He slides my mug across the island without asking how I take it, because he already knows the answer. Black.
“Thanks.” I take a sip. He takes a sip. We stand on opposite sides of the island like two people who have definitely seen each other naked once and are definitelynotthinking about it right now.
Except I am thinking about it. Just for a second—his bedroom back home, the door closed, his hands shaking a little because mine were shaking too. The way he asked,“You sure?”and I said“Yes”and meant it more than I’d ever meant anything. Afterward, the way he pulled me against his chest, his hearthammering so hard I could feel it against my cheek, and I thoughtthis changes everything.
Except…it changed nothing. For him, at least.
I take another sip of coffee and bury that memory deep, locked away beneath fifteen years of practice.
“Sleep okay?” he asks.
“Yeah. The guest room is really nice. The pillows are, um—really fluffy.”
“Good. I just got them.”
We are talking about pillows. We are two adults standing in a kitchen at six in the morning discussing pillows because the alternative is confronting the fact that he looks like that and I look like this, and nobody prepared either of us for the morning-light version of forced proximity.
He reaches for a shirt draped over the back of a kitchen chair—a worn Knights t-shirt, soft and faded—and pulls it on in one fluid motion. The show is over. I’m both relieved and disappointed, a combination I’m going to need to get used to if I’m living here.
Then I see it. On the inside of his bicep, just visible for a moment before the sleeve covers it. The small black outline of a paper airplane, about an inch long, the tail slightly crooked because the tattoo artist in our hometown wasn’t great, and we were eighteen and didn’t care.
I have the same one. High up on my thigh, almost to my hip, only visible if I’m in a bikini. Same artist, same night, same crooked tail.
“Hey.” I nod at his arm. “How’s your airplane holding up?”
He pushes up the sleeve and looks down at it, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Still flying. Yours?”
“Same. Still there.”
The tension cracks, and we’re both almost smiling now. This is us—this is what we do. We find the thing that makes it feel normal again.
We got the tattoos the summer after senior year. He was leaving for Boston, I was heading to UNC, and for the first time in four years, we were going to be in different states. We were at this coffee shop we liked, and he was doodling on a napkin while I pretended not to panic about the fact that my best friend was about to be a thousand miles away.
He drew a paper airplane and slid the napkin across the table.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A reminder that we’re just a flight away. No matter where we end up.”
I looked at the little crooked airplane on the napkin, then at him, and said, “We should get these tattooed,” mostly as a joke. He replied, “Yeah, we should,” and he wasn’t joking at all.
Three hours later, we were in a tattoo shop, and the rest is history.
We drink our coffee. The kitchen is quiet. The kids are still asleep—I can hear the monitor on the counter, nothing but soft breathing.
“Arch,” I say. “How are you doing? Really.”
He leans against the counter and wraps both hands around his mug. “I never thought I’d be divorced,” he says. “That wasn’t, uh—that wasn’t the plan.”
“I know.”
“Bree and I tried. We really did. But for the last two years, we were basically roommates. We slept in separate rooms.” He glances at me. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”
He didn’t. My expression shifts before I can stop it. Two years. He lived in this house with his ex for two years, and they slept in different beds, and he never told me. He calledme sometimes when he couldn’t sleep and texted me about the twins, but he never told me how bad it was.
“Two years?”
“About. Give or take.” He takes a sip. “It is what it is. She needed to go. I get it. I don’t blame her.”
