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And sex, of course.
But she felt like there was more. She wondered what. Because past the barriers of love, sex and marriage, what else was there?
Intimacy.
She didn’t even know what that meant.
Not functionally.
“Tell me about your thirteenth birthday,” she said, sitting down at the table.
He looked over at her, his expression blank. “Why?”
“Let’s pretend we’re on a date. Or maybe let’s really be on one. Because all we ever did was pretend to date, and then we got married.”
“I think you and I have been dating for a long time.”
“Not really,” she said. “We met, and we got to know each other. We meshed into each other’s lives. The first day that I met you, you had been beaten up by your father. But you didn’t tell me that for a while. It was something I kind of figured out. Didn’t I? I figured out because you made some comments, and my dad had heard rumors about him. Finally, I asked you. But we haven’t done a lot of actual getting to know each other. We just sort of...formed a friendship. Then we lived so many years of each other’s lives just being together, that we didn’t ask each other these kinds of questions. Kinds of questions we would’ve asked if we’d gone on a date. So I want to know. What happened on your thirteenth birthday?”
“You already know I didn’t get birthday parties. So it’s a shitty question. And a leading one.”
She bit her lip. “Okay. Sorry. I’m hungry.”
“I can open up a big can of stew?”
“Sure.” She felt like he was being deliberately difficult and she wasn’t really sure why. It was those walls.
“Canned stew all around.”
He got up. Went over to the cupboard and opened it up, pulled out a big black label can of what she knew to be very cheap stew.
“I’ll put it on the stovetop.”
She sat there staring at him, feeling like this was a very surreal version of that magical night when they’d gone out to the restaurant. But instead of a gourmet meal, it was stew, a bit of resentment and a whole lot of uncertainty on her part.
She had married the man. This should all be less confusing. Notmoreconfusing.
“Are there at least corn chips?” she asked.
He grimaced. “Corn chips.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Saltines,”he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“Saltines for chili and stew,” he said.
She pulled a face. “Corn chips for both.”
“I should’ve asked you about this before we got married,” he muttered. “The ketchup eggs were a red flag and I ignored them.”
He dumped the big, block-shaped bit of stew out into the pan and started to smash it down with a big wooden spoon.
Then he took a box of saltines and a bag of corn chips out of another cupboard and dumped them on the table between them.
He started to stir the stew, adding a bit of water to the condensed mixture.
