Dolly All the Time(71)

“All of it, Stewart.” And it’s like a slingshot pulled so far back that the tension released matches the intensity of what follows. It’s different, the way we touch each other, it’s as if we’ve removed the last barrier between us. We make love with eyes and hearts open, and I feel like we’ve told each other something that can’t be taken back.

“Let’s never do that again,” he says afterward. My head is on his chest and he’s running his hand over my hair in a way that makes me feel like I’m in the safest possible place. Then I clock what he said.

“Have you gone crazy?” I ask. I look up at him and he smiles.

“No. Not that. I want to do that again immediately, or maybe just after dinner.” He kisses my forehead and pulls me in closer. “I mean being apart a whole week. It was torture. Let’s not do that again.”

I press my head harder onto his chest. I want to stay here in this exact second. If I had long fingernails there would be blood on his arm. I feel a burning at the back of my throat and I wonder if I might cry.

“Why?” I ask.

“Why?” He laughs. “Because I missed you. I had this weird anxious feeling the whole time, like I’d lost my phone. I mean, you mean more to me than my phone. But like everything was off, knowing I wasn’t going to see you at the end of the day.” He’s quiet for a bit and I lie there with my hand on his heart. “I love being able to share things with you.”

“Like what?” I say, though I know. Everything.

“My life. My worries. For the first time I feel like I don’t have to handle everything on my own.”

I pull myself closer to him and run my fingers along his neck. “Yeah,” I say.

“Okay, I’m out on a limb here with my feelings. I’m naked and I’m lying here telling you how little I can cope with not being with you. And you’re saying ‘yeah.’ Cue my next panic attack.”

I laugh. I run a hand down his chest to his stomach. He takes a breath, and I let the sound wash over me. “I have all of those feelings too,” I say finally. “But I’m probably more afraid of them than you are.”

“Afraid of what?”

“This. Us. We’re not exactly an obvious couple.”

“Pretty obvious to me.”

“It doesn’t scare you?”

“Dolly, I wake up scared. Everything scares me, like one wrong move is going to topple the house of cards. Dr. Meyers calls me Atlas.” He turns onto his side so he can see my face. “He calls Oscar the spare.”

“My therapist calls me Mom,” I say after a while, and he smiles.

“Lucky,” he says. I don’t react. This is the thing that will keep what’s beautiful between us from blooming into forever. Stewart wants a baby, and he deserves to have a child. And while I’m not so great at determining what I want for myself, I know in my heart I don’t want to be pregnant again. After a complicated pregnancy and an emergency C-section, I would never risk Gus losing his only parent. We’ll talk about this if we ever start talking about forever. And I have it in my head that forever starts after the Starlight Gala tomorrow night.

“You’re quiet,” he says after a while, trailing his fingers like silk over my shoulder. “You okay?”

I look up at him and decide not to sabotage this moment for a moment that may never come. “Yes, super okay. You?”

“I’ve been waiting my whole life to feel like this.” He means it, or at least I hope he does. “Sometimes Audrey would cancel dinner plans and I would try to feel disappointed. I’d actually talk myself through it, like Oh no I’m going to be alone tonight, because I was dying to feel something. But I never did. I honestly thought there was something wrong with me. Then this week I’d be sitting in a meeting, hoping it was getting close to one o’clock so I could text you when you left work at four, and I’d look at my watch and it would only be noon, and I felt gutted.”

There are tears in my eyes and I don’t want them there. I wipe them with the back of my hand and roll on top of him so that I can see what he looks like after having just said what he said. I rest my head atop my hands on his chest. He is so strong to be this vulnerable. His eyes plead with me, adoring, but he doesn’t say anything more.

“All of that,” I say. “I could barely sleep while you were gone.” He runs his hands down my back, and it’s so familiar. I could draw a map of his hands and trace a line where the rough parts and the smooth parts meet my skin. I am truly terrified to feel this happy. I have left Paris with the Mona Lisa in my checked baggage.

“What if it became impossible?” I ask. “What if there was something unfixable between us and we couldn’t get past it?” I’m thinking of the baby thing, but there are a million more possibilities. “What if the world kept us apart?”

Like it’s nothing, like he’s agreed to go get me a glass of water, he says, “Then I’d change the world.” I believe him because I feel that way too.

“Same,” I say.

His face relaxes and it’s so beautiful. The deep brown of his eyes, his overworked lips. “Okay, I guess we’re on the same page, then.”

I smile at the business talk. “Should we circle back to this after dinner?”