Georgie, All Along (74)

So maybe I should’ve picked something that would’ve kept me calmer, more confident, less concerned about potential failures. That way, I could’ve kept focused on Bel entirely, could’ve probably laughed off her question about marriage, the same way I’ve laughed off every other question she’s asked over the last few weeks, ever since I first told her—in a text I’m not ashamed I sent from his bed the morning after we first slept together—about me and Levi. At first it was Does he go down (God, yes) and Is his bathroom clean (extremely), but then it became How nice is he being to your parents (very; he rebuilt all their outdoor planter boxes) and Does he have a pet name for you (not yet, unless you count my last name, and I do). The other night she asked if Levi had given me a key to his house (yes, after the very first night I stayed over), and so maybe to her marriage is the natural next inquiry in this series of pelting but well-meaning questions.

But it’s the first one that’s made me—for some reason—restless and hand-shaky.

“I’m grating,” she says, but what she’s really saying is, I’m waiting.

“We’re having a good time” is all I’ll say, pushing my diced-onion pile to the corner of a cutting board, bending my head again to the cookbook. I’m only on step two.

Of, like, ten million.

I suppress a groan, trying to shake off this strange mood.

It isn’t, of course, that I’m lying to Bel with my answer. Levi and I are having a good time—the best time, really, better than anything I’ve ever had with someone I’ve been in a relationship with. The sex is incredible; the conversation is easy and interesting and meaningful; the jokes are funny and increasingly personal to the two of us, a private language we’re building in all the moments we’re alone together.

But being with Levi—really being with Levi—it isn’t just a good time. It’s . . . it’s a big time, a full time, an infinite time. A time where something inside of me is trying desperately to click into place. The first time outside of the bedroom that I truly stopped to let myself feel it was that night a couple of weeks ago at the high school, when I drew that big pink heart around our initials. I’d chalked it up to the fic, to the way the night had been so different from what I pictured for my high school self.

So much better.

It’s only that the feeling has kept chasing me in moments that have nothing to do with the fic. Being in Levi’s boat while he collected samples for his former professor, him quietly explaining to me what he could see about the water quality from looking at a half-inch of plant stem. Lying alone on Levi’s bed with Hank snoring beside me, flipping idly through one of those old textbooks. Sitting on my parents’ back porch, watching Levi listen patiently to my mom tell him all about his star sign, his face betraying none of his natural suspicion. Letting myself into Levi’s house after work, the smell of something cooking in the air, the sound of Johnny Cash playing from the speaker Levi keeps in the living room. Hank greeting me with his wagging tail; Levi greeting me with his low voice.

But whatever that trying-to-click sensation is—it won’t turn over, it won’t slide fully into place, and over the last couple of days, while I’ve been keeping pace with Bel’s changed energy, it’s gotten harder to ignore. Between Levi and me, there’s this ocean of unsaid things, big blanks that hover uncomfortably between us. I don’t tell him that I’ve started working two days a week at The Shoreline’s day spa, too; I don’t tell him that last Thursday I met his mother, a polite but distant woman named Corrine who Olivia told me spends half the year in Florida and the other half treating her family as little more than acquaintances. He doesn’t tell me what that look on his face meant when, as part of his star sign reading, my mom had asked him about his siblings’ birthdays, or why, when I needed to take the Prius into the shop yesterday for a new back tire, he didn’t offer to drive me over himself to my dinner shift at The Shoreline. My dad had taken me instead.

This morning, when I’d woken up alone in Levi’s bed and checked my phone, Bel’s 7:30 a.m. I’M ALREADY BORED text had greeted me like a judgment, and I’d suddenly felt overwhelmingly under pressure: two weeks to Bel’s due date, two weeks to the big event that had been my reason for coming back here, and had I gotten any closer to fulfilling that promise I’d made to myself that afternoon in Nickel’s? If I were to stop in there again, if I were to run into a curious, judgmental Mrs. Michaels while waiting in line, what would I have to say for myself? That I took a job waiting tables and scheduling massages and beauty treatments, but it’s not permanent? That I’ve got half my scarce belongings at my parents’ house and the other half at Levi Fanning’s, and he and I don’t talk about his past or our future?

That I’m almost through with my old friend fic, but still not sure if I’m any closer to getting what I wanted out of it?

“That’s it?” Bel says, breaking into my thoughts. “A good time?”

I clear my throat, hating the way my own words sound repeated back: superficial and small, when the way I feel about Levi is anything but. I think again about that night out at the rock, and how he’d seemed to understand me automatically, completely. I cling to what he said—that knowing what I don’t want isn’t a blank, after all.

But it’d still be nice if I could know what I do.