“I thought you preferred to be on your own,” he said.
“I don’t prefer it,” she said. “I’m just not afraid of it.” She looked out into the rain and saw a bird cross the sky in her rippled field of vision. “I want to be…a bird who can fly by itself some of the time and know that the rest of the birds aren’t too far away, you know? Maybe it would look strange to everybody else and not to us. Maybe we would live in a duplex, or upstairs and downstairs. Maybe I’d figure out how to fall asleep with you because I love that feeling so much and then how to get good sleep, too. Maybe I’m always going to want to rattle around at two in the morning and I’ll keep doing that, or maybe it’s melatonin or the sound of the ocean or something I haven’t thought of. Nick, I don’t know what it would look like. And maybe it’s not my house. Maybe it’s not my city. But it’s not going to look like living in my aunt’s house in my hometown, even though I know that would be simplest. And I just thought maybe you would, you know, want to be Citizen of the Year somewhere else someday.”
The corner of his lip raised. “You’re making a very romantic appeal to me in the rain, you know. I mean, we’re on the porch, but I think it still counts.”
“I didn’t have time to wait for a sunset. I was feeling impatient.”
He turned to face out toward his front yard, ignoring the water that was now pouring off the gutter in thick streams. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I could be anywhere else, Laur. I am so crazy about you, I want to tell you yes, but I would be lying to make you happy if I said this sounds easy.”
She stepped closer. “I don’t want you to feel like I expect you to bend your whole life around me just because I can’t bend my whole life around you. And maybe it won’t work, I don’t know.”
He looked back at her and squinted a little. “So, you don’t want to get married,” he said, “but it’s more than dating. What you’re talking about.”
“Yes. Not married, and not living together, like together, in the way a lot of people do. I have to have my own kitchen cabinets, I think.”
“But it’s not casual.”
“No.”
“It’s committed.”
“Nick, yes,” she said, grabbing his hand. “I’m not a split-the-closets person, but I’m…I don’t know, I’m a partnership person. And for the last few weeks, you’ve been an outstanding partner to me and I have really, really liked it. When I say I want to make it work, I mean I want it to work as you and me, just you and me. For good. I want to be able to go chase turtle traffickers and then I want you to be there when I get back. And then I want to be there when you get back from whatever you can dream up.”
“That’s your vision,” he said with a small smile, and for a minute, she thought he might be making fun of her. But then he looked over at her. “I get it.” He ran his hands over his damp hair. “It’s hard, Laur,” he said. “I don’t know how to decide anything based on a few weeks, no matter how good they were.” He smiled. “At the same time, the older I get, the more I feel like…when I’m happy, I want to get on with it already, you know?”
“I really do.” She squeezed his hand, and now they were both looking out at the rain. “It bothers me a little to want this so much. It feels like it’s not real yet. I mean, it isn’t real yet. Or…you know. It’s real, but it’s not…”
“Tested,” he finished. “It’s not tested yet.”
She nodded. “Yeah.” Waiting for him to speak made the rain so loud and everything else so outrageously quiet.
“I guess we should test it,” he said.
She turned to face him, and he was looking at her, and it was 1998 and it was a month ago, and it was 1985, and she was at Dot’s knee and in her parents’ house and in Ginger’s living room, and she was at home alone and in bed with Nick, and all of it seemed right at once. “It might not work,” she said to him. “I know it might not.”
“I think it will,” he said.
“I hope it will.” She smiled.
“I think it will,” he said again.
She pulled him toward her. “I think it will, too.”
Epilogue
Who doesn’t hate the airport? It’s loud and crowded and you can’t go anywhere, and people keep bumping into you with roller suitcases and speeding past you because they left the house later than they intended to and now they’re literally running late. Everything is overpriced, everything is cramped, everyone is stressed, and on this particular day, Laurie felt like she was happier to be there than she’d ever been to be anywhere. Last time she’d picked him up at baggage claim, she had practically tackled him, knocking him back a foot and making him drop his bag and laugh so loudly that it echoed in the tiled hallway. She was thinking about doing it again.