Second Chance Sunday

I woke up in a bed that wasn't mine with somebody's arm heavy across my ribs and sunlight coming through blinds I did not recognize, and I lay there for a good minute before I remembered the whole day in order. The intake event. The folding tables. Luther in a polo shirt with the firm logo on it, looking exactly like he had three years ago when he was my boyfriend, which he had been at thirty-three and me at thirty-one, and now he was thirty-six and I was thirty-four and apparently we were doing this again. His alarm clock said 7:42. His arm said stay put. My head said I had no regrets and also no plan, which felt like a very me combination.

I slid out from under the arm the way you slide out of bed when you don't want to wake a person, slow and one body part at a time, and he didn't stir, just rolled over and breathed into the pillow. I found my dress from the night before folded over a chair, which I took as a decent sign that one of us had been considerate, and I put it on and padded out to his kitchen barefoot.

His apartment was the same one, or at least it looked the same. Same couch, same smell of coffee he never wiped off the counter, same stack of case binders on the dining table like a little paper skyline. I found the filters where they always were and started a pot, and while it dripped I leaned against the sink and thought about yesterday, because of course I did.

* * *

The pro bono intake event was my project, which meant everything that went wrong landed on me and everything that went right got credited to the attorneys, and I had made peace with that years ago. We had two dozen folding tables in the lobby of the tower, a sign-in desk, a line of people wrapped around the velvet ropes by nine, and I was on my fourth coffee and running on four hours of sleep when I looked up from my clipboard and saw Luther standing at the volunteer check-in with a lanyard in his hands.

"Carrie," he said.

"Luther," I said, and then, because I am a professional, "you're on the litigation volunteer list. Table six. Family filings."

"They put me on family filings?"

"I put you on family filings, yes." I handed him a pen and a stack of intake forms. "It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you too." He looked around the lobby like he was buying time. "This is a big thing you built."

"It's a big thing the partners funded and I built, but sure."

He smiled at that and I remembered that I had always liked his smile, which was a dangerous thought to have at nine in the morning on a Saturday, so I pointed him at table six and went back to my clipboard and told myself the whole morning was going to be fine.

It was fine for about two hours. Then the line backed up, the copier jammed, an attorney from tax got into a mild argument with a woman from housing, and I was everywhere at once doing my usual runaround, and somewhere in all of it Luther fell in step beside me and just started helping. He fixed the copier. He talked the tax attorney down. He fetched a box of pens from the supply closet without being asked, and when I finally stopped moving at one o'clock he was sitting on the edge of the empty stage in the lobby with two sandwiches from the volunteer tray.

"You look like you need to sit down," he said.

"I need to sit down, yes!"

I sat next to him and we ate sandwiches and it was easy in a way that annoyed me, because easy with an ex is a trap, everybody knows that. But we talked about the event, and then about people we used to work with, and then about nothing much, and it got to be four o'clock and the lobby was empty and the cleaning crew was stacking chairs around us and neither of us had said anything about leaving.

"There's a rooftop thing," I said finally. "Volunteers. I have to make an appearance because I organized it."

"Do I get to come?"

"You're on the volunteer list, so yes."

So we went up to the rooftop lounge, and I made my appearance, which took about twenty minutes of shaking hands and thanking people, and Luther stood by the rail the whole time with a beer looking at the skyline, and when I was done with my hostess duties I went and stood next to him and neither of us said anything for a while, which is a thing you can only do with certain people, and I had forgotten he was one of them.

"I keep thinking about why we stopped," he said.

"Don't."

"Okay." He took a drink. "I'm not trying to reopen anything. I just noticed I was thinking it."

"We stopped because I didn't know what I wanted and you did, and it wasn't fair to you to keep you guessing." I said it the way I'd rehearsed it three years ago and never used. "That's still the honest version."

"That's fair." He looked at the city. "And now?"

"Now I'm here watching the sun go down with you at a firm event, so I honestly don't know what that says." I turned my glass in my hands. "Maybe it says we can be in the same room without it being a whole production."

"Maybe it says that."

It did not only say that, as it turned out, but I didn't know it yet at the rail. What I knew was that by eight the event had wound down, that we were the last two volunteers at the coat check, that he asked if I wanted to get dinner somewhere quiet, and that I said yes before he finished the sentence. Dinner went long. Dinner went to his apartment, where he asked me, plainly and out loud, if I wanted to stay, and I said yes, plainly and out loud, because at thirty-four I have stopped pretending that saying what I want is some kind of defeat. And that is how I came to be standing in his kitchen on a Sunday morning in his coffee smell with no regrets and no plan.

The pot finished and I was pouring the second cup when I heard him come down the hall, and there he was in the kitchen doorway barefoot in yesterday's jeans, hair going in four directions, looking as if he had slept better than he had in a while, if I was going to flatter myself about it.

"You made coffee," he said.

"I raided your kitchen. Feel free to bill me."

"Pro bono." He came over and took the cup I held out. "You remembered where the filters were."

"You never moved anything in three years, apparently."

"Once I find a system I keep it." He leaned against the counter next to me, not too close, and we drank in silence for a second. "How'd you sleep?"

"Better than I expected to, honestly. You?"

"Same." He looked at me over the rim of the cup. "There's a question hanging in this kitchen. I can feel it."

"There is. I'm aware of it." I wrapped both hands around my cup. "The question is what yesterday was. And I don't have an answer yet, so let's give it a minute."

"Fair enough." He tapped his cup against mine. "So. Small talk. The event. Did we get the Walkers their paperwork filed?"

"We did, after you fixed the copier, which by the way I'm putting in my report. Litigation volunteer performs emergency equipment repair."

"I have hidden skills."

"You always did." I sipped. "That housing attorney, Collette, asked me who the paralegal was who talked Wallace down from his high horse, and I said table six and she said tell him the firm should clone him."

"Wallace's been on a high horse since I started there."

"Since before, I hear."

He laughed and the kitchen got easy again, and we kept going like that, trading little pieces of the day before, the copier, the line, the guy who showed up with a shoebox of documents and no organization whatsoever, and it was nice, it was genuinely nice, and under all of it the question sat there on the counter between our cups like a third person who hadn't been introduced yet.

"Okay," he said, after a while. "Small talk's running out. Can I ask it now or do you need more coffee first?"

I looked at my cup. It was full. "I probably need more coffee anyway," I said, "but go ahead."

He set his cup down and turned so he was facing me, and he didn't do the thing where a person steels themselves, he just stood there easy, the way he'd been at the rail last night, and he said, "What happens on a Sunday? Do we go back to our separate lives and wave at each other in the elevator, or is there a version of this where I see you again next weekend on purpose?"

"That's the question, all right."

"That's the one."

I looked out his kitchen window at the parking lot and the gray Sunday light and I thought about how I'd spent the last three years telling myself the door was closed, and about how easy yesterday had been, every single part of it, and about how the only thing I actually felt afraid of was finding out the easy part didn't last.

"Can I think about it while we eat?" I said. "You got anything in this fridge besides creamer and old takeout?"

"There's eggs."

"Then make me eggs, Luther, and I'll give you a real answer."

He was already opening the fridge.

He scrambled eggs the way he always did, low and slow, with too much pepper, and I sat at his little dining table next to a stack of case binders and watched his back and let myself have the thought I'd been dodging all morning, which was that this kitchen looked exactly the same and I was the one who'd been rearranged. My phone buzzed on the table while the toast was down. I flipped it over out of habit, and it was Dee, of course it was Dee, because Dee had texted me at nine last night asking how coat check duty went and I had left her on read like a coward.

"Your phone's been face down for an hour," Luther said, sliding a plate in front of me. "That's a guilty conscience."

"It's Dee. She texted me last night asking about the event and I never answered, and now she's texting again at eight in the morning on a Sunday, which means she thinks something happened."

"Something did happen."

"That's what I'm afraid she thinks." I picked up the phone. The new message said, ok you are ALIVE, so did you hook up with him or what, and I put it back down and took a bite of eggs instead of answering, because apparently my plan was to die of delay.

"That's her, isn't it," he said, sitting down across from me. "The sister who runs the trivia night."

"Same Dee. She was at the rooftop thing for ten minutes yesterday, she saw us talking at the rail, and now she's doing math."

"What's the question, exactly?"

"You don't want to know."

"Carrie."

"Fine. She wants to know if I hooked up with you or what." I said it flat, looking at my plate, and then I made myself look up, because if we were going to have the real conversation we were going to have it with our eyes open. "And the honest answer is I stayed here, and she is going to run with that for a month."

"You could tell her it's none of her business."

"I could. She'd laugh at me." I buttered my toast, mostly for something to do with my hands. "Can I ask you something while we're being honest? Did you plan this? Yesterday, I mean. Putting your name on the volunteer list, being at table six, fixing the copier like some kind of handsome handyman."

"Handsome handyman."

"Don't deflect."

"I didn't plan it. The volunteer committee needed bodies from litigation and I said yes because it was your project and I wanted to see it work. That is the entire scheme. I fixed the copier because it was broken and there were forty people in line." He ate a bite of eggs. "The dinner invite, that part I planned. I stood at coat check working up to it for twenty minutes, if that helps your math."

"It does, actually. Twenty minutes is flattering."

"Ten of those minutes I spent rehearsing and the other ten I spent forgetting the rehearsal."

I laughed, and some knot in my chest came loose about a quarter turn, and I picked up my phone again and typed before I could talk myself out of it. Stayed at his place. Yes. Details never. I hit send and put it back face down, and Luther watched me do it with an expression that was trying very hard not to be a grin.

"She's going to reply immediately," he said.

"She's going to reply with a single emoji and I'm going to have to live with that."

The phone buzzed before the toast was gone. I didn't look. Luther raised his eyebrows at me and I said, "If it's the eggplant I'm leaving," and he choked on his coffee, and for a second the kitchen was just two people laughing over breakfast on a Sunday, which is a thing I had forgotten I liked so much.

* * *

We ate most of the plate between us, trading the toast back and forth like