He groaned. “You’re killing me! But fine, fine, if you don’t want to share the details, I’m not going to force you. There was a reason for my call, actually.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. The team had this guy writing an article about us over here in Paris, at the new indoor skate park they just built, but he broke his arm last night, so he’s going to be out of commission for a little while. You want to fill in? They’ve got a couple other people they were thinking about asking, but I said I wanted to ask you first. You’d need to take about a couple weeks off; there’s an opening ceremony they want covered at the end of this week and then a couple promo events, too. It’s gonna be pretty off the hook, and I thought you might be interested. It’ll pay pretty well, too. How does that sound?”
Of course it sounded good, and there was a part of me that was ready to hop on a plane that very second, but more than that, I didn’t want to leave Tessa. I wouldn’t really be leaving her, though—It’s not even like we were in a relationship. We were . . . well, I wasn’t quite sure what we were, but call it a sixth sense or instinct, I had the strong feeling that if I were to take my brother up on this offer, it would mean the end of
things between Tessa and me. Maybe in the time apart she’d realize what she was doing and wouldn’t want to do it anymore; maybe she’d meet someone else, maybe I would . . . I couldn’t ever remember feeling this sort of conflict over anyone before, and I wasn’t quite comfortable with the feeling, but it also wasn’t something I could just ignore.
“You know, I think I’m just gonna stay put,” I said.
“Really?” Aaron sounded surprised. “I thought you’d be psyched.”
“It sounds like a great opportunity,” I said. “It really does. And I definitely wouldn’t mind getting to chill with you, but . . . I really shouldn’t take that much time off of work.”
“You can bring your girl with you, if you want,” Aaron said.
“Maybe next time,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him that a week away with me might not be exactly the thing Tessa wanted to do, considering she seemed so unenthused about the prospect of going to dinner.
I put all of those thoughts out of my mind, though. That Saturday, I picked her up and
we left the city and drove up to Fairfax, where there’d be less chance of us running into anyone we knew. It seemed like there was something that she wanted to say, or that something was bothering her, but when I asked if everything was okay, she smiled and said that it was.
We went to this little Italian place and got glasses of red wine and ate bread and salad and lobster ravioli for me and linguini and clams for her, though she mostly just pushed it around her plate.
“Food okay?” I asked.
She nodded.
I gestured to my plate. “You want to try any of this?”
“No, I’m all set. It looks good, though.”
The conversation wasn’t flowing exactly as I’d imagined it. I took another sip of wine. Were we, perhaps, only compatible when we were fucking? Was it possible that she and I didn’t really have anything else to talk about?
“Is everything okay?” I asked as I put my wine glass down.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry if it seems like I’m not having a good time. I am. This is really nice, actually.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it, but it seems like something’s been bothering you all night,” I said. “What’s up? Is this too much? Does it feel like too much of…I don’t know, like a relationship?” It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe she would want to just keep things physical. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe she didn’t even like me, maybe hanging out with me was excruciating. It didn’t seem that way, but I could tell there was something on her mind. “If you’d rather just keep things strictly physical, that’s fine,” I said, though I found myself hoping she’d say she didn’t want to do that.
“It’s not that,” she said. “That has nothing to do with it, actually. I really like getting to spend time with you—please don’t think that I’m not enjoying this.”
I smiled. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m having a good time. I promise you, it’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
She hesitated, and in that silence I tried to figure out what it was she was going to say. She was really a lesbian? She had an STD? She had a boyfriend? As it turned out, none of that. “I got this letter,” she said. “And at first I thought it was from you. You know how you had slipped that note into my paper that one day? I thought it was like that, except you’d sent it to my apartment this time.”
“No, it wasn’t me. Who was it from?”
“I don’t know. There was no signature.”
“Well, what did they want?”
“They wanted me to write a paper. They gave me the topic and everything.”