Then there were the creaking sighs of Rebecca’s footsteps on the stairs. Rebecca, at this point, was single and exuded a take-no-prisoners quality with her sexuality, a fearless older-woman sophistication from having lost the love of her life to the war, and truth be told, she was the last person to whom Olivia wanted to explain the charred remains of this particular wish. But to throw away the remainder seemed like a bad symbolic message to the universe, so by the time Rebecca was on the landing, Olivia had slipped into her room and hidden what was left. Safe.
Time passed. Life in the house became set and cherished. Delan and Rebecca, the people she most wanted to see, the ones who lined bad days in silver and gave her more reason to stay home than to leave. Then, almost five months ago, she couldn’t sleep and ended up cleaning out her desk. There, under a notebook, she found that partial bit of the list that hadn’t burned. The edges were blackened and crisp and left a trace of dark on her fingertips, and there was a faint scent to it, something that hinted at aftermath. Then a knock on the door and Delan was standing in the threshold.
“The Tonight Show’s on,” he said. “I’m making pasta.”
She was wearing her nightgown. Knee-length white cotton with white embroidery on the bodice and braided satin straps. Her Little House on the Prairie nightgown, as he called it, which was the reason she usually had it covered. But now she wore nothing else, and in a split second there was the lowering of his eyes, and she felt a shiver and a thrill and then a shyness. So she looked down to the paper in her hand, grateful for the distraction.
And that’s when she read the words: Someone to watch The Tonight Show with.
Certainly it was timing. But maybe it was more. Whatever it was, the room seemed to fill with a pounding, and her hand shook as she put the paper back in the drawer. Other items from the list came back to her—someone who is bold and not a wallflower, someone who knows his way around a kitchen, someone who’s artistic—and she realized what she’d done: described him. Her roommate. The person she’d told herself was off-limits. The person she’d been attracted to but passed off as a playboy, a ruthless flirt whose interest in whomever he was with swelled and faded with the moon. He was not someone to fall for, but in that moment, she realized it was too late. That clearly it had been too late for some time.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as she passed by. “Something’s wrong.”
Not knowing what to say, she stopped walking, as if her words might catch up to her. He waited and then said her name, his voice rising slightly at the end, arcing into a question.
Within minutes, she was watching as he stirred tomato sauce on the stove, then nodding dully when he said he could use some oregano and basil from the garden.
“What were you looking at?” he asked as she was about to walk outside. “That paper.”
He faced the stove and so she studied the paisley of his shirt, the collision of patterns where it creased at the elbow. “Part of a list. One of the things I wanted in a man.”
Now he turned, watching her, holding an open palm under the spoon to catch the drips. “What was it?”
“Someone to watch The Tonight Show with.” She thought he would laugh.
But he didn’t. His gaze was steady as she opened the back door and even as she stepped down into the garden. And all at once, it hit her. What she’d said, it was just enough to ruin the ease they’d always had with one another. With this, everything would change.
Rocks on the path pushed into her feet. Her shoulders tensed with cold. She wondered how long she could stay out here before he checked on her, and that thought made it worse—knowing he would check on her. Because he would. He always did. He brought her blankets on nights they sat by the firepit and made sure her umbrella was by the door on days it rained. He observed. He noticed. They both did. They always had. What would this do to that routine? How would it affect the way kindness was felt? How would it make them second-guess caring?
Pots were lined along the wall, and the herbs inside had gone wild. Already the basil had begun to flower, so she pinched farther down on the stem like he’d taught her, then brought it to her nose. There was that fresh, slightly licorice scent, and she heard him on the path.
“Liv.”
A last breath in of the basil, the flowers bright with streetlight. She lowered her arm, needing to face the moment. But then his hand was on her wrist. She turned to him, and he stood there, making a decision. And she saw it in him, a sad curiosity and his need to be kind to her, to let her down easy, and with this she was about to cry—not just because she wanted him, and want, once recognized, is a ruthless accomplice—but because already something had ended.
Then she heard him breathe. A deep breath in and an exhale out that seemed to catch slightly with sound. Barely there, but in the silence of the garden, she heard it. A sound that made her heart beat faster. And at that point, she realized that his fingers were still on her wrist, moving as he felt her skin, and that the sad curiosity had actually been a searching curiosity, and then
