“How long?” Adela asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Make him earn it. If he folds after a month, he wasn’t worth it. If he’s still there in three, consider it.”
“Is he hot when he begs?” Hallie asked.
“Hallie.”
“What? It’s a valid question. Begging is a spectrum. Some men do it pathetically, some do it attractively. Where does he fall?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“You’re blushing. That answers it.”
Tara handed me a granola bar. “How are you feeling? Still nauseous?”
“Better. The mornings are easier.”
“Prenatal vitamins?”
“Taking them.”
“The folate?”
“Tara, I laminated the list.”
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
The group chat lit up that night.
Hallie: scale of 1-10 how hot is the beggingAdela: leave her aloneHallie: I’m doing researchTara: Andrea please drink water before bed the second trimester dehydration isrealHallie: TARA WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HOT BEGGINGTara: hydration is always relevant
I laughed so hard I woke Grandma up. She knocked on my wall. “Go to sleep, Andy.”
The next morning I came back from my walk and he was on the porch. Sitting on the bench the way he did every day, but this time he was reading. I stopped at the bottom of the steps because the book in his hands was mine. My copy, or a copy of it anyway, the same one I’d read to Fin on the porch dozens of times.
He was about halfway through, brow furrowed, turning pages with his thumb, so absorbed he didn’t look up when I approached.
I stood there watching him read my book on my grandmother’s porch and felt something in my chest crack open a little further.
I sat down beside him. He glanced up, surprised, because I hadn’t chosen to sit near him since the night on the porch steps. I could see him processing it, the careful way he didn’t react too much, didn’t smile, didn’t shift closer. He looked at me for a second, then went back to his book.
I pulled my own book out of my bag and opened it.
We read side by side for an hour. Neither of us spoke. The morning was quiet around us, birds in the garden, Grandma’s radio playing through the kitchen window. His shoulder was six inches from mine and I was aware of every one of those inches, the warmth radiating off him, the sound of his breathing, the way he turned pages with his thumb. I could smell his cologne,faint, mixed with coffee, and underneath it the scent that was just him, the one my body recognized before my brain caught up.
I’d missed this. Reading beside someone. The quiet company of a person who didn’t need to fill the silence to justify being there. I’d missed it since the library at the estate, the two armchairs, the fireplace, the hours we spent in the same room without talking because the talking wasn’t the point.
He finished a chapter and closed the book on his thumb, looking out at the garden. I finished a page and didn’t turn it.
My phone buzzed with a text from Mary. I picked up my bag, stood, and on my way past his chair my hand found his arm and squeezed. Brief, barely there, my fingers pressing into the warmth of his skin through his sleeve before letting go. I didn’t look at him when I did it.
I went inside and stood in the hallway with my hand still warm from his arm, my heart doing something complicated that I wasn’t ready to name.
That evening I called Mary, lying on my bed with one hand on my stomach, phone on speaker.
“He won’t leave,” I said.
