We interrupt this replay of Wedding Hell to return to life in Berkeley, California, where your correspondent is still living in a 500 square foot studio with her fiancé and his ever-growing collection of political and investments magazines, an oversized television and fleetingly a recliner. A recliner briefly saved from a much-deserved death upon the relocation of the fiancé’s co-worker from San Francisco to Silicon Beach, and which is of the filing of this dispatch now somewhere more appropriate — a Berkeley frat whose president found the listing I slapped up on Craigslist.
The chair — dubbed “Harris” by Alex for its tweed upholstery, and appearing to hang together only with hope and Cheeto dust — arrived last Saturday, unheralded, at least to me, and was not the the welcome home I’d sought after my shift at the bookshop. Not that it had been a terrible day at work, but we’re in a bit of flux. At the moment, Ben’s imposed a moratorium on buying paperbacks unless they’re something that flies out of the shop (like a few very recent young adult series) or something a little weird or outre, like ’40’s to ’60’s pulp fiction. The plan he and I have been hatching is to bring the shop up a notch, to make it less of a dumping ground for neighborhood cranks to offload their excess Janet Evanoviches and David Baldaccis, and more of a — as much as we both hate the word, we’ve found ourselves using it — curated experience.
“I want us to be still a little raggedy at the edges,” Ben explained as he leafed through a first edition of Dorothy Parker’s “Death and Taxes,” one of several new acquisitions from an estate sale up near Humboldt a couple of weeks ago. “I want us still to have that feeling that you could walk in here and meet the paperback of your dreams, one you didn’t even know you were looking for. The one you lose sleep over, the one you think of all day at work. But if I have to look at another fucking Mary Higgins Clark I will cut a bitch.”
As part of our redirection — Ben had wanted to call it “the Great Realignment” until Molly shot that down for sounding vaguely totalitarian — I’ve also been given some greater latitude in expanding our art selection to outside of what ends up stuck in ephemera. Ever since Fenn had brought her dark botanicals to Berkeley, I’d been considering how we might expand the meagre offerings we have: plates X-Acto-knife’d out of otherwise unsalvageable or unsellable volumes, old postcards, and the occasional small format poster kept safe in a glassine envelope. I’d gently nudged Ben to let me exploit my background — such that it is — in art history and design to figure out how we could take advantage of some of the wallspace not given over to bookcases to showcase local artists. Connecting us more to the community has been a goal of our well-meaning but somewhat clueless boss since he opened for business about five years ago. While we may be known as the place to get every Clive Cussler ever published for the low, low price of 50 cents, that’s not going to cut it to get people in the door, browsing and buying. Getting Berkeley people up on the wall, I reasoned, was a way of bridging that gap and keeping Molly and Ben in jobs.
The very first fruits of my labor were now on the walls above the small span of low pine bookshelves near the front of the shop, ten woodcuts from the studio of a Cal graduate student: birds against a turbulent sky; a farmer ploughing fields; a surging sea; a woman in profile, kneading bread in her kitchen. Black on cream paper, there was nothing twee or safe about them, even the domestic and rural scenes: each was ablaze with energy, of doing, of creation.
Alex was the one who’d found our inaugural artist: Katya works part-time at the donut shop Al and I frequent (well, he frequents more than I do now, given that I’m starting to think about wedding dresses). Reminded of his sister’s hands covered in stubborn ink when he saw Katya’s handing over a unicorn-themed doughnut meant for me, he asked what she was working on. She was surprised by the question — she couldn’t recall another customer understanding the significance of the stains, though to be fair I know she’s only worked there since September — and she encouraged him to follow her on Instagram, which is where I saw her work when he was scrolling through his feed in bed. (Alex has posted exactly one picture on his own account. It’s a selfie of the two of us wet and miserable during a hike in the Muir Woods that we thought we should enjoy because nature is beautiful but turned into a water-logged nightmare where I left a shoe temporarily in an unseen and very muddy hole in the path. We do not look happy.)
We’d had a small reception for Katya on Friday night at the shop after closing — twenty or thirty people, mostly friends of the artist but a few of our regulars made an appearance, including Cool Prof and Sour Milk, neither of whom can pass up a freebie even when it’s boxed wine and Ritz crackers. A cracking Saturday review of Katya’s work by a Berkeleyside reporter I’d invited to the opening made for a steady stream of new faces shuffling over the threshold, some of whom even bought books instead of waiting around for when I put out the weekly load of free books later in the afternoon. We’re no Pegasus or Moe’s, and I know we’re our hedge fund boss’s passion project rather than a strictly moneymaking venture, but days that hum along like that Saturday bring that sense that I am doing something, that I am for something beyond my skills as my partner’s mate.
And the promise at the end of the day was a quiet evening in with Alex, poring over rental listings and munching on a meal of what we’d taken to calling “Indoor Picnic”: usually a baguette and some crispbreads, grapes and satsumas, hard and soft cheeses, salami and a country pork pâté. Although Alex would have loved to have eaten it on his disgusting wool blanket, I preferred to spread out one of the few things I saved from my old Pasadena home — an over-the-top, practically Trumpian black and gold brocade tablecloth, emblazoned with the monogram Julian had commissioned of our initials, topped by a coronet. It is spectacularly vulgar, and even his mother — not one for naysaying her son in front of me — questioned his taste when I’d spread it on the table for dinner during one of her dreaded (and dreadful) visits. Now I’ll cheerfully sit on it in my underwear and a cardigan while I eat cheese with my fingers and slosh red wine down my throat. That I do so with Alex, similarly stripped down to his boxers and popping grapes in my mouth, brings me even further pleasure.
“Write me a shopping list and I’ll take care of Indoor Picnic tonight,” Al had suggested on Saturday morning before I set off on my walk to work. “No footie today, so I’ve got the time.”
“No practice?” Alex’s Saturday afternoon soccer practice is as much a mainstay of our weekend routines as his video chats with Lucy and his early Sunday forays for breakfast while he lets me sleep in. Perhaps it’s from living with Julian so long, but when there are small shifts in routine I get suspicious that something is awry, that some punishment is to follow when I least expect it.
Compounding my wariness, Alex explained that he was planning on having lunch with Dave, the dimwitted and ineffectual son of the COO. “He’s just dropping something off for me, then I thought we’d have lunch over at Gaumenkitzel.” He popped a kiss on my cheek as I washed up our mugs. “And to be honest, I feel a little ropey after last night. I won’t be on my game.” I was a little dubious of this — I know he’d only had three small plastic cups of wine and practically an entire box of Ritz crackers to soak up the booze.
As a sop to my mom, I’ve promised her that I won’t walk home at night from the shop, even though much of what happens in the way of on-street crime I see reported on recently seems to be happening in broad daylight. But that evening, the last before the clocks went back, would be the very last until the spring I could argue somewhat convincingly that a walk home would at least start before sunset. And, I justified to myself, if I took the long route down University Avenue, at least it would be well-lit and well-travelled.
Mostly I just wanted to stretch my legs and consider in peace the idea Ben had floated towards the end of the day: attending a book fair at the end of January. “Not as exhibitors,” he stressed. “We are in no way ready to do that. But I think you and I need to make connections. Meet people. Learn how other people got to a place where they could exhibit. Get ourselves known so we can move forward with the Great Realignment.” After reminding him we’d agreed to use the label “Phase Two” for our plans, I told him I’d think about it, whether I thought it was any use for me professionally to come along, or if I’d just be there to keep him company amongst strangers. (“Porque no los dos?” he’d asked me with a shrug of his shoulders.) He’s been in this game, even if just for himself, for longer than I have, and I worried I’d just embarrass myself with my lack of knowledge and stupid questions around the very people we’d be looking to forge links with.
Alex’s text came through right before I rounded the corner onto San Pablo to pass La Marcha. Happy hour was almost over there, and popping in for a glass of cider, some patatas bravas and a quick chat with the bartender sounded like a good idea, but from the looks of the number of people loitering outside there was no chance of fighting my way to the bar before 7. I fished my phone out of my handbag to read: “Are you almost home?”
Calling him back seemed easier than tapping out messages for a couple of blocks, and he answered on the fifth ring — far slower than usual.
“I just passed La Marcha,” I said. “Do you need me to stop at La Tierra for anything?”
“No. I…” Alex trailed off, but I waited instead of jumping in. “Please don’t hate me. I got something. I know what you’re thinking, and I didn’t pay too much for it. In fact, I didn’t pay anything for it. I think… I think I like it.”
“Is it smaller than a toaster?” Given the amount of, or really lack of, free space in the studio, it really needed to be.
“Ahhhhh. Maybe it isn’t. It goes with my blanket though, which I think brings it thematically into the scheme of the room.”
This sounded even worse — that blanket is so wretchedly foul, and he has refused to have it professionally dry cleaned for fear it will lose its “Scottish essence” (read: mustiness). “I’ll be walking through the gate in a minute. All I ask is that you pour me a glass of that Merlot I put on the list and I’ll see if I forgive you once I see whatever this blanket-themed thing is.” Steve peered through his living room window as I crunched through the gravel to the garden gate and gave me a quick wave before retreating into the cozy interior glow of the main house.
As I began punching in the code, the gate opened gingerly, just wide enough for a glass of wine to be thrust out by Alex’s pale hand. The backyard floodlight shone through the glass, making its contents appear a rich ruby red. “As requested, madame.”
As I said, all highly suspicious. With the glass now in hand, I creaked open the gate to find Alex, freshly showered (additionally sketchy, given that there had been no soccer practice) and in the new green pullover I’d bought for him in the Barney’s going out of business clearance that he’d deemed “too scratchy” (doubts upon doubts). On the other hand, he did smell delicious, had offered’ me wine and was massaging my neck as we walked from the gate to the studio.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I asked him as I made to step over the threshold, but stopped before I passed inside. Oh yes, it was bad. At some point in the not-so-distant past, this had been a perfectly respectable grey tweed recliner from West Elm; I recognized it from wandering through the Pasadena store with Rachel a couple of years ago as she was furnishing her then-new home. But somewhere between the showroom and its presence in my studio a manchild had clearly slicked himself up daily with cooking oil, sat his large arse in the seat and proceeded to shower in ground up Ruffles and cheese puffs.
“It was free!” Alex rushed past me to sit in the chair. As he pulled at a sticky wooden lever, a great squeeeeaakkkkk groaned out of the recliner and the leg rest slowly emerged to hang lopsided before the seat. Al stretched out his long legs and propped his arms behind his head. “Dave said it was from West Elm and it wasn’t cheap when new. It’s very comfy.”
“When new!” I cried out at him, closing the studio door quietly so as not to alert Steve of the domestic disagreement in his backyard. “That thing is not new, Al, if you haven’t noticed. It’s foul.” Throwing my handbag on the dining table, I stalked around to stand between the chair and the TV it was facing. “We don’t have enough room for it –“
“It’s not an ‘it.’ This is Harris.” He patted his lap for me to join him Alex’s little chuckle to himself for his perceived cleverness only served to rile me up further, but I climbed on the rotten thing anyway. Harris moaned in protest.
“You need to get rid of it. If you want a better gaming chair, we can afford one. Ow!” His belt buckle ground into my tailbone as I shifted on his lap, trying in vain to get more comfortable. “This is a death trap. I’m going to come home some Saturday evening to find you impaled on a spring that’s finally sprung free.”
“Ach, it’s a beauty, sweetness. All it needs is a good clean with that steamer of yours and it’ll be like a new chair. An expensive new chair.” He clasped me as I curled on my side upon his chest, a hand lazily wandering up to my breast. I swatted it away, far too cranky to be petted into submission.
“No. I want it gone.” It wasn’t just the chair itself that bothered me, that it smelled terrible when I sat upon it, or that it was clearly broken, or that it was far too large for what little floor space remained in the studio. “You didn’t even think to ask before you said yes. I thought… I thought we were in this together. No surprises.”
“Even for just a chair?” Alex stroked his cheek slowly on the crown of my head. Canny boy, he knows how being close to him, the feel of my body upon his as our breathing synchronizes without thought is enough to drag me out of my clear exasperation. The volume was turning down already on my anger.
“Yes.” I let his hand drift back up to my chest. “It was kind of Dave to think of us, but he knows we can afford new. Why did he bring it here?”
Alex shifted beneath me. “Your hipbone is sticking into me, Mel. Let’s eat.” With a gentle push from Al, I was on my feet again. “If you give me a hand, we can push Harris into the garden and spread out that hideous tablecloth for a proper Indoor Picnic.”
I’d expected more of a fight, though whether that was from my previous dealings with Julian — who would never have been gainsayed in similar circumstances, though I couldn’t imagine him doing anything other than recoil in disgust if he encountered Harris — I wasn’t completely sure. When he feels strongly about something — a person’s behavior, a particular item of clothing, a song, politics — there’s no mistaking Alex’s intentions. (It’s also why he and Fenn are always either in lockstep or at loggerheads, as there is no one, even me I think, for whom he has such a passionate love, even if it is not a romantic one.) That there was simply no resistance was unexpected.
“Does that mean no more Death Trap?” I was already opening the door to the garden before he changed his mind.
“Harris. And yes. No chair is worth fighting for over you, my little red hen.” (He’s taken to calling me this recently, after Amanda convinced him I was being quite silly insisting I was a strawberry blonde rather than a ginger.) “Now get your arse over here and help me get this death trap outside. I always wanted to give our neighborhood raccoons a better place to sleep anyway.”
With a good deal of grunting and a near-miss on gouging the doorframe, we pushed it out onto the deck, next to the green Adirondack chairs. “Al,” I panted, catching my breath. “Will you please tell me why Dave was offloading this anyway?”
Brushing his hands on his jeans, he sighed heavily. “Go wash your hands and get the tablecloth and I’ll gather dinner. I have some news.”
“News? Sounds grim.” I tried to sound breezy as I scrubbed at my hands, but my words wore the anxiety that began to burble in my gut. The tablecloth floated down on the floor after a brisk shaking. On its surface, Alex laid out two plates, four knives — two fruit, two cheese — and a bowl full of grapes and Fuji apples. As I snatched pillows from the sleeping nook to lounge against, he juggled a cheeseboard and a small plate on which he balanced slices of dried sausage and a thick tranche of duck terrine. With the baguette he’d picked up from Acme and some stoned wheat crackers added to our provisions, Indoor Picnic could commence.
I reclined on a large blue bolster — the one I’d never managed to get Alex to actually used on his bed in his old place in Cow Hollow — as Al made me a plate. He took his time, choosing what he thought were the nicest grapes, carefully pulling out a hefty section of the terrine, smearing some Coulommiers inside a chunk of the baguette. I poured him a glass from the bottle of Merlot and waited for him to say something, anything, though I knew he was not-so-secretly enjoying holding back on sharing whatever nugget of information he kept from me. I knew this game, and it isn’t a mean one: he just enjoys the tease of me tugging the truth from him.
I munched thoughtfully on the improvised cheese sandwich as I watched him preparing his own plate, sometimes licking a finger while he stacked crackers with sausage. His black curls occasionally fell in his eyes as he leaned over his work, and he brushed them aside, reminding me he’s overdue for a haircut. When he got to whistling “My Favorite Things,” though, I’d waited enough. I cracked first. As I usually do.
“Come on, Alex,” I pleaded, tugging on the sleeve of the (admittedly a little scratchy) sweater. “Spill.”
“Here, have a taste of this sausage, lovely. Spanish chorizo.” He popped a large piece in my mouth, presumably so I couldn’t speak while he said his piece. “Dave is leaving the Bay Area.”
“Leaving?” I mumbled through the truly quite delicious sausage. “Why is the COO’s son quitting? Was he fired?”
“Fired? Ha!” Al snorted. “He’s getting promoted. Head of Financial Modelling down in Santa Monica.”
I chewed slowly on the sausage, the spicy heat exacerbating how warm with dread I was already feeling. “Santa Monica?” I gulped down the chorizo. “Since when has there been a Santa Monica office?”
“Since this week, apparently.” He popped a grape in his mouth. “First most of us in our department heard of it was when we had a department meeting on Tuesday. Didn’t think much of it until yesterday when Dave pulled Zeke and me into a meeting room and told us about his promotion. They’re trying to get us plugged into what’s going on down in Silicon Beach, to ‘develop synergies,’ as they told us in the meeting.” Alex pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted his eyes. “And, um, there’s more. Would you like some of this terrine?” He released his grip from his face and slathered a thick slab on a cracker, commanding me to open my mouth. I refused, taking it from his hand instead.
“More?” I inquired, breaking a corner off the cracker. “What kind of ‘more’?”
Alex slouched further down on the pile of pillows propping him up, so that he was nearly prone, his legs stretched out to cut the distance between us. He prodded the sole of my foot with his big toe. “They want me to fly down next Tuesday for a couple of days. Just to see what the new team needs. Hold Dave’s hand a little, you know. I’m kind of the Dave-whisperer.” He brought one knee up and began jostling it up and down in a rapid beat. What are you hiding, Alexander Carr?
I plinked the cracker down on my plate like a mah-jongg tile. “We don’t keep secrets, do we?” This was a terribly hypocritical question to ask of him given my own subterfuges of only a few weeks before, back in Sussex and Scotland. The best way, I knew from experience, to peel the truth off of him was to dangle a little something he might want: a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit (currently banished from his diet, as he’s still laboring under the misconception that he’s put on weight — honestly, he could stand to gain a few pounds, which is why I encourage his doughnut fixation), or most deviously and only as a last resort, the promise of sex. Weaponized sex, I knew from experience with Julian, was a bit of a powder keg that might blow up when least expected. But when applied judiciously, it provided immediate results.
Before I shook some common sense into myself, I rose from the ghastly tablecloth and performed a sorry little three step strut to where he lay back. “Aw, Mel,” he sighed. “No.”
I kneeled down, straddling his chest. “No? No secrets? Or no need?” I purred. “My Alex has no need for me?” I leaned over, propping myself over him with my elbows, and glad of the pushups I’d been doing recently to give me the upper body strength to suspend myself above him long enough for this to look enticing without collapsing on him. (This had happened before, my pushup tumbling into a push-out of the air in his lungs — “uuumppphhhh.”)
“Sweetness. Honey girl. Of course I need you.” He lifted his head for a kiss but I dodged his lips.
“No kisses, Alexander.” I waggled a finger at him before drawing back on my haunches slightly to give my arms a break, but I let him work open the little red heart-shaped buttons on my cardigan.
“Mmmmm, no vest underneath,” he murmured as he got to the third button from the bottom.
Before he got to the last one, I biffed his hand away and sat up straight. “Why are you really going to Santa Monica?”
“I… aw, fuck, Mel. They might need me to join the team down there.” His long arm looped behind me and pulled me down to his chest; my cheek itched where it rested on his scratchy pullover. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew more.”
Nothing. I felt… nothing. No, that’s not right. I felt something, something familiar, the bite of “I’m doing this for your own good” I’d known with Julian. Because I was too delicate, too sensitive, too bound to get upset or angry at a developing truth, it could be concealed from me until it was a fait accompli and far too late for me to have a say in. “That’s how it’s going to be, Liss,” Julian would tell me as he presented an unpalatable decision he’d made that affected me. “Too late to change course. No need to be upset when there’s nothing to do to change it.”
Alex is a less slippery fish than Jules, though, and far easier to read. Extracting the truth before any finality was imposed upon me did not draw the sting, however. The crabbed pain of fear still radiated from neck into my torso. That he’d dissembled to spare my feelings didn’t impress me as it once might have. Blustery rage at every man who’d ever thought he knew how best to protect me from the wolfishness of the world — my father, Sean, Josh, and Julian, Julian, a thousand million times Julian — burst from the trinkety box I’d pushed it into for years, where it had built up in layers of sedimentary fury.
“Fuck you, Al.” With a shove at his chest, I wriggled from his arms and sprang to my feet. “Fuck. You.”
One of the problems inherent in living in a studio with another person is that it is quite difficult to be together and yet apart when you need to be. To seek seclusion in the only ostensibly private portion of the space requires you to sit on the toilet or lie in the tub, which just feels ludicrous. My other option in such moments is the sleeping nook, which provides a slightly more dignified location, but there one is sequestered only by stiff blue taffeta from the rest of the room. I went with the nook, and drew the curtain closed, each brass ring clinking as it passed over the seam in the rod.
“Don’t be like that, Mel. Please.” A shadowy Alex-outline loomed before the curtain before it dropped lower to sit. Through the gap at the curtain’s bottom, I could see his stockinged feet side by side, pointing towards me.
“Fuck you. You were, what, just going to let me know if it did happen? And then what?” I rubbed my finger along the line of wainscotting on the wall beside me. “I’m just supposed to say, ‘Oh, that’s fine, I’ll just leave my life here in Berkeley and everything I have built up on my own for the past year to go back to LA’ like I have no choice?”
Al’s fingers started to pull at the curtain but I slapped them away. “Sweetness,” he implored. “Melissa. Of course you have a choice. I don’t expect you to come with me — if I even have to go at all. It’s your decision.”
“HA!” I shouted. “Some choice! I get to stay here, and go back to living on my own even though we’re nominally engaged now –“
“Nominally?” Alex sounded confused. “What happened at my house then? I thought I proposed to you and you said yes. I gave you my great-grandmother’s bracelet.”
“What about my ring?” I felt churlish for mentioning it — my continued lack of a ring shouldn’t have meant much, but Julian has been sending me nasty little texts asking me if I have my ring yet. And each one I read — and I should not read them, but I do — makes my finger feel lighter and lighter.
“That’s low, my love. And I know where that comes from, don’t think I don’t because I’ve been hearing it from Fenn, too.” His hand tugged again at the taffeta but I punched through the curtain to swat it away.
“Fine, I’m sorry,” I mumbled. (And I was.) “So when you have to leave –“
“If I have to leave. If work says I have to go, love, I have to go. I have no choice — that’s the terms of the visa. I go where they tell me or I’m on the next plane back to London. I can’t just quit and look for a new job up here.” His fingers waggled under the curtain, but I didn’t have it in me to stop him this time. “I don’t want to leave you here, but it’s your choice. If you even have to make it.”
I let him pull open the curtain and climb in the nook next to where I was now lying on the double bed, let him crook his long body around mine. “Alex, I don’t want to go,” I confessed. “But I don’t want to be here alone.”
Outside, Berkeley, Saturday night. Slamming car doors of Doordash delivery drivers, Charlie Mingus playing from our neighbors’ place to the left, the sounds of a post-midterm party just cracking into form from the grad student house to our right. I don’t want to leave.
“If you’re looking to me to force your hand, I won’t.” A brush of his lips on my ear. “You’ve had man after bloody man telling you what you can and cannot do, who you must and must not be. I want you with me, but I don’t get to choose for you. And of course, it might not happen.”
“How do I know,” I whispered, “if I’m choosing to please you or myself?”
“Why don’t we wait and see?” His hand slipped inside my unbuttoned cardigan and rested on top of my heart. In, out, in, out, our breathing slid into synchrony again. Together, apart, together, apart.
***
It once seemed that we would never have any time, that what time we could ascribe to an “us” would only ever be those three weeks when we were kids, and the one brief interlude we had in Seattle, before I let Julian take me back. And now there seems like there’s more than enough, and will always be more than enough. A surfeit of days and weeks for Dave to realize he didn’t need Al around to whisper him into the appearance of competency.
And then there wasn’t. Alex’s two days in Santa Monica became three, became four. “It’s meeting after bloody meeting,” he explained in a Hangouts call on the first night away. “Barebones operation down here, couple of devs, one other quant guy right now, some analysts. The portfolio manager hasn’t even joined yet. Still manning up. Dave’s a bit in over his head, but I expect once he gets settled in, he won’t need to lean on me so much. They’re all in with this push though, so it will be a proper team soon enough.”
“Did Jenn call?” A brief heads up that Al was in town to help launch a new location was all it took for her to start fantasizing about us moving into the new complex next door to hers, even when I stressed it was only an outside chance he’d have to move.
“Aye, lass.” I do love it when he pours on a cod-Scottish accent; he rarely sounds even slightly north of Westminster, except when he’s a bit drunk. (Or a lot drunk.) “Tomorrow night, Chez Jay.” Shutting his eyes briefly, he rubbed his jaw. “Lovely place, this town. Not like Burbank at all. Gets a bit chilly here at the seaside, going to need a jumper tomorrow. You’ll fit right in, if you want to.”
In that moment, I knew. I knew even though he wouldn’t know for certain until Sunday, when we were sitting around watching Constantine (again), good-naturedly bickering about what was the best Keanu Reeves movie. (I voted for Bill and Ted, he maintains it’s the first John Wick film.) I knew when the screen of his phone flashed up “TREVOR” — only his boss’s boss’s name is entered in all caps in contacts. I knew when the words he said after, “Hi Trevor” were “Okay… Okay… I see… Wow! Of course. When? … I see. That’s fine.”
When he disconnected, and kissed my forehead, I knew. “Ah, sweetness,” he said. “You know.”
I knew. “How soon?” I mirrored his kiss, and let myself sink into the embrace he offered.
“Middle of January.”
And it is my choice now: together, apart, together, apart.
meandering again 