Page 67 of Happy After All

I laugh at that too, even though I get the sense there’s more truth to it than humor.

“Will you come to the dive-in movie?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

I don’t get into the subject of schedules. Like, are we going to have sex every night? Part of me hopes so. Another part of me has no ideawhat I would do with that much sexual activity after such a long dry spell. I fear it could leave me physically damaged. I also fear I might decide it’s worth it.

That’s just where I’m at, at the moment.

It’s a strange thing. I’m emotionally compromised, but I’m also so physically exhausted that it’s difficult for me to sort through the hierarchy of needs here.

Sex for me has generally been part of a relationship, and even then, the most important component to me has always been maintaining emotional closeness through the physical connection.

This is something else. Something I’ve never experienced before.

He rocked my world. What I really wish is that I could focus solely on that. That I could see him as nothing more than a gorgeous body that has been inside mine and made me feel pleasure like I’ve never known before.

I wish I didn’t care so much about him.

That would be nice. It just isn’t me. I can appreciate that he was kind to set boundaries. To set an intention, even if those intentions leave me feeling slightly wounded.

“I need to get some work done,” he says.

“Yeah, same.” I do my best to lighten my tone. “I kind of run the place where you’re staying. I’m not sure if you know that.”

“Do you have writing to do today?”

“I have a word count to get every day,” I say. “What do you do?”

“I have scenes and I work on them, and when they’re perfect, I move on, but I don’t think of it in terms of word counts or page counts. It comes together that way.”

“Gross, Nathan. That’s so unstructured it offends me.”

“I’m an artist, I guess.”

I laugh. “Ohhh.”

“And you always meet your deadlines?” he asks.

“Deadlines turn me on,” I say.

“What else turns you on?”

My face gets hot. “Your omelet is getting cold.”

I take a bite of my own fiercely.

There is a tone shift, and it’s like he’s a different man. Like he managed to pull himself out of whatever space he’d been in just a few moments before.

His emotions are so intense I can feel them like the changing of the tide. Even if I can’t quite get a handle on what they are.

“Actually,” he says, looking at me, his omelet half-gone now. “Part of what I was going to do today was go to Joshua Tree. Research. And I was wondering if you wanted to go.”

“So you are writing something set here,” I say, rather than answering his invitation.

“Kind of,” he says.

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