“At first? Definitely,” she said. “But he’s had time to prove me wrong. And he has, a thousand times over.”
Then why aren’t you fucking him instead?
Mal squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the thought before it could crystallize into a feeling. He felt raw, flayed, and also a bit sticky, and his discomfort was making him vicious. He needed clarity, the sort he could find in a cold shower.
“I’m going to clean up,” he announced.
Jo had the nerve to look embarrassed, as if she’d had no hand in his mess.
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll go after you, if that’s okay.”
Mal snorted a confirmation, then tossed the sheets aside and clambered out of bed. It had been so long since he’d slid out of bed with a new partner in it that he forgot what it felt like to have eyes trailing after him. His last first time, he’d had roommates, and he hadn’t stayed naked long, tugging on boxers and a shirt before waddling to the communal bathroom. And he was pretty sure Portia had huddled under the covers and pretended to be asleep, not trailed his every move like Jo was doing right now. Ordinarily, her naked admiration would have made him flush, but now all of his energy felt frenetic. There was rejecting him because she didn’t feel the same way, and then there was not believing him at all. He’d rather she’d laughed at him, instead of this. Instead of telling him that what he felt for herwasn’t real.
Suddenly, a memory came to Mal, of Yves, his therapist, peering at him over round rimmed glasses.
“We’re doing an exercise today, where we try to step into another person’s shoes. A practice in empathy, so to speak,” he said. “And I want us to start with Portia.”
Mal remembered this session well, even though it was one of dozens, a single point in the extensive timeline of work he’d done to rebuild himself. It was not his first appointment, but one of his earlier ones, attended at a time when Mal was still skeptical about this whole therapy thing, and even more skeptical of the thin, bespectacled Haitian man sitting cross-legged in front of him. Yves preferred to keep his clinic space sparse and depersonalized, so there had been no photographs of family, and the only artwork on his wall was so nondescript that it gave no clues about his personaltastes—watercolor sailboats and thinly rendered flowers that Mal suspected had come with the frames. But on this day Mal had walked in to see a vibrant print of six children gathered behind a seventh, whose arms were spread wide, as if to protect them from an unseen threat.
“Bisa Butler.TheSafety Patrol.She had a great exhibition at the Art Institute recently,”Yves said, following the path of his stare. “So. What do you think was the greatest source of Portia’s frustration in your relationship?”
“I don’t really understand what the point of this is,” Mal snapped. “Portia wanted me to be some big hotshot. She wanted spreads in magazines and partnerships with major brands. She thought I should want the same things. I didn’t. She left. End of.”
But the question had lingered in his mind, sticking to him like a burr, until, against Yves’s advice, he convinced Portia to meet and asked her his question directly. Portia had answered succinctly, with a hard gaze and a tight smile: “You never gave me the space to figure out me. I was too busy trying to figure out you.”
And even though it hurt, Mal understood. He understood that Portia pushed them to take on more clients because she’d come from a working-class family in which fourteen-hour days and six-day workweeks were the norm rather than the exception. That she grew frustrated when he missed opportunities to network because those networks had not been available to her growing up. That ten years into their relationship, she’d looked back at her life and realized that she was living it for a man, just like her auntie Elaine, who’d given up a future as an accountant to have four kids and clean house for a husband who picked the craps table over her in the end. Mal had known Portia’s history. He should have realized that self-determination was importantto her, shouldn’t have let her yoke herself to his talent just because a photography business had made sense when they were first trying to make it out of college. He should have tried to look beyond his hurt andlistened to her.
He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.
Mal let go of the doorknob, turned around, and marched back to Jo’s side, then dropped onto the bed next to her.
“I’m not running away,” he said. “I’m going to go shower, and then I’m going to make breakfast, and then we’re going to continue this conversation. Cool?”
The look Jo gave him was indiscernible, her hands clenching and unclenching around blankets like a kitten kneading biscuits.
“Cool,” she said.
Jo brushed her teeth with his toothbrush, showered with his products (“Good arsenal you’ve got,” she said. “I was kind of worried I’d be walking in to three-in-one shampoo and the sad remnants of an Irish Spring situation.”), sipped his coffee at his kitchen bar while wearing his T-shirt and basketball shorts and watching him flip pancakes over his gas stove. She’d emerged from the bedroom shortly after he’d finished in the shower, her expression pensive. He tried to play Yves’s empathy game and step into her shoes. Josephine Boateng, who’d been abandoned by her parents at a young age, who learned early on that the only person worth relying on was herself. Who, despite the cosmopolitan big-city-girl image she projected online, was sort of a hermit. Who trusted people so little that she struggled to accept love when it was offered.
“I think that one’s ready,” Jo said, appearing by his shoulder to point to the pancake that was beginning to smoke.
Mal cursed, then flipped it over.
“That one can be mine,” he said. “Almost done.”
Jo stretched, bouncing to the tips of her toes, and it took a Herculean effort not to ogle. She was beautiful dolled up, of course, but he thought he preferred her like this, her face wiped clean and skin shining, padding about braless in one of his favorite graphic tees.
“It smells incredible,” she said, leaning against the counter. “Is this a thing for you? You try to impress me with your cooking?”
Mal laughed, bumping her aside with his hip so he could get sausages from the oven.
“If you’re impressed by pancakes and pasta, then I’m going to blow you away someday,” he said, laughing. He cocked his head toward the dining table. “Go sit.”
Jo obeyed, but only after badgering him into letting her set it. It occurred to him, as they gathered around the table, that this was the first time in years he’d had breakfast at home with someone else. Even more since it was someone he could say he loved.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in love,” Jo clarified around a mouthful of fluffy buttermilk pancake. “It’s that I think it’s very temporary. The majority of the time, it doesn’t have much staying power.”
“Okay,” Mal said, propping his chin on one hand. “Explain.”
