by Ivy Carter
“Cadence, there’s something I have to say.”
I suck in a breath.
“Okay,” I reply, my voice barely above a whisper. I force my gaze to meet his, and for a moment I see a glimmer of the old Levi, the one who was filled with determination. The one to whom no one said no. And even though that Levi nearly broke me, he’s also the one I fell in love with. And seeing him there in this new package breaks something open inside of me, something I’m not yet ready to name.
Levi leans in. “What I did to you was absolutely inexcusable. I could spend the rest of my life apologizing for it, and never even come close to doing my penance. I’m surprised you’re even speaking to me right now, to be honest,” he says. “But I’m so glad that you let me sit and tell you about what I’ve been doing. Because my life is so much better now than it was, and I wouldn’t have anything if it weren’t for you.”
“Oh Levi, I’m sure that’s not –“ I say, but he cuts me off.
“It’s absolutely true. I was headed down a dark road, and the fact that I concocted that horrific plan to begin with was evidence of how bad it had gotten for me. I was going nowhere. I was a miserable man with nothing meaningful or good in my life. And you changed all that. You showed me who I was, and what I was becoming. And I did fall in love with you. Harder than I ever thought possible.”
“Levi, please,” I say, and my voice is shaking now. My entire body is shaking. Because this is officially too much now. I can’t.
I can’t be strong when he’s saying these things to me.
But Levi presses on mercilessly. “I don’t blame you for leaving. You absolutely should have. It’s who you are, and it was why I loved you in the first place. And that’s why I gave up the money and the estate.”
I let out a long, slow breath that I didn’t even know I was holding. My thoughts are swimming around in my head as if they’re the little flakes in a snow globe after a child has given it a furious shake. I’m trying desperately to grasp one – just one – and yet it’s all too much to take in. His admission, the things he’s saying and how different he even sounds. This changed man who I loved once, and who, if I’m completely honest, I never really stopped loving.
I don’t even know where to begin. “This is a lot to process,” I say.
But it’s more than that. I’m also terrified. Terrified to allow myself to feel this way again, knowing how badly I could be hurt again as well.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he says, sensing my confusion. “Really, if you want, I can just get up from this bench, continue on my walk with Oliver, and we can leave it at that. But I just want to say one last thing before I go.”
I can feel the itch behind my eyes, telling me they’re on the verge of welling up with tears. I don’t trust my voice at this moment, so I simply nod.
“Once I started loving you, I never stopped. Not for a moment. And not now. But I know that what I did hurt you too much to ever pick up where we left off.” His voice is brittle, and I know he’s trying to wrestle his own emotion at this moment. “But if you think there’s a chance, I’d like to start over.”
I suck in a ragged breath. “What would that even mean, Levi?” I ask.
“Let me take you out. On a first date. The kind we never had, because I fucked everything up so royally. But, maybe…maybe we can get to know each other.”
It’s so absurd that I can’t help but bark out a laugh, which makes Oliver’s ears perk up at our feet.
“I’m sorry, are you really asking me out on a date?” I say, dazzled by what’s happening right now.
He shrugs, knowing it’s the only card he’s got left in the deck, so he may as well play, and play it hard. “Yes, I really am asking you out on a date,” he says. The corner of his mouth quirks up into a hint of a smile, and he looks at me from beneath impossibly long eyelashes. “Cadence Fallon, will you go out with me?”
Every part of me is screaming no no no no! While every part of me is simultaneously screaming yes yes yes!!! are you kidding? of course I will!
Again, I have to pause to let my thoughts catch up with my speech. And when they do, I show him that I’ve got no poker face at all. All I’ve got is a wide grin.
“If you’re free tonight, you could pick me up at seven,” I reply, and then his smile matches mine, watt for watt.
LEVI
I can’t remember the last time I was nervous before a date. In fact, I can’t remember if I’ve ever been nervous before a date. But as I stare into the mirror in my bathroom, trying for third time to tie my tie, I realize that this is what it’s like to really feel.
To actually give a shit about what happens in your own life.
“Get it together, Levi,” I mutter at myself in the mirror.
“Seriously, dude, you’re acting a little bit insane.”
I glance up and see Logan in the mirror, leaning in the doorway of the bathroom. I rarely lock my apartment door, and since I rarely have visitors, Logan and Julia have taken to wandering in and out as they please when they’re working in the evenings.
“Don’t you people knock?” I ask.
“Family doesn’t knock,” he retorts. He nods to my tie. “Having trouble there?”
“Where are you two going, anyway?” Julia asks, suddenly appearing behind her husband.
“Sportello,” I reply, naming my favorite Italian restaurant in Fort Point.
“In that case, ditch the tie. Sportello isn’t that fancy, and neither are you anymore.” Julia reaches for the end of the tie and gives it a yank, sending it whipping off my neck and pooling in a puddle on the floor.
I huff out a sigh, trying to release the tension that’s wound inside me like a spring. It’s no use.
“Julia, he looks terrified,” Logan says.
“He does,” she nods. “It’s sweet, isn’t it?”
“You better put that ring in your pocket for dessert,” Logan says with a wink.
“You two shut up,” I say, turning around to face the firing squad. “I’m not fucking this up again. We’re taking it slow, ok?”
“Sure thing, boss,” Logan says with a little mini-salute. “Best of luck to ya.”
“He doesn’t need luck,” Julie replies, the two of them now focused on each other as they wrap their arms around one another’s waists, pulling each other close. “He’s got love.”
“No sex in my house,” I say as I roll my eyes at the two of them. I squeeze past them through the door to grab my coat. I’ve got twenty minutes to get to the address Cadence gave me, an apartment deep in Somerville. “You two can let yourselves out.”
Her new apartment is just outside of Union Square, a shabby neighborhood on the verge of getting cool. She lives on the top floor of a rickety triple-decker that’s been chopped up into way too many apartments. She told me to text her when I arrived, but I climb out of my car and head up onto the porch to ring the buzzer.
“I’ll be ready in a sec,” she calls through the ancient, crackly speaker. “Come on up.”
The door gives a low, electronic buzz, and I begin my climb up a dim, narrow wooden staircase to the top floor. With the dingy walls and the squeaky stairs, this place looks like it’s been staged for crime scene photos. Gruesome ones.
Cadence’s apartment is one of two doors at the top of the landing. I knock on number six, which she noted was hers. The door flings open, and as soon as she opens it, she’s darting across the floor back towards the bathroom. “Just one second!” she calls as she disappears behind a closed door. It gives me a moment to look around her place, which is a tiny studio with one bay window at the end, a narrow galley kitchen at the other. She’s got a bed, a shabby armchair, and a dinged coffee table that looks like it was picked up on the side of the road. In the corner by the window stands a small easel, a canvas rested on it and a palette of paints on the floor next to it. The canvas bears the image of a red line train as it whizzes across the Longfellow Bridge towards Cambridge.
Just behind
the canvas I notice the blinds on one of the windows are detached and hanging at an angle. After standing there for a full minute, I can no longer take it, so I cross the floor and reach to fix it.
“Ugh, thank you. I’ve been meaning to fix that, but I’m too short, and I just haven’t had the get-up-and-go to slide my coffee table across the floor to stand on it,” she says. I turn and see that she’s dressed in a pair of dark wash skinny jeans, brown boots, and a soft gray sweater that hangs off one delicate shoulder. If this were four months ago, I’d cross the floor and gather her in my arms, planting kisses along that line from her shoulder, up her neck, and to the spot she loves behind her ear. Just the thought of it makes me hard, and I shift and shake my head to erase the image. This is, after all, a first date.
As if she can read my mind, she cocks an eyebrow at me, but doesn’t say anything. Instead she reaches for her coat and her bag. “You ready to go?”
“I am if you are,” I tell her.
She gives me a smile, and just that smile is enough to wash away months of pain and loneliness.
God, even if I only have just this one night with her—I’ll savor each moment for the rest of my days.
I follow her down the stairs and out the door.
“Where’s your car?” she asks, scanning the street.
“It’s that one,” I say, pointing to a black Volvo sedan.
She raises her eyebrows. “Damn, you really have changed.”
“Oliver wasn’t a big fan of the sports car, and I wasn’t a big fan of muddy paws all over the seats,” I explain. “So I traded it in.”
“Smart,” is all she says in response. I unlock the car and open the passenger seat for her, and she slides in. So far, so good. I think. Though of course we’re only about five minutes in. There’s still plenty of time for me to fuck things up.
The drive to the restaurant takes about fifteen minutes of light conversation that feels charged with electricity.
I keep trying to remind myself that this isn’t a normal first date. I have, after all, already seen her naked. But that only makes things worse, because it sends my mind down a fantasy slip and slide of memories of being inside her, and how much I want that again.
The restaurant is loud and bright, which is exactly why I picked it. I didn’t want low lighting and soft music to give us too much time to get awkward. Sportello is arranged like a high-end diner, with patrons sitting around an enormous bar, the waiters walking around to serve drinks and take orders from behind it, and the kitchen staff preparing all the meals in an open kitchen along the back wall. It’s like being in a Waffle House, if Waffle House made truffle risotto and penne alla vodka from scratch. I give the hostess my name, and she leads us to a spot right in the center, where we’ll have a great view of the chef to distract us from any awkwardness that might occur.
But Cadence has other ideas.
“No private room? No bottle service? My, how you’ve changed,” she says.
“Well, I’ve got a little less money than I used to,” I reply.
“Oh? Where did all that money go, anyway?”
I shrug. “A variety of places. I endowed a scholarship. I put a lot of it towards building the new firm. There’s a small foundation that pays for a lot of the pro bono clients that come through. I gave to quite a few charities.”
“And left yourself with?”
“My salary at Cabot Essex Maxon and the building that houses it. That’s pretty much it.” I shrug, leaving off the fact that it took a lot of convincing to get my financial planners to realize I wasn’t losing my mind or the victim of a brain tumor, and that yes, I really did want to get rid of it all, and no, I wasn’t interested in a tax shelter or other offshore accounts of any kind.
Which, by the way, I discovered was my father’s specialty, and untangling all of those after inheriting the estate took weeks and quite a lot of doing. Turns out giving away money is a lot harder than I anticipated, and required that I pay an awful lot of it to people who absolutely didn’t want to do it.
“And how does it feel to be poor?” She asks. She’s awfully feisty tonight, definitely not into taking any shit from me, or letting any shit slide.
I like it. I like her.
“I’m hardly poor,” I tell her. “Despite my lack of stock options and bonuses, I still have a pretty nice salary. Anyway, what about you? What have you been up to?”
And then the seal is broken. We spend the next hour talking over glasses of pinot noir and bowls of fresh pasta and braised pork shoulder. She tells me that she’s been temping for the last month while she looks for a permanent job, and that she’s been surprised to find that she likes administrative work.
“Turns out I thrive on being organized and organizing for other people,” she explains between bites of risotto.
“And your art?” I ask, thinking back to the canvas in her apartment.
“Frankly, it’s better if my art is separate from my paycheck. It makes it easier to create. To be honest, my painting has never gone better than when I took a seemingly mindless office job. I’ve been working on a series of little city details. I’m only a few works in, and I’m still getting the feel for it, but I’m happy with the direction.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I tell her, and I am.
She tells me that she managed to scrape together the money to move out of her parents’ house (with a little bonus money her dad snuck her on the side) about a month after she left Maxon Law. She thought about getting roommates, but she managed to find her tiny studio and loves living alone for the first time in her life.
“It means I can stay up all night at the easel, and no one’s there to give me shit,” she says, and I can just imagine her hands and cheeks streaked with paint, working as the sun rises over the Atlantic.
“Between Oliver and Logan and Julia always around, I’m rarely alone these days,” I say. I’m shocked to realize the truth of it. That after she left me, my life suddenly got bigger. Before Cadence, I’d managed to isolate myself almost entirely, both in the office and outside of it. Maybe it was that she’d left a hole I knew I had to fill. Whatever it is, I’m thankful for it, and it’s just another reason I have to be grateful to her for precipitating the change. Even though I’ve been barely three steps above miserable since she left, I can’t help but admit that my life has gotten exponentially better than it was before she ever arrived.
We finish the meal with a shared slice of tiramisu; our chairs slid closer, our heads bowed over the rich, sweet cake. All trace of her anger, my misery, or our shared awkwardness seems to have faded away. I have no idea what comes next, but I feel like we’re off to a very good start.
When the waitress brings the check, we both reach for it. “Please,” I say, pulling it away from her. “I asked you out, so let me pay.”
She narrows her eyes at me with a devious grin, but finally acquiesces. “Fine,” she says with a carefree shrug. “That seems fair.”
I pay the bill, and we make our way out into the autumn evening, which has grown considerably colder since we went into the restaurant. Next to me, Cadence shivers and pulls her jacket around her. Without thinking, I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her into my side to keep he warm. I feel her tense, just for a moment, but then her body seems to unwind and melt against me. It feels familiar in the kind of way that also stings, like rubbing alcohol poured on a wound you’re trying to heal. It’s helping, but it hurts along the way.
We get to the car, and again I open the passenger door for her. I hate to let her go so she can get in, but I have to. We can’t stand out on the street all night, as much as I’d like to.
And so I climb into the front seat, the question I want to ask on the tip of my tongue, but I’m far too afraid of the answer. Instead, I start the car and start towards her apartment. Because I can’t ask for more than what we’ve had tonight. I shouldn’t. I don’t deserve it. I should simply bid her goodnight and hope she’ll see me again.
I’
m halfway down the block when she reaches over and places her hand on my knee, her thumb stroking absentmindedly across my thigh.
I turn to see her looking over at me.
“Maybe back to your place?” she says.
She doesn’t have to ask twice. I pause only to pull out my phone and shoot a text to Logan and Julia.
Coming home. GET. OUT.
CADENCE
I don’t know what possesses me to say it.
I know it’s exactly the wrong move. But then I have to ask myself, what is the right move exactly?
What am I trying to do? Am I trying to play games with him? Do I want to punish him? Or do I want to be happy? Because at this moment, nothing in the world would make me happier than going back to Levi’s place.
I spent so long broken to pieces over the fact that I’d given myself to him, only to find out that our relationship was built on the worst kind of lie. I trusted him, and he shattered that trust beyond what should be able to be repaired.
But once the initial pain of it wore off, I was left with emptiness: over the loss of him, the future I saw, and also the way he made me feel. Literally, I missed the things he did to my body. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I was worried I never would again.
Over the course of our date, which started a little rocky but quickly fell into a comfortable rhythm, I realized that even though the premise of a first date was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, it was working.
Sure, we’d already been engaged. We’d had sex – and lots of it. But in sitting at the counter and devouring plates of the best Italian food I’d ever eaten, I was realizing that I never really knew Levi.
Probably because he never really knew himself.
As we talked, I realized that I’d already forgiven him. It was easy to see that he’d suffered, and that he’d changed. He was a different man, and it was clear that this new Levi would never do what the old Levi had done. But it was also clear that while I may have forgiven him, he hadn’t forgiven himself. And I’m not sure he ever would, unless I convinced him that he should.