All Adults Here(38)
“This seemed interesting enough to take a break for.” Jeremy opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine with one hand and a bottle of seltzer with the other. “Thirsty?”
“It’s ten in the morning, what’s wrong with you?!” Porter said. “Fizzy water is fine. And are you really going to? What if you have to operate on someone’s cat?”
Jeremy shrugged and put the water in front of Porter. “Keeps things loose,” he said. “I’m kidding.” Being in someone’s house was like having immediate access to their private world. Not just their things, their objects, but also what they fed themselves, what they made with their own hands to fill their body.
In all their time together, Jeremy had never made Porter a meal—the opportunity had never presented itself. She had no idea whether he could cook or not, which seemed like an enormous thing not to know about someone you’d had sex with so many times. Porter popped a cashew into her mouth before she’d fully taken in the bowl in front of her. There were things to eat everywhere, it was heaven. She wondered what kind of sheets Jeremy had, if he had a ceiling fan, if there was a place to sit in the backyard, if he thought about her when he masturbated, if his wife ever watched him, the way Porter sometimes did in hotel rooms. There was a wedding photo on the bookshelf, and Porter looked away quickly. It was harder to ignore his other life when she was sitting in his house, where she was surrounded by proof of it, but she wasn’t interested in changing direction now.
“Egg sandwiches?” Jeremy pulled open the heavy stainless steel door of the fridge. Had that fridge come with the house? It looked new. Shopping for appliances—that was something they’d never done together.
“Okay,” Porter said. “I’ll be your assistant.” It felt more like when they were teenagers than it had in years. Jeremy’s parents’ house had been carpeted everywhere—the kitchen, the stairs, even the ceiling of the basement rec room. The house had always smelled like the inside of a kennel, which it was, more or less, with one or two wounded animals always limping around. Porter looked around Jeremy’s messy kitchen. What did his wife complain about? Porter couldn’t think of one thing, not counting the sex he’d been having on the side. And that wasn’t a problem anymore, which made it vanish into the air, a rain cloud pushed farther across the sky.
Jeremy left the fridge open and walked away, across the room to the screen door, which he then propped open, revealing the backyard, with a wooden playhouse, a stainless steel grill, and a small table with benches. A bird feeder hung in the nearest tree. It was almost too much.
“Not bad,” Porter said, peeking through the doorway, as if she hadn’t seen a thousand photos of him and his kids frolicking in the patchy grass.
Jeremy walked back to the fridge and started piling things up on the counter—a loaf of bread, two eggs, a hunk of what Porter recognized as her own cheese. He’d thought of her, before the second she showed up outside the clinic. She wondered if he ever dreamed that she was sleeping next to him and woke up surprised to have his arms around his wife. Jeremy leaned over Porter to reach a pan and then turned on the stove. She stood next to him, their bodies almost touching, and side by side, watching the eggs cook.
“So, Porter,” Jeremy said. “What’s the story?”
Porter thought about it. She hadn’t had sex with anyone for so long—more than a year—the longest dry spell in her adult life. Her body was only getting bigger, and once the baby came, what would dating be like? This was what her mother worried about, Porter knew, among other things, and it killed her that she agreed. No one really knew what changes motherhood could bring—to the body, to the sex drive, to anything. It was like going to another country and knowing that you could never go home again. In the not-too-distant future, everything would be different, and Porter could no sooner imagine it than she could imagine life after death. But standing in the warm morning air, Porter knew what the story was, the story happening right at that moment. Jeremy slid the eggs onto the bread.
It was not a date, it had not been a date. She stood next to Jeremy and stared straight ahead at the food in front of them, her stomach grumbling with hunger she hadn’t known was there—and then extended one hand and put it at the lowest part of his back. Jeremy closed his eyes, a butter knife in his hand. He let the knife fall to the counter and pulled Porter’s hand around to his stomach, putting it flat against the cotton of his T-shirt. It wasn’t sudden if you counted the last twenty years as a very, very slow courtship, or if you blinked and the last two years disappeared like a bad dream.
“Hmm,” Porter said.
“Hmm,” Jeremy said, and slid her hand farther south until it rested against his newly sprung erection.
They were kissing, and then they were peeling clothes off each other like they were being timed by a trainer with a stopwatch. His tongue was clumsy, so eager, slipping in and out of her mouth. Porter was grateful for the light coming in through the open door to the backyard, and through the windows. She licked his belly button; she couldn’t help it. Being in Jeremy’s house was sexier than a thousand pristine hotel rooms, which by design felt temporary. Being in his house felt like the moment in the A-ha video where they step out of the cartoon. This was real life.
“Are you . . . ,” he said, his eyes on her belly.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “On my own.” Porter didn’t want to wait for him to ask, for him to imagine that there was someone else, which was of course ridiculous, but there it was.