Page 76 of About Last Night

Audrey steps out of my embrace. “OK, stop. This is not taking it slow, Toni.”

“Audrey…”

“No. The kiss, I understand.” She looks at me. “I wanted to kiss you, too. But all the rest of it. I’m not ready for any of that.”

“Which is why we’re going to take it slow.”

“Kissing me in front of your family is not taking it slow, Toni. Talking about future holidays together is the very opposite of taking it slow.”

“I can’t want those things?”

Audrey sighs and looks up at the ceiling, as if searching for the answers. Finally she looks me dead in the eye and says, “I don’t want those things.”

I feel as if I’ve been punched in the solar plexus. “What?” I say, in a voice strangled with shock.

“I thought I made it pretty clear yesterday that I just want to have fun. Like you offered that first night. No strings. That’s the kind of rela— attachments you’re used to, right?”

I’m listening to her but barely understand the words coming out of her mouth. Her expression is so far removed from how she looked at me when I came into the house not five minutes ago I wonder which one is real, which expression is a figment of my imagination. They both can’t be right.

“I don’t want that with you,” I manage to say.

“You don’t want to have fun?”

“I don’t want it to be that…shallow. We aren’t that shallow.” There’s a flicker in her mask, and I know I’ve hit a nerve. “You felt it that night, too, Audrey. That connection. I didn’t imagine it.”

“That night was amazing and fun, but there was nothing more.”

“Audrey, I fell in lov?—”

“No,” Audrey says. “You do not get to say that to me right now.”

I bristle, and Max’s words come back to me. “Oh, I don’t get to say that I love you? That I started falling in love with you the moment I saw you in Dewey’s that night and have been falling further and further every day since?”

“No! Fuck, Toni. It’s too soon.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I can say or how I can feel, Audrey. All I’ve done is be respectful of what you’ve wanted, every step of the way. I was ready to give you all the time you needed after the Christmas party, but you decided that you wanted me. That you were ready. I shouldn’t have given in, but I did. You want to take it slow, and I will. But letting my family know that we’re seeing each other isn’t rushing things. Telling you how I feel isn’t rushing things.”

“Telling me you’ve loved me since you set eyes on me is leveling things up pretty far, Toni.”

“If I was asking you to marry me, or move in with me, then yeah. But I’m not. I’m not ready for that, either. But, yes, I want that with you long term.”

Max’s words echo in my head. There’s nothing wrong with asking for what you want, Toni.

Fuck it.

I inhale. “I love you, Audrey, and I want to grow old with you.”

Audrey’s head jerks back as if I slapped her, and her eyes go comically wide. Any subliminal hope I’d harbored that my declaration would make her melt into a pile of goo and declare her undying love is shattered when her shocked expression morphs into something like resignation.

“I can’t say those words, Toni. Any of them.”

“It’s OK,” I say quickly. “You don’t have to. I just wanted you to know how I feel.”

“But I didn’t want to know,” Audrey says. “I don’t need, or want, that pressure, the responsibility.”

“Responsibility? For what?”

“Your feelings. It doesn’t matter what I feel, it will never live up to ‘I want to grow old with you.’ Jesus, Toni, what are you thinking? Laying something like that on me after I’ve known you a month? Not just me but on anyone? There is nothing about this conversation that goes along with what we agreed to last night. Or did you just agree to whatever would get you laid?”

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