Mrs. Fletcher(88)

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 . . .”

“No pressure,” Eve assured him. “What about school? How’s that going?”

Brendan gave a listless shrug. He’d registered for two spring-term classes at ECC—Accounting Basics and Intro to Political Science—but he hardly ever talked about them, and claimed to do all his homework in the library, which supposedly explained why he never had any studying to do at home.

“It’s kinda boring, to be honest.”

“What is? The textbooks? The professors?”

“I dunno,” he mumbled. “The whole place. It’s like I’m back in high school, just with all the losers. The ones who weren’t smart enough to get into a real college.”

And whose choice was that? Eve wanted to ask him.

“It’s not a bad school,” she said. “I had a great class there last semester. The professor was excellent, and some of the other students were really smart.”

Brendan looked up from his plate. His face was blank, but she could sense some hostility in it nonetheless.