“Are you okay?” he asked.
We both were quiet as we passed a high school that was low and palm-tree-bedecked like a high school in a movie, and finally I said, “Are you afraid he’ll sell a picture of you holding my hand?” I could hear that my voice was weird, too, though not how Noah’s was—mine was sharp and distant. There was a warmly teasing way we’d gotten in the habit of speaking to each other, and this was its opposite.
“I hope he doesn’t for your sake,” Noah said.
“Oh, really? For my sake?”
Noah looked over again as he said, “Are you accusing me of something? Because that’s what it sounds like.”
“If I were a hot twenty-five-year-old actress, would you have dropped my hand like that?”
He squinted. “Are you serious? Did you want the guy to take our picture?”
“There was something very—” I paused. “Instinctive. About how you pulled away from me.”
“I thought you’d hate it. Yes, you. Not me. You. Because you’re a private person and I know you’ve walked red carpets a few times, but I don’t think you’re used to being ambushed in normal life like I am.”
In front of us, the ocean appeared again, turquoise beneath a cornflower sky, and the beauty of the view was an unpleasant contrast to the disagreeable energy inside the car. At least sixty seconds had passed when, taking pains to keep my tone matter-of-fact rather than resentful, I said, “There’s nothing you promised me. I’m complicit in how undefined whatever we’re doing is. I admit that. And I believe you genuinely like me, or at least you genuinely like me enough to be your secret pandemic hookup. But I don’t think I have a low enough opinion of myself to be your secret pandemic hookup.”
“Wow,” he said. “I don’t even know where to start. The fact that you could think any of that is so off base that it makes me wonder if we’ve been having completely different experiences the whole time you’ve been here. I thought we were having a great time.”
“Secret pandemic hookups and having a great time aren’t mutually exclusive.”
While looking straight ahead, he pulled the car over to a parking lane abutting a dusty upward slope dotted with sage scrub. He moved the gear shift into park before facing me, his expression bewildered and displeased. “Do you remember when I told you I was attracted to you from the moment you started talking at the pitch meeting in Nigel’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Part of the reason was that you seemed so confident, like one of the most confident women I’d ever met. One of the most confident people. You had very clear ideas for your sketches, and it was obvious that you knew you could will them into being. And you talked in this way where it seemed like you were planning to be polite and professional with me, but you assumed I wasn’t very bright, and you were prepared to overcome my lack of intelligence. I’ve worked with tons of creative people, tons of talented people, but there was something so refreshing about you, something so cool, where you just really knew who you were and how to get shit done. I had this overwhelming feeling of I want to know her. I want to be around her. Then in your office, you were incredibly kind and supportive. You’ve probably told me seven times, starting that night, what an asshole you are, but you almost never are. Or when you are, it seems like some kind of bluster. It doesn’t seem like who you really are.”
I was fascinated, silenced, and unsure where this was going. On the other side of the windshield, a big white bird I couldn’t identify swooped down and then up again.
Noah exhaled deeply. “You and I hung out in person that week at TNO and it was fun and great. Even after things went off the rails at the bar, I felt like there was a conversation we hadn’t finished, and for the next two years, I wondered how the rest of it would have gone. From the minute you responded to my first email, it was like that conversation picked up exactly where it had stopped. Emailing with you was fun and great, and then we talked on the phone, and it was fun and great, and you came here, and, yeah, it’s not effortless, there are little bumps where we need to figure out how to be around each other. But that’s just life, and having you here has been even better than fun and great. When we’re hanging out by the pool and when we’re watching a movie and above all when we’re making love, and I already know you’ll mock me for saying making love, but that’s what it is—all of that is amazing. I’ve waited my whole life to feel connected to someone in the ways I feel connected to you. I don’t even know if this registered with you, but when we were emailing, after I got worried I’d offended you by telling you to send me a pdf about your divorce, I told you that I didn’t want you to ever stop emailing me. But I wrote a different sentence first that I was too scared to send. And it was that I wanted you to be part of my life forever. I want you and my sister to get to know each other, and I want to introduce you to all my favorite people that I work with. When everything isn’t shut down, there are so many experiences I want to share with you, like taking you to this really cool restaurant in Tokyo or to my favorite park in Sydney. I think of marrying you. And to feel this way and then hear you say crap about how I’m embarrassed to hold your hand in front of some fucking paparazzo—it’s like The Danny Horst Rule wasn’t just a funny sketch idea. It’s your philosophy of life. That version of you in Nigel’s office that I fell in love with, you are that person and you do have that confidence. But at the same time, you might be the most insecure adult I’ve ever met.”
Really, I had been completely silenced. I had never been on the receiving end of this kind of—well, I didn’t even know what it was. An admonition? A declaration? An encomium? None of it was clearly wrong; much of it was heart-stoppingly flattering; a small but significant portion was humiliating.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I said.
“I love you, Sally,” he said. “For you to suggest that I’m ashamed of you—you’re not just insulting yourself. You’re insulting me.”
He loved me? He loved me! Or had he loved me five minutes earlier but changed his mind since then because of what I’d said since we’d left the parking lot? “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I think it’s easier to dismiss entrenched dating patterns when you can date anyone you want.”
He said nothing.
“Setting aside The Danny Horst Rule as a generalization,” I continued, “I guess the thing I don’t understand is that you can do better than me. You can find someone prettier.”
He was looking at me with a not-warm expression. “Is that a question I’m supposed to answer?”
“Please.”
“Will you at least acknowledge how fucked-up it is that first you accuse me of not thinking you’re attractive enough to date, and after I tell you that’s not true, you ask why I’m not dating someone better-looking?”
“You just admitted that you liked me at first because you could tell I didn’t think you were smart. What’s that Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member?”