MEET ME AT MY APARTMENT.
They hadn’t seen each other in six days—she wasn’t even sure where he’d been that time. When he’d texted two hours before saying he’d taken an earlier flight, she’d gladly obeyed his command.
She was surprised to find him in the lobby of his building when she arrived. His muscular chest and arms looked amazing beneath the dark gray Henley he wore. He stood barefoot in an old pair of jeans that reached the floor and something told her he was fresh from the shower. Before he saw her, she watched him hold court at the reception desk. They were all laughing—Javier the doorman, Jim the security guard behind the desk, and the delivery man who had just handed over a large paper-in-plastic bag. But it was Michael’s smile that lit up the room, Michael who had everyone feeling good. He would’ve made a great politician.
She recognized the second that he spotted her. His smile widened. His eyes brightened as he took her in. She thought she would melt from how he made her feel.
“You’re right on time,” he said as she approached, nodding his thanks at the delivery man and shifting the bag of takeout into his other hand so that he could hold hers. He kissed her cheek in the friendly manner they reserved for public greetings. As always, he waited until they were in his apartment to kiss her for real.
“Prying eyes,” he’d clarified once as they’d ridden the elevator and he’d shifted his gaze up to the iridescent black sphere that she recognized as a camera.
But once the elevator doors closed behind them and they walked into his space, he hastily dropped the bag on his kitchen counter. Still holding her hand, he pulled her body toward his and devoured her mouth in a hungry kiss. She could feel it already—the familiar magic that happened when they were together. At that moment, it was just a kiss, but she knew how it would manifest next, knew how she would feel it in the desperate way he touched her, how she would see it in the way he looked at her when he moved inside her. Touching Michael always felt like touching the divine.
When her stomach growled again, he pulled away from her reluctantly and kissed the tip of her nose lightly. Turning away, he dug into the bags to extract the food and began making each of them a plate. Her eyes wandered to the television, which she had just noticed was on. It was the news—they were running a story about her father. Not wanting to sour a nice moment with thoughts of him, she searched for the remote.
“You look nothing like him,” Michael commented lightly as he spooned green curry tofu onto their plates.
Darby had been told this all her life. Frank Christensen had a polished movie star look to him—smooth dark hair that was always perfectly coiffured, a smile that tempered cockiness with charm, and blue eyes that foreshadowed mischief. Being compared to a man as striking as her father would have normally been taken as flattery. But for Darby, being told that she was not like Frank Christensen in some way was always the better compliment.
“I am my mother’s daughter…in more ways than one,” she agreed. Not seeing the remote, she considered walking to the television and turning it off the old fashioned way. Her father’s voice always sounded grating to her.
“I take it you don’t share his politics?” Michael asked.
“We disagree on every issue.”
“Did your mother disagree too?”
“Their fights were legendary.” Darby didn’t want to elaborate. “How about you?” she asked, shifting her focus back to Michael.
He stopped what he was doing and pinned her with a remorseless look. “Every time he’s run, I’ve voted for the other guy.”
You and me both, she thought. Forgetting the remote for a minute, her face broke into a wide smile.
Later, after they’d eaten and made good use of his bed, the soft vibration of her phone against the bedside table began a split second before the ringtone. As she recognized the guitar intro to We Are Never Getting Back Together, Darby untangled herself reluctantly from the peaceful cocoon of Michael’s waterbed, resplendent with its 800-thread count sheets, to press the red button that would let her decline the call. Twisting back toward the bed, she again wrapped herself in the blissful afterglow of their rendezvous. Sinking in made her feel like she was being enveloped in a warm hug.
Michael’s footsteps on the bamboo floors could barely be heard as he returned from the inner chamber of his master bath. She had learned to expect the warm washcloth tenderly pressed between her legs. When he was done, he tossed the washcloth on the floor, straightened the disheveled covers and tucked her back into bed. Being cared for like this was splendid and she loved it more than she ever planned to let on.
Her eyes were trained on Michael. There was a clear line of vision through his enormous dressing suite. Michael even made washing up look sexy. God, his body was beautiful. She was becoming obsessed with his arms—his biceps and triceps were like steel. She especially liked the visual of his corded forearms and long fingers as they did simple things like swipe the screen of his cell phone or make coffee in the kitchen. He hadn’t called her out on her staring, and she was glad because she couldn’t help it. Clothed or unclothed, the man was gorgeous.
After climbing back in bed, he shimmied close to the middle and tucked his arm underneath her head, pulling her to his side. He was a master cuddler, a fact she had learned from hours of pillow talk. And he’d held to their agreement—to at least six orgasms every time they were together. That commitment meant they had plenty of down time in between rounds. Sometimes they snoozed, but mostly they snuggled, snacked, and talked. She tried not to dwell on how much she was getting used to it.
“The sushi today was so good,” she murmured, drawing out the “o”.
“You love sushi.” He said it as if it explained why had started to have lunch delivered to her regularly. Any time Michael even suspected Darby was too busy to eat, Andrew showed up at her office with a brown bag and an effervescent smile
“Thank you,” she murmured against his chest, sniffing him discreetly as she always did.
“How many ‘you’re welcomes’ do you need to hear before you stop thanking me?”
She felt a bit embarrassed. She had thanked him three times that day—once after Andrew dropped off the bag, then after she’d eaten because, holy shit, that shrimp tempura roll been good. And again just now. She had thanked him profusely each time he had done something like that. Eating lunch every day was making a big difference. She had more energy, felt less irritable, and made better snack and dinner choices because she wasn’t so ravenously hungry. Plus, he always ordered from the best places. They worked in more or less the same neighborhood but Michael—or, rather, Andrew—knew his way around the local restaurants better than Darby.
“It’s just…really nice.”
As the last word left her mouth, her phone began vibrating again with the same ring tone she had heard a few minutes before. This time she really didn’t want to get up to turn it off. Still, if he’d called twice already, he would probably keep on calling.
Fucking Felix.
Rolling over, this time she didn’t merely decline the call—she turned off her ringer altogether. She set her cheek back down on Michael’s chest, and his hand returned to stroking her hair.
“I take it he didn’t get the memo?”
Crap. He heard both calls.
“You know, the one where you told him that you are never, ever, ever getting back together.” He said it in a girly voice.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Taylor Swift fan.”
He pulled back a little bit and looked straight down at her. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for one.”
Fair enough.
She put her head back on his chest. “He’s holding out hope,” she explained.
Michael didn’t say anything, but his silence was heavy with expectation. He had a way of coaxing out all the stories that she didn’t want to tell. Sometimes Darby thought that, between the two of them, Michael would have made for a better shrink.
“He thinks things between us could work if we reimagined them.”
“Could they?”
“Oh, wow—we’re gonna do this?” she hedged.
“Avoid questions? I don’t know. You tell me.”
It was always like this with them. No small talk or shallow conversation. Like that first night, nothing was out of bounds, no topic too heavy when covered in witty repartee.
“Felix…” she began, emphasizing the name of her ex-boyfriend, “is a cable network executive. He spends a lot of time in New York and LA.”
“Is that why you broke up?”
“Let’s just say we had misaligned expectations.”
“Did he cheat on you?”
Michael sounded mildly irritated by the possibility, but it was hard to tell. His guess was so far away from the truth that Darby let out a small laugh.
“Worse. He wanted to get married. I didn’t.”
She waited for Michael to express shock of some kind, or at least to question her decision. That was what every other person did when they got wind of the proposal.
“Well aren’t you going to ask why?” she baited, irritated with herself for even caring whether he was interested.
“I don’t need to ask why. It’s obvious that Felix wasn’t taking care of you.”
She didn’t miss how Michael emphasized her ex’s name sarcastically.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting upright, staring at him expectantly. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because you thank me three times every time I buy you a sandwich.”
When he put it like that, it sounded a bit depressing.
“I think you’re overthinking my gratitude for your having bought me lunch.”
“Am I?”
He was entirely too observant.
“You know that you’re more of a gentleman than monarchs I’ve met, right? Your chivalry is uncommonly refined.”
It was true. Despite her high-society upbringing, Darby was hard-pressed to recall a single person as genteel as Michael. Michael, meanwhile, had grown up on the South Side, where his life had surely involved none of these absurd civilities. And yet, he had shown her more refined attention to her needs in the short time they’d been fucking than Felix had during their entire relationship.
“And your standards are lower than they should be,” he retorted. “You’re the last woman I know who should settle.”
Don’t settle, Darby.
Those were the words her mother had spoken to her over and over again, the one piece of advice she had consistently dispensed, the unspoken confession that said everything—that she’d married the wrong man, that in choosing Frank Christensen, she had made a terrible mistake.
“I didn’t settle. I told him no.”
Michael quieted, ostensibly satisfied with this response. But before Darby could relax, he spoke again.
“There are only three kinds of guys who call, Darby. The kind who are actively dating you, the kind who think they have a shot at dating you, and the stalker kind.”
“Oh, yeah? What does that make you?”
He ignored her. “How long has it been since you broke up?”
“Almost a year.” Darby cringed.
Michael sat up even more, further disrupting her previously comfortable position.
“How often?”
She sat up, too. This was not how she had wanted to spend their time.
“A few times a week.”
Michael was starting to look pissed.
“Stalking is serious shit, Darby. Do you think that just because you’re a psychiatrist you can handle your own situation?”
“He’s not stalking me. He thinks he has a shot, and I understand why.”
When Michael looked at her impatiently, she relented and began to tell the story.
“So out of the blue, Felix proposed to me…and, practically in the same breath, tried to sell me on having kids. It turned into a huge fight. He pinned me down about exactly why I didn’t want kids. I admitted some things I’d never told him, which pissed him off more and made the fight worse. It got so ugly, I broke up with him on the spot.”
“It didn’t take him long to figure out that he’d gone about everything all wrong,” she continued. “He shouldn’t have sprung it on me like that. He thought he’d just messed that one thing up and that if we could press rewind and have that same conversation differently, we could get everything on the right track.”
“But that’s not what you thought.”
She shook her head.
“Him proposing was the wake-up call I needed to realize we were in two different relationships. He was…”
She hesitated, because it was uncomfortable to say.
“…deeply in love with me. More than I realized. The proposal was a surprise. It proved how little we understood each other. He didn’t know how lukewarm I was about marriage…about him, really. He didn’t know I—”
I was too fucked-up to get close to someone, she almost let slip out.
“—didn’t want kids. I had to break up with him.”
She watched Michael’s face as he absorbed the story and waited for him to ask her again why Felix was still calling after a year. But he went in a different direction.
“So you just walked away? Maybe you didn’t want to marry him, but weren’t you at least a little in love with the guy?”
Michael picked up on everything.
“I really, really liked him.”
And he gave her that look again, that look that said he could see right through her, the look that, in moments like these, scared her to her core. Because she wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t telling the whole truth and she wondered whether Michael really saw that part of her.
“Tell me why he’s still calling you.” This time, his demand was softer than before.
“He rarely does anymore. And rarely on purpose. It’s midnight in New York right now. He’s probably drunk dialing.” And her voice held her compassion. “He really is getting over me. Just…every once in a while, he has a bad day.”
Michael still seemed wary. Instead of speaking, he pulled open the drawer of his bedside table and pulled out two pixy sticks. He opened both of the candies before pulling Darby back into his arms and rearranging their bodies so they were once again reclining on his bed.
“Do you want me to have a little talk with him?” he asked finally, breaking their silence after he had poured the flavored sugar into his mouth.
“Is that a euphemism, Vito Corleone? Are you going to make him an offer he can’t refuse?”
“Guys know what to say to one another in these situations,” he said. “You think I’ve never had to talk a guy down from chasing a woman he couldn’t have? Besides, any call he gets from a guy he doesn’t know telling him to back off of his ex is gonna be a pretty clear warning.”
She’d never thought of it like that. Felix was getting better about not calling her, but what she hadn’t admitted to Michael was that some part of her was concerned. On the very rare occasion when she picked up the phone, Felix sounded unhappy, and very much still in love.
“Alright. The next time you hear that ringtone, have at it.”
She would be curious to eavesdrop on what she guessed would be an insightful conversation. Michael held her tighter in response and she snuggled back into him finally tipping back the straw full of sugar and pouring it in her mouth. A moment later, he spoke again.
“Hey…you wanna watch The Godfather later?”
It made her laugh.
“Yeah. I do.”
He kissed her hair.