Lucas and I went out for burgers at a new place in my neighborhood. On the way into the restaurant, he grabbed my hand. I was surprised—he was usually so careful about us touching in public inside the district. We sat at a table in the window and ordered from a menu printed on heavy paper.
Lucas’s face looked shiny; his eyes were bright. “Have you noticed the names of these beers? Buddha’s Revenge Lager? Pond Scum Ale? I might have to try that one next. What about you?”
“You seem happy,” I said.
“I am.” He craned his neck to look out the window. “The moon is so bright,” he said.
“That’s not the moon. That’s the searchlight from the public housing across the street,” I said.
“I’m happy and I’m…relieved,” he said.
I brought my burger to my mouth, and as I did, a dollop of ketchup plopped out of it onto my shirt. It slid, comically, down the length of my torso into my lap.
“I’m leaving Mina,” Lucas said.
I looked at him.
He nodded. I glanced down at the ketchup on my shirt and up at him, and we both laughed.
“You’re leaving her?” I said. “Leaving or left?”
“Leaving, left. It’s over,” he said. “I adore you. You have ketchup all over you.”
I got up from my chair and flung myself onto him. He laughed and held me. “And now it’s all over me too.”
We came back to 1938 House to lie entangled in my bed. I may have been fired from my first journalism job, but I had Lucas here with me, my boyfriend at last. My roommates were puttering around the house, Adrian was lifting weights through the wall—I recognized the grunting of a man with barbells—but I was removed from it all. Maybe I would live with Lucas someday, in our own apartment, and for a second I felt a touch of bittersweet sadness and loss and excitement that I was outgrowing all of this, that I would leave it behind.
“What was it like when you told her?” I asked.
Lucas tucked his arm behind his head. “Why do you want to know?”
“It must have been hard. You did talk to her about everything, right?”
“Of course.”
“Where will you move?”
“I’ll stay at a hotel until everything is settled.”
He moved his fingers to my hip, and then he began playing between my legs. I opened my thighs to let him in. “Don’t distract me,” I said. “I want to hear about it.”
He plunged his fingers in deeper, twisting them around in the way we’d discovered together. “You’re so wet,” he breathed. “You’re so special. My God. What should I get for my new apartment? Are there things you need? A bike rack?” These items came out breathy, and I felt him harden against my leg.
“Lucas?” I pushed him. “But you told her, right? You explained and she understood that you were leaving?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I feel like there’s something you’re not saying.”
His fingers lay on my hip bone. “Technically I didn’t tell her. She found out.”
“She found out?”
“Gianni told her. The man who saw you at my office. He wrote her on Facebook and said he thought I was having an affair. Mina confronted me and I told her the truth. We talked about it over a couple of days and decided we should separate and I should move out.”
I looked at him. What he was saying didn’t compute. Wasn’t the cuddling we’d been doing in my bed, the burgers we’d eaten out in the open where anyone could see us, the new apartment he would get, stocking it with things I liked—wasn’t that all because he had picked me? Because I was the chosen one?
I rolled onto my side, away from him. In fact, he hadn’t chosen me. I was reminded again of that line from The Member of the Wedding, the Carson McCullers novel I loved most. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.
“Ellie, what’s wrong?” he said.
The bed between us was a wide river. He began to cross it, confident of my love. “Mina and I have been struggling for years,” he said. “We went into therapy for a while. It didn’t really help. Everything was stagnant. What I have with you is different. It’s passionate. There’s nothing fallow about it. It feels so real.”
I turned onto my back, and he took me in his arms again. “Let’s watch a movie and drink wine,” he said. “Then I want to sleep next to you. And in the morning, I want to cook you breakfast and kiss you goodbye, and then tomorrow night I want to do it all over again.”
I nodded. This was what I’d been asking for, hoping for, but now that it was here, it felt off. Mina had initiated the breakup by confronting him about the affair. Lucas could decide to return to her and work things out—it would probably be easy for him. Now his choosing me felt haphazard, like a backup plan he had been forced into. I had wanted Lucas to choose me because he loved me in a way my father never had. I wanted him to choose me over another woman. My father had always been picking others, leaving behind a trail of women and children, but confiding in me the whole time so that I felt special, like his peer. But I hadn’t been his peer. I had been his daughter.
“I love you, Ellie,” Lucas said.
There it was. That word. Like aloe on a sunburn, instant relief. “I love you too,” I said.