seven days of almost

I was twenty-eight when I flew to Tempe, and Elijah was thirty-one. I want to get that down first because it matters to me that nobody reading this pictures anything younger. Two adults. Two months of messages. One week.

The flight landed at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. I got a rental car, some gray Hyundai, and drove to a cul-de-sac in a quiet part of town where the houses all looked like they'd been built the same year by the same tired crew. His was the one with the lemon tree in the backyard. He'd told me about that tree a dozen times in our messages. I felt like I'd already stood under it.

I sat in the driveway for a while. Not because I was scared exactly. More because once I knocked, the two months of texting became a real person in a real hallway, and there was no undoing that.

I knocked anyway.

He opened the door and I forget, honestly, which of us moved first. I think I did. We hugged and it went on longer than hugs go. His chin was on top of my head and my cheek was against his shirt and the air conditioner hummed somewhere behind him. Neither of us said anything for a good thirty seconds.

"Hi," he finally said into my hair.

"Hi."

"You're shorter than I pictured."

"You knew my height. It was on my profile."

"Knowing a thing and picturing it are different," he said, and I laughed, and the nerves loosened some.

He made dinner that first night, nothing fancy, chicken and rice, and we ate on the couch because the table had boxes stacked on it. He was mid-move-in, sort of. He'd lived there two years but the second bedroom was still half full of boxes. After dinner he walked me to the backyard and showed me the lemon tree for real. Cicadas were starting up in the dark, that low evening hum he'd told me about too.

"You really do have a lemon tree," I said, like I hadn't believed him.

"I really do. They're sour as hell. I keep making lemonade out of spite."

We stood there and he put his hand on my back, light, between the shoulder blades, and I didn't pull away. That was Tuesday.

* * *

Wednesday afternoon the light came through the horizontal blinds in stripes across his living room floor. He'd mentioned that light in a message once, that he liked it around four o'clock, and it was around four o'clock, and it looked exactly like he'd said. I was starting to think this man was incapable of lying about anything.

I was sitting on the floor against the couch with my laptop half open when I asked him for his playlist. The one he'd built for me over the two months, song by song, adding tracks and telling me why.

"It's on my phone," he said from the kitchen doorway.

"Play it out loud then. I've only heard it with my earbuds in."

He came over and sat on the couch behind me and pulled his phone out. I leaned back against my hands, which put the back of my head near his knee. The first song was one I'd mentioned offhandedly six weeks ago. I'd forgotten I'd mentioned it. He hadn't.

"You remembered that," I said.

"I remember most things you say. It's kind of embarrassing how much."

I tilted my head back to look up at him, which was a mistake or wasn't, depending. He was looking down at me. The striped light was on the floor and part of his arm and his face was in the softer shade and I thought, well, this is it, this is the moment, kiss me or don't.

His hand came down and rested on my hip. Light. Just resting. My whole body went aware of it, that one warm point of contact. I turned my face up a little more. He leaned down a little. His thumb moved once against my hip, slow, as if to confirm I was real.

And then I panicked, because that's what I do, and I stood up too fast and said, "I'm going to get more iced tea. You want more iced tea?"

"You have iced tea."

"I know. More of it."

I poured it in the kitchen with my back to him and my heart going. When I came back he was just sitting there with his phone, calm as anything, and he didn't say anything about it, which I was grateful for and also a little wrecked by. We listened to the rest of the playlist. He ordered pizza. We watched half a movie and I fell asleep on the couch and woke up under a blanket with him on the other end, reading. I went to the guest room. He said goodnight at the door like a gentleman and I lay awake for an hour thinking about a thumb on a hip.

* * *

Thursday evening we cooked together. That had been his idea, over breakfast, said easy, "we should actually cook something tonight instead of ordering." I said sure. I should say here that I can't cook much and he knew that and didn't care.

He put me on pasta water duty and took the chicken himself. The kitchen was small enough that we kept bumping elbows, and every bump made me laugh for no good reason. He'd taste the sauce and hold the spoon out for me and I'd taste it and we'd argue about whether it needed more salt. It needed more salt. He added it. I won, technically.

I was stirring the pasta when he came up behind me. I heard him first, the floor, and then his hands were on my shoulders and he started rubbing, slow, both thumbs working into the muscle on either side of my spine.

"Oh," I said. Just that. I'd been carrying my shoulders somewhere around my ears all week.

"You're tense," he said.

"I'm always tense. It's my whole personality."

"Well, stand still."

I stood still. I stirred the pasta one-handed and let him work the other shoulder and it felt so good it was almost stupid. I leaned back into him without deciding to. My back met his chest and he kept going, unhurried, and I could feel him breathing. I could have stayed there all night. I think he could have too. The water was boiling and the sauce was simmering and his thumbs were moving in slow circles and I thought, third day, this is day three, and something in me was quietly keeping count.

"I like this," I said.

"Me too."

"Like, a lot."

"I got that," he said, and I could hear the smile in it.

His hands slowed. One of them, I don't remember which, slid a little toward the side of my neck, and I tipped my head to give it room, and that was as far as it got before my phone rang on the counter. Work. I stared at it. It was the kind of call you don't let go to voicemail on a Thursday.

"That's mine," I said, and stepped away, and answered it.

He turned the burner down without being asked and kept stirring the sauce for me while I paced the hallway with the phone. The call took twenty minutes. Something about a design handoff, a client who couldn't make up his mind, my co-worker Dave needing me to look at mockups before Friday. By the end of it I'd half forgotten what my back felt like.

When I came back to the kitchen dinner was plated and on the table, actually on the table, he'd moved the boxes. Two glasses of the iced tea I kept drinking. A candle, unlit, sitting in the middle of the table like he'd considered it and lost his nerve.

"You lit the candle in your head," I said, sitting down.

"What?"

"The candle's not lit."

"I didn't know if that was too much."

"For who?"

He shrugged and got up and lit it with a match from the junk drawer, and we ate by that small flame with the overhead light off, and the cicadas going outside, and the air conditioner humming its one note. He asked me about Dave and the client and I told him the whole dumb story and he laughed in the right places.

After dinner I washed and he dried, and our hands touched passing a plate, and neither of us made a thing of it, and that was Thursday.

That night I lay in the guest room bed again, staring at the ceiling, doing the math I'd been avoiding. One full week. Three days gone. Four left. And the thing we'd both said we wanted, in careful late-night messages, weeks ago, back when it was safe to say things to a screen. The thing I'd flown here knowing about and hadn't said out loud once since.

Four days, I thought. We had four days, and I was going to have to be brave about at least one of them.

Friday we watched a movie. That was all we planned, a movie, and even that felt like a big thing by then, honestly.

Elijah picked because I'd picked the pizza Wednesday and the playlist was his anyway. He picked some heist movie I'd already half seen and I didn't tell him. We sat on the couch and there was a whole cushion of space between us and then there wasn't.

I'm the one who closed it. I should say that, because I keep a mental ledger of who did what this week and I don't want to misremember. I moved my feet up first, tucked them under me, and that got me partway over, and then during some scene where nothing important was happening I let my head go sideways and land on his chest.

He went still for a second. Then his arm came around me, slow, giving me the whole time in the world to change my mind.

Under his shirt I could hear his heart. Not see it, hear it, a steady thump a little faster than I'd have guessed. I fit my ear flat against him and listened like it was a thing I'd paid for.

"Your heart's loud," I said.

"Yours probably is too."

"Mine's behind my own ribs. I can't check."

He laughed and the laugh moved his chest and moved my head with it. I liked that. I liked that a lot.

We watched most of the movie that way. Somewhere in the middle I said, "Can I ask you something dumb?"

"Probably."

"What have you imagined? This week. Since I got here. You can pass if it's dumb."

He was quiet long enough that the movie filled it up. Then he said, "Holding you like this, mostly. That was the top of the list."

"Mostly."

"Mostly," he said, and I could feel him smiling again. "There was other stuff on the list. You know what's on the list."

I did know. We'd typed it to each other at one and two in the morning, careful words with a screen between us. I knew exactly what was on the list, and I'd thought about it every night in the guest room with the ceiling doing nothing interesting above me.

"I've imagined this too," I said. "The couch part. Not the movie part."