“I don’t know what to do,” I tell him.
“Sweetheart,” he says. He squeezes my hand. His grip is strong, assured. “Sure you do.” He smiles at me. There is a glint in his eye. “You just do what’s in your heart.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I meet Jake at the parking lot on Ocean Avenue that’s a short walk to Santa Monica Beach. He arrives in the old, beat-up Chevy.
“No breakdowns on the Ten,” he says. “New record. I still have no idea why I take this thing anywhere.”
He’s wearing khaki shorts and a blue long-sleeved T-shirt. His hair looks red in the sunlight.
“Why do you, anyway?” I ask. I shove my hands down into the pockets of my jean shorts. I can feel them vibrating.
He looks at his car—a heaping pile of rubbish, really—and then back to me. But I realize I already know as soon as I say it.
“She gave it to me for my twenty-second birthday,” he says. “It was always a lemon. But I love the damn thing. I like to drive it fast, with the top down, which is a douche move. But it feels alive to me, you know?”
I nod.
“Should we walk?” I ask.
He takes my hand, and we cross the street and walk down the wire-gated pathway to the ocean. It’s almost six and the sun is still overhead, the whole beach bathed in light.
“I think four thirty will be perfect,” he says when we’re down there. “It’ll give us at least an hour, even in the fall.”
Fifty paces down, the ocean yawns and exhales. There are no waves along this stretch of beach really. It’s made for toddlers and paddleboarders.
The sand underneath us is wet and heavy, and when my feet sink down, I wiggle my toes, letting it fold in between them.
I once read that there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on earth. It seemed impossible. It always seems impossible to believe the things we cannot see.
“Jake,” I say. I squeeze his palm.
The thing I remember from the night I met Jake is that I was in a hurry. I’d just come home from work fifteen minutes before I was meant to leave. I didn’t have time to take a shower, I didn’t even have time to be too intentional about my outfit. I didn’t necessarily want to go. There is something that happens when you’ve been single too long—you decide what things will be before you experience them. I figured Jake was a nice guy. That we’d have minimal chemistry. That the whole thing would be a night I could have spent on my couch with Murphy.
And then I got the note. What is that saying? “Man’s greatest fear is not that he is inadequate but that he is powerful beyond measure?” Something like that. I never really understood it, but I do now. Because power is responsibility.
All my life I had been waiting for the note that would tellme it was finally time to stand still. That the long, broken road was over. Thathewas finally here. But when it came, all I felt was fear. Fear that he wouldn’t be who I’d imagined. Fear that I wasn’t ready. Fear that I wouldn’t feel the way I was supposed to. Fear that I’d fuck up even this, this thing I was meant for. But what I was most afraid of, maybe, was that it was over. It’s hard to be single, but it’s also something you can get good at. And I was good at it.
It’s easy to love the things we are good at.
“Yes?” Jake threads his fingers through my own.
Yes, I wanted epic love. Weak-in-the-knees, movie-kiss-in-the-rain epic love. What I never realized, not up until this very moment, is that I got it—everything I’d been asking for. I’d been on the back of a motorcycle in Paris and across the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise. I’d been on the beach in Santa Monica at sunset. My life has been filled with magical moments, I was just so busy waiting I didn’t see them when they were here.
Density, I think. I try to hold on to this moment. I try to fall to the depths of it. And it’s there, in the reflections in the water at the very bottom, that I know what I need to do next.
It’s easy to pretend you do not know while you’re waiting, but it’s impossible once the truth arrives.
“I can’t marry you,” I say. I see myself at the surface—coughing, sputtering—new life in my lungs.
Jake turns to look at me. His hand is still in mine.
“Daphne.”
“I know,” I say. “Believe me, I know. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but this takes the cake. And it’s idiotic, to boot. You’re the one. You’re so clearly the one.”
I think about Jake in the mornings, bringing me an espresso and a water with fresh lemon juice. I think about him cooking for us in the kitchen at night. I think about the way he knows how to fix a leaky faucet and how he now lays my medicine out for me, every day, in a smiley face on a bright yellow plate. As if to say,Let’s be happy in this. As if to say,Only good things here.
