“Mm, the wind,” I say, distracted by the sudden jolt of reality. He seems to sense it immediately.
“But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t really happy to hear from you last night,” he says. “I was hoping you’d change your mind.”
“Did I change my mind?” I raise my eyebrow, the playfulness not quite coming through.
A little line appears between his eyes. A line that will not take root in his face for another decade, at least. Mine is removed by an injection every few months. “What do you mean?”
I regret my sharpness. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be flip about it. But…this weekend. Will probably just be this weekend, right? I know you think it’s silly for me to beat the ‘but I’m turning forty’ drum, but it’s real. I personally can’t go where the wind takes me. Certain biological things dictate decisions in my life.” There’s a tenseness in my body when I say this. It’s the first time, ever, when dating anyone, that I’ve admitted to the fact that I probably want to have children one day. That, at some point, I have to commit to the idea and stop fucking around. And I’ve never admitted it because unless I was talking to Daniel Nam, it wouldn’t matter. But something about Ellis makes me feel like I have to explain it. That he does matter, a little bit.
He is completely calm and serious when he says, “And what makes you think that I don’t fit into certain biological things?”
The unintended euphemism makes both of us pause for a second. Then I say, “There’s no way you want to have kids anytime soon.”
“You don’t know that,” he says with a shrug. And it’s so easy, so casual that it only reaffirms that he doesn’t understand the weight of these kinds of decisions. Because when you’re twenty-eight, they are still abstract.
“Even if you did, I can’t gamble on the hope that maybe sometime in a few years, the guy I’m seeing might want to have kids,” I say. “It’s a really sobering reality for a lot of straight women. If we want a family, we have to be five steps ahead of men. We don’t have the luxury of figuring it out as we go.”
“I get that, I really do,” he says earnestly. “But there’s also room for romance, for the falling in love of it all.”
The words are jarring, and then the tug in my ribs feels like it’s yanking me forward and I physically sit back to put distance between us. His foot had been hooked with mine under the table, and I pull it away in the movement. Because what he’s revealing is an intense belief in romance—the same that I have.
He puts his chopsticks down. “Listen, I’m not trying to coerce you. I just think that, even when you need to get down to business because of, ah, biological realities”—I make a face and he looks exasperated—“you know what I mean. Even then, there’s a certain alchemy that can happen, and that sometimes it takes time to see if the experiment works.” He pauses. “That sounds unromantic. Replace experiment withmagic.”
I laugh. If only he knew what I know about magic. “Do you think I don’t believe in love? That’s my literal job.”
“Is it? Or is it matchmaking?” He also sits back and crosses his arms. Our food is getting cold between us.
The challenge in his tone is the first real bit of friction I feel from Ellis, and it’s kind of intriguing. Is it about his male ego? Or something more deeply felt in his value system? “Matchmaking is ultimately about love. That’s the whole point. Especially my agency—it’s called ‘One & Only’ because we believe there is one right person out there for you.”
“Just one?”
I hold back from being too adamant here, not wanting to hint at the truth. “Well, if there is more than one—the one we find you will be the last one.”
“Pretty confident there,” he says, a bit of cheekiness sneaking back into our serious shift.
“The one thing I have earned by living almost four decades is confidence in this one thing,” I say with a smile.
He nods, his face softening. “I admire that. I wish I had it.”
“You will.”
“How do you know I’m any good at what I do?”
I stare at him, intently. “Hm. You’ve shown an incredible work ethic and, ah—quick ability to learn new skills in the time I’ve known you.”
His face flames red and he ducks his head down to fiddle with his chopsticks. “Yeah, well. I think my parents would have something to say about my work ethic.”
I tilt my head. “What do you mean?”
The chopsticks in his hands are turning into whittled-down pieces of wood. “Ah, nothing.”
“You can’t just bring up parental disappointment and not elaborate.”
“They’re not disappointed,” he says quickly. “They are annoyingly always supportive.”
“Wow. Big problems.”
He flicks the chopstick wrapper at me. “But you know, they were worried for a while because I was kind of nomadic. Going from one job to another until this one.”
