The Lemon Cake

Felix arrived at six on Saturday with two paper parcels and no tools.

“I brought supper,” he said. “I paid someone else to make it.”

“You think I only invite you in when something’s broken.”

“I think we’re learning.”

I moved aside. He came through the shop, stopped before the repaired rail and gave it a discreet professional glance. Six coats hung on it. I had already checked the fix twice myself.

“No inspection,” I told him.

“I didn’t touch it.”

“Your eyes did.”

He raised the parcels. “These are all I brought.”

I locked the door and led him upstairs. My flat was one room deep, with a narrow kitchen at the far end. The table had been covered with placement forms that morning. I had moved them to the shelf before he came, then put them back, then moved them again. In the end I left the acceptance letter where it was, beneath the bowl of pears. Hiding it would not make the journey shorter.

Felix put the parcels down. One held hot rice and vegetables. The other held a lemon cake cut into two untidy pieces.

“Did you choose the cake?” I asked.

“I asked what they had left.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I saw it and wanted you to have it. Is that closer?”

“Much.”

We ate with the window open to the rain. Felix told me his father had finally agreed that the radio could go on a freestanding shelf; no drilling into the wall, no evening lost to a fix neither of them wanted. I told him about a client who had asked me to shorten a dress without changing the length. The request had meant she wanted it to fall differently around her knees. Once I asked the right question, it took me fifteen minutes.

“Your work is mostly finding out what people mean,” Felix said.

“So is yours.”

“Mine has measurements.”

“That hasn’t stopped you guessing.”

He looked at me over the rim of his glass. I thought of the restaurant, the cinema window, the kiss I had wanted badly enough to refuse until I knew I could say yes for myself.

I had said to him, I’ll close the shop at six. I had not said come upstairs for supper, but he had brought it anyway, trusting that I could tell him if I preferred something else. It pleased me to discover I did not.

After we ate, he washed the two forks while I put the plates away. I watched him turn the tap off between rinses. His sleeves were rolled back, exposing the pale scar below his left elbow. He had got it years ago on a job he insisted had been safe until he tried to save a piece of wood that should have been discarded. I knew the story because I had heard him tell it three different ways. I had never touched the scar.

“What?” he asked.

“I was looking at your arm.”

“I gathered that.”

“I’ve known you eleven years and I’m still finding places I haven’t looked at properly.”

He put the last fork on the draining board. “Is that what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

He did not turn around at once. When he did, I could see the effort he was making not to reach for me simply because I had told him I wanted to look.

“I didn’t mean only your arm,” I said.

“I know.”

We stood in the narrow space between the sink and the table. The placement letter was behind him. The rest of my flat was behind me. There was no emergency to blame for our being there together, no broken rail and no rain to turn a decision into an accident.

“I stopped you last night because I was afraid of the morning after,” I said.

“You can still stop me.”

“I know. Will you come closer?”

He did, slowly enough that I could have changed my mind. I reached for his hand first. It was warm from the water. He held it, waiting, and I used my other hand to bring his face toward mine.

“May I kiss you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

His answer was quiet. The first touch of his mouth was quieter. I had expected a jolt, some proof that so much wanting could be resolved in a second. Instead I knew the shape of him and did not know this shape at all. He moved back a fraction and looked at me.

“Again?” he asked.

“Please.”

This time I pulled him close. His hand settled at my waist. I felt the seam of my dress beneath his fingers, the one I had let out for myself. He kissed me until I forgot to be surprised and remembered to breathe against his cheek. When I stepped back, it was because I wanted to see his face. The look on it almost sent me forward again.

“You knew,” I said.

“I hoped.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I keep having to.”

I put my forehead against his shoulder and laughed. I was happy in a way that made me feel unguarded, as though the windows were open in every room. His hand moved once along my back and rested there. I could have stayed until morning in the safety of that pause.

Felix was the one who said, “Nina.”

I looked up. “What is it?”

“I want to tell you what I want while I can still say it without pretending this kiss promised me anything.”

I let him go so that he could. The kitchen was very small. The space between us was not.

“All right.”

“I want to go out with you. I want ordinary days with you as well as tonight.”

“We are going out,” I said. “We went out yesterday.”

“For eight weeks we can keep doing that without deciding how it works afterward. I don’t want to get on with it by accident.”

I looked toward the shelf. He followed my glance, then shook his head.

“Take the placement. I mean that. I’m not asking you to choose between the work and me.”

“You might be asking for a promise I don’t know how to keep from another country.”

“I’m asking whether you want to try to make one with me. Something we could each actually do. Calls. Visits if we can afford them. Room for the work we already have.”

“And if I’m terrible at distance?”

“Then we say so. I don’t need you to be good at something you haven’t done.”

“You sound very reasonable.”

“I’m frightened,” he said. “Being reasonable is all I’ve got left.”

That was the thing about Felix. He could stand in a room beside a person he wanted and tell the truth before he knew whether the truth would cost him the room. I had called him steady because it let me avoid calling him brave.

“I don’t want tonight to be a farewell present,” he said. “If that’s all you can offer, tell me, and we can stop here. I won’t ask you to pay for going with whatever happens between us.”

I thought of how his hand had waited on the table on Wednesday. How I had let myself want him more because he could say no and because he could hear mine. I wanted to pull him back into the kiss and postpone this. He would have kissed me. Neither of us would have been fooled by it.

“I want more than one night,” I said.

His shoulders eased. Then he waited. I had given him a want, not a choice.

“I don’t know if I can promise the shape you’re asking for,” I said. “When I applied for the placement, I thought being away would give me a clean line between the life I’d had and the one I was building. You’ve always been the part I assumed would still be here.”

“I will be here. I have work, and my father, and a flat full of things I keep meaning to throw out.”

“I know. I made your life sound like a room I could leave and come back to exactly as I left it.”

He looked down at our hands. I had taken his again without noticing. He did not let go, but he did not use the grip to hold me there.

“I’ve helped you think that,” he said. “I liked being the person you could count on. I didn’t always ask whether I was choosing it freely.”

There was relief in his admitting that. There was grief too, for the years we could not go back and live differently.

“If I can’t give you this,” I asked, “can we be friends?”

“Yes. Not immediately as we were this morning. I would need some room.”

I had asked him for the truth. It hurt to hear it and made me trust him more.

“I don’t want you to wait while I make a list and decide how much of you fits on it,” I said.

“Then don’t make me wait for the sake of being kind. Take the time you need for an answer you can mean.”

The rain had stopped. Below us a customer came to the shop door, saw the closed sign and moved on. Felix looked at the clock. It was later than either of us had noticed.

“I should go,” he said. “I don’t want you to wake up feeling that I stayed until you gave me an answer.”

He took his coat from the chair. I almost offered to button it properly. Instead I stood with him at the door and let him manage the buttons himself.

“I’ll come to the workshop tomorrow,” I said. “Eight thirty. If that works.”

“It does.”

“I want to answer you there.”

“All right.”

He kissed my cheek, a kiss I could have refused and did not, then went down the stairs. I watched until the front door closed. In the room behind me the cake was unfinished. The acceptance letter lay beside it, the two things I wanted occupying the same small table.

I had spent eleven years treating Felix as the one part of my life I did not have to choose. In the morning I would have to choose him, or let him have the freedom of not being chosen.