The Night We Got It Right

The dinner had been a disaster, if you can call two people not talking a disaster. It was more a museum exhibit of a disaster. Quiet Diner, an installation piece, free admission.

Walt had picked at his burger. I had pushed my fries around in the basket until they went cold. He asked me if the fries were okay, I said they were fine, and that was the longest exchange of the night. Forty-five minutes, two drinks, and eleven words between us. I counted. I count things when I'm nervous, which is a horrible habit, because counting things like words and weeks and months only ever makes me feel worse.

So we walked the six blocks to the Rusty Nail, because that's what we do when we don't know what else to do. We've been doing it for nearly three years. The Nail is the kind of bar where the floor is sticky in a way that feels almost loyal, like the floor has been through some things with you and deserves your patience. The jukebox only plays classic soul because the owner, Dee, got sick of people feeding it quarters for country and finally just unplugged everything else. Otis Redding was on when we pushed through the door, and I felt my shoulders drop half an inch, which is about as much relief as I'd felt in a while.

We took our usual spots at the horseshoe bar, near the bend, where the wood is worn smooth and there's a divot Walt swears was made by a dart in ninety-four. Two glasses of the house red for me, a bourbon for him. The same order for three years. I could order it in my sleep. Some nights I think I basically do.

"Rough night, you two?"

That was Mitch, a regular who has been at the Nail so long I half believe he was poured into his booth with the foundation. Seventy-one years old, retired machinist, suspenders every single day, rain or shine. He shuffles over to the bar with the pace of a man who has nowhere better to be, which, to be fair, he doesn't, and he squints at us like we're a math problem.

"You two look like you're sitting shiva," he says. "Which one of you died?"

"Ha, nobody, Mitch," Walt says, and he does his half laugh, the one where the sound happens but the face doesn't join in. "Just a long day. Long week, maybe."

"Long month?" Mitch asks, and then he cackles at his own joke, slaps the bar, and orders another old fashioned from Penny, one of the two bartenders working the slow Wednesday crowd. There are maybe six other people in the whole place. A guy doing a crossword. Two women splitting a plate of wings and arguing about something on their phones. The usual.

Walt smiles at Mitch, a real one this time, small but real, and for a second I feel that warm pull toward him, the one that used to be constant and now shows up mostly when other people are watching. That's a nasty thing to notice about yourself. I noticed it anyway.

Here's the part I have to say plainly, because this whole story is about it. I'm Katelyn, I'm thirty-three, I teach yoga at a studio off Delancey, and Walt is thirty-six, he runs his own contracting crew, and we have been together three years as of October. And I sat on that bar stool with my cheap red wine and I realized, somewhere around Otis's second song, that I could not remember the last time we had sex.

Not couldn't place the specific night. Couldn't remember it at all. No image came up. No Saturday morning, no Sunday-afternoon-since-we-had-nowhere-to-be. My brain just offered me a static-y blank, like a channel that doesn't broadcast anymore.

So I did what I do. I counted backward.

There was that camping trip, but no, we'd been too tired both nights and it rained the second one. My birthday, a few months ago, but I remembered that clearly, and what I remembered was that we'd gotten home late from dinner and he'd kissed my forehead and we'd both fallen asleep with the TV on. That wasn't it either, whatever it was, and I know it wasn't, because I remember lying there listening to him breathe and thinking, well, there's always next weekend.

I counted weeks. Three weeks, nothing. Eight weeks, nothing. I got to fourteen weeks and my chest did this small, awful squeeze, like a hand closing gently around something soft, and I kept going. Sixteen. Nineteen. Somewhere past the four-month mark I stopped counting, because the number stopped being funny and started being a fact about my life.

Four and a half months. Maybe more. Four months of sleeping next to a man I still, genuinely, love, and neither of us had reached across that gap in the mattress. Not once. And the worst part, the part that made me stare into my wine like it held answers, is that I hadn't missed it out loud. I'd felt it, this low hum of something wrong, this itch under the routine, but I'd filed it under stress, under his shoulder injury, under my studio's insurance paperwork, under everything except the truth, which was that we had stopped wanting each other in that specific way and neither of us wanted to be the one to say it first.

I felt guilty, is what I'm getting at. Guilty like I'd let a plant die. You don't kill a plant on purpose. You just stop watering it, one busy week at a time, and then one Tuesday you notice the leaves and feel sick about it.

Otis rolled into Cassidy Cooke. Penny refilled my wine without asking, which is one of the reasons I love this bar. Walt turned his glass a quarter turn on the bar, the way he does when he's thinking, and I watched his forearms. He has good forearms, my man, from hauling lumber for a living, and I used to be embarrassingly obvious about how much I liked them. When was the last time I'd actually touched one on purpose? Not a hand on the shoulder passing in the kitchen. A real touch.

"Hey," he said, quiet, just for me, under the music. "You okay over there? You've been doing the eyebrows thing."

"What eyebrows thing?"

"The thing where you're working something out. Your whole face gets involved."

"I don't have a whole face thing."

"Katie. You've got a whole face thing."

I laughed, and it surprised both of us, that laugh, because neither of us had produced one in a while. He looked at me then, really looked, and his eyes were doing that thing too, the careful thing, a man standing at the edge of a frozen lake testing the ice with one boot.

"Hey," he said again, softer. "We're okay, right? You and me."

And there it was, the question, sitting on the bar between our drinks like a coin somebody had left. Four months of silence had a question now. I could have said sure, fine, of course, the way we've both been saying it in our own quiet ways since spring.

Instead I looked at him, this warm, tired, decent man I've loved for three years, and I told the truth.

"I don't actually know," I said. "I honestly don't know, Walt."

He didn't flinch. He set his glass down all the way, and he nodded slowly, like I'd finally answered a question he'd been carrying around too.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Then let's figure it out."

Mitch, from two stools down, raised his old fashioned at us like a toast to disaster, and I swear to you the man winked.

Walt flagged Penny down with two fingers, which is our old signal for the check, except he didn't ask for the check. "Two shots of your rye," he said. "And keep the bottle handy."

I raised an eyebrow at him. He raised one back. We hadn't done shots at the Nail since Dee's fiftieth birthday party, which was over two years ago now, and that night had ended with Walt teaching Mitch how to use my phone camera and me laughing so hard I pulled a muscle in my side.

The shots came in those little glasses that always look dirtier than they are. He pushed one toward me and kept one, and we lifted them, and we clinked them, and here's the funny thing, we both looked down while we did it. At the glasses. At the bar top. Anywhere but each other. Like a couple of shy strangers on a first date, except we've been sharing a bed and a mortgage pre-approval email draft for three years.

The whiskey burned going down. Good burn, the kind that sits in your chest and radiates outward like a small personal sun. I felt it hit the wine already in my stomach and make peace with it.

"Okay," Walt said, exhaling. "That's better."

"That is better," I agreed.

He tapped the little divot in the bar top, the one he swears was made by a dart in 1994, though he has never once produced evidence for this and I have stopped asking. "You know what my problem is?" he said, turning his empty glass a slow quarter turn. "I stopped being scared of you."

I laughed. "That's a weird compliment."

"No, listen. First year we were dating, I was terrified of you. In a good way. Like, I'd rehearse texts. I'd change shirts twice. And then somewhere along the line I got comfortable, which is good, comfort is good, but I think I confused comfortable with finished. Like I'd already won you so I could stop showing up."

I turned on my stool to face him fully, which I realized I hadn't done in a while. We'd been sitting side by side, both facing the bar like two people watching the same television.

"You still show up," I said. "You fixed my studio's door hinge last month. You drive me to the doctor because I hate parking downtown. You show up constantly, Walt. That was never the problem."

"Then what was?"

And I didn't have a neat answer for that, so I ordered us another round. Penny was already pouring it, because Penny misses nothing and I love her for it. The second shot went down easier than the first. Cassidy Cooke gave way to Etta James, and Etta was singing about a Sunday kind of love, which felt like the jukebox was eavesdropping and being smug about it.

Here is a thing about whiskey. It doesn't give you courage. It just turns down the volume on the voice that talks you out of things. That voice in me had been running a very long justification track all evening, all four months really, and the rye reached into my head and pulled its plug.

So I put my hand on Walt's thigh.

Just that. High on the thigh, near his knee at first, and I felt him go still in that way men go still, like a deer hearing a twig. Then I slid it up maybe three inches, and his breath changed audibly.

"Katie," he said, careful.

"I want to do something different tonight," I said into his ear, quiet, so quiet that Mitch and Penny and the six other sad Wednesday souls in that bar got none of it. My heart was pounding and I could hear it in my own ears, which was ridiculous, we have been intimate thousands of times, but it had been so long that my own hand felt transgressive. "I don't want to go home and sit on the couch and watch our show and fall asleep at ten thirty. I want to do something different. Tonight. With you."

"What did you have in mind?" His voice had dropped a register, and I felt it in my spine. Three years and that voice still worked on me, which was good news, actually. Extremely good news. That was data I desperately needed.

"I don't know yet," I admitted. "That's the point. We always know. We have the whole script memorized. Dinner, bar, home, couch, bed, sleep. I want to skip to a page we haven't read in a while."

He covered my hand with his, right there on his thigh, and squeezed it. "Okay," he said. "Okay, yeah. God, yes!" Then he laughed, this short huff of a laugh, half embarrassed. "You know I was sitting here trying to figure out how to say basically