Page 130 of Almost Not Quite Engaged

“Nobody talked you out of it but yourself. But you have a camera now and a French app.”

That hits somewhere quiet and deep, and I don’t say anything for a while.

Later, much later, after the containers are empty and the building has gone silent, I realize I’m on his couch and his arm is around me and neither of us moved there on purpose. The lamp is still on. We’re still in the clothes we wore to the hospital. His breathing has slowed and deepened and when I turn my head he’s asleep.

I should move but I don’t.

This is the best part of my day, he’d said earlier, gesturing at nothing in particular. At the takeout containers and the kitchen floor and the two of us when nobody’s watching. But it’s only part of our day. I got a glimpse of having it all the time, and I’m fucking greedy.

I close my eyes and try to hold onto what I can.

Chapter 67

Places Please

ZANE

Boston

Birdie has set the table with the good china.

Jack has been home for four days and is supposed to be resting but there are twelve people in the dining room and my mother made rack of lamb. Rob Taylor is telling a story about a fishing trip in Montana that has somehow become the highlight of the evening for everyone except me.

I watch Kat across the table.

She’s doing the thing. I know the thing because I’ve watched her do it for two weeks now, the warm amusement that never fully commits, the laugh that lands exactly where it needs to, and the eyes that never truly connect to emotion. Like the way she asks my father a question about his recovery that makes him feel like the most important person in the room without making anyone else feel excluded. She’s remarkable at it and getting better every day.

She’s also disappearing inside it, and I’m the only one who can see it happening.

Birdie mentions the engagement party. She and Nan picked a date two days ago, while Kat and I were at the hospital with Jack for his post-op checkup, eating terrible vending machine sandwiches and not talking about any of the things we weren’t talking about.

I look at Kat across the table. She looks at me. I give her the small sorry look. She gives me the small, ‘it’s fine’ look. We’ve developed a whole vocabulary of small looks over the past two weeks and this particular exchange means we both know it isn’t fine.

“Wonderful,” Kat says to Birdie. “What date?”

She doesn’t look at me when she says it.

My dad holds court from his end of the table, lots of color to his face. He’s telling his own Montana stories alongside Rob now to much laughter and friendship. Nan and Mom are discussing photographers and it stabs at me. They didn’t think to consult Kat, and she’s not fighting back. Nate is family dinner drunk which is more dignified than family boozy lunch drunk. Stacey is refilling everyone’s wine. Sweetie keeps disappearing into the kitchen and reappearing with nothing new. Nothing is wrong with the lives they’ve chosen, they’re wonderful. They’re just not for me. Or her.

I’m doing my impression of a man who belongs at this table. Kat moves to sit next to me as coffee and dessert are fetched. She reaches under the table and finds my hand without looking. I hold it. Neither of us looks at the other when it happens.

In the cab home she stares out the window. I check my phone. We don’t fight or fuck. We don’t perform either.

At the townhouse, she goes straight to the bedroom and changes out of the very bland dress with red wine dribbled down the front. I see the moment it happens, the thing in her face that’s been tight all evening unknots. She sits on the edge of the bed and becomes herself again. I make her a drink without asking and sit next to her and we watch something stupid on my laptop and she falls asleep on my shoulder forty minutes in.

I don’t move her.

I sit in the dark with my laptop closed and her breathing slowing next to me, and I think about the look on her face when Birdie said the date. The microsecond before the faux warm amusement clicked into place. The thing underneath it that nobody else saw.

I saw it.

I don’t know what to do about it yet but I saw it.

Chapter 68

The Almost

KAT