She’d thought he was joking about requiring the panel truck, but a few hours later, her hair tied into an impromptu tail, sweat glistening on her forehead and sticking her shirt to her shoulders, she was forced to admit that it was a great idea, the sort one expected from ultra-efficient Evan. For less than she’d believed possible, she’d gathered the very basics of civilization – a couch, a bed, a table to pile high with paperwork, chairs, glasses, and even, to her surprised whimsy, a touch of green – a lucky bamboo plant. “And you probably can’t kill it, either,” Evan had said, placing it in her allegedly black-thumbed hands. “Bamboo pretty much takes care of itself.”
Perhaps a hidden meaning there, she mused, preparing to shoulder her side of one of the couch boxes, and then again, perhaps he just knew how much she loved beautiful things and despaired over her ability to care for them.
“You’ll need to come back for shelves for the books and all,” Evan said, once they’d dropped all the cardboard boxes into the center of what would become her home. She winced at the reminder that they’d not be together in her new adventure, but Evan had already moved on, teasing out the folder of “local information” that the apartment manager had left on the kitchen counter. “Thai?” he queried Wynn, one eyebrow lifted. “Or pizza? God, look at the variety – gourmet, wood-fired, Domino’s...”
“Thai,” Wynn answered, as she sliced open a package with the razor-bladed utility knife that Evan had thoughtfully bought at the U-Haul depot. “Lemongrass chicken,” she dictated, “coconut pad Thai, and hmm...tikka masala. Chicken tikka masala.”
“Can’t get you to try anything new,” Evan groused, as he dug out his phone to place the order. She smiled: it was their oldest argument, one of the ones that had propelled them into that food fight, and the intense and torrid affair afterwards. He’d looked down into her tray on a random day, recited exactly what she’d had, and informed her, his lips pursed, that she’d had exactly that lunch every day for the past ninety-four days.
She’d responded by picking up her cup of strawberry yogurt, peeling free the metallic tab, and emptying it onto his head, in a solid and satisfying clot. She’d expected him to get the hint and not poke fun at her poverty, but later, he’d confessed that he worried about her – she was “nothing but hair and eyes. Nice eyes.”
He’d asked her out after pelting her with ice cubes from the soda fountain cup beside himself, and they’d been inseparable since. Inseparable until now, that was: Monday loomed over her like an unforgiving and angry giant. Certainly, Waters and Wheeling might be the goose that had laid her golden egg, and if she applied the proper coaxing, there could be many more. Many, many more. Anticipation and ambition whispered their contrasting messages into her ears, but her heart was reneging. Junior partner, though: that was a goal to make her salivate.
They constructed the furniture in silence, breaking it only to collaborate on the more complex tasks, finally falling on to it not to make love, but rather to seek solace. As hands wandered and kisses lingered, she remembered, fleetingly, that she had not yet found that clinic, but by then, the moment had washed her thoughts away, and replaced them with sensation. He had always been a gentle lover, and tonight that was perfect, a slow, caressing worship. They finally parted into a component tangle, going in search of the leftover Thai food. “Have we been naked on everything yet,” she asked, half-amused by the idea of “christening” all the furniture they’d put together.
“Not some things. We definitely didn’t get naked on your bamboo,” he teased.
“It’s got enough grief coming,” she said, darkly, and he grinned.
“Seriously,” she said. “I think I’m just totally incapable of keeping anything else alive, Evan. I always try my best, but you’ve taken enough of my best intentions to the trash.” Wincing as she realized how many ways that statement could be taken, she shrugged in apology. “Maybe I should’ve just let the joke go,” she said, contritely.
“I guess,” he said, softly, and she hated herself for the flash of pain she saw cross his face.
“Tomorrow?” she asked, trying to push her mistake away, “let’s go to the Space Needle. Okay? It would be awful to be a new denizen of the Emerald City and not have seen the famous sights, eh? We could even have fish for supper,” she offered, a bit of a sacrifice since she hated the lingering odor after a fish supper. “Isn’t Pike Place Market the place where they throw fish at you?” Her grin failed to get a response in return, so she gave up. Evan wouldn’t sulk forever – she hoped. It was her way to store the grudges and the petty anger: he let everything roll off his back. Of course, she had seen his bottled emotions explode, from time to time, but even in his rages, he was creative. All right, perhaps creatively destructive.
“How about a tour of the city?” he countered, a moment too late to save her from her own foolishness. “From above, from the water, and I found this Underground tour brochure, too. We can see your city in three dimensions.”
“My city?” she asked, probing delicately into the open wound at the center of their lives. “Our city, Evan...if it works out, you’ll be here. You’ll be with me.”
He glanced away.
Her heart broke.
“You’re thinking of divorce, aren’t you,” she asked, woodenly. “You started this by thinking of divorce.”
“I didn’t look that up on my laptop for us,” he said, his voice quiet. “Jonathan, my boss? He and Caroline aren’t working out. He says she’s having an affair so they can get a divorce more quickly, even: says she can’t wait to be free of him and the mistake she made.”
She wiped some stray moisture from her cheeks and blinked even more away. “Is that...was that all?” she asked, incredulously. “That was why “divorce” was on your laptop? Damn it, Evan, you could have just said!”
“Perhaps I should have,” he said, voice still subdued. “But Wynn, I thought we were stronger than this, stronger than this “it has to be me first” and stronger than “a chance of a lifetime,” But you know,” he said, sliding a knife out of her new block, sliding it back in, a nervous tic of his, “if the first thing you’re going to do when things become hard is to run, Wynn, then maybe this couldn’t ever have worked out.”
A hot retort blistered past her lips. “I have a lawyer on retainer already.”
“You would,” he said, turning on his heel, letting the knife’s wooden handle click home against the wooden block. “I guess I’ll just get the hell out of your way, then.” The report from the slammed door felt like rocks against brittle glass.
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