Page 101 of Where the Snakes Sleep

We have simply allowed ourselves to become lazy with one another.

That is fixable, surely.

Eighteen years should make a relationship sturdier, not less worthy of tending, and perhaps I have been unfair in expecting the intensity of our beginning to perpetuate itself without either of us doing anything to preserve it.

When we were young, we had no choice but to make room for each other.

Everything was new. Every conversation felt urgent because we had not yet heard one another’s stories a hundred times. Every touch seemed to contain some discovery.

So I am attempting something.

This evening, I asked Henri to come to the cottage with me.

No work.

No staff.

No visitors.

No telephone, if I can convince him to leave the damned thing alone for six consecutive hours.

Just us.

He looked surprised. That hurt more than it should have. Then he smiled and asked if I was trying to seduce him.

I said yes.

He laughed.

God, I had forgotten how much I love making him laugh when it is real.

Not the polite sound he makes for donors or the dismissive little breath he gives when someone says something he considers stupid.

His actual laugh.

He agreed to come, so I have spent an absurd portion of today planning dinner.

I bought wine we drank during our first year together, or at least the same region and vintage family—I am not sentimental enough to have preserved the exact bottle.

I bought bread from the bakery he prefers. Olives, cheese, pears.

He was nearly an hour late.

I had already begun rehearsing an argument by the time I heard his car outside, but then he entered carrying flowers.

Henri has not brought me flowers in years. They were completely inappropriate for February, expensive and obviously purchased somewhere between Le Mas and here, but I did not care.

For nearly two hours, we spoke about nothing important.

That may have been the best part.

He complained about a colleague in Montpellier who misused a term during a presentation. I told him he was insufferable. He said competence should not be considered an unreasonable expectation in academia.

After dinner, we danced.

It was ridiculous. There was no music at first because the radio would not cooperate, so Henri hummed a tune for us. I felt twenty-one again, and I remembered believing that loving Henri would be the great adventure of my life.

Perhaps it still is.