Julian reached across the console and took her hand. She was so surprised that it didn’t occur to her to resist.
“I was just hoping we could hook up sometimes,” he said, stroking her knuckles with the pad of his thumb. It was a nostalgic sensation, a memory made flesh. “Nobody has to know but us.”
Eve laughed. She hadn’t seen that coming. Belatedly, and with some regret, she extracted her hand from his.
“Julian,” she said. “That’s not gonna happen.”
“Why not?”
She groaned in disbelief. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Just give me one reason.”
“Are you kidding me? I mean, really. How would we even—”
“My parents are on vacation.”
Eve didn’t understand him at first. She thought he was changing the subject, conceding defeat.
“They’ll be gone all week.” He paused, giving her a moment to catch up. “Come by any night you want. Early, late, I don’t care. Just text me and come on over.”
Eve couldn’t even imagine it. What was she supposed to do? Walk up his front steps and ring the doorbell? Stand there in full view of the neighbors and wait for him to let her in? But it was almost like he read her mind.
“I’ll leave the garage door open. You can just pull right in. There’s a string with a key on it hanging from the ceiling. You can reach it from the driver’s-side window. Give it a tug, the door goes down automatically. No one’ll even see you.”
Eve didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a good plan, simple and totally plausible, if the person pulling the string had been anyone other than herself.
“You’ve given this some thought,” she muttered.
Julian looked at her. His face was serious, full of adult longing. It was like she could see right through the college boy to the man he would one day become.
“It’s all I fucking think about,” he told her.
Coyote
Eve had no intention of sneaking out for a tryst with a nineteen-year-old boy whose parents were away on vacation. Leaving aside the difference in their ages, which was a deal-breaker in and of itself, everything about the scenario felt tawdry and vaguely demeaning—the open garage door, the ticking clock (offer valid for one week only!), the whole booty-call/friends-with-benefits aspect of what he was proposing. It smelled like a surefire recipe for regret, if not disaster. Even the memory of their semi-illicit rendezvous at the Senior Center—the cold rain, the car and the van side by side in an otherwise empty parking lot, the brief interlude of hand-holding—made her feel foolish and a little uneasy in retrospect.
She remembered reading an advice column a few years back in which the expert suggested the following rule of thumb: If you’re thinking about doing something you won’t be able to confess to your spouse or best friend, then DON’T DO IT! YOU ALREADY KNOW IT’S WRONG! This was solid, unimpeachable advice, and it definitely applied to her current dilemma. With the possible exception of Amanda—to whom Eve wasn’t currently speaking in any case—there was no one she could imagine confiding in, no responsible adult she knew who wouldn’t be horrified to hear what she’d already done with Julian—to Julian?—let alone the proposition that was now on the table.
Luckily, this wasn’t a major problem, because there was nothing she needed to discuss. She wasn’t going to drive to his house and pull into the garage, nor was she going to tug on a string (the key on the end was a nice detail, very Ben Franklin) and wait for the door to descend so she could sneak inside and compound her previous mistake—which at least had the virtue of being unpremeditated—with a more serious and deliberate error, stupidity in the first degree.
She simply wasn’t going to do that.
*
And yet, for something that was totally out of the question, she found herself thinking an awful lot about it in the days that followed. His desire—the simple fact of it—exerted a kind of gravity on her that she hadn’t anticipated, and found surprisingly difficult to resist.
He was waiting for her.
Nobody else was.
That had to count for something.
It would be so easy to make him happy, which also had to count for something, because it wasn’t like she was making anyone else happy, least of all herself. Besides, what was the alternative? Updating her Match.com profile and getting some professional photos taken? Wading through hundreds of boastful profiles of guys she wouldn’t want to meet in a million years? And the ones she did want to meet, those guys probably wouldn’t give her a second look, if they ever condescended to give her a first. Months could go by before she got asked on a date. Years could pass before she went on a good one. Maybe even a lifetime.
And the thing was, these men on the internet, the ones she was hoping to someday maybe just possibly meet, they were purely hypothetical. Julian was real. He was waiting for her. Yes, he was young—way too young, she was well aware of that unfortunate fact—but there was something to be said for youth, wasn’t there? The stamina, the gratitude, all the clichés that were clichés because they were true. Even his lack of experience was touching, because it wouldn’t last forever. And he was beautiful—there was no other way to put it—at a time when there wasn’t nearly enough beauty in her life.
It was painful, to be offered a gift like that, and have no choice but to return it unopened.
*
Julian was a gentleman; he didn’t press too hard, but he didn’t let her forget, either. He texted her a question mark on Thursday night, and all alone on Friday. At midnight on Saturday, he sent a photo of himself sitting up in bed, narrow-shouldered and shirtless, with a comically forlorn expression on his face.
No one came to my party
She couldn’t stop thinking about him on Sunday. She thought about him on her afternoon walk—it was a mild day, and she took a rare second lap around the lake—and she thought about him while cooking a hearty dinner of roast pork, scalloped potatoes, and kale with white beans. She wished she could invite him over, set a heaping plate in front of him, and watch him while he ate. With his parents out of town, he was probably subsisting on ramen noodles or yesterday’s pizza.
Instead it was just Eve and Brendan at the table, and Brendan seemed a little down. She wasn’t sure what was bothering him. They’d barely spoken in the past week—their schedules were out of whack—and she felt guilty about neglecting him, allowing her attention to drift into more selfish channels.
“Did you work out today?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Mostly cardio.”
Eve took a bite of the pork. It was perfectly cooked, tender and garlicky.
“Were your friends there?”
“A few.”
“I’d love to meet them sometime.”
“Sure.” He took a sip of water and set his glass back on the table. Then he picked it up again and took another sip. “I mean, I mostly just see them at the gym, so . . .”