THE RELATIONSHIP WITH PAUL WAS FINE. Nice, even. I knew he was more invested than I was, but he never really showed it. We saw each other twice during the week and once on the weekends. We followed this rhythm week in and week out—never more, rarely less. I met his parents, but only because they happened to be in town and he had tickets to a Mets game. He didn’t cook, and neither did I, so we ordered in. We liked the same television shows and slept in on Sundays. He told me he loved me after seven months, at the Italian place on Carmine we went to regularly. I said it back.
Occasionally I heard from Tobias. He’d send me e-mails with links to articles I might like—never to his own work. I responded back a line or two. “Thanks” or “I like this” or “I hope you’re doing well.” We didn’t ask questions.
I had dinner with Matty a year in. He had texted asking if I wanted to get together. I had only seen him once or twice since Tobias left, and I missed him—he’d been my friend, too.
We met at the Indian place close to their old apartment we had gone to many times. Tobias obviously didn’t live there anymore, and neither did Matty, but we met there anyway. A pilgrimage to our past. He came in carrying a copy of Rolling Stone.
We ordered chicken curry and yellow lentils and saffron rice, and once we’d eaten a bit I asked about Tobias.
“He’s doing really well,” he said. He spoke quietly, like he was trying not to startle me, gauging how I’d take it. “I think the work stuff is really good.”
He didn’t mention any woman, and I was grateful. I wasn’t sure I could have handled that.
“I know he’d kill me if I told you,” Matty continued. “But I wanted you to see.”
He handed me the copy of Rolling Stone, which had been sitting on the table through dinner like a gun on the mantel. On the cover was President Obama. I opened it and went to the dog-eared page, which was the cover feature.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“It’s Wolfe’s credit,” Matty said. “But Tobias shot the whole thing.”
My heart swelled with pride and then tightened with sadness because he hadn’t told me. This was the thing he wanted most in the world, and I couldn’t be there to share in it with him. A thought crossed my mind: that we could have the things we wanted, just not together.
Matty sensed my emotion. “How’s Paul?” he asked. I remembered he’d met Paul at my birthday party a few months back and liked him.
I cleared my throat. “Good,” I said. It was true. “We’re going to Portland next week.”
We were going to stay for a long weekend, explore the city and do some hiking. We already had all our dinner reservations.
“Nice,” he said. “I love it there.”
“I’ve never been, but Paul says I will, too.”
I looked down at my food. Matty reached across the table and touched my arm.
“Hey,” he said. “You know I thought you guys were totally meant to be, but maybe it’s for the best, you know?” He swallowed. “He’s doing really well, and I think you are, too.”
I thought about work, my relationship. “Yeah,” I said. I touched the magazine on the table. “This is amazing. Obama. Wow.”
Matty grinned. He looked so proud. “Pretty cool. He’s doing Harrison Ford next week.”
After my dinner with Matty I thought about Tobias less and less. Knowing he was doing well, that he hadn’t moved for nothing, that we’d gone through this for a reason, helped. I liked Paul, maybe I even loved him. I was happy. I was just starting to believe that maybe it had been for the best when Tobias came back. It was Christmas. He had been gone in L.A. for twenty-three months and six days when he showed up at my apartment.
I was renting out the second bedroom to a girl named Rubiah who was getting her doctorate in physics at Columbia and was never there. It was easy rent, and I liked the occasional company.
I don’t know why he expected to find me there, but he did. I hadn’t gone home with Paul. My mother and stepfather had elected to go on a cruise for the holidays. She asked me along, but I get seasick. People with migraines should never set foot on boats. So I decided to spend the holidays alone.
I baked macaroni and cheese and made cookies. I was just settling down to watch a History Channel special Rubiah had DVR’d about the end of the Mayan calendar. It was 2014, and they were claiming the end hadn’t been in 2012 like expected, but was still coming.
He rang the buzzer. I heard his voice. “Hey,” he said. “It’s Tobias. Can I come up?” Just like that. Hey, it’s Tobias. Can I come up? Like the world wasn’t ending. Like it hadn’t already.
I waited for him in the doorway. My heart pounded so loudly it was preventing me from seeing. He took the steps two at a time. He always did. He showed up with a bag. “I just got off the plane,” he said.
It should have taken more. It should have taken explanation. Dates, times, plans. We had barely spoken in those twenty-three months. Not once in the last seven. But all I asked was: “How did you know I’d be home?”
“I took a shot,” he said.
He put his hands on my face. I didn’t even try and fight him. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“It’s where you are,” he told me.
“You shot Obama,” I said.
He raised his eyebrow at me. He was smiling. “I believe Obama is fine and at the White House,” he said.
I shook my head. “I thought you were doing great.”
“I was,” he said. “But it wasn’t enough without you.”
All I knew was that I missed him. Just seeing him there, standing where Paul had stood so many times in the last two years—coming, going, never hesitating—it was everything that I had been missing. It felt like my life for those last two years had been a silent black-and-white movie, and here he was rushing in with sound and color—making the whole thing come alive. He was my destiny returned.
I kissed him, because I wanted to know that he was real. That he wasn’t some apparition. I had, at times, imagined a reunion exactly like this.
“Macaroni,” he said, his mouth still on mine.
I resented how confident he was. But it felt like confidence in me, in us. It wasn’t just his confidence that I’d take him back. It was my confidence that he had come back for me.
“Are you staying?” I asked.
“If you’ll have me,” he said.
That was all I needed. It sounds ridiculous. When it’s isolated it seems like the most clichéd quote in the book. But there you go.
He dropped his bag in the entrance. He brought me in close to him. We started making out against the closet door. I wound my hands up into his hair—dirty. I felt his move down my back. I’d had sex with Paul for almost two years and hadn’t felt, in all that time, what I did now, fully clothed, with Tobias.
He angled me toward the living room and then lifted me up and carried me into my bedroom. He knew the apartment. It had once been ours. It was ours again, maybe, already.
He laid me down on the bed and undressed me. I was hungry for him, impatient—all at once ravenous—but he took his time. He peeled off his shirt and hovered over me. He was tanner than he had been a few years ago, and heavier—denser somehow. I looked up at him.
“I waited for you,” I said. As soon as I said it I knew it was true—I had. Paul, the apartment, the past two years—they weren’t real. None of it had felt like waiting. It had all felt like the slow slog of moving on. But I had been wrong. I had been struggling against a current that had, all this time, been trying to tow me out to sea. Finally, I let it.
He kissed me, and I reached up and grabbed on to his shoulders. He moved his lips to my neck and I shifted under him as he slid his hand down to rest in between my legs.
The touch of his fingers sent me pulling at whatever clothing remained between us. It had been too long.
“Now,” I said.
He pressed into me and we both exhaled sharply at the same time. He stopped inside me, unmoving.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed this.”
We started moving together. The rhythm of our bodies, the way he knew exactly how to touch me, what my nonverbal cues were. I felt heady, weightless, like I might spontaneously combust at the intensity of being close to him.
“Sabrina,” he whispered softly. And all I could think was my name, my name, my name—over and over again. I was found.
Later, wrapped around each other in bed, I told Tobias about Paul. He listened intently as I filled him in. The party, the last nearly two years. He wasn’t jealous; he was Tobias—thoughtful, honest, sincere.
“Do you want to end it?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. I kissed him again.
I broke up with Paul the following week. When he was back in town I asked if we could get coffee. We went to this depressing Starbucks on Fifty-seventh Street that was kid-filled and loud. I got there first. I wanted to pick the table.
I ordered a whole-milk misto for him and a small coffee, black, for me. I think he knew already. Usually when he greeted me he was smiling. Life for Paul was like the chorus of a song. Familiar and melodic. Never any pivotal moments. No inspiring crises.
But he knew what coffee meant.
“What happened?” he asked me when he sat down, after thanking me for the coffee. Paul was very polite.
I thought about telling him I didn’t think we were a match. That I wasn’t where he was. And those things were true, sure. But they still weren’t the answer.
“He came back,” I said.
Paul knew enough about Tobias. In the beginning, he caught me crying. After sex, sometimes, which made us both feel pretty awful.
“I see.” He said a lot of things afterward. About how Tobias would leave again. About how Tobias didn’t deserve me. But none of his arguments were trying to convince me to stay. It didn’t feel like he was campaigning for us. He already knew there wasn’t much worth fighting for.
I didn’t blame him. He only knew the worst of Tobias. Half truths and some complete fictions concocted in the heart of someone who was heartbroken. The real flesh-and-blood man was nothing like the fractured image Paul had in his mind. I couldn’t hold his distorted picture against him. And of course, plenty of it was true, too.
I left the Starbucks and called Tobias. He came uptown and met me. When he saw me standing by the door he put his arms around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. That was all. I let the sorry extend out. I let it blanket the whole last two years.
We went home, ordered in dosas, and ate on the floor. We were twenty-seven. At the time, it felt close to thirty. But now, here, it seems far closer to twenty.
We had twenty-four months left. The clock was on. But I didn’t know it. There, in the dead of winter with him, it felt like the start of forever.