Flying Solo(31)

“And when you lived with him, you didn’t?”

“It was like having a hot water bottle in bed with me. It threw off everything. I was afraid to move because I didn’t want to wake him. I was afraid to sneeze because I didn’t want to wake him. I couldn’t splay my arm out, because it would land on his chest. I woke up at two in the morning, day after day after day, and I’d lie there listening to this ticking clock he brought over that was like listening to the audible expiration of my youth.”

“Did this happen with other boyfriends you had before him, or just him?”

“My boyfriend before Chris, we didn’t live together. Mostly, I went to his place instead of him coming over to mine. I liked it better that way. And it didn’t seem weird that I didn’t sleep well, since I wasn’t at home.”

“Should I ask what happened to that guy?”

Laurie took a sip of her drink. “Well,” she said, “Angus was great, honestly. I was very happy with him. We had all kinds of things in common, he was funny, he was comfortable, he was really smart.”

“Sounds good so far.”

“Yeah.” It had, in fact, been good so far—but only so far. “Unfortunately, he wanted kids, and I didn’t. When we met, he thought he probably wanted them and I thought I probably didn’t.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I like kids. I love my brothers’ kids, I love June’s kids. I just wanted other things more,” she said. “I never had that thing, the thing where people say they always wanted to be a parent, always dreamed about kids. I just never felt it. And we were together for a couple of years, you know, right at that age where if you want kids, you’re not really in a hurry, but you’re starting to think about when you will be in a hurry, you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“We went to his cousin’s wedding, and I saw him with this adorable little girl who was there, maybe three or four? He was just great with her, totally at home, and he was so happy. He was just over the moon in love with this kid, you could tell.” She sighed. “We came home, we talked, and we broke up. That was a few years ago, and he has a wife and a daughter now.”

“Sounds like it ended the only way it could.”

“It did,” she said. “The only thing I should have done was figure out sooner that it wasn’t going to resolve itself. Anyway, a year later, I met Chris. And I liked him, and he did not want kids, and he did not mind that I was, as Angus used to say, ‘sturdy.’ And by then I was thirty-eight, and he was age-appropriate, and he was looking for someone who was age-appropriate. And I just thought…he was a stroke of luck.”

Nick nodded. “However,” he offered.

She smiled. “However. When we moved in together, I hated it. It ruined things I liked about him. It made me resent him. And I just thought…this is not sustainable. And for whatever reason, that crystallized when he wanted to put a big dumb waffle maker in my modest kitchen cabinets, which I could not even get myself to call our kitchen cabinets.”

Nick thought about this, took a bite of bread, finished it, drank a slug of wine. “Maybe you needed a bigger bed.”

She laughed. “I love my bed. And we went on vacation once and slept in a king, and guess when my dumb ass ended up staring at a generic clock radio in the middle of the night?”

“Two in the morning?”

“You know it.” She sighed. “It wasn’t the bed. It just wasn’t right. Some part of me was screaming, ‘don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t bind your life to this guy just because he’s fine and he didn’t rule you out.’ And that’s when I started to think, you know…if it’s not this guy, maybe it’s not anybody. Maybe I’m not a June, maybe I’m a Dot. Maybe I’m supposed to die with boxes of love letters and pictures, and one of my brothers’ grandkids will find something of mine and figure out something about me, something special that nobody knew. Maybe even something nobody asked me about.”

“I don’t think you’re a June or a Dot,” he said. “I think you’re just yourself. And that should satisfy anybody, including you.”

Laurie felt a melt of warmth that started somewhere in the core of her and prickled out to her arms and her legs, and she knew she was gazing at him again, but she was not moving into Dot’s house, she really was going back to Seattle. “I missed you, Cooper,” she finally said.

He took a drink of his water, but when he put it down, he didn’t look quite as date-drunk as she felt. “You know what? I made a mistake.”

She blinked. “What do you mean? What mistake?”

He picked up his napkin and set it on the table. Out of his wallet came enough money to cover his dinner and hers and the tip. He set it next to his bread plate. “You trust me, Sass? Can I change the plan?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. We have to go. I brought you on the wrong date.”

Laurie picked up her bag even as she watched him scribble a note on his napkin. “What is wrong, Nick? This is a perfectly good date.”

“What I brought you on,” he said as he took her elbow, “is a first date for people who don’t know each other. I completely missed the opportunity to take you on the correct date for you, as a duck enthusiast and person who is as curious about weird things as I am.”