We sit in a comfortable quiet, letting the radio fill the silence between us as we idle in traffic. His hand is holding the inside of my thigh, and I’m trying to hold myself together.
He turns the radio down, twisting in his seat to face me as we slowly creep down the highway. “Have you written anything today?”
“Maybe like a thousand words before I started getting ready. I was pretty tired after helping at the bookstore.”
“And what were your imaginary friends doing for those thousand words?” he asks, eyes darting between the road and me. “Is she dating his friend yet?”
“No, the book moves around in time so you see the key things in their story. I’m writing the past when she’s worried she likes him more than he could ever like her, because he isn’t a relationship guy. She’s scared to get hurt and she’s keeping bits of herself back, which he hates. She wants him to prove that he deserves those bits before she hands them over, and he wants her to just trust that he can be the person she needs because what they have is special enough for the risk.”
“And can he? Change for her?”
“No.”
He keeps checking between me and the road, which is how I catch his furrowed brow. “Why not?”
“You’re asking me to spoil the book for you?” He nods. “I don’t know yet. I’m working it out as I go. Mainly because I question if one personshouldchange to be in love with another person. At what point do you eventually revert back to the person you were? And is the love even genuine if you had to become someone else to achieve it?”
“I disagree,” he says. “I think the right person makes you the person you were supposed to be in the first place. I don’t agree that you become a different person. That suggests people can’t change through all the other factors that make people evolve that aren’t romantic.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve seen my friends change for the better because they fell in love with the right person. If people only fell in love when the other person became their perfect match, messy relationships wouldn’t exist. People can’t control when they fall in love. You wanted to love Will, but you couldn’t.”
I take in what he’s saying, and it seems so different from our firstdate when we talked about my idea. “What happened to not valuing romantic love above the other types?”
“What happened to complicated is exciting?” He squeezes my leg playfully. “Does she really have to marry someone else?”
“I haven’t written it yet, but yeah. That’s the plan.”
“I’m going to keep asking.” He tsks. “I still have faith in my imaginary man. He’s going to pull it out of the bag and win her.”
The traffic picks up and we revert back to our normal comfortable silence. I realize where we’re going when Henry takes a familiar exit, and I’m immediately glad I found my other flat shoe. I’ve always intended to visit the Byrd & Bolton art gallery, but I haven’t had anyone to go with.
Henry climbs out of the car, immediately walking to my side and opening the door for me. He holds out his hand. “You’ve really got this gentleman thing down,” I tease.
“It’s the suit.” He threads his fingers through mine like he did earlier. “Makes me act up.”
He produces two tickets when we reach the entrance and scans us through the barrier. “I’ve always wanted to come here,” I admit. “Thank you for bringing me.”
“I’ve been wanting to bring you for a while. I was just hoping I’d have something special to show you here.”
I let him guide me through the first floor; his hand grips my waist to gently tug me out of the path of someone staring at a pamphlet as they walk toward us. His finger runs down the length of my forearm. “You have goose bumps. Are you cold?”
“The AC is a little high,” I flat-out lie. Lying might be bad, but so is admitting that my body does weird, uncontrollable things in his presence. “It’s my fault for wearing this dress.”
“The dress is perfect, and you look perfect in it,” he says, shrugging off his suit jacket. Before I have time to object, he places it over my shoulders. “I don’t want you to be cold.”
“Thank you,” I say, but it comes out as more of a whisper.
“Why are you whispering?”
“I don’t know.”
Henry gives me a funny look and retakes my hand. “It’s supposed to be around this corner.”
We pass signs for a local up-and-comers exhibition on display through December. He stops in front of a large painting.
It could be a photograph, it’s so intricately detailed. The women are sitting together at a table outside; light blue sea and small white buildings are their backdrop. Their intertwined hands rest on the table between wineglasses, and their faces are turned toward each other. The woman on the left has pale white skin and dark blond hair, cut to a length that just skims her collarbone. Her blue-and-white collared shirt is unbuttoned at the top, and I can just about make out theYandHinitials hanging from a delicate chain around her neck.