Nate arrived at seven carrying a paper bag and wearing a shirt I had never seen.
That was what undid me. Not the flowers he hadn’t brought, or any elaborate thing he might have said. A clean blue shirt, sleeves rolled once, chosen for an evening with me.
“You said nothing that needed repairing,” he said. “Bread seemed safe.”
“You haven’t seen my kitchen.”
“I brought supper as well.”
I stared at the bag.
“You invited me on a day you worked ten hours,” he said. “I thought we could eat before you started another job.”
“I was making pasta.”
“Then we can have two suppers. I won’t report you.”
I stood aside. He came into my flat, looked at the lamp, and said it suited the room. He didn’t touch its slightly crooked shade. I nearly kissed him for that before we’d put down the food.
The flat was above a bakery which had closed two winters before. My landlord used the ground floor for storage, and the stairs still smelled faintly of warm sugar on humid days. It was mine for the year, though I would be away for some of it. I had chosen the lease because I wanted somewhere I could return to without having to ask Jonah whether there was room.
Nate put the bag on my small table. Lemon chicken, potatoes and a salad in a container he admitted came from the grocery store.
“Good. I was afraid you had grown the lettuce to make a point.”
“Not enough notice.”
I put my untouched pasta away. That small surrender was difficult. He noticed but didn’t congratulate me. We sat down with water and the windows open, our knees close beneath a table too small for professional distance.
For the first twenty minutes we talked about anything that wasn’t the marina. My worst client, who wanted every spreadsheet cell green because red felt judgmental. His former supervisor, who described a seized engine as a motivation issue. A terrible motel outside Duluth where I’d once stayed during a winter job and found the bedside phone in a drawer, unplugged, under a note saying PLEASE DON’T.
Nate laughed more than he did at work. The sound changed him. He tilted his head back; the tendons in his neck moved; I forgot the second half of my own story.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He waited.
“I was looking.”
His hand stopped beside his glass.
“You can,” he said.
I looked. At the faint stubble his morning shave had left behind by evening. At the little crease beside his mouth. At a man who knew what I meant and wasn’t going to make me rescue either of us with a joke.
“You’re very sure that I can,” I said.
“I’m trying to be.”
That answer made the room feel more intimate than confidence would have.
After supper he carried the plates to the sink, but when I said I’d leave them, he came back. We sat on the narrow sofa under my properly working lamp.
He noticed the old record sleeve propped on my bookshelf and asked whether I liked the music or the picture. I admitted the picture. I’d bought the sleeve in a secondhand shop without checking for the record inside.
“There wasn’t one?”
“There was. Something entirely different. A man teaching conversational French.”
“Useful.”
“Not at all. He spends the first side insisting the post office is closed.”
Nate laughed. I found the recording on my phone, where I’d saved a short clip to send Jonah months earlier. We listened to a grave voice announce the closure of an establishment neither of us intended to visit.
“He sounds relieved,” Nate said.
“Perhaps he works there.”
“Perhaps he’s in love and wants everyone to stop sending letters.”
I turned off the clip. Nate was still smiling, but the word lingered between us, too large for the room and too early for either of us to touch.
“What did you do on evenings before you came here?” I asked.
“Worked. Watched things I couldn’t remember the next morning. Went out with friends when someone asked.”
“Did you ask?”
“Not often.”
“Dates?”
He looked at me, amused. “Sometimes.”
“I’m conducting a responsible inquiry.”
“It feels thorough.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“I don’t mind. A few dates. One relationship in my late twenties that ended because we wanted different things and kept hoping one of us was only saying it. She was a year older than me and knew what she wanted. I thought time might change her mind.”
“What did you want?”
“To stop moving. She wanted a job that meant moving. Neither of us was wrong.”
I felt the relevance before he said anything else. He saw me feel it.
“You don’t have to become her because you work away,” he said.
“Good. I don’t have the costume.”
“June.”
I put my phone down.
“I know,” I said. “I’m listening.”
He shifted toward me. His knee touched mine and stayed.
“We were both waiting for the other to admit that wanting something different meant wanting less. I’d like not to do that again.”
I looked at the old sleeve, its bright picture promising music it didn’t contain.
“I had a relationship at twenty-six with a man of thirty who said I was easy to be with,” I told him. “I thought it was a compliment. Then I realised he meant I always made the plans he liked, so he never had to find out what I wanted.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Eventually. By then I was furious that he hadn’t guessed.”
Nate smiled without laughing at me.
“That sounds exhausting.”
“I was excellent at it.”
“Are you planning to be easy to be with tonight?”
I looked at him. He asked it so gently that I could answer without defending myself.
“No,” I said. “I’m planning to tell you I want you closer.”
He moved closer. Not all the way; enough to let me finish the distance if I wanted. I set my hand on his thigh, through the worn fabric of his trousers, and felt the muscles tighten beneath it.
“Is this all right?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The answer was quick, then a little breathless. I liked knowing I could affect him. Not control him, not win something from his composure. Reach him.
He put his hand over mine. We sat like that while the last light faded from the window, aware of every point at which we touched and the places we had not yet chosen to.
“I haven’t spoken to Jonah yet,” he said.
I folded my feet beneath me. “About the promise.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not waiting for his permission.”
“Neither am I. But I need to tell him I won’t keep it. He shouldn’t hear it as gossip.”
I could accept that. An honest conversation between friends was different from a request about a woman who wasn’t in the room.
“What are you going to say?”
“That I was wrong to give him a promise about somebody else’s choices. That I want to see you, if you want to see me. That the business still has three owners.”
“That’s a lot for you.”
“I’ve been practising while sanding.”
“Any damaged boats?”
“One very smooth chair.”
I laughed. He moved nearer, slowly enough that the movement was a question. I put my hand on his sleeve.
“I want to see you,” I said. “There. You can stop practising that part.”
His fingers closed around mine. He looked down at our joined hands as if something ordinary had become difficult to believe.
“June.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t the question yet.”
“I thought I’d get ahead.”
He smiled, then lifted his free hand to my cheek. The roughness of his thumb was unexpectedly tender against the corner of my mouth. I turned toward it. His breathing changed.
“I’d like to kiss you.”
“Then kiss me.”
He did, gently at first, giving me time to find the difference between imagining his mouth and having it on mine. I hadn’t imagined the brief uncertainty, or the way he drew back to look at me when I touched his neck. I hadn’t imagined that I would smile in the middle of it.
“All right?” he murmured.
I answered by moving closer and kissing him again, less gently.
His hand settled at my waist. Mine found the warmth beneath his collar. The sofa made a complaining sound when he shifted, and we both laughed against each other, which should have broken the spell and instead made it ours.
For a while there was no promise, no share certificate, no brother returning from Denver. There was his mouth, the weight of his hand through my dress, the way he paused whenever I moved and followed only when I brought him with me. Wanting him had been an argument with myself for so long that the ease of being wanted back felt almost extravagant.
When I rested my forehead against his, he stayed still.
“I want to stop here tonight,” I said. “Not because I regret any of it.”
“Here is good.”
He eased his hand from my waist to my hand. No disappointed sigh. No attempt to make a little more seem like nothing.
I kissed the corner of his mouth for the pleasure of it.
We sat until the sky outside my windows lost its colour. He told me about the boat on his shelf, how he’d built it because he wanted to finish something whose mistakes belonged to him. I told him I had always wanted to learn to swim the long way across a lake, not just safely between marked buoys. Neither of us made a plan to fix the other person’s longing.
At the door he didn’t ask whether he should stay.
“Tomorrow?” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
After he went, I carried the plates to the sink. My lips were tender. My supper was somebody else’s work. The lamp cast a circle of light on the sofa where we’d sat, and I left it on while I washed up.