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“I was also disappointed. I need to say that too.”
He didn’t argue.
“I understood the other night,” he said. “When you wanted to eat without talking. You’d had a long day, and you asked for what you needed.” He stopped. “I still went home without telling you something I’d wanted you to hear.”
His voice was flat, lacking his usual enthusiasm.
“Sometimes I miss knowing my evening’s my own,” I said. “We’ve still got two places, but I shouldn’t assume an open night is going to stay open anymore. I come home and wonder whether I should call you, and then I wonder what it means if I don’t.”
“I miss that too,” Mark said.
I’d thought hearing him agree would make it easier. It didn’t. I pictured him at the lamp end of his own couch, looking forward to a night when I wouldn’t turn up.
“I like having you here,” Mark said. “I like it a lot. I’ve also started treating every free night as one I ought to give to you. Then if I don’t want to, I feel like I’ve done something wrong.”
“I think that way too.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Neither of us said anything for a few moments. I turned up the stove and put pasta in.
“Thursday?” Mark asked eventually.
“Yes,” I said.
***
On Thursday, Mark made turkey burgers on my stovetop grill pan and wouldn’t let me near the onions. The pan spat every time he pressed a patty, and the kitchen filled with onion smoke. I made a salad. Peaches supervised from the little wooden chair until the burgers came off the heat. Then she went back to the window bed.
After we ate, we sat at the counter with our phones and opened our calendars side by side. We’d done it a dozen times since October. This time neither of us was looking for another opening.
“Thursdays,” Mark said. “For now. When your schedule allows.”
“And the rest of the week stays open.”
“Open meaning open. Not open meaning ‘call if you’re free.’” He scrolled. “If a meeting falls through, I don’t text you about it. If you get back from a road trip at four in the afternoon, you don’t have to wonder whether I’m expecting a call.”
“And if one of us wants to see the other on a Tuesday?”
“Then we ask, and the other one can say no without it meaning anything.”
“That’s what we were doing before.”
“That’s what we said we were doing before.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Chapter twenty-two
Mark
Tuesday was mine. I had nothing but climbing with Dana and Felix to fill my evening.
I left the office at five forty with my climbing shoes in my bag. On Sunday, Dana had sent me a picture of a new route under the overhang: pink holds and a long move near the top she’d called rude.
Trier had treatment until six, then an evening at home with a heating pad and Peaches.
“Rude,” Dana said when I walked in, pointing up. “I told you.”
