I taste the crab cake, and it’s so good I close my eyes—salt and seasoning and a perfect amount of breading all arranged to showcase the tender, sweet crab. “Oh my God, this is good.” I point with my fork and he obliges. Nods his approval. Waits for my answer.
“I know I should say someplace far away and very different, but I’d really love to go to England and see castles. Is that embarrassingly twee?”
“Not at all. The UK is beautiful.” He eats with gusto for a few minutes. I find myself watching him tear a roll with strong, tanned fingers. Everything about him is sure, clear, easy, and I wonder what that would be like—to be at home in yourself so completely. I don’t think I ever have been.
But in that moment, I want to try. I sink into my body, wearing a dress that makes me feel pretty, and the delight of the food, and the pleasure of the falling light on the ocean. Even more, the deliciousness of Ben—Ben—sitting here with me. How did I bury my desire for him all this time?
Moments flash through me. The day in my studio when he ran his fingers over the old windows and suggested they should be replaced before winter. The light haloed his thick hair and the shape of his shoulders and I’d felt a quick, hot awakening. One that I quashed as fast as it came, fearful of looking foolish, or maybe of claiming my own longing.
He looks up and catches me studying him. His expression softens. “Thank you for coming tonight. I’ve been trying to ask you out for about a month.”
“What? Why didn’t you?”
“You’re a little intimidating. A successful artist. So competent.”
“Is that how you see me?”
“Some of it.” Against my knee, I feel his thigh, and the air between us is charged, electric, as if we are magnets pulling together and pushing apart. I want very badly to kiss him. The waiter appears, and we both look up.
“Ready for salads?”
We nod.
Ben says, “You’ll get a chance to travel to England now, won’t you? With Stephanie moving to London?”
I nod, but my stomach flips. “It makes me nervous.”
“What parts?”
“The plane. Getting off in a different country.”
He nods, listening without judgment, which feels surprisingly good. “I get that. Not dismissing your fears, but England is not a big jump.”
“I keep telling Jasmine that.”
“Is she still worried about it?”
“Yes.” I pause, and pieces fall into place. “Maybe I’m not really making it much better. If I’m conflicted or afraid, she probably picks up on that.”
“Good insight.” He swirls a shrimp in cocktail sauce, squeezes lemon over it. “Have you heard from Steph?”
“Not a lot, but she seems to be getting her bearings. She emails, and I know she’s had a FaceTime with Jasmine.” The waiter collects our plates. “I was thinking the other day about how much she adored me when she was little. It’s nice to get some of that back with Jasmine, but it also kills me to know she’ll grow out of it.”
“All the more reason to have things in your life that matter to you. Like your art.” He touches his lips with a napkin. “You’ll tell me if I drop something in my beard, won’t you?”
I grin. “Of course.”
“Are you going to write another book, do you think?”
“That’s a question I’ve been getting a lot, actually. My publisher would like me to, but I really wrote that one because I wanted to have something appropriate for Jasmine.”
“Ah, that’s nice. But isn’t it you and Suze?”
I take a breath. “It is. I’d been working on a comic book about us for years, and it just emerged like this.”
“Well, I think it’s quite a beautiful book. I’d love to see you do more.”
“Thank you. It has been remarkably lucrative, actually.”
“I’d think so.”
“When I was in art school, I thought I had to do everything the way the other artists were doing it, but I love illustration.”
“Isn’t illustration art?” He shifts, and I feel his warm body along the side of my hip. I want to press closer, but allow it to just be for now.
“Technically, yes, but in the kind of art school I attended, there’s a lot of emphasis on fine art, and the only true mark of success is showing in big galleries, becoming an artist people want to collect.”
“Did any of the people you went to school with get famous?”
“One of them, a woman from Omaha nobody really took seriously because she was so pretty and blonde and earnest. She does these gorgeous portraits.”
“And you,” he says. “New York Times bestseller.”
His voice is deep and warm, his body so near. “Yes,” I say, claiming it aloud. “Me too.” I take a sip of water, shift the conversation his direction. “Is it okay to ask about the fact that you don’t have kids?”
“I think we’re moving into that level of intimacy,” he says, and I can tell by his tone that it’s slightly tongue in cheek. We’ve been pretty intimate conversationally for a while. “I did want kids. Never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have any. But my wife didn’t, and she would have had to carry a lot more of the burden of care. Her career was very important to her.”
“Like Suze.”
“A bit, I guess, but Suze had a baby, right? Gave it up for adoption?”
It’s not something we ever talk about, not Suze and I, and certainly not Ben and I. It startles me a little. “How do you know that?”
“Small town. Everybody knew.”
“I guess they probably would have.”
“Well, and her shaved head. It had to have been hell to come back to school with her short hair and that label hung around her neck.” He puts the words in air quotes: “Unwed mother.”
I nod, a wash of remembered shame moving through me. I wasn’t the friend to her then that I should have been, but I also didn’t really know what to do. My own life was a mess with my parents getting divorced, selling the Portland house, feeling so bereft at the loss of the life I was comfortable with. In my fifteen-year-old self-centeredness, I’d believed our pain to be equal.
How could I have ever believed that?
The waiter brings our salads and the conversation lightens, turns to the flower plans for next year, some new cultivars he wants to try at the farm, and the series of paintings I’m working on, and how much fun it is to have Jasmine with me. As we’re winding down, ordering coffees and one slice of their famed blueberry cobbler to share, he mentions that it was one of his wife’s specialties. “She grew up in Michigan,” he says, “and they have great blueberries there, but nothing like ours.”
I smile. “Oregon: everything is better.”
“Agreed.” He touches my hand lightly, lifts it away.
When the cobbler comes, I ask about his wife. “You met her in . . . was it Cairo?”
“In a hotel restaurant, actually. She was on a break from an archaeology dig, and I wanted to see the Nile.”
I want to ask if it was amazing, but I don’t want him to get distracted, and of course the Nile was amazing. I mean, what an absurd thing to even ask. I lean on my hand, watching his face as he remembers. “Why did you like her?”
He meets my eyes. “She was pretty. She had really nice hair and . . . well, tits.”
If it were a first date of an ordinary sort, the comment would be out of place, but we’ve been talking about everything under the sun for the past six months, since he came to work for me, and I know he has this earthy side.
I laugh, and straighten a little because this is one of my attributes, too, even if they’re not exactly what they once were.
He tilts his head, meets my eyes for a long moment, and something new rises, knitting a bubble around us, creating a world that is only ours. The potential leaves me a little breathless, and more than a little terrified. If I give in to all these . . . desires, will it undo me?
And yet, there he is, the Ben I’ve come to know so well, smelling of something delectable I once understood and haven’t forgotten. It draws me closer. He takes my hand.
“And? What else?” I prompt.
“Do we want to talk about her?”
“Why not? I want to know about you.”