind my ribs.
Just a little longer. I just found something.
9
HANNAH
The next two days happen like weather.
Not like a decision, not like a plan. Like something the atmosphere produces when conditions are right, inevitable and consuming and not particularly interested in my opinions about it. We fall into a rhythm that feels like it’s been here waiting for us.
Mornings on the deck with coffee.
Afternoons on the beach.
Evenings that start as one thing and become another without either of us forcing the transition.
He cooks. Correctly, this time, with actual attention and no camera, and I sit on his kitchen counter with a glass of wine and hand him things he asks for and we argue companionably about whether garlic can be overused —it cannot, I maintain this firmly— and the domesticity of it should alarm me and instead just feels like breathing.
I finish my book.
I start another one.
I don’t read very much of it.
The third evening he’s on my deck when I come out after a shower, hair still damp, and he looks up from his sketchbook and the way his eyes move over me, unhurried, warm, completely reverent and it does the thing to my pulse that I’ve stopped pretending it doesn’t do.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, my mouth dry.
Neither of us pretends we’re just neighbors anymore.
I sit in my chair.Ourchairs now. I’ve stopped correcting the possessive in my head.
I tuck my feet underneath me and he goes back to his sketch and the evening settles around us and I think: I could get used to this with a speed that should concern me and doesn’t.
“Come here,” I say.
He looks up. Reads my face. Sets down the sketchbook.
He crosses to my chair and I stand up to meet him and he cups my face in both hands the way he did on the beach, like I’m worth being careful with, and this time when he kisses me there’s noprobably a mistakebecause I’ve already made the case, weighed the evidence, and ruled in favor of this.
In favor of him. In favor of Cruz.
In favor of me, actually— this version of me that puts on good earrings for a dinner that’s definitely a date and sits on kitchen counters arguing about garlic and lets herself want things without building a counterargument first.
I pull him inside.
This is what I’d forgotten.
Not the mechanics of it. I’m forty-eight, not amnesiac. But I mean the specific quality of being wanted by someone who is paying attention. Cruz is… present. That’s the word, the same word that keeps applying to him. Present in a way that makes the space between my thoughts go quiet, and I have a very loud interior life, I always have, it is one of my defining characteristics, but here with the ocean coming through the open window and his hands learning me like I’m something worth knowing I am —finally, briefly, beautifully— just here.
Not Hannah Caldwell, senior partner.
Not the reliable one. The capable one. The one who holds everything together.
