For years, everything felt hard, like the world wasn’t turning properly on its axis. This isn’t hard. I hate that and love it at the same time, but I’m done fighting it.
“I wrote you another note,” he groans as I move my mouth down his neck.
“I’m done being offered to strangers on the street.”
“Isnotthat,” he mumbles. Then he gently shoves me off him and grabs a notepad at the end of the couch. On it are a bunch of lines, half-formed thoughts, and then three sentences are underlined.
Trust
Doubt
Faith
Evidence
I know you will always have a reason to doubt me.
I can’t erase that.
But I want to give you more reasons to let me love you anyway.
He drops the notepad and grabs my hands. “I know I’m drunk. I really didn’t like the idea of you going to a hotel, and what my brain did with that information. But doing things different, yeah. I like that plan. Tell me what you want. Maybe I want it, too? I do want it. I want everything Grace wants.”
The list rolls off my tongue with ease. I know it inside and out by now. “I want to cook dinner with my partner almost every night. Side by side in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of wine. Half drunk on it by the time we eat, and the things that we eat…I want pasta, without a care in the world for whether it bloats me. I want all the fucking bread. I want fancy salad and a big ass porterhouse for two. I want to make those decisions together, with someone who is as into food as I am, because he isn’t hung up on what he looks like. I want—”
“Let me give that one a try. The food. And I want to share a bottle of wine with you.”
“You don’t like wine.”
“That was the old me. Obviously I can drink tequila, which tastes like a cactus fell into a vat of vodka, so let me give wine a chance.”
“Maybe no booze at all would be smarter,” I whisper. But when have I ever been smart? “I went on a bit of a rant about the food, but that’s just the start of the list.”
“Let me make dinner with you tonight,” he says, his voice urgent. “And you give me the rest of the list as we cook together.”
26
Luke
She leaves me to sleep off the tequila, and when I wake up in the early afternoon, there’s a text message from her.
Fear grips my chest as I click into it, fully expecting her to have cancelled our plans. Instead, she’s given me an instruction.
Grace: I want to try making cacio e pepe. Can you go shopping?
Grace: And how’s your head?
Fingers shaking, I type back an affirmative response.
Luke: Shopping, yep. And the head will survive, but no more tequila for a while.
Then I google whatever the fuck cacio e pepe is, find out it’s some glorified Mac and cheese, and tell myself it’s literally, truly the least I can fucking do.
I remain an absolute bastard, though, because it’s not until I’ve read three recipes on it that I’m even remotely interested in this. It sounds like a coma-inducing carb nightmare.
I couldn’t be more wrong.
Grace’s cheeks are pink from the steam, and she nudges my elbow. “Hurry, Luke,” she says, her voice light with laughter. “You need to add the cheese now, and I’ll stir.”
I jostle around her, my arms long enough to bracket her as I grate the block of parmesan with the new rasp I bought just in case the one we’ve never used in our kitchen isn’t sharp enough.
The pasta smells amazing. Peppery and salty, it’s coming together into a dish that I guess I’ve seen her order in restaurants, but never really thought about.
We’ve made something here, together, and it’s kind of fucking amazing.
“All right, I think that’s good,” she says, wiggling with joy. “Let me grab two bowls, and—”
She twists in the bracket of my arms and I turn us around, intending to point her in the direction of the cupboard where we keep the bowls, but she winds up clinging to me instead of spinning away.
She’s pressed against me. She can feel I’m hard for her. Her breath comes shallow, sweet and panting, which only makes me throb more.
“Luke…”
“I’m enjoying making dinner together,” I say, my voice low and rough. “Just ignore the rest of it.”
“I’m not ready.”
“I know.” But that means she might be soon.
Time to learn how to cook a porterhouse for two. My wife wants variety? She wants a partner to bump into in the kitchen, until her cheeks are pink and my cock is aching for more than a scant brush against her body?
Fucking hell, I can be that guy.
I am that guy.
And I’m as surprised as she is.
We plate up our pasta, and she watches me with a funny look on her face as I light a candle for the table.
“A bit on the nose?”
She shakes her head. “I like it.”
Good.
A plan is coming together, and after dinner, when she excuses herself to use the washroom, I have time to really sit in this space that she made for us and think about what my next step is.
If we're going to do this, it has to be completely new. It has to start in a completely different way.
I have to be a new and different man. For too long, I bought into the lie that you can’t change a person. I just accepted that I was turning into my father as I got older. But the truth is, that was changing a person. I went from being a young man who was worthy of Grace to a middle-aged asshole she rightfully kicked to the curb.
I want to be the guy she fell in love with again. Without the baggage he was silently carrying. I want to be who she wanted to grow old with once upon a time. I want to be what she thought I could be. And to do that, I'm going to have to go back, strip myself of everything that I have learned over the last ten years, and undo all of the mistakes that I have made.
The poor choices I have made.
I need to get myself back to that pivotal moment when I stopped listening to my wife and I need to start listening, again.
I need to show her that I will do it as fast as I can. But also, because I'm serious about it, because I want this to be real and lasting and forever, that it won’t happen overnight.
And I can show her that incremental work. I can be honest about my progress.
What about setbacks? My first reaction is denial. There won’t be any setbacks, my grandiosity wants to claim, but that’s not true.
And then there’s the kink stuff, which fucking hell is so hot, but intense. She wants some sort of daddy figure, strong, and unwavering. How does that go hand in hand with a humble man who admits that he's failed miserably at keeping her safe?
The acid churn is back. And I don't like it. But what I like even less is that echo, that visceral body memory of how I ran from the challenge in the past.
I can't run from it now, I have to sit here and feel disgusted with myself and look at that shame and think, you're not going to get the better of me today. I'm going to stare at you, until you get smaller and turns into nothing.