“Delicious,” he says, red sauce on his lips.
I laugh and shake my head.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say. “You’re just so honest.”
Jake smiles. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
His eyes graze my face—moving down to my lips and back up. I feel something come to life between us. The space that was once open, mild, if not inquisitive, is now kinetic and charged.
“Can I ask you something?” Jake says.
“That’s a trick question.”
He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything.
I take a sip of wine. “Yes,” I say. “Of course. Ask away.”
He looks at me. His eyes don’t move off mine. “What are you looking for?”
I blink back at him. No man has ever asked me that before. At least, not a man who I was sitting across from on a second date. Other people have asked. Friends; friends of my parents; once, a local underground matchmaker. But never him.
“What everyone is looking for,” I say.
“And what it that?”
I think about how to say it. Becauselovedoesn’t seem good enough, it isn’t really what he’s asking. He wants to know if I want something serious. He wants to know if I want to let someone in, all the way.
“To meet the right person, to be with someone I want to see in the morning and naked. To not be afraid to have a bad day around them. To be happy, I guess.”
Jake nods slowly. I can’t tell if he likes the answer. He does not seem disappointed or relieved.
“What are you looking for?” I ask, although I expect I know.
Jake holds my gaze. And then I can tell. I can tell he is about to tell me something that he doesn’t want to. People always look a little sorry when they’re about to say something that hurts. “I was married once,” he says. “We were very young when we got together.”
I don’t react, just let him keep talking.
“We were high school sweethearts, and we got married pretty soon after we graduated college.”
“In Seattle?”
Jake nods.
“Beatrice,” he says. “But everyone called her Bea.”
Something cold spreads across the back of my shoulder blades. I feel it circle around and flood my sternum.
“You didn’t get divorced,” I say.
Jake shakes his head. “We were just twenty-seven. It was an aggressive diagnosis. They gave her eighteen months, but she only made it a year.”
I see tears fill his eyes. He’s so vulnerable here. So open. My hands begin to tingle. I tuck them under me and cross my legs.
“I’m very sorry,” I say. “That must have been devastating.”
He swallows. He’s not trying to hide his emotion, but he’s not trying to have them boil over, either. I am familiar with this dance, the space between being open and being a liability. The fine art of dating.
