You had to think so much about food when you were with another person. You couldn’t just eat celery and cream cheese all day. Or the same kind of bagel sandwich six meals in a row.
Enoch liked breakfast. He took breaks for lunch. He made dinner. Every meal was a separate event that he looked forward to and put effort into.
Corinne was starting to feel self-conscious about it. Selfish. Alicia and her pizza stones had never made Corinne feel like a child, but Enoch and his crockpot did. He took care of himself, fed himself, even when he was alone. He went grocery shopping for himself—and now for her. He planned meals.
His whole life was more structured and grounded than hers. He woke up an hour early and exercised in the basement. He owned a lawn mower. He took a multivitamin.
Corinne tended to treat herself like a head in a jar. She woke up late and worked. She stayed up late and worked. She ate whatever was easy. She exercised intermittently. She bought nice things for her house, usually when she was feeling down, but then never bothered to hang them up or arrange them.
Her life hadn’t been much different with Marc … He was a head in a jar, too. (Rapidly pickling.) The two of them thought and worked and talked. They watched movies and read books. They came into their bodies to have sex. But not to take walks or make dinner.
Corinne felt herself shifting. Wanting to shift. Wanting to let Enoch rub off on her.
“I thought you were never making dinner again,” Enoch said, when Corinne suggested that he come over to her apartment after work.
“Don’t use my own words against me.”
“I would never.”
“I’m capable of making dinner, Enoch Miller.”
“I know, I partook in the chicken broccoli braid—but you don’t have to.”
“You shouldn’t have to cook every meal…”
“I would anyway.”
“Yeah, if you spent the rest of your life alone. Let me carry my weight. I can make dinner every … so often.”
He laughed a breath into the phone. “Every so often, huh? I feel lighter already.”
Corinne was making pasta. (Spaghetti.) With meat sauce, because Enoch had meat with every meal. She’d bought a salad mix. And salad dressing. And bread—she was going to try to make cheese bread. As meals go, it hardly required any cooking at all, but it still took hours of time that Corinne could have spent working. How was this worth anyone’s time, ever? She ran out of time to put on makeup and arrange her hair; she usually at least managed mascara. She did remember to set out the lamp Enoch had given her, on the table by the couch. It was pink ceramic with a two-tiered green shade that Enoch said was fiberglass. It was perfect.
Enoch got to her apartment earlier than she was expecting and wanted to kiss her in the doorway. “You smell like garlic,” he said. “I like it.”
“What do I usually smell like?”
“Deep thoughts.”
Corinne laughed and pulled him in.
He took off his coat and followed her into the kitchen. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt with a button-down collar. “Can I help?”
“Everything’s mostly done,” Corinne said. “I just have to make the pasta.”
“I can do that.”
“Don’t. It’s the only part with actual cooking—I want to do it myself.”
They ate at her table, sitting right next to each other, with Enoch’s big hand resting on Corinne’s thigh. He was eating and drinking with the other hand, so that he wouldn’t have to move it. It reminded her of the way he used to roll the dice and move his game pieces with his right hand, so that he didn’t have to stop touching Corinne with his left.
Enoch ate a huge plate of spaghetti and acted like she’d offered him something more impressive than boxed pasta with expensive grocery-store sauce. “This is so good.”
“Now you’re patronizing me,” Corinne said.
“I’m not,” he said. “Any food that I didn’t have to cook myself automatically tastes more delicious.”
“When did you learn to cook? Your mom never made any of you help in the kitchen…”
He shrugged. “My twenties. Trial and error. I got better at it when I was living alone.”
Corinne nodded.
He squeezed her thigh. “How old were you when you first lived on your own?”
Corinne thought of the dorm room she’d had to herself the summer after freshman year. Did that count as living alone? “College, I guess.”
“Did you have an apartment?”
“Eventually.”
“You didn’t have roommates?”
“I did sometimes.”
“Were you on a top-secret mission for the government?”
She tilted her head toward him, trying to get the joke.
“I can’t ever get you to talk about yourself,” he said.
“That’s not true—we talk all the time! I’ve never talked to anyone this much before.”
Enoch laughed. He was eating a piece of cheese bread. “You make it sound like a real pleasure, Corinne.”
“It is a pleasure.” She couldn’t not roll her eyes as she said it.
“We talk…” Enoch swallowed. “About me. And about life, in the moment. And you give me reams of sass … plus a smaller measure of guff…”
“Guff,” Corinne repeated.
He shook his head. “But we don’t talk about you.”
“There’s not much to talk about.”
“There you go.” Enoch winked at her. “Cagey.”
She put her hands in the air. “What do you want to know? I’m an open book!”
He’d just taken another bite of bread. He laughed so abruptly, he almost spat it out.
Corinne folded her arms. “I’m an open book,” she said more calmly. “Ask me anything.”
“All right…” He chewed for a second. “When did you get your first apartment?”
“After I got my bachelor’s degree. During grad school.”
“Did you live by yourself?”
“No.”
Enoch was watching her. His eyes were gentle. “No?”
She sighed. “No. I lived with my boyfriend.”
“What was his name?”
“Why do you want to know his name?”
“For ease of reference. That’s what names are for.”
“Jeremy,” Corinne said.
“Jeremy,” Enoch repeated. “Was he nice?”
“He was fine.”
“Open book.” Enoch patted her thigh.
She sighed more heavily. “He was nice—I met him in class, junior year. He was in my program.”
Enoch closed an eye, doing the math. “So you were together a long time. You must have been serious.”
“I mean…” She shrugged and sighed again. She scraped her plate with her fork, moving the last bite of salad around.
“Did you like college?” he asked, changing the subject.
“It was f—”
“Fine,” Enoch said along with her.
Corinne clenched one fist in her lap. Enoch moved his hand to cover it.
She bit her lips and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “I still feel like I need to be careful about what I say to you.”
“Careful … why? I’m not going to hold your dating history against you.”
“No, I know that, actually. I just, um…” She wrinkled her nose. She didn’t want to say any of this. “When we were kids, I got very good at being careful. Around people from church.”
Enoch pulled his chin into his neck. “Is that how you see me? I’m a ‘people from church’?”
“That is literally where we met.”
“Yeah, twenty-five years ago. I’m not a ‘people from church’ now—I’m your boyfriend.”
Boyfriend. What a dumb word. Corinne wrinkled her nose again. She bit her bottom lip. She went a little weak.
Enoch noticed. He leaned in to whisper it into her ear. “I’m your boyfriend … right?”
Corinne nodded.
Enoch kissed the skin behind her ear.
After a few more kisses, Corinne pulled away enough to get some eye contact. “I was always afraid you were going to turn me in. When we were kids.”
“For what?”
“Watching bad movies. Having worldly friends.”
“I was never going to turn you in.”
“You might have. For my own good.”
He frowned. “Well … I’m not going to turn you in now.”
She shook her head. “It’s not just that … I guess I don’t want my worldliness to make you uncomfortable.”
“That’s not an issue.”
“It is with my family.”
“I’m not your family.”
Corinne made a frustrated noise in her throat. “It is an issue. Sometimes. Like, you don’t like it when I swear.”
“I mean … true? Do you need to swear a lot to tell me about college?”
She frowned at him. “I’m probably not ever going to stop swearing, you know.”
“I gathered as much. You dropped three F-bombs in the kitchen.”
“I burned myself.”
“I offered to the drain that pasta for you—you’re not supposed to use a plate.”
“Well, I don’t have one of those holey things.”
“A colander.”
“Yeah.”
Enoch kissed her neck again. “Okay.”
Corinne sighed. Again. For probably the fourth time in as many minutes. “What was the question?”
Enoch’s chest hitched merrily. “Did you like college, Corinne?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes. I liked it a lot.”
“What’d you like?”
“I liked…” She looked over at him. He wasn’t smiling, strictly speaking, but she knew his face well enough to know he was grinning. “My roommate. She grew up on a farm, and she was super into Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
“What was her name?”
“Jodie.”
“Jodie,” he said.
“And I liked my classes. I liked that my whole job was studying. That I didn’t have anything else to worry about.” Corinne pushed her plate away from herself and leaned an elbow on the table, facing him.
The side of his mouth twitched up. He rubbed her thigh. “What’d you study?”
“Everything. I sort of took as much of everything as I could. In four years. I lived on campus over the summers.”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“You can. It’s more expensive than getting an apartment, but my scholarship covered it. I ended up with a major in political science.”
“Did you go to parties?”
She rested her chin on her hand and shook her head.
“Not one?”
“Maybe one.”
“I thought college was supposed to be a Bacchanalia.”
“I didn’t want to get raped at a frat party.”
“Always thinking.”
“I just really loved the game of it.”
“What game?”
She lifted her legs and slid them on top of Enoch’s knees. His lips twitched again, and he pulled her legs deeper into his lap, rubbing one of her calves.
“College is all a game,” Corinne said. “You have to get a certain number of credits in certain areas. And each class has its own rules and requirements. None of it is all that hard, as long as you focus. And you can get rewards and bonuses. I loved it. I think you would have loved it, too.”
Enoch was watching her face. He nodded. “I envied you.”
“You did?”
“I still do.”
They looked in each other’s eyes. Enoch rubbed her calf with his thumb. Then he said, “So you kept going? After you graduated?”
“I got a master’s degree in communication.”
He snorted.
“Your amusement is noted,” Corinne said.
“Why communication?”
“I was fascinated with advertising and propaganda. Public health messages. Recruiting. Persuasion.”
“How very evangelical of you.”
She laughed. “I was more interested in the why and how of it. There’s this theory in communication that it’s the sender’s job to effectively communicate an idea … It’s not the receiver’s job to understand it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like, if I’m throwing you the ball, it’s my job to make sure you catch it.”
“I understood. I was making a joke.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh. Well. Anyway, I really liked that idea. That if you want to be heard, you have to know your audience.”
“I don’t feel like you use these tactics in your everyday life.”
She frowned. Genuinely. “You really think I’m a bad communicator?”
“I don’t think you’re manipulative.”
“It’s not about manipulation—or it shouldn’t be. It’s about making sure that you’re meeting people wherever they are.”
Enoch looked in her eyes. He rubbed her legs. “So,” he said, finally, “you studied everything, you didn’t party, you fell in love with a guy named Jeremy…”
She shook her head.
“You weren’t in love?”
“I wanted to be,” she said. “But … no.”
“You were together a long time.”
“There wasn’t any reason to break up. He was a good person. We liked the same things. I remember thinking that it wouldn’t be fair to break up with him, because he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“Did he break up with you?”
“No. I moved to Boston. We sort of mutually agreed it wasn’t working.”
“Did you start a conversation with him about how you both agreed it wasn’t working?”
Corinne bit her lips and laughed. “Maybe.”
“Poor Jeremy.”
“Oh, God, he was better off without me. He married the next girl he dated, and they had so many cute kids—a raft of them.”
Enoch was still eye-smiling at her. He was rubbing her knee now.
Corinne touched his hand. “It doesn’t make you feel jealous and weird? To hear about it?”
He shrugged, looking almost egregiously unbothered. “Maybe it would, if I gave it too much thought. Or if you seemed hung up on him … Or if I saw a picture of him, and he was really handsome.”
“Says the guy who was married to Shannon Frank.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that your ex-wife is extremely beautiful. And I wish she wasn’t.”
Enoch laughed breathily and cocked an eyebrow. “Okay, but … she kind of looks like a twelve-year-old boy these days.”
“Are you kidding me? She’s more beautiful than ever!”
He raised both eyebrows. “Well, that is unsettling to hear…”
Corinne kicked his belly.
He caught her ankle. “Are you jealous of Shannon? Really?”
“Are you kidding me? Yes. I’ve spent my whole life jealous of her. I’ll never get over it.”
“But you know … everything.”
Corinne shook her head. She kept her voice even: “I don’t think you understand how much I felt for you when we were teenagers. Shannon had you, and I didn’t. For those few months that we were together, and for all the years after—she had you. I don’t hate her or anything, but … yeah, I’m jealous.”
Enoch looked sad. “I feel like I’ll never make this up to you.”
“I don’t need you to make it up to me,” Corinne said.
“What do you need?”
Corinne looked in his eyes. Chocolate brown and small behind his glasses. “I need you to be mine.”
Enoch leaned forward and hooked both of his bear arms around her waist. He hauled her into his lap. It was awkward. She worried about his knees. “Corinne…” Enoch said to himself and maybe to her. “Honey, I’ve always been yours.”
It was both the right and the wrong thing to say, but Corinne would take it.
She’d take his kisses. His arms around her back. His teasing.
It was all she’d ever wanted, and she’d take it.