He nodded once, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I do.”
“Buying a home is a commitment,” I continued. “Bill is making such a big thing of it. Of what it symbolizes.”
“What does it symbolize?”
“Our future. It’s like he’s been waiting and waiting for it to start, and now it’s finally here. That’s a lot of pressure. I feel the opposite—like it snuck up on me. One minute I’m twenty-two and graduating college. Suddenly, I’m thirty, and I’m supposed to be this other person. An adult, a wife, a homeowner, a mother.”
“Mother?” he blurted.
“One day.” I bit my lip. “Isn’t that why people move to the suburbs?”
“Are you . . .” He paused, swallowing. “Are you having second thoughts?”
I folded my arms into myself as we waited to cross the street. To say yes would be admitting the worst thing possible to the worst person possible. “I met Bill soon after college,” I said carefully. “I was so young. I mean, I don’t know if twenty-five is too young to get married, but maybe it was.” When I looked up, the cool expression David normally wore had slid from his face. He looked almost panicked. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I meant second thoughts about . . .” His disjointed reply made it seem as if his throat were constricting. “About the house, not about . . .”
“Oh,” I breathed in a rush of air, too conscious of the flush creeping up my neck. I understood why David couldn’t finish his sentence. Second thoughts about Bill meant second thoughts abouteverythingin my life. “No. I was hesitant to move out of the city at first. Maybe I still am. I love the house itself, but what it represents—”
His hand shot out and yanked me back as I stepped off the curb. “Watch it,” he chastised as a car flew by. We both looked at his hand on my arm, and he dropped it after a moment. “Sorry. Continue.”
With the break in my stream of consciousness, I shook my head. “Never mind. I should probably keep this stuff to myself.”
“It’s not the house, but what it represents, you said. So what is that?” he asked.
Once I exaggerated checking for cars, David and I continued across the street. “I guess I just don’t know when everything happened,” I said. “I don’t remember choosing this. I knew it would eventually come to this, me on the brink of my life, about to dive in, but I expected to be more ready.”
“You keep saying that you two are starting your future together. But you also know that your future? It’s already happening, Olivia. Finding you should have been the start of his future.”
“When you say things like that, I can’t tell if you’re being authentic or if you’re just so used to feeding people lines.”
He laughed, but his smile slipped from his face quickly. “If I had found you first, there’d be no waiting. When I looked into your eyes at that theater—”
“David,” I admonished quietly, scanning the faces of passersby as we walked. His words diffused as much guilt through me as disbelief. I already knew how quickly and painlessly I could fall under his spell. “Don’t say those things to me. Save it for your girls.”
“You don’t have to go through with anything you don’t want to,” he said over me.
“Yes, I do,” I said resolutely. “We’ve put the offer in. There’s no reason they won’t accept it. And anyway, I want the house. I just said I wasn’t quite ready.”
“An offer can easily be undone,” he said. “If you’re not ready, if you don’t want—”
“I want it,” I snapped.
A tourist with an upward-pointing camera momentarily split us apart. My gaze spanned the city around us. I wondered why David didn’t just leave me right there on the sidewalk. I sighed and looked over at him in the falling dusk, noting how powerful he seemed with the steely buildings as his backdrop. As if, with a snap of his fingers, Chicago would bow at his feet and heed his commands.
“What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.
“That the city looks different depending on who I’m seeing it with.”
He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him.
“I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings—the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”
“Reflections?” he asked quietly.
I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.”
I wanted to ask him why he was walking with me after he’d told me in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t fuck me again. Didn’t he know it was impossible for us to be anything other than what we had been during our one night together? A sweeping and powerful force of passion and insatiable hunger?
