Page 46 of Don't Call Me Sweetheart

It was so simple, when she spelled it out like that.

And yet.

“I don’t take care of anyone,” I said. It was the truth. I had spent most of my life intentionally avoiding doing just that.

She cocked her head, studying me. “It’s interesting that you think so.”

“I don’t,” I insisted. “I’ve had girlfriends before, even if none of those relationships lasted for very long. Occasionally, some of them even had the flu. I never did any of this for them.” I gestured to the bed, where Kate was fluffing the comforter.

“Maybe that’s true. Maybe you thought caring for someone would be messy, would take too much from you and leave you with nothing left to take care of yourself. Maybe you never took care of them because you didn’t trust them to take care of you.”

The truth of that walloped me hard. I was afraid of giving so much that I had nothing left to give myself, and if I didn’t take care of myself, who the hell would? No one, that’s who.

But she wasn’t done.

“But maybe you should also consider that you chose a career that literally requires you to take care of people, in a way that doesn’t allow you to ask anything of them in return. So, yes, Max. I do think it’s interesting that you don’t believe you take care of anyone, when really you take care of so many people. You just don’t let people take care of you.”

“Oh,” I said.

When what I meant was holy shit. Because she had just handed me an epiphany, and I felt like I was on the cusp of discovering something useful about myself. I made a mental note to bring it up with Josh later, when I wasn’t discombobulated from a sinus infection and Kate calling me honey.

She looked at me. “You need a nap. Get in bed, honey.”

I did as told, and damn it all, but she was right again. The clean sheets felt amazing against my skin. “Are you staying?” Please stay.

“No,” she said. “I need to get back to the shop. And then home to eat dinner with Jessica.” She dropped a kiss on my forehead. “But I’ll be back.”

I’ll be back.

For the first time, I let myself believe it.

Chapter 15

Max

It was dark when I woke up. I heated a large bowlful of the soup and ate it on the couch while watching John Wick for the hundredth time. I had never bothered to buy a dining table. What was the point, when I lived alone and ate every meal with a book or television?

The soup was good. My usual go-to sick-day food was phô delivered from a neighborhood restaurant, but Hart’s Ridge was sadly lacking in phô. It was something I missed from San Diego and DC, although at least there was a good Thai place, and I couldn’t complain about the Latin flavors.

But Kate’s soup was better than all of that. I suspected I wasn’t unbiased, although the lemongrass was a revelation.

There was chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer, also courtesy of Kate. I stood there longer than I should have before finally scooping a generous portion into a bowl. Chocolate chip was the sort of innocuous flavor everyone liked. A safe choice when you didn’t know someone’s favorite flavor.

It wasn’t my favorite flavor, in fact—she had no reason to know my favorite flavor, which was salted caramel—but I had the strangest sense of foreboding that one day chocolate chip would be the flavor I reached for when I needed comfort.

The way Andrea, an ex-girlfriend five years ago, had craved grape soda and canned ravioli when she was sick, because that was what her mother had made for her as a child. The memory hit me hard now, as cold as the ice cream on my tongue. She hadn’t asked me to get it for her, the one time she had been sick during our short relationship, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to do it. I figured she would take care of herself, the way I did.

I hadn’t even checked in on her in person. I had texted daily to see how she was, but I didn’t want to risk getting sick. I was exposed to more than enough germs from my students. I figured that was fine, because she hadn’t asked me to do that either. And she never brought it up after. Never said a word about it. The grape soda or the ravioli or the lack of boyfriend visits.

She had dumped me a week later, but if there was a correlation, she didn’t say. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

But now, I wondered.

Because I hadn’t asked for Kate to make me soup or bring me ice cream or any of the other things she had done to take care of me, but she had done them anyway.

And it felt good, to have someone do that for me. It felt so damn good.

It felt so good, in fact, that it felt terrible. Now I knew what I had been missing all those years. From a parent or a friend or a lover. Now I knew what I had failed to give. And it didn’t help at all that, when I had confessed my failings, she had seen right to the heart of me and understood it all in a way that I hadn’t been able to see myself.

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