by Cara Bastone
“Just because I’m not what she wants doesn’t mean I’m not good enough for her,” he informed Ruth, who merely arched a feline eyebrow and gave a rather pointed yowl. “Even if her mattress is a damn cloud and her room looks like a page from a West Elm catalog.”
He stood up and strode to stand in front of the box fan. It was too hot in his apartment to sit in one place.
“You don’t care about West Elm, do you, Ruth?” he asked her as she plowed her forehead into his ankles. “That’s why you’re my best girl. All you need is food in your bowl and water—Oh, crap.” He strode over and filled up her water bowl, plopped a fresh can of food down for her.
He stood in front of the box fan and watched Ruth eat her breakfast. His insides hurt. He was haunted by thoughts of Mary’s bedroom. The expensive, decorative baubles twisting in the sunlight at her window, the framed art photographs he was willing to bet were originals, her heaven-soft duvet cover that wasn’t made of any material John had ever encountered before.
He winced and dragged a hand over his face, trying like hell not to feel like an idiot for thinking he had a real chance with her.
In an attempt to trick his mind into another direction, John pulled out his phone and opened his email. There at the top of the stack was the unanswered email he’d received from his father last week.
Come spend time with me, son, his email had implored.
You’re too rich for comfort, John’s non-reply had said back.
John sighed. Why was it always about money? “Whaddaya think, Ruthie?” John asked, setting his phone back down on his kitchen table. “Should I shelve my dignity for a week and let my father take me on a bonding vacation?” Jack would certainly pay for it if John told him he couldn’t afford to go.
His head snapped up at the tap-tap on his front door. John groaned, pressing his fingers against his suddenly pounding forehead. He knew, without having to look, exactly who was at the door. Even her knock was sweet. Two little taps, polite knuckles. God, he wasn’t ready for this. Her words earlier this morning had almost been a kindness. They’d cut him down to ribbons, but at least he knew, without question, where she stood on the matter. He didn’t want her sweetness, her reason. He didn’t want her to be nice to him right now. And he knew, without question, that if he opened that door, she was going to be unbearably sweet to him.
Ugh.
With any luck, she’d heard him asking Ruth for her opinion on financial matters. Wouldn’t that just be the cherry on top.
Two more knocks, these slightly louder than the last.
Deciding that he wasn’t so much of an asshole that he could hold his breath and pretend he wasn’t home, John stepped around Ruth and dragged his ass over to the door. With grim surrender, he swung open the door.
She stood there, an unexpected expression on her face, her hands on her hips. Her hair was piled up messily on top of her head, still wet from a shower, and she wore no makeup. She was in red shorts and a white T-shirt and perfectly white sneakers. She looked like she’d just thrown some clothes on to run down to the bodega, but here she was, all the way across town, standing at his door.
Apparently even piles of ribbons were capable of stomach-swooping. He wished like heck it didn’t affect him to see her standing there in his doorway. But of course, it did.
John frowned at her. Mary frowned back, her eyebrows knitting forward like her forehead muscles were straining from the position.
“Mary—”
“You’re not attracted to me.” She cut him off, her expression morphing from surly to stubborn.
“What?” It was probably the only thing she could have said that truly shocked him. One hand on the door, practically blocking her from coming inside, John just blinked at her.
She shoved forward, knocking his arm askew and coming into his house. She kicked off her white sneakers to reveal tiny, pink socks. She tossed her purse down next to her sneakers and whirled on him, her eyes narrowed.
Thoroughly thrown off and befuddled, John muscled Ruth back from the open door and closed it behind them. He turned to Mary and mirrored her position. Hands on hips. A scowl for the ages.
Surprisingly, he broke before she did. “You think I’m not attracted to you?”
She stalked over to his kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, chugged it down to empty and slammed the glass down. “I know you’re not attracted to me. That’s what the whole problem is. Has always been.”
In the courtroom, he was notorious for being a quick thinker. He’d been captain of his debate team in high school. He drove Estrella nuts when they watched Jeopardy!, always saying the answers before the contestants did.
But staring at Mary standing in her stocking feet in his kitchen, glaring at him, John’s mind was completely blank. He had no idea how to respond to her utterly insane statement.
He settled on a second “What?”
Still glaring at him, she held up her fingers and listed the incriminating evidence. “You never look me up and down the way you do every other woman on earth. Besides last night you’ve never tried to kiss me, but we were drunk so that barely counts. And if we’d gotten naked this morning, you would have seen me all in the bright light, and you’d have to come face-to-face with my age. I... I couldn’t handle that. Not when you already think I’m too old for you.”
There were too many threads to grab hold of in what she’d just said, too many issues to address. He went for the most glaring one. “Too old for me? This is about what I said on our blind date? Mary, for God’s sake, are you ever going to let me live that down?” He stalked forward, his blood boiling in his veins.
“John, it was humiliating. I did my hair, chose an outfit, walked into that restaurant feeling like a million bucks. And ten seconds later, I felt about two inches tall.” She threw her arms into the air. “It would have been three inches, but I was so stooped with age.”
He took three more steps forward and took her by the shoulders. “You think you were the only one who was humiliated, Mary?” He squeezed her shoulders once, firmly, and then stepped back from her, pressing his fingers to his forehead in deference to the headache. “You want to know how I felt? I’d scrambled across town to be on time for the date, so I was still in my work clothes, sweaty and smelling like fried chicken because one of my clients works at a Crown Fried Chicken and it was the only place she could meet me. So, then, there I am, in a fifteen-dollar haircut, twenty-nine dollars in cash in my wallet, at a restaurant expensive enough for me to have to charge dinner to my credit card, on a date set up by my mother. My mother. God bless her, Mary, but what man in his right mind isn’t humiliated by a date set up by his mother?” He paced away from her, still pressing his fingers against the headache. “My mother is a lot of things, but reality-based is not one of them.” He turned to her. “You know how she described you to me? A beautiful, bubbly blonde who loves to chat about movies and music. She said you liked going to the beach and pilates. She said you were thinking about starting business school.”
“That’s all true—”
“She made you sound like you were about twenty-five years old, Mary. I thought to myself, John, the rumpled work clothes and cheap haircut won’t matter to a twenty-five-year-old. She’ll be impressed that you even have a full-time job. That you made it through law school. If it’s a match, hopefully you can start taking her to happy hours at more affordable restaurants, and she’ll be impressed that you know how to life-hack your way through this fucking city.”
He paced again. “You say you felt like a million bucks? Mary, you looked like a hundred million. A billion. My first date in six months, and I’d been expecting a softball. Someone who I could maybe impress with a law degree until I could get comfortable enough to flirt with her. But in walks this—” he waved his hands in the air, searching for the words “—sophisticated creature in some sort of dress...heels...your hair...
” He trailed off, not adept enough to actually describe how she’d looked. “And then you saw me across the restaurant and smiled at me with that fucking smile of yours.”
“What’s wrong with my smile?” Mary croaked.
“Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s the best fucking smile in the universe. But you know what that kind of smile says to a man like me across a restaurant? It says, I will devastate you, you poor schmuck. And then there you were. The most gorgeous woman in the entire restaurant, on the entire block, in the entire goddamn borough, and you were sitting down to dinner with me. Fried-chicken suit and all.” He pressed at his forehead again, trying to smooth away the ache. “I said the first thing that came to mind. It was fucking stupid. I immediately regretted it. I had no idea it would shape our entire relationship.”
“You...you mean that you meant that literally? You weren’t calling me old? You were saying that you were literally expecting someone younger?”
“It’s not an excuse. It was a rude thing to say, and I wanted to staple my mouth closed the second I said it. But yes. I meant it literally. I don’t care about our age difference, Mary. It’s negligible anyways. Only six years.”
“But...” She looked deeply confused. “I heard you tell Tyler that we’re in different stages of our lives. Like I was three moves away from winding up in an old folks’ home.”
“That’s what you took from that statement? Oh, God.” He threw his arms up at the universe. “I have the worst freaking luck for you to have overheard that. No. That is not what I meant. I was standing in your beautiful kitchen, staring at your hanging collection of copper pots when I said that.”
“What do my pots have to do with anything?”
“I have one cast-iron pan, Mary. One. And I use it for literally everything. I have one sharp knife. Four cups. Two mugs—”
“So?!”
“So? What I mean is that you’re in this place in your life where you can host dinner parties in your two-bedroom apartment. I mean, my God, you had a candle the size of my forearm next to your gigantic bathtub. You probably drink red wine in that bathtub and listen to audiobooks. Mary, I don’t even have air-conditioning! My big splurge last year was Ruth. A rescue cat! We’re at different stages of our lives. That’s what I meant. You’re a put-together, affluent woman. I’m still scrambling to pay off my student loans. It has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with who we are.”
He was starting to deflate. He’d never expected to lay it all out like this to Mary. He’d never even wanted to.
John strode over to his couch and plunked down. He lowered his forehead to his fingertips and rubbed at the ache.
“Not attracted to you?” In for a penny, in for a pound. He might as well clear it all up now. There was nothing else to lose. Their friendship was most likely shot to shit. All he was going to get from her were a few tipsy kisses last night and a goodbye in a few moments once she’d said what she came to say. “You want to know why I never look you up and down? Because it hurts to look at you.” He leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes, his face tipped up toward the ceiling. “Being around you is like being parched while there’s a glass of lemonade sitting right there, within arm’s reach. I have to talk myself out of gulping you down pretty much every second we’re together. I’d never be able to sip. That’s why I don’t look you up and down.”
John felt a soft, light touch at his arm and his eyes flung open. She’d padded over without him realizing it. She stood next to the couch, her eyes on her own fingers, which played with the sleeve of his shirt.
“You’re in a T-shirt,” she whispered. “And shorts.”
“I was going to go for a run before work. Before it got too hot outside,” he defended himself. “You’re in shorts too.”
“I’ve never seen you in anything but your fancy clothes. And your pj’s once.”
He blinked. If he was interpreting the expression on her face correctly, then she was looking at him rather softly. It was confusing. Weren’t they fighting? Wasn’t she just about to say goodbye?
With one pink-socked foot, she nudged at his shin. “You have hairy legs,” she whispered.
He looked down at his legs. Looked back up at her.
She took a deep breath. “This is how I look without makeup.”
“There’s no need to brag, Mary.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes and went pink in the cheeks. “This is a big deal for me, John. To stand here in laundry-day clothes and wet hair and no makeup and no sleep. The world isn’t kind to pretty much any women when it comes to how they look. But especially not ‘women of a certain age.’ Ain’t that right, Ruth?” Mary scratched at Ruth’s head where she twined between her feet, but when she straightened again, her face was deadly serious. “My mother constantly reminds me how old I am. How time is running out for me. Dying alone is right around the corner. It’s been getting harder to ignore her. And I hate to think it’s because she’s right.” Mary shuddered. “I’m not naive. The world isn’t as accepting of you if you’re over thirty-five and single. Hell, even Sebastian and Tyler, two of the most open-minded guys I know, partnered up with people a decade younger, or more, than them.”
She took a deep breath and nudged at his shin again with her toes. “So, yeah. This is it. This is what I look like with no makeup on. After too little sleep. Thirty-seven and a beer too many. Whatcha see is whatcha get.”
Her bare legs were close enough for him to knock his knee against hers. If he reached up, he could loop a finger through one of her belt loops. Instead, John tried to calm his tumbling mind and piece together everything she’d just said to him. Her age, her mother, his apparent lack of attraction this morning.
“You’re telling me all this because...” He was pretty sure he already knew the answer, but he really, really didn’t want to misunderstand.
She took another deep breath and the sight of her nervous had him reaching up to take her hand, gently leading her to sit next to him on his tiny couch.
“Because when you asked me if things felt different in the morning light, I wasn’t lying,” she said. “But I didn’t mean what you thought I meant.” She looked away and reached down to skim her hand over Ruth’s arching back. “I meant that, like I said, you were about to see me in the bright morning light, and I thought you already had such an issue with my age that you wouldn’t be able to ignore it all spotlighted like that. I get that I misunderstood that now. But think of it from my point of view. Last night I felt sexy and loose. This morning I felt hungover and ugly.” She turned her head to face away. “I didn’t want you to see me that way.”
John’s throat closed over the words he tried to say. He took a deep breath and tried again. “I thought you turned me away because you’d seen the situation in the metaphorical morning light and decided that you didn’t really want me.”
“I know you thought that,” she said, turning back to him, though her eyes stayed cast down. “But by the time I’d put the pieces together, you’d already left. We really misunderstood each other.”
“Misunderstanding doesn’t begin to cover it.” He impulsively reached forward and took her hand. It was the same hand that had had the imprint of a house key across her palm last night. It was the hand that had borne the evidence of how much she’d wanted him.
How could he have let that get lost in the mud of his own insecurities? How many times had he told himself that money wasn’t everything? And then, at the first sign of choppy water, he’d assumed that she’d changed her mind about dating a working-class public servant. He’d made the situation about money. Not Mary.
He quickly kissed her palm and then placed it flat against his beating heart, knowing that she liked to feel his heartbeat. “Mary, do you know what Richie told me about you the other day?”
She shook her head, her eyes still down.
�
�He told me that I look at you like all the light in the world originates from inside you.”
Her eyes flashed up to meet his.
“And he’s right,” John continued. “What he said made instant sense to me because that’s actually how I feel. To me, Mary, you’re radiant.” He touched her hair with his free hand. “You’re sunny and bright. But it’s not just your hair or your coloring. It’s your mood that shines through.”
Her eyes fell again. “I know I’m a happy-go-lucky type of person, but I’m not always upbeat. There are times that I’m seriously down.”
“I know that. I’ve seen some of them. You know what I thought the first time I saw you cry? That it was like water caught in sunlight. It’s not about whether or not you’re happy, Mary. You always glow with this internal light. You can’t help it. It’s your spirit. Your determination, your kind heart. The laughing, the smiling, it adds to it, but it doesn’t define it. I can’t define it either, really. Shit.”
He turned his head away to gather his thoughts, and when he looked back, Mary was staring right at him, obviously trying to figure out if she believed what he was saying or not.
He barreled on, determined to get the rest out. “I think you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, and it has very little to do with clothes or makeup or whatever. It’s you, Mary. It’s your whole thing that you have going on. That’s the best I can describe it. It doesn’t have anything to do with age. I don’t want to date a twenty-five-year-old. Not even the twenty-five-year-old version of you. I want you, as you are right in this moment. With the sum of all your experiences making you who you are. I wouldn’t shave a single day off your life. This is who you are. And you are what I want.”
Mary blinked at him for a long moment and then shocked him when she burst into tears. She covered her mouth with one hand but looked up at him with red, watery eyes, tears practically pouring down her cheeks. Apparently, Ruth was concerned as well, because when John tried to lean toward Mary to hold her, suddenly there was a twenty-pound ball of yowling fur in the way, putting her paws on Mary’s shoulder and staring her in the face.