It’s not because I’m a masochist. It’s because I know there are things I need to tell her, and if I let myself have what I want most, to be buried to the hilt inside her, I might not say them.
So I stroke her hair and kiss her cheeks until she comes down off her pleasure high. I bring her a warm washcloth and clean her up and let her protest that she wants me to get off, too, and even if I don’t want to fuck her, I should still let her make me feel good, please let her, she wants to make me feel as good as I make her feel.
It’s so fucking hot and I file it away for fantasy material for the rest of my life, but right now I have something else on my mind.
“In a little bit,” I say. “I want to say something first.”
“Okay,” she says. She pushes herself up higher on the pillows.
“I’ve been thinking a lot these last two days, and I realized that I?—”
I thought a lot about how I wanted to say this to her. Part of me wanted to go all in and tell her exactly what I realized when I was talking to Fay.You’re the woman who changed my mind about marriage.
But it’s too much too soon. She’s also the woman who was jilted just weeks ago, she’s also the woman who’s been left so many times it hurts me to think about it. I need to be gentle.
So I say, “I want to try to make this work. Between us.”
I’m not sure exactly what I’m expecting. A confession of love? A glitter canon?
What I get instead is a slightly blank look.
47
Eden
Ihate the feeling of hope that wells up in me.
I hate that I want to clutch his hands and beg him to mean it.
I hate that I already know how much it will hurt when he doesn’t, when he changes his mind, when he takes back the ring, when he ends the marriage, when he leaves.
I hate that even though I’m standing on the edge of the highest, cruelest cliff, I can’t stop myself from saying—my voice filled with hope, like an nine-year-old’s asking her mom if this is the time she’ll stay, “You want to do long distance?”
He shakes his head, and the wind rushes up at me from the edge of the cliff, the vast empty space beyond, but I don’t fall, not yet. Because he’s not sayingno, he’s saying something else: “I want to stay here. In Rush Creek. I have a friend who’s partner in a firm in Bend that does collaborative divorce and a bunch of other family law stuff, and he wants me to join their firm.”
He wants to stay.
Hewantsto stay.
But can he? Will he?
He said it himself—he’s a shark. Sharks don’t live in Rush Creek and do “a bunch of family law stuff.”
How long would he be happy doing that?
How long would he be happy withme?
Before New York would draw him back?
It’s my turn to shake my head. “You’re not going to be happy doing that. When I brought up collaborative divorce on our road trip, you acted like I’d suggested you raise bunnies instead of doing law.”
He winces. “That was before. You’ve helped me see other possibilities.”
“No,” I say. “You’re setting yourself up—you’re setting us both up—for failure. You take some job that’s the antithesis of who you are, you try to yank the city boy out of New York and dump him in backwater Oregon, you take the cynic and try to turn him into the committed monogamist—and in the end, you can’t make any of it work, because it’s not you.”
“It could be me,” he says. “I want to try it.”
Like Paul tried not to still be in love with his ex-girlfriend?
