The Months Between Us

Dear Maeve,

I asked a man to stop offering me the good chair because I wanted to sit close enough to touch him. This is apparently what forty looks like on me.

His name is Orson Salter. He’s forty-three, he teaches pottery, and my friend described him as useful. She neglected his mouth. She also neglected the laugh I got out of him by making an unkind remark about book indexes, which I have been trying to hear again ever since.

I’m renting her flat for six weeks. After that I have a room booked abroad, work I can carry and a life I like. I told him the date before I asked him on a picnic. I thought that was the sensible part done.

He brought peaches in a paper bag. By the time we reached the headland, they had abandoned all ambition to remain separate objects. We ate them before the sandwiches. I kissed him with sticky fingers and asked whether this was a date, though not in that order. I was less organised than I like to remember.

He knew when I was leaving. He kissed me anyway. I liked that he had heard me; I liked considerably more that his hand was at my waist.

On Tuesday he showed me a blue bowl that leans to one side. He made it after his marriage ended, when everything he tried to make looked as though he had done it because he ought. I wanted to keep holding it. I put it down when we began to talk about the marriage. Then he told me why it had ended.

He used to travel too. He began wanting somewhere that was more than a place to keep the luggage. His wife didn’t. Neither of them was wrong. That is an inconvenient story to hear from a man you would very much like to kiss again.

I told him I wasn’t waiting for the right reason to stay. He said he’d heard me.

Then I took him home and cooked supper. He let me pay for the ingredients. He asked about my work and listened to the actual answer. Later I put my feet on his lap, and his thumb rested against my ankle while we disagreed about biscuits.

I want his hands elsewhere. I want another evening in which he forgets to make himself useful and tells me what he wants instead. I also want the room I’ve booked and the ordinary days I already know how to enjoy there.

I thought being clear about leaving would keep this simple. It hasn’t even kept me from watching him walk home.