Madly (New York 2)

Allie slid her hand away, wrapping it around her mug again.

She’d left her fingers on top of Winston’s for longer than she should have, probably. It was something she’d noticed that she missed since Matt, or at least Matt early on in their relationship—having someone to touch. Implied intimacy.

Sometimes when she dropped by her parents’ house for lunch she’d squeeze her dad’s shoulder as he finished his coffee, and she had her visits with the dogs, of course, who always wanted petting. But it wasn’t the same.

She wondered if she’d pushed Winston, though. He wasn’t looking at her. She’d have thought he was tired except he held his body square and tight, resisting the plush backrests of the fancy breakfast bar chairs.

She wanted to say the next right thing, and her mind swooped between thoughts and around them without focusing on one. Probably, she should reassure him that she didn’t think he was a monster. He wasn’t the first man to make bad decisions or push a brother away. She had pushed May away over and over, especially when she didn’t know what she wanted. She had been pushing May away since she left Matt at the altar, and had one great night of sister bonding in its aftermath. For months and months she found herself stopping right in the middle of work, right in the middle of some flow state on a task, as if she had left the broiler on, forgotten to pay some vital bill, and then would realize it was simply guilt.

I haven’t called May to really talk, in ages. I ignored her last text. I’m pretending I didn’t get her email. I blew off our FaceTime date. I’m not going to do anything about it. Not anytime soon.

She focused on the cuffs of his shirt and immediately recognized fine hand-stitching on Indian-milled broadcloth. The online arm of her business had recently sold a similar vintage dress shirt that wasn’t nearly as lovely, for three hundred dollars. In a tasteful satin stitch, white silk thread on white cotton, was his monogram, in a half inch square.

She’d missed it in the dark of the bar, distracted when he’d rolled his cuffs the first time that evening. But now she focused her attention on this small, lovely detail as he removed first one cuff link, then the other, and placed them on the table, one bar crossed over the other, like how he might leave them on his dresser. They gleamed there, exotic chunks of hammered gold.

She’d never known a man who wore cuff links.

He folded back the cuffs of his shirt, rolled his sleeves to the elbow, every movement precise and practiced. It was an end-of-day ritual for him, and observing it close up, she felt like a tourist on safari, twenty feet from an uncaged lion.

She’d seen cuff links behind glass in jewelry stores, had even sold them herself to other collectors in her business, but Winston wasn’t behind glass.

He was right here. With her.

An intimacy that had to be negotiated, because it was anything but implied.

“It’s impossible to explain why someone would leave a nice man.” Her voice was loud in the kitchen, with all of its hard, expensive surfaces.

He looked up at her and leaned back a little. She wondered if he had learned in some fancy business school how to look receptive, how to perform active listening, or if he was truly, truly interested in her.

“Is it?”

“Yes. It is. Because you think, when you’re with him, that you can make that choice anytime—that both of you can choose to be together or choose to break up. But then it turns out, actually, that if he’s a nice man, a man everyone likes, who loves you, that the only way to leave is to have a reason. Like, a good reason, that everyone you know will agree about. It’s like…I’m not explaining this very well.” She glanced at him. “Because it’s impossible.”

“Maybe it would help, I suspect, if you told me what you mean by a ‘nice’ man.”

Allie felt some very tight knot, tangled painfully deep in her gut, loosen, just a little.

“For starters, a nice man always has a reason. For everything.” There was a teeny, tiny window at the end of the galley kitchen. It was so dark outside that all she could see was her face, pale, reflected in it. “There’s a reason for how much gas you’re supposed to keep in the tank, at all times, but especially in the winter. There’s a reason why bright red pants might not be right to wear to a meeting at the bank. A nice man is…reasonable. He’s not ever heedless. Or impulsive, like I am. And so he doesn’t even have to really explain his reasons. The reason is self-evident.”

Maybe Winston winced, or maybe he didn’t. She tried to just keep looking at the small oval of her face in the window.

“There’s so many of the reasons, then, that of course, of course, the way that your life is put together is simply the way life should be. And that means you’re happy, because all the reasons say you’re supposed to be, and anything you might think you want, or you think might make you happier—there’s always a reason you can’t have it.”

“What did you want that wasn’t reasonable? That wasn’t…nice?”

“He left on the closet light.”

When she didn’t elaborate, Winston frowned. “I don’t understand.”

She shook her head. He wasn’t supposed to understand. She wasn’t supposed to tell him, probably, because sex confessions with strangers were uncool. But he’d told her his sex thing, about him and his wife, and about what he’d done to his brother, which was obviously his very worst thing.

It seemed right to try to tell him this.

“He left on the closet light. On the nights he wanted to, you know. Have sex. I’d come in the room to brush my teeth and get ready for bed, and the closet door would be cracked open, and the light would be on in there, with the bedroom lights turned off. And he’d be waiting in bed, already undressed. So I had to…I just had to brush my teeth, and pee, and decide whether I was going to put pajamas on or not. But if I did, it wasn’t—” She drew a deep breath. “It wouldn’t be reasonable.”

She felt his wince, then. She felt hers. This time her face was hot because shame is hot, unforgiving. Elvira had told her that shame was just a lie someone has told you about yourself. She didn’t know, for sure, what the lie was here. She never looked straight at it.

“Allie?”