“Shh. I win.”
“Yes, Nicholas, you are much better than an Inspector Gadget character.”
Nicholas lifts his chin, mollified. In the kitchen, he tugs a chain that activates a strand of globe lights that run the perimeter of our ceiling, which casts a cheery ambiance. Then he taps a radio app on his phone and music infuses the room while he sifts through pans in the cabinet. “Where’s the—oh, here it is.” He twirls a frying pan and winks at me.
“What are we making?”
“Pecan pancakes.”
It’s barely dinnertime and the sky’s already black. If it weren’t for the glowing bulbs overhead that throw our reflections back at us in the windowpane, we’d be able to see the star-sprinkled forest. Familiar music wafts from his phone. Generationals. Our band. The song playing now is “Turning the Screw,” which I haven’t cued up lately because it reminds me of everything lovely that’s disappeared from our relationship. It’s been a while since we’ve listened to their music together. I wonder if he’s favorited this song before, or if he’s got it on a playlist. The thought of him listening to our band all by himself in recent times hurts my heart.
“Naomi.”
His voice is velvet. I don’t have to wonder if the choice of music is a coincidence, because I hear it in his deepened timbre. I see it in the feathering muscle in his cheek. I feel his atoms vibrating.
He looks sideways at me and my stomach drops. “Come here,” he says, extending a hand.
I walk over so slowly that he laughs. I marvel at the impossible softness of the sound, coming from him, directed at me; the quirk of his lips, the warm fire in his eyes. When my hand slides into his, I’ve never been so aware of another person’s physicality. All of my senses spike, picking out his details, the way he feels, smells, his body heat. He takes up the entire room.
Breathing becomes an effort.
The hand he doesn’t have laced through my fingers lightly grips my waist. The top of my head rests perfectly beneath his jaw, which makes leaning against his chest irresistible. I didn’t think we were the kind of couple that danced in a kitchen in the middle of the woods, but it turns out that’s exactly the kind of couple we are. Two months ago, we would have done something like this only if other people were watching. Putting on a show.
I never want this dance to end. He won’t let me press myself against him so that I can hide my face, gently tugging back every time I try to disappear. He tilts my head up and gazes right on through me to what lies inside. His eyes are bluer than a lake and they’re gleaming with happiness. It dawns on me that I haven’t seen him genuinely happy in forever. I’ve been so concentrated on my own unhappiness that I haven’t noticed his. I’ve been fooling myself by thinking he’s been content all along. How arrogant, to assume he was content with me when I so obviously wasn’t content with him.
Our past is a string of disconnected memories I can teleport across. All of the golden, feel-good, light-as-air memories have been going dark, which has allowed the bitter poison ones to dominate the spotlight. But when Nicholas stares into my eyes like this, a few of those positive memories twinkle back to life and take the stage. When his palm slides over my cheek, fingers disappearing into my hair, it cauterizes a wound on my heart that’s been festering untended.
Nicholas absorbs my attention so fully that I know I’ll never forget how this feels. It’s a peace and a comfort I haven’t been able to find anywhere. It’s how my heart pounds so loud I’m certain he can hear it. It’s how his closeness makes my knees weak, and his skin brushing mine jolts me like a spray of hot sparks. It’s how he knows me better than anyone else, and I never meant for him to.
I tried to keep him at a safe distance where he could only see the decent parts of me and it made us both miserable. I inadvertently let him in to see the ugly parts but instead of running away like I’d counted on him to do, he wrapped his arms around all of that ugliness and didn’t let go.
We’re on the floor, and Nicholas is asleep.
We had a picnic in the living room, the palm-leaf comforter from his bed serving as our picnic blanket. I can’t stop running my hands over the fabric, remembering what it was like to sleep beneath it, next to him. Remembering him holding me close, breath stirring my hair. The memories make me ache so bad that my chest hurts and I want to cry, but I can’t stop remembering. The floodgates are wide open.
It’s warm and comfortable here in front of the fireplace, so I’ll let him sleep for just a bit longer before I wake him up. And it’s nice, this sense of normality, lying next to each other. It’s what most couples do, especially the engaged ones. But it hasn’t been our normal.
Nicholas and I aren’t touching. He’s lying on his back, one arm bent behind his head, and there’s a slight frown in his brow that makes me want to smooth it, so that’s what I do. I think that’s the place we’re in now: I’m allowed to briefly touch him in innocent spots. For the purposes of caring. Soothing. Giving. We’re not in a place where we can take. Greediness wouldn’t survive. Moving too quickly might kill us stone-dead.
I hold my ring finger above me and watch the diamond sparkle. It’s too forward for me to lay my head on my fiancé’s chest. How absurd is that?
I don’t touch him, but I think about it. I think his shirt would feel soft, fragrant with subtle notes of cologne you only catch when he moves. He’d feel like reassurance. Quiet strength. Security. The bright coals of a fire. He’d feel like warm arms on a cold starry night, breaths puffing up white. He would feel like a sturdy old house in the woods and a plaid winter cap.
Nicholas Benjamin Rose is a good man right down to his bones, and that is true even if he and I have been impossible.
I think touching him now would feel like plucking a flower from the barn and dropping it inside a blue-green drinking glass next to your breakfast plate. He would feel like blue spruce and wood smoke. Moonlight and glittering clouds. Pine, my new favorite scent. He’s chinks of sunlight falling over a woven rug, warm to the touch, lazy as an afternoon kiss. Bare, tangled legs, napping together on the couch.
He’s the cold, crisp air in fall and the sharp ice of a shovel’s blade you run the pad of your finger over as you pass it, propped upside-down next to a dilapidated barn. He’s in the trees. The pond.
I imagine him swimming in the pond this summer: bare, glistening skin. Jumping off the weathered dock. The lean muscles in his back bunching, every ligament springing to life.
Someday, for some woman, he’ll feel like parting the curtains in an upper window, dust motes swirling in a sunny room, peering down on the curving back of a man building your children a swing set. He’ll be a thick wedding band of solid silver, the only place on his hand that doesn’t tan in the summer. He’ll feel like two old trees growing together, branches plaiting into an embrace.
I wish I could see inside his head to know how he feels about me. I don’t want to ask, because what if he says the past few weeks haven’t been enough? What if he thinks we’re unsalvageable? That’s what I’d thought, but I’m not so sure anymore. I want to think that he’s here with me because he wants to be, not because he’s measuring all the inconveniences of splitting up and decided making it work is the easier option. He could be anywhere, with anyone, but he’s here with me. That’s got to mean something.