Love and Other Words

After that one text during lunch with Sabrina, things with Elliot snowball and we’re doing something we didn’t do even in high school: talking nearly every day. Maybe only for a few minutes. Sometimes it’s just over text. But I feel his presence almost constantly, and no matter how much I want to talk myself out of it, I know the gentle hum of relief in my thoughts is because of him.

Perhaps relatedly, things with Sean are . . . weird, at best. We’ve had zero arguments. We’ve had zero conversations about what we’re doing. When I happen to catch them awake, Phoebe seems happy to see me, Sean seems happy to see me. I’m sure if I planned a big wedding tomorrow, Sean would still happily show up. I’m sure if I put off planning it indefinitely, Sean would never ask about it.

I’m also sure I could leave and he would be fine with that, too.

It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever been a part of, and yet, it could be so fucking easy. It requires nothing of me, requires no involvement from my heart, and I know without a doubt that he doesn’t need me. We could have a relationship that gives us both sex, financial security, a roof over our heads, and stimulating conversation at the dinner table, but otherwise live entirely separate lives.

But the critical truths—that we aren’t really in love, never have been, and its absence troubles me—don’t seem to come in little drops of awareness. They’re suddenly there, in stark black and white, shouting This Relationship Is So Very Over every time we smile politely as we shift around each other at the bathroom sink.

I’m sick over it. I’m desperate to find the best way out. Unfortunately, I worry that Sean’s chief reaction will be disappointment. I am as convenient a lover to him as he is to me; but in his case he may not need more: he has the love of his life already, in the form of a six-year-old daughter.

A good start seems to be to make sure I can afford to live on my own in the city. I take a rare vacation day and drive to El Cerrito to do something I’ve been putting off for months: meeting with my financial adviser. Daisy Milligan is Dad’s old finance whiz, and I kept her more out of sentimentality and laziness than any particular knowledge about her skill.

That said, though she’s approaching seventy, she barely needs to refer to my file while lecturing me on what I have in my trust (enough to cover home repairs and taxes, but not much more) and why I should sell one of my houses (I need a retirement account more than I need two properties). I don’t dare mention that I’m living in San Francisco and not even making rental income from the Berkeley house.

I hate talking about money. I hate even more seeing how badly I need to get organized financially. Afterward, I’m sort of high-strung and buzzy, and when Elliot texts asking how my day is going, and I tell him I’m on his side of the bay . . . meeting up seems like a pretty obvious choice.

He suggests Fatapple’s in Berkeley, having no idea how close that is to my house. So instead I suggest we meet at the top of the Berkeley hills, in Tilden Park, at the entrance to the Wildcat Creek Trail.

I get there before he does, and outside my car I pull my fleece higher on my neck to battle the wind. The fog rolls in over the hills, making it look like the gray horizon is sinking down into the valley, an inch at a time.

I love Tilden, and have so many memories of coming up here with Mom, riding the ponies, feeding the cows at the Little Farm. Dad and I would come nearly every weekend after Mom died to feed the ducks at the pond. We’d sit in silence, tossing torn-off pieces of bread into the water, and watch the ducks snatch them up, quacking at one another competitively.

The nostalgia of Tilden seems to mix with the nostalgia of Elliot and forms a potent brew in my blood, tearing through me. Even though he and I have never been here together, it feels like we have. It feels like he’s part of my nuclei, entwined with my DNA.

So seeing him emerge from the fog of the parking lot and move toward me with his long, loping stride and tight black jeans . . . it makes my anxiety just . . . evaporate.

In a pulse of Obvious Epiphany, I realize Sabrina was right: I haven’t been living without him. I’ve been merely surviving.

I want to share this life with him somehow. I just . . . have no idea how that looks.

He seems to read my mood as he lowers himself onto the bench beside me, sliding his arm along the back. “Hey, you. Everything okay?”

The impulse to hug him is nearly debilitating. “Yeah, just . . . long day.”

He laughs at this, reaching with his hand to wrap a gentle fist around my ponytail and tug. “And it’s only noon.”

“I met with Dad’s old financial adviser.”

With his other hand, he reaches up, scratching his eyebrow. “Yeah? How’d that go?”

“She wants me to sell one of the houses.”

Elliot falls silent, digesting this. “How does that feel to you?”

“Not great.” I look up at him. “But, I know she’s right. I don’t live in either of them. It’s just that I don’t want to get rid of either of them, either.”

“They both carry a lot of memories. Good and bad.”

Like that, he cuts right through everything. Even since the first time he asked about my mom, he’s gently relentless.

I pull a leg up and turn to face him. We’re so close, and even though we’re outside, in a public park, there’s no one around us and it feels so intimate. His eyes are more green than brown today; he’s a little stubbly, like he didn’t shave this morning. I slide my hand between my knees to keep from reaching out and cupping his jaw.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Elliot’s eyes dip briefly to my mouth and then back again. “Always.”

“Do you think I keep things bottled up?”

Straightening, he looks around, as if he needs a witness. “Is this a serious question?”

I push him playfully, and he feigns injury. “Sabrina suggested I have a habit of keeping people at arm’s length.”

“Well,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “you always talked to me, but I had the sense you didn’t really do that with anyone else. So maybe that’s still true?”

A car drives past, and its diesel engine chugs loudly around the parking loop, pulling our attention momentarily away from each other and out to the grass-lined lot. The faint noises of animal life trickle to us from the Little Farm, just up the gravel road.

When I don’t respond, he continues. “I mean, maybe I’m biased by our current circumstances, but I feel like maybe you don’t really . . . talk about stuff. And I might be pushing my luck here, but I get the feeling that Sean is that way, too.”

I choose to ignore that part, wanting to avoid the Sean conversation with Elliot entirely. I know now what I have to do, but I owe Sean enough to discuss it with him first. “I used to talk to Dad,” I say, sidestepping like a pro. “Not like I did with you, maybe, but about school. And Mom.”

“Yeah, but we’re talking about now,” he says. “You were always pretty insular, but do you have anyone? Other than Sabrina?”

“I have you.” After an awkward beat, I add, “I mean . . . now I do.” Another pause. “Again.”

His expression straightens and Elliot picks up a twig from the ground, resting his elbows on his knees and spinning the stick between his fingers and thumb. Fidgeting.

I know—

I know—

I know what’s coming.

“Macy?” He looks over his shoulder at me. “Do you love Sean?”

I knew it was coming, yeah, but the weight of his question still propels me up off the bench and two paces away.

“I’ve seen you in love,” he says gently, not standing. “It doesn’t look like you’re in love with him.”

I don’t answer, but he reads me anyway.

“I don’t get it,” he growls. “Why are you with him?”

I turn back around to catch his expression, brow furrowed, mouth tight with emotion. It takes a few breaths for me to put the words together in a way that doesn’t feel supremely melodramatic.

“Because,” I tell him, “we have the totally fucked-up agreement of emotionally messed-up people—that was unspoken, I guess, until recently—that we only give each other a fraction of ourselves. Losing him would never wreck me.” I shake my head and look down at my shoe, toeing the dirt. I feel my epiphany from earlier about a robust, shared life starting to fade as Elliot pokes at my self-preservation instincts. I hate that Sabrina was right. I hate that retreating to my cocoon is my first reflex. “I realize how cowardly that sounds, but I don’t think I could take losing someone I love again.”

“It hurt that much,” he says quietly, not really a question. “What I did. When are we going to talk?”

“I didn’t just lose you,” I remind him.

I stop, needing a second to breathe. The memories of the last time I saw Elliot used to make me physically sick. Now they just send a wavy lurch through my body.

I can see he’s processing this. He studies my face, turning the words around in his mind and looking at them from different angles, like he knows he’s missing something.

Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.

“What’s his story?” he asks.

“You mean Sean’s?”

Elliot nods, picking up another twig. “He was married?”

“Yeah. She was in finance, and got addicted to cocaine on a work trip.”

His head shoots up, eyes shocked. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Terrible, right?” I look past him, out into the parking lot. “So, I think part of it for him is that he has his daughter, and he never really got to get over Ashley. It’s been . . . really easy for both of us to just fall into something permanent without really needing each other.”

Elliot leans forward. “Macy.”

“Elliot.”

“Are you staying because of Phoebe?”

I stare at him, genuinely confused. “What?”

“Phoebe.”

“No, I heard the name. I just don’t understand how— Oh.” I get what he’s saying. “No.”

“I mean, she’s this sweet little girl without a mom . . .” He says it like it’s obvious why I’d stick around, and okay, from the outside I can see why he’d think that. But he doesn’t know them.

“She doesn’t need me,” I reassure him. “She’s got an awesome, involved dad. I’m this . . .” I wave my hand around, unsure. “This accessory. I mean, let’s be real: I don’t really know how to . . . ‘mom’ anyway, so she doesn’t seem to need anything from me.”

He grunts a little, looking down at the twig he’s slowly and methodically shredding. “Okay.”

I glare. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

“It means okay.”

“You can’t think that long before giving me an ‘okay.’ That’s a condescending ‘okay.’ ”

He laughs, and tosses the stick to the ground before looking up at me. “Okay.”

A challenge. He wants to engage me, I can tell.

“Goddammit.” I turn and stare up at the education center and the gray clouds rolling in behind it.

“She might need a mom when she gets her period,” he says quietly. “Or when her friends are jerks.”

“Maybe she’ll have a friend in a closet who listens to her instead,” I counter, and then turn to look up at him, suspicious. “Why does it feel like you’re trying to talk me into staying with Sean? Are you reverse-psychologizing me?”

Grinning, he relents. “Come on, let’s talk about something else. Favorite word?”

Heat ripples across my skin. I’m so unprepared for this that my mind stalls and suddenly, there are no words, anywhere. “I’d need to think . . . What about you?”

His laugh comes as a low rumble. “Mellifluous.”

I scrunch my nose. “That’s a mouthful.”

“It most certainly is, ma’am,” he growls, with a meaningful lean to his words.

He gets a pebble tossed at him for that.

“Your voice is mellifluous,” he murmurs, pushing off the bench to stand and move toward me. “And come on. Your turn. You don’t get to think too hard on this, cheater. You know the rules.”

I watch his lips part as he looks at my mouth. Watch his tongue dart out.

“Limerence.”

There’s no other word like it: The state of being infatuated with another person.

Elliot’s eyes shoot up to mine, pupils dilating like a drop of ink in a pond. “You’re terrible.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

He nods to the trail marker, beckoning me to follow. We hike down the path, and it reminds me of walking with him through Armstrong Woods, or along the dry creek bed in summer. It’s so weird how it feels like another lifetime, and also like it was two weeks ago. Slowly, our steps converge into the crunch . . . crunch . . . crunch of feet on gravel moving in tandem. He’s shortened his strides to match mine.

“Are you happy?” I ask him.

The question is so abrupt, I expect him to balk a little, but he doesn’t. “I’ve had moments of it, yeah.”

I don’t like this answer. I want him to be joyful, loved, adored, full of everything, all the time.

“I’ll admit,” he adds, “I feel more of it being near you.”

It’s heady, knowing I have the power to deliver that.

“Are you happy?” he asks.

“I haven’t been,” I tell him, and feel him turn to look at the side of my face. “And being near you again has made me realize it.” We stop on a tiny, slippery bridge in the middle of the woods, looking at each other. “You make me feel so many things,” I admit in a hush.

He reaches up, gently pulling my ponytail through his fist. “Me too. That was always true.” Shifting his hand to smooth a palm over the front of my hair, he murmurs, “I wasn’t trying to talk you into staying with Sean, by the way. I just think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

My eyes narrow in skepticism. “Me?”

Nodding, he says, “I think you’re beating yourself up for being with Sean. It’s why I asked about Phoebe and . . .”

“Ashley?”

“Yeah. Ashley.” He uses the tip of his index finger to push his glasses up, and stares out at the thick trees in front of us. “You act like you’re with him only because it’s easy. But in some ways, he’s your dad in this scenario, and you’re the woman who came after your mom. Sean doesn’t have as much to give, but you understand why. After all, you wouldn’t want to try to replace anyone.”

I stare up at him in shock. In only a few sentences, Elliot has just explained why it makes sense for me to be with Sean, while simultaneously proving that he—Elliot—is the only person who truly understands a thing about me. I didn’t even see this truth until now.

“Why are you so good to me? After everything?”

Elliot tilts his head as he looks back at me. Of course he doesn’t see it skewed this way. He only knows his betrayal, not mine. “Because I love you?”

Emotion clogs my throat, and I have to swallow a few times to get the words out. “I don’t think I really noticed before how numb I’ve been. Or cared, maybe.”

I see the way this hits him, physically. “Mace . . .”

I laugh darkly at this, at how fucking horrible it sounds. “That’s awful, isn’t it?”

He steps forward abruptly, pulling me into his chest. One hand cups the back of my head, the other wraps around my shoulders, and it feels like I haven’t really cried in ten years.