Ben had come out to Los Angeles for a profile Architectural Digest was running. He and a handful of other architects had been included in their “New Talent” issue—a title Ben thought was hilarious, considering he had been a working architect for a decade by then. But he was glad to take the work that came with it. He had an hour after the photo shoot before he had to head back to New York. We were sitting in a hotel bar near the airport, drinking watered-down martinis. Ben wanted to go over contracts—that was what he’d said. But he also said, out loud, that he was doing something else. Ben said that was finding out if the girl on the phone matched the idea of her in his head.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” he said.
“For me?”
“For me,” he said.
Ben looked like he never felt pressure. He sipped his martini, looking sexy in a button-down shirt and jeans, a sports jacket.
“Why pressure?”
“Why pressure?” He smiled. “You know why.”
He paused.
“That woman, on the phone, is the best part of my day. She makes me laugh and she makes me feel happy. She makes me feel like everything is going to work out as soon as she says hello to me.”
My heart skipped a beat. I nodded, my way of saying I felt the same way.
“If she is the best part of my day, in person, I’m going to have to do it.”
“What’s that?”
He smiled. “You know, change everything for her.”
Then he reached for my hand. He reached for my hand—his palm cupping my fingers, his fingers running through mine—like we were touching for the thousandth time—and he still had no intention of ever letting go.
How could I not be his after that? This was how he said hello.
It would be too simple to say that I never felt good about myself until Ben. And it wouldn’t be true. But everything I was trying to reconcile—who I’d been growing up in Sonoma County, who I was trying to be as a woman building a life in Los Angeles—he was my partner in it. Maybe it was that he grew up similarly to the way I did: in a small town outside London—his father a carpenter who worked around the clock, Ben helping his mother raise his little sisters. He’d received a scholarship to study architecture at the University of London, had built a career for himself there, and then in America.
I understood the thousand steps between where he’d started and where he’d ended up. And, more than that, I understood the versions of him he contended with along the way: the version of him that was proud of what he’d built and the version buried far beneath that still felt like an outsider. Which might have been why all the versions of me I’d ever been—all the versions of me that I hoped to be—made sense when I was with him.
Deep in my soul I felt we understood each other, we loved each other. So—despite all the reasons I maybe should have—I didn’t feel threatened by Michelle. I didn’t feel threatened by any of Ben’s previous girlfriends. The thing was, I was in. The first drink together establishing it for me, every day proving it. Ben was my yellow buggy.
Ben opened the refrigerator to get Maddie some milk. He handed me the bottle, trying to get me to talk to him. I couldn’t seem to meet his eyes.
Maddie was sitting at the kitchen table having an enormous piece of chocolate cake, her arm protectively blocking the plate as if she were afraid someone was going to take it away from her before she could finish.
Jacob sat across from her, his eyes focused on those bites. He didn’t look toward Ben and me, standing by the refrigerator, getting the milk. But I knew he was trying to listen.
“What happened to you not showing up here?” I said.
Ben poured the milk into three of the glasses. “We needed to talk,” he said.
“So you bring Maddie?”
“I also brought you a suitcase full of clothes including a dress for the harvest party, the purple one that looks so pretty. What about a thank-you for that?”
“I’m serious.”
“Yes, we needed to talk and we needed you not to kick me out.” He held up the empty glass. “I still can’t tell if you want the milk or not. The cake is going to be much better with it.”
He flashed those eyes at me, and I wanted more than anything to let it all go—to just decide that everything was okay.
And maybe I would have, but he headed back toward the kitchen table and took the seat next to Maddie, leaving me the one between him and Jacob.
“She’s serious about that cake,” Jacob said as we sat back down.