“Where’s your friend?”
“My friend.”
“You said you were here with someone.”
“Right. Yeah. Lorraine…She’s my landlord, but she’s cool…It’s a long story. She’s around here somewhere. Rum?”
Jonathan demurs. “It’s a little early for hard liquor. Don’t you think?”
Cece flips her phone over. When had they started drinking? “I guess so.”
“What the hell,” Jonathan says, elbows on the table. “Don’t think I’ve had straight rum since that terrible New Year’s party we went to last year.”
“That was an exceptionally terrible party,” Cece says. They touch glasses; everything is warm and tingly at once. “Why did we go to it again?”
Jonathan scrunches up his face. “That one was my fault. Had to impress one of the higher-ups at work.”
Cece remembers. Dripping ice sculptures, buttoned-up finance bros with their idle chatter, steam peeping through manhole covers on their way home, Jonathan’s arm around her.
“You were always game for those work functions. I don’t think I appreciated it enough at the time.”
“They weren’t so bad.”
“Oh, but they were. They were awful! You’d always get relegated to the significant-other table, talking about God knows what. I don’t know how you did it.”
A chuckle sneaks up on Cece, and she finds herself smiling. “There was a lot of interior decorating talk…wallpaper, sconces.”
“You’re a saint.”
“It was nothing.”
“Work was crazy back then…postponed dates, reheated meals, eighty-hour workweeks. You were my rock.”
“We had a plan. Failure wasn’t an option.”
“Maybe that was the problem,” Jonathan says, blue eyes flashing, “I mean…that’s a lot of pressure, to make things work.”
Cece is trying to listen, but she’s having trouble, visionnarrowing, the room spinning out. She focuses on the soft indentation where Jonathan’s chest meets his neck at the base of his throat. “I’m sorry about the way we left things. I guess I…” The rum threatens a return, sloshing in her stomach, saccharine and perfumed. “I freaked out.”
Jonathan moves instinctually to take her hand but pulls it back, realizing what he’s doing at the last moment. Pure muscle memory. “That’s on me.”
“Your family must hate me, especially your mother.”
Jonathan pushes a hand through his hair and cracks a smile. “Quite the opposite. It raised your estimation in their eyes. My mother was relieved. It seems like you weren’t the only one who thought we were rushing.”
“You mean she thought I was only marrying you for the money,” Cece says, surprised by how easily the truth comes with a little alcohol. It’s satisfying to say aloud what she’s always suspected. After all this time, honesty seems like the best chance at recovering something between them.
Jonathan scratches his stubbled chin. It’s strange to see him with any facial hair. He was meticulous about shaving every morning before work. “Maybe,” he says, eyes cast down in disappointment. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said before, about us moving and starting a family…I haven’t been very understanding…about our differences.”
“Our differences?”
“Where we’re from. How we grew up. I didn’t consider how hard you’ve worked to get where you are, and how you might feel giving it all up.”
Jonathan’s contrition catches Cece by surprise. “Pretty sure I should be the one apologizing here. Aren’t you angry? Upset with me?”
“I was. You didn’t exactly let me down easy, Cece. You just sort of picked up and left. But mostly, I was worried about you. I mean, did you just make the decision then and there? Or were we in trouble before then and you just never said?”
There are so many moments Cece can recall, not glaring warning signs or fluttering red flags but the subtlest of intuitions, so small and insignificant that even now, she doubts them, cannot give them credence; and yet, at the time, they’d added up to something, something big, something she felt she couldn’t ignore. Jonathan’s preference for taking a taxi instead of the subway, his habit of discarding hotel towels to the bathroom floor after one use, the reverence with which he spoke to her father, even after she’d told him how difficult he’d made her life after she quit swimming. Alone, none of it was terribly bad, but it balled up into a collective feeling—a want—to get out, to escape. The proposal and his response to her firing were the last things to tip her over. But now, with Jonathan seated before her, cheeks cherry red from the rum, eyes searching, she feels foolish, like a child who’s fallen for a cheap magic trick. Is she really giving him a hard time about being nice to her father? Would any other woman in the universe judge a man for flagging down a cab instead of riding the subway? Yes, they’d been in trouble long before she’d returned the engagement ring, but none of that seemed like Jonathan’s fault, at least not now.
