He looks at me with that particular Ronan directness, the one that still gets me every time because most people don’t look at you like that, like you’re worth the full attention. “Since approximately the plane.”
I laugh. He smiles, and it’s the real one, the one that escapes before he decides to let it out, and I think, yes. That’s what I want. That smile, and the man behind it, and whatever comes next.
The date arrives with the particular energy of a day that has been anticipated. Leigh shows up at six with her overnight bag and a level of enthusiasm for babysitting that is frankly excessive and which I find deeply endearing. She holds Baldy and fluffs her hair as she says, “We’re gonna help Mama get laid.”
I snort at that. “Classy, Leigh.”
She grins and I get dressed in my bedroom with the slightly surreal awareness that I am going on a date. A real one, with a restaurant and everything. Out of my cottage and into the city. Without a baby attached to any part of me.
I put on the green dress I haven’t worn since before the pregnancy, which fits differently now and fits well, and I do something intentional with my hair, slap some lipstick on, and I look in the mirror.
There she is. There’s the person who was in here the whole time.
Ronan picks me up at seven. He’s in a dark jacket and he looks different. Not less like himself. More, maybe. The collar of a gray sweater under the jacket, his silver hair and the particular way he carries himself, the way he looks at me when I open the door like he’s deciding something and has decided it. “You look beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I say. “So do you.”
His smile grows. “You find me beautiful?”
I roll my eyes. “Come on, smart guy. Before I change my mind.”
The truth is, I do. He’s all refined features and muscles and there’s something intense in his eyes that just does it for me. Call it beauty, call it handsomeness, whatever it is, it works.
The restaurant is exactly what he described. Warm and low-lit, the kind of place where the menu is short because everything on it is excellent and they don’t need to do too much.
We get a corner table and wine I don’t know enough about to have opinions on and he explains it to me without condescension, which I clock and appreciate. My steak is extraordinary. I eat with the enthusiasm of someone who has been subsisting on whatever is fastest to prepare for two months, and he watches me with the smile that still gets me.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing. I like watching you enjoy things.”
I consider this. “That’s either very sweet or slightly concerning.”
“Probably both,” he says, which makes me laugh, and the evening settles into the ease that I’ve been hoping for and slightly afraid of. The ease of two people who have been building toward something and are finally in the space to let it be what it is.
What that is scares the bejeezus out of me, but it’s also the only path forward, because I can’t stop myself with Ronan.
We talk for two hours over dinner and a second bottle of wine. When the topic of my half a degree comes up, I tell him, “I want to have done it. I want to know that when life got complicated I still chose to finish a thing I started.”
“That’s a good reason,” he says.
“But you don’t think I need it.”
“I think you don’t need it for the reasons people usually do it. I think you need it for a better reason. You need it for you.”
I look at him across the table. “You say things like that and you expect me to just… what? Carry on eating?”
He smiles, slow and deliberate. “I expect you to carry on eating, yes. The duck is excellent. Try a bite.” He feeds me a bite of his duck, and like most times, he’s right.
We walk to his place after. It’s cold and the streets are quiet, and somewhere between the restaurant and the corner of his block the distance between us closes until we’re walking close enough that our shoulders touch, and then his hand finds mine, and I look up at him and he looks down at me and we stop walking.
He presses me gently into the shadow of the alley entrance, and I go, and when his hand slides beneath my coat and finds my hip, I make a sound that I’m not proud of, but I don’t regret.
He doesn’t kiss me immediately. That would be too simple for him. He tips his forehead to mine in the way he did in my doorway two months ago and breathes me in before he murmurs, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time.”
“Do what?”
He tips his head to the side and whispers, “This.” His hand slides from my hip to my ass and grips. “Might I continue?”
