Jonah steps toward her. “I’ve got this. It was my idea.” He faces the clerk. “Are we adjusting for inflation? Interest added?”
The clerk’s cheeks flush as Jonah smiles at her. Ilena knows the feeling.
The clerk gestures to the cupcakes. “How about you leave those, and we’ll call it even?”
“Hard bargain. Counteroffer: I keep the chocolate–peanut butter, and you’ve got a deal.”
The clerk lifts her chin. “And how do you know there’s a chocolate–peanut butter?”
“Because I know my wife as well as she knows me.” From a shopping bag in his hand, he pulls out a smaller pink box. “We both hate sleeping alone.”
Ilena’s heart tumbles over itself.
He opens his cupcake box. “Congratulations on the listing, and I’m an asshat.”
The ache in her chest morphs into laughter. Across each of the six chocolate–peanut butter cupcakes is written one letter, the sum total equaling “asshat.”
“You’re not an asshat,” she says.
“Jerk?”
“Pea brain?”
“Clod?”
The clerk interjects, “Partial to ‘chowderhead,’ myself. Keep it local.”
Ilena leaves her box with the clerk and takes Jonah’s, carrying it into the small sitting room where they ate all that Gouda. Jonah follows, a hand pushing back the abundance of gray hairs absent from their photograph on the bulletin board. She places the cupcakes on the coffee table and sits on the settee that is even harder than its stark frame makes it look. He takes the chair across from it.
“It feels so long ago,” she says.
“And not.”
“And not,” she says. “Would you do it again?”
“Considering what they charge for a single night, we should have crashed happy hour every week.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” His smile is sad and pained, which is both so much worse and so much better than the expression he’s worn around her lately. That expression has just been blank. Feeling something means they each still care. “I’d do it again. With better choices, though, so we never end up here.”
Ilena shakes her head. She believed that was possible once. Not anymore. “But you couldn’t know. Hindsight is the only way a choice becomes right or wrong. All we can do is recognize it and adjust. I’m starting to think life is one big pivot.”
He grins, at her, and it feels glorious. “Since when do you speak like a desk calendar?”
“Since I realized what life would be like without you.”
“And how is life without me?”
“No one steals the covers.”
“I don’t—”
“And no one complains that they don’t steal the covers. But also, there’s no one to share the covers with.”
“You could find someone else. Someone who wouldn’t mind that you accuse them of stealing the covers.”
“I could, but then that someone would probably floss in front of an open fridge door.”
