This was different, though, maybe: a negative of a negative. Don’t want him to leave. Don’t want to give up. Don’t want to say goodbye. Don’t want to miss him. Don’t want to make a mistake and tell him no, tell myself no.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered. She slipped her shoes on and grabbed the car keys from the post by the front door.
* * *
—
She wasn’t far behind him, only a few minutes. When she pulled up in front of his house, he was on the porch, pulling mail out of the box. He looked up only when she shut her car door. He looked confused. “Hey,” she said.
He smiled. Oh, it was such a good smile. It was a good smile when he was ten, and when he was fifteen, and it was a good smile now. “You know, somebody once told me not to start conversations that way,” he said. “People suspect it’s an indiscriminate ‘hey.’？”
She walked up the driveway. She liked his house; in fact, she was pretty sure she’d left a toothbrush in the bathroom. “I had a very bad feeling after you left,” she said. “And I wanted to talk to you.” He didn’t say anything. She couldn’t really blame him. “This is not what I want,” she said. “I don’t want this, where I leave and we just…” She made a motion with her hands like the puffing of fluff off a dandelion.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”
Well, there it was. And now, with it upon her as she continued to get rained on, she was surprised how it tumbled right out. “I want to be with you. I mean, ideally,” she said. She didn’t say “be with you,” like a song; she said “be with you,” like a decision.
Nick stood still. “You do.” Not “you do” like a declaration, “you do” like a discovery. He looked around them and pushed the damp Superman curl off his forehead. “You want to come up on the porch and get dry?”
She nodded. She walked up until she was next to him, outside the door, feet from the rain. It was so quiet other than the water drumming lightly on the roof. Laurie took a breath. “What if I said I didn’t want to get married, and I didn’t want to live with anybody, and I didn’t want the kind of relationship that my parents have or your parents have or Junie has, but I didn’t want to let you go either? That I…want to keep this. Us.”
His forehead wrinkled. “You want to date? Seattle to Maine? Do you think that’s realistic?”
“I don’t think it’s realistic at all,” she said. “And I’m not talking about just dating forever, I promise. That’s not where I want to end up. And I really don’t want to write polite letters when you’re married to someone else.”
“You’re there,” he said, “and I’m here, and I don’t know what you have in mind.”
She took a big breath. “Could you really never leave?”
“You mean move to Seattle? I’ve never even been there.”
“I don’t mean move there now. I don’t even want you to promise to move there. I guess I mean…I mean, what if you visited me and I visited you, just so we could see, just so we can know each other more? And we just didn’t let go yet? Is that even possible?”
“You can’t come back, but you want me to leave.” He could have said this angrily; he didn’t.
“I realize that geographically speaking, I may be asking you to meet me more than halfway. Because like I said, halfway is Minnesota, and I don’t want to live in Minnesota, it’s just too cold.”
“Agreed.”
“Everything I have been able to think of is very hard,” she said, “because we are too old to make everything from scratch. This is…advanced relationship stuff, I realize. I don’t know how to make it any less so. I don’t know how to be any more honest than that I am probably in love with you but I’m not going to break everything just so it all fits together, and I don’t think you should either.”
“So what do we do?” He ignored what she had said, the part about being in love with him. In that moment, it was a kindness.
“I don’t exactly know,” she said. “Because of course, of course, maybe you want to stay just as much as I can’t stay. And that’s fair, and if that’s how you feel, then yes, we are John and Dot, going different ways, and there’s nothing to be done. We should say goodbye, and I will miss you and I will be a total mess—and maybe you will be one too, I don’t know. And I swear to you, if that happens I will understand and I will always love you and I will always be glad we did this. But I am just saying that even though I don’t want to get married, and even though I will always need space of my own, and even though this isn’t my home anymore, I wish, I wish I could have you. I wish I could negotiate something, figure out something—”