He wants to see my house, and burrow in my stuff.
I still think about my dad. I think about how he and my mom were high school sweethearts, and that didn’t stop him from destroying their relationship. I think of how he still cheats, sheds marriages like last season’s clothes. I think of all the nice guys I’ve bailed on, back before I stopped dating people who might care if I leave them.
Instead of quietly obsessing, I talk to Seth about it in the dark.
He’s tender in hearing out my fears, but optimistic. We love each other, he reassures me. We know each other. This can work.
He writes a gratitude list in his journal every night before he brushes his teeth, and makes me do it too.
I’m thankful for mornings listening to Chopin as the smell of toast and pesto drift around me in a sunlit cabin.
For lake water crisping up my hair.
For a job that lets me disappear into this momentary life.
For sex on the deck at midnight when the stars are out and the neighbors are asleep.
I’m grateful, in a word, for Seth.
CHAPTER 31 Seth
Every time I hear Molly Marks softly snore beside me, my heart flips over. I wake up early just to hear the breathy rhythm of it. The proof of her beside me.
She sleeps in while I do my morning workout. But I know she gets up in secret to brush her teeth, because when I join her in bed after I shower her breath is minty fresh.
Her suitcase is such a mess I itch to fold and organize her clothes. (I manage to control myself.) But hanging from a hook on my bathroom door is a bag with neatly packed compartments of skin care products, sorted in the order she applies them. It takes her fifteen minutes every morning, another twenty in the evening. She says she doesn’t meditate, but I think this is her version of it.
After she does the products, she smells amazing.
In fact, she always smells amazing.
The first morning we woke up together she said she didn’t eat breakfast—“not to worry about her.” Maybe, she said, she’d have a protein bar later. A protein bar! I made her scrambled eggs anyway, and it turns out she does eat breakfast if you make her something delicious, infused with love. Every day while I’m preparing it, I brainstorm what to make tomorrow, trying to top myself. Trying to use every tool at my disposal to make her associate me with sensuous delights.
She likes to wander around my place while I’m cooking, tinkering with this and that, asking me the provenance of furniture or books or records. She rifles through my possessions with an intense curiosity that flatters me, but also makes me slightly nervous. I hope she likes whatever she is finding.
Sometimes, when I have to work, she takes out her laptop and writes. She’s the fastest typist I have ever seen, using the tips of her long nails to fly across the keys. It’s as though her ideas have overtaken her body, transforming her into those flying fingers.
Yet she often complains of being stuck, or uninspired. “How can you say that when you write so fluidly?” I ask her.
“I delete a lot,” she says. “I delete hundreds of thousands of words a year.”
Imagine that. Hundreds of thousands of words, gone. I wish that I could have them.
At night she asks me questions about my cases and my clients. I never share identifying details, but we talk about the law, the issues that my clients face. “I’d rather never marry than get divorced,” she says.
“That’s why you have to marry your soul mate,” I say.
She looks away.
I have yet to get her to agree that I am hers.
I will never stop trying.
Every day Molly makes us lunch, and every day it’s exactly the same thing: a giant mound of dark, curly kale generously massaged with a pungent garlic-Parmesan dressing, topped with avocado, grapes, pepitas, and grilled chicken breast. She calls it The Salad, and eats it directly out of the bowl with her fingers. She claims The Salad is meant to be consumed with one’s bare hands. I find this point of view questionable, and consume my portion on a plate with a fork, but I like watching her daintily pick out just the right piece of kale and lick the dressing off her fingers.
After lunch, we grab towels and sunscreen and books and walk down to the beach. Molly always wears an enormous sun hat embroidered with the words BEACH MILF in hot pink cursive, which she stole from her mother in Florida. We go into the lake together and frolic. If there aren’t too many kids around to scandalize, we’ll wade deeper and make out—just like we did in the ocean in high school. Molly is naughty and touches me below the waist. I do not allow things to become too hot and heavy, because we are in the land of decency, but I enjoy her daily efforts to tempt me to submit to a public hand job.
When I go back to shore she goes for a swim, and I watch her figure cutting back and forth across the water in the distance and think we have five days. Three more days. Still one last night.
Usually, when we get home … let’s just say I get something better than a hand job.
When I don’t have more work after our siesta, we play gin rummy. It was Molly’s suggestion—it’s her mom’s family’s vacation game of choice—and at first, she beat me every hand. Then, after humiliating myself two nights in a row, I googled “Gin Rummy Strategies” and realized I was committing to my cards too early. Now we are evenly matched, and she is outraged every time I win. Beating Molly Marks at something has always been one of life’s great pleasures.
We make dinner together and drink good wine from my friends’ little shop in town. (The two owners, Meg and Luz, quit their jobs in Milwaukee to be local booze purveyors, and sometimes I wish I had thought of it first.) Molly is fantastic at assembling sides and salads. (But never The Salad. The Salad is only for lunch.)
I’m so in love. I’m so happy. I try to play it mostly cool, because Molly gets anxious when I’m emotional. In a way, it’s worse than high school, because she’s had two more decades to perfect her defenses against love. But when it happens—when she gets panicky—she lets me hold her.
She lets me stroke her hair and help her breathe.
She trusts me.
And I’ll take that.
Because I don’t want this to be a fling. I don’t want this to be another one of Seth’s Doomed Impulsive Love AffairsTM. I don’t want it to be the thing that makes Molly finally stop talking to me for good.
Before we go to bed, I make her join me in writing in a gratitude journal.
I’m thankful for the sunshine that warms our skin.
