Page 30 of Exit Lane
“Nice move, Teddy. Very well played.” I can’t tell if Marin’s poking fun or is as unnerved by our double-occupancy predicament as I am. “Who needs hot water anyway?”
XXIV
Marin
“So it’s not the Four Seasons,” I quip nervously, spreading a towel across the desk before unpacking my toiletries, “but it’s also not a semireclined passenger seat in a snowstorm.”
My plan is to try to get to bed, lights off, as quickly as possible. The longer I’m awake, the more I will have to metabolize the last few hours, which I’m not prepared to do. Teddy’s reaction to my bid for a second chance at the bar stung, especially painful because I deserved it. I’ve given him the impression I think I can just waltz back into his life. It’s killing me that I don’t know how to demonstrate, in some meaningful, convincing way, the truth: That what I did to him at Tivoli is not who I am. That I would never do that to him again. That we are this close to the Iowa border and all the emotional baggage and uncertainty that it carries, and yet my conviction about him is stronger than ever.
Teddy steps into the bathroom, and I look around the room. I avoid dwelling on the lack of a pullout sofa—or any furniture beyond a dresser and bed—as I focus on locating my decidedly unsexy gingham pajama set from my suitcase. Teddy starts brushing his teeth, door open, and I wince athow familiar the sound is, still. Any chance I had at winning him back, proving to him I’ve changed, feels bleak at this point, and I don’t want to think about it again until the storm passes.He’s better, and we’re on speaking terms, I remind myself. That alone is a better outcome than I could have hoped for.
“I’d offer to sleep on the floor,” he calls out over the running water, “but I’m pretty sure there’s concrete under this carpeting.”
As soon as we were assigned this lone room, I knew we’d be sharing a bed. Actually agreeing to it is something else altogether.
I have to make light of it—have to play the part of brusque Marin who is unbothered by the presence of this man. It’s my only defense. “Don’t worry. I’ll control myself despite the irresistible allure of your cotton boxers from college.”
I blush as I say it, thankful he can’t see me, and I think about the nights in Copenhagen where we’d go hours without clothes, one of us tiptoeing into the kitchen wrapped in a quilt to make tea. The time I ran out for wine in my giant parka and only a bra and underwear beneath because I knew I’d strip down as soon as I returned anyway.
I step up to the sink with my own toothbrush, desperately aware of how comfortable it feels to be lost in a quotidian moment next to him. This is what I missed most when I thought of him—sex, yes, a thousand times, but the quiet peace of being in his orbit. He slips out of the bathroom, pulling off his shirt and folding his pants the way he does every night. “Don’t fuck this up,” I mouth to myself in the mirror, desperate to get out of my own head. I brushmy hair with the same brush I use every night, my heart pounding. I examine myself in the mirror, the bags under my eyes a little more pronounced. I reach for the cream I almost never use but pack anyway. I look for excuses to dawdle.
“You going to sleep in there?” Teddy asks from the bedroom with just enough teasing in his tone to tell me the chilliness of our Envy’s Pub exit has thawed. I’ve extended my skincare routine well past its typical five minutes. Anxious, I click the light off, feeling my way toward the bed. As I tentatively pat at the mattress, I meet only a sheet. We’re both partial to the side farthest from the door.
“You took the bad side,” I say.
“When Dolores comes for you, she’ll have to get through me first.”
It’s quiet as I climb in beside him. As my eyes adjust to the light, I can tell he’s propped up on his elbows, and I can fill in the rest of his shape from memory. “Look, Mar, we both need to go to sleep. But I just wanted to say...” He sighs. “We can talk about this more tomorrow.” Sleep. My body is intensely aware of its proximity to his. I can’t imagine my heart rate slowing and can only hope that the jet lag, whiskey, and sustained fight-or-flight hormones will catch up with me.
Teddy reaches across the bed, and I hold my breath. He flips my collar right side out. “I’m donating this to a good cause,” he says, tucking his only pillow perpendicular to mine, remembering my preference to curl into something, usually his chest, when sleeping. Lumpy barrier between us, I swear the tug between my body and his will keep me up all night. That’s the last thought I have before I fall asleep, Teddy next to me.
XXV
Teddy
Here’s my definition of bliss: waking up to Marin’s warm body curled against mine, her hair a thousand different directions, and a puddle of her drool collected on my sleeve. This is an enduring personal truth I can’t deny even if it’s a complicated one.
The bedside clock is flashing 7:21, and I ease out of the sheets to check the snowfall through the window. There’s a sea of white, but nothing is falling from the sky. We’re going to make it to Iowa City on time. The solace that brings last seconds. It’s almost immediately replaced by nerves about what happens next.
Tiptoeing back to bed, I spot the notebook she pulled out at the bar peeking from her bag. It’s not snooping if the entire thing is addressed to me, right? If she put it in my hands and encouraged me to page through it the night before? I reach for it. I extract it gingerly and crawl back beneath the covers, careful not to wake Marin.
On the front page, dated almost three years back, I read the first entry. “Teddy, you’re at Mayo, getting better, and I’m here, in Copenhagen, wishing more than anything Icould be with you—wishing I hadn’t ruined that for both of us.”
The entries vary from there, one a diagram of her new fund’s thesis, another a list of birthday gift ideas she had for me but would never be able to execute. Flipping at random, tears fill my eyes, and I land on a list of everything she’d tell her dad about me if she could. “You’re the exact kind of person he asked me to hold out for when I was twelve and grossed out by the idea of kissing anyone. You two have the same annoying trait of knowing what I need that I won’t admit that I need.” I turn to watch her, chest rising and falling, and feel the warmth of all the things she could never say but, turns out, could write down. The regret and hope she’d clung to these last three years.
I land on a note from nine months ago. “Sloane and Carter called to tell me they’re getting married, and I couldn’t be happier for them,” it starts. “But when I got off the phone with them, I cried. I’m jealous that they both have what it takes to make this commitment to each other work when I failed you so completely. All my life, since I was fifteen, I have been looking for escape routes to get further and further away from my past. To carry myself far enough afield that maybe I wouldn’t even be able to find my way back if I wanted to. But being with you—it was like finding the exit lane that would take me back to myself. Being with you showed me that I could be who I am now and who I was then, and that made me feel more whole than I had since my dad has been gone. Even if we never speak again, you will have forever changed me.”
My eyes are too bleary to keep reading, and a tear falls on the page. “Mar,” I whisper, unable to stand another minute without her. “Marin.” I smooth her hair behind her ear. As her lids blink open, she jolts up to sitting, confused, before softening her face toward me. For a second, I think we might kiss. I’m done wasting time. Grabbing her hand, I press the little notebook onto her chest.
“I read it. I probably should have asked, but I figured if it was for me... Marin, I’m, uh...” She pushes the hair out of her face and opens her mouth to say something, but I continue. “I didn’t know. For the last three years, I didn’t know what you were thinking or feeling, but now I do. You love me, and that scares you. You can be scared if you want to be, but I’m not.”
Marin’s face twists, and I watch in awe as something, guilt or relief, works its way through her body. Then, without warning, she starts crying. Sobbing. “I don’t want to be scared with anyone else.” She gasps, her tears running onto my bare shoulder, our bodies pressed against each other as my own tears start to fall.
“You’re the love of my life. I think you know that,” I whisper into her ear, running my fingers through her hair.
Marin
The notebook. The notebook I couldn’t leave the house without for fear I’d have something I needed to tell Teddy and wouldn’t have a way to say it. The pages I filledwith ramblings of how I could work remotely from Iowa and how we could build a guest room for our siblings and host cornhole tournaments with Carter and Sloane. On one of the last pages, on the plane, I drew a map of Iowa City and the spots there that now made me think of him, even though we’d never been there together. “Everything reminds me of you,” I wrote, resigned to Teddy’s hold on all the places that matter to me for the rest of my life.
