He pulled me on top of him. We started making out. His hands found my hips and then the small of my back. He threaded them up under my tank top. I sighed out into his mouth.
“Let’s can the movie,” I whispered.
“We can multitask, too,” he said. He drew me in for a deep kiss and then got up from the couch and popped the movie in. I watched his back—I was still wearing his sweatshirt, and he just had a thin gray T-shirt. It stretched and bent as he moved, like a dancer warming up.
He pulled down a projector screen from the ceiling just as the opening music swelled somewhere in the apartment.
“Movie viewing, deconstructed,” I said.
He turned around and gave me a funny look.
“What? It’s cool,” I said quickly, and he rolled his eyes.
“You win,” he said.
The movie was playing, but I never got to see it. Because he picked up my hand and led me down the corridor to the fifth bedroom. A small room with a double bed, blue sheets, and bookshelves. They covered every wall. Cheerful clutter.
He put his hands on my face. He bent me backward, and my head landed on the bed. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.
“Well, look at that,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “look at that.”
9:02 P.M.
JESSICA SCURRIES BACK TO THE TABLE, stuffing the pump into her bag. “Sorry, sorry,” she says. “But I’m back!”
Our starters have been cleared (I didn’t get any crudo), but what Audrey says is: “I believe we began to turn the corner on this.” She gestures across the table at Tobias and me.
Jessica tosses her bag down and runs her hands through her hair. “Sabby and Tobias?”
Conrad leans forward. He points at Jessica. “You,” he says, “might be the only true teller of this tale.”
“Oh no,” Tobias says. “We’re in trouble then.”
Jessica gives him a look of mock anger, and my heart squeezes remembering how they used to be with each other—how the three of us were.
Audrey looks confused. Conrad chuckles. Robert pushes back his chair. “Why is that?”
“No,” Jessica says, taking a sip of wine. Since the baby, she’s started drinking again. She glances at me. “Do you really want me to say?”
I extend my hand. “Whatever,” I say. “This conversation is already pretty deep in there.”
“It was ten years,” Jessica says cautiously. She keeps her eyes on Tobias. “It was a very long road. I—” She exhales. “Are you sure?”
“Please,” Conrad says. “Go on.”
“They loved each other. Sometimes I think that was the problem. It was too much; it made things hard when they shouldn’t have been.”
“Sometimes love isn’t easy,” Audrey says.
“If you’re with the wrong person,” Jessica says. She catches herself and her eyes go wide. She just corrected Audrey Hepburn.
“I think she’s right,” Robert says.
“Ringing endorsement.” I can’t help myself.
“You didn’t think they were right for one another?” Audrey asks.
“I did,” Jessica says. “At first. For a long time, really. But … they kept not growing up. Sometimes I felt like their relationship kept them perpetually the age they were when they met.”
“You were eighteen when you met Sumir,” I say. “That’s not fair.”
“You never got anywhere,” Jessica says.
“Why does there always have to be a destination?” I ask. “Aren’t you the one who was always talking about the journey? You used to believe in things like that—in the flow of life, or whatever.”
“Life is forward moving,” Jessica says. “I’m not saying you had to get married. I’m just saying you needed to be evolving, and you weren’t.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. Tobias turns toward us. “In some ways you’re right,” he says to her.
“Duh.” She smiles at him.
“I loved her,” he says. His eyes find mine. “My whole life—it’s always been her.”
Before I have a chance to let his words settle, Jessica cuts in. “I know that,” she says. “I never doubted that part.”
I think about the two years we spent apart. When he went to California and worked as a photographer’s assistant for some rock-and-roll guy in Santa Monica.
“What does it matter?” I say. “Tobias said it himself: it’s in the past.”
“Because isn’t that why we’re here?” Audrey says.
I look around the table. “I thought there was something essential about us,” I say. “That we were fundamental. That we were just destined to fit back together.”
Jessica exhales loudly. “But I’m not sure you fit at all. Tobias has always been a flower.”
Jessica has this theory that people in relationships are either flowers or gardeners. Two flowers shouldn’t partner; they need someone to support them, to help them grow.
“I liked him that way.”
“And you?” Audrey asks.
“I’m a gardener,” I say. “That wasn’t our problem. That worked.”
Jessica shakes her head. She picks up her wine. She seems, all at once, unabashedly sad. “You weren’t a gardener,” she says. “This turned you into one.”
SEVEN
“I THINK YOU’RE AN ORCHID.”
That’s what Tobias said to me as we lay in his tiny, narrow bed in his five-bedroom apartment listening to the end notes of Roman Holiday playing somewhere outside. It sounded dreamy, far-off. Matty had come out of his den to make food, and I heard him in the open kitchen, dancing around with the microwave.
“You think I’m a flower?”
Tobias propped himself up on his elbow. He traced the terrain of my shoulder with his fingertips. Up the curve, down through the crevice of my collarbone.
“Of course.”
“We’re in trouble, then,” I said. I had just told him about Jessica’s theory. I don’t know why. Sex does that sometimes. It smooths time out. It makes you think it’s okay to be farther down the road, somewhere you’re not yet ready to be.
“We are?” He put his lips where his fingers were. I threaded my hands through his hair. “Doesn’t feel like it.”
“Well, you’re clearly a flower.”
“I am?”
“You are. And two flowers can’t be together.”
I remember holding my breath then. Be together. Did I use the phrase too soon? What did I even mean by it? I knew what I meant. Already, I meant everything. I meant live, work, create, breathe. I meant entwine our lives until they could not be separated—but that’s insane to think after knowing someone for barely seventy-two hours.
The problem, of course, was that I believed I had known him since that day in Santa Monica. I had known him for four years.
“How come?” was all he said.
“There are flowers and there are gardeners. Flowers bloom; gardeners tend. Two flowers, no tending. Everything dies.”
“Or becomes overrun,” he said. He kissed me some more. It helped. “Who came up with this again?”
“My roommate.”
“Your roommate.” He pulled back. He squinted at me. “No offense,” he said. “But that seems pretty boiled down and not altogether accurate.”
“None taken. It’s not my theory.”
“But you believe it?”
I let my head fall back against the pillow. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I think there are two roles in a relationship.” Again, why did I use that word? Relationship. It sounded so clunky right there, stuck in the middle of our conversation. “The person who’s the base and the person who’s the height.”
“I’d never want to stop anyone from growing,” he said.
“But you’re not a gardener.”
“Why can’t we grow together?” He looked at me, and I knew he didn’t mean in general, as a rule. I knew he meant us.
“Maybe we can,” I said.