We pulled up to the Grant House in my truck, still wet from our trip down the river. Hunter was loose.
“Did you leave him out?” Alexis asked, braiding her wet red hair over her shoulder.
I looked at her a moment longer than I needed to, thinking how beautiful she was. I couldn’t stop thinking it every time I looked at her. She made me feel like I must have done something right in a past life to get the privilege of being with her.
Even if it was only for now.
“No,” I said, peering back out through the windshield at my rogue dog. “Great. Now he opens doors.”
She laughed and got out, and Hunter ran around to meet her like he always did. We’d gotten him to stop jumping, so that was good, but he still preferred Alexis to me, hands down.
I turned off the engine and stepped out of the driver’s side. Then the smell hit me.
“Uhhhhh…Daniel?” Alexis said, wrinkling her nose. “I think he got skunked.”
He definitely got skunked.
I could practically see green stench waves wafting up from his head. He sat, smiling back and forth between us, looking proud of himself.
“Jesus, Hunter.” I breathed into my elbow.
“We need hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dishwashing soap,” she said, shaking her head at him.
“How do you know?” I gagged.
“We get skunked patients in the ER.” “You wash skunked patients?”
She shook her head. “No, my nurses do it.” She pulled back his eyelids. “It can cause ocular swelling if they get it in the face. He seems okay. I can wash him. I’ve already got it on my hands.”
I had to smile a little. A few months ago, this woman hadn’t known how to sweep. She didn’t scrub toilets or clean the kitchen. Now she was washing skunk off my dog? It made me feel oddly proud of her for some reason.
“I’ll help,” I said.
She grabbed him by the collar. “Are you sure? No point in both of us getting gross.”
“I’m sure.”
I didn’t want to lose time with her. Not even to this. The sand in the hourglass was running out.
They were voting on her new job tomorrow. If she got it, which she seemed to think she would, that was it.
She’d given me three more months. I was grateful for it. But at the same time, I knew it might have been better to let her leave that day after the spaghetti dinner and never see her again. Because while it would have hurt me, it didn’t have the power yet to kill me.
Now it did.
I was in love with her.
I couldn’t even breathe thinking about this being over. It woke me up at night, made me feel for her next to me to be sure she was still there. I
wanted her to stay so badly, I didn’t know what to do. I felt desperate. I wished I had a genie in a bottle or a fairy godmother, someone to grant just one wish. Just one.
But as it stood, there was nothing to be done.
A lot had changed in the last three months. Amber hadn’t called to ask me for money or to let me know the deal was off. I called her last week just to check in, and she sounded good. My guess was she’d come out of whatever self-destructive slide she was on the last time I talked to her and she was doing okay—for now.
I’d cleared out most of the backlog in the garage and sold it at the swap meet. Made eight thousand dollars, so not bad. I’d been focusing more on my freelance pieces than anything. Alexis liked them.
She’d started an Instagram and an Etsy store for me, and I’d been using it. I shipped a headboard to an interior designer in Maine last week, made two thousand dollars on that one item. It was looking like I could raise the money in time. I was almost halfway there, and I had half a dozen projects in the works and the house was rented out straight through October—but what happened with Alexis would determine everything in the end.
I’d decided. I’d give up my life here to be where she was if she’d have me. I’d give up my house and this town and all the people in it. If she was at the hospital eighty hours a week, I could be there when she left and be there when she came home. Make her breakfast, take her lunch, take her dinner. I could pick up the slack. She wouldn’t have to do anything, it could be all me this time—I’d go to her. It didn’t have to end.
We’d gotten so close after the last three months. We were comfortable with each other now. She’d walk around my room naked, looking at the little wood carvings I had on my windowsill or flipping through one of my books. Pee with the door open. We didn’t use condoms anymore. She had
an IUD, but knowing that barrier had come down between us, that we had that extra layer of trust…
All these little things were everything. At least they were to me.
But she still talked like the end was still going to be the end. She was always trying to remind me it was coming, like she wanted to manage my expectations. She wouldn’t leave anything here. Not even a toothbrush. She wouldn’t take the drawer I offered her or the key I’d tried to give her. Every time she left, all of her did. And it always made me feel like this time could be the last time, because there was nothing here for her to come back for.
There were times when we were together and I knew I made her happy, and I told myself that meant I might have a chance. And then something would happen to remind me how extraordinary she was and how she had a different life she needed to go live, and I’d feel hopeless.
I’d hear her talking to some other doctor on the phone, saying things that I couldn’t even begin to understand. She was so damn smart. She learned things like it was nothing. I could show her a recipe and she could make it again from memory, remember all the measurements and ingredients, just from seeing it once. There was the time a day laborer from a nearby farm came to see her with an infected cuticle, and Alexis started speaking Spanish. Just rolled right into another language I didn’t even know she spoke. When I asked her about it, she said she was fluent in sign language too. I couldn’t believe it. I just stared at her.
Sometimes it felt like she belonged to a different world. Literally. Like wherever she came from was so out of the ordinary, I couldn’t even imagine it.
I’d never been farther than Rochester—well, once I went to visit my cousin Josh back when he was still living in South Dakota, but that was it.
And his town wasn’t much bigger than mine. I’d never even been on a plane before. I had no idea what living in a big city was like.
Alexis would bring me things sometimes, food from places over where she lived.
When I was a kid Grandpa would get me a Happy Meal every time we went into Rochester for the hardware store or the dentist. Most people take stuff like that for granted, but McDonald’s was a treat for us here, a big deal. Hell, it still was.
But the stuff Alexis brought me was something else. It was like wherever she came from, nothing was average. She brought these rainbow macarons from some French bakery in Minneapolis, wrapped in red ribbon and brushed in gold leaf. Handmade chocolates from an artisan chocolatier with apricots inside of them. These fancy donuts with bacon on them, soft colorful cupcakes from Nadia Cakes. Most of it was too nice to eat. I didn’t even want to touch it. It was like the little rose-shaped soaps Grandma used to keep in a bowl in the downstairs bathroom that nobody was allowed to use to wash their hands.
Stuff like this—her Mercedes, her designer clothes, opera singers in her ER—all of it served to remind me that she belonged to somewhere else, some universe a million miles from mine.
She’d told me what hospital she worked in. I Googled it. It was the second largest hospital in Minnesota after the Mayo Clinic. It was the third best training hospital in the nation, a level-one trauma center. I found a documentary about her family, a two-hour show on the History Channel. Her dad was this world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon. He pioneered the Montgomery Method, some fancy way to do heart surgery. Her mom was a huge philanthropist and a spinal surgeon to boot, and her brother was a famous plastic surgeon.
Alexis was part of some elite medical legacy that I couldn’t even begin to understand. But every single time she showed up she still slid into my life like she belonged here anyway. Every single time it made it that much harder to let her leave and go back to where she came from. And when she did, it gave me a sinking sense of hopelessness, because how could I and this place compete with whatever that was out there?
She said she didn’t see a future with us. That our lives didn’t fit. I knew there were things I could never give her. At best, I had about as much to offer as my damn dog—companionship and entertainment. I couldn’t talk to her about the stuff her ex probably did, I couldn’t make the money she made or buy her expensive gifts or take her on vacations.
But I could love her better than anyone ever could for the rest of her life. That, I knew. And if there was even a fraction of a chance that might be enough, I was going to take it.
I didn’t have time to play it cool or let things happen slowly. I had to make my argument now. I was going to talk to her about the way I was feeling, I was going to ask her to let me try and make this work.
We took Hunter back behind the garage and spent the next half an hour washing my stupid dog. We locked him in the kennel to dry off and then went to take a shower.
She stripped in the bathroom, and I watched her as I got undressed next to her.
“I hope he learned his lesson,” she said, stepping under the water. “You know he didn’t.”
She laughed.
Last week he’d gotten porcupine needles in his nose. Alexis had to sedate him and take them out with pliers. This wouldn’t have been
noteworthy except that he’d done the exact same thing the week before that and clearly learned nothing about sniffing porcupines.
I couldn’t say I could really fault him for chasing down things that could hurt him. I couldn’t stop doing it either.
We’d already hosed ourselves down using the same stuff we’d cleaned Hunter with, so this was just a quick shower to wash our hair.
She stood under the water rinsing out the shampoo, and I wrapped my arms around her from behind and kissed the side of her neck.
My body reacted to her. Everything in me reacted to her, all the time.
When she called, my mood lifted. When I saw her coming down the driveway, my heart would pound. When she was here, I slept better. When she was gone, I was sad. She felt like the sun. Like she was the reason for everything. Like I’d always been waiting for her to get closer and bring me to life.
I pressed my hard-on into her, and she leaned into my chest. “Don’t you want to wait until we get out?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She laughed and turned around to kiss me. “Let’s rinse and get in bed,” she whispered. “We have another hour until check-in.”
We toweled off and barely made it to the mattress. I slid over her body, both of us still damp.
I pulled the blankets over us and caged her under me, warming her up. She nuzzled my Adam’s apple with her nose and wrapped her arms around my neck, and I felt like my entire universe was here in this bed, like everything that mattered was somehow right here in this dusty garage in this tiny town in the middle of nowhere.
Nothing could convince me this woman wasn’t made for me to love. I think my soul recognized hers the second I laid eyes on her. Our bodies
knew it the very first night.
The power she had over me terrified me. But it also gave me clarity.
There is a peace in knowing the one thing you can’t live without. It simplifies all things. There was her, and then there was everything and everyone else. And only she really mattered. It was easy to know it.
I just wished she knew it too.
I hovered over her, kissing her softly. I brushed her wet hair off her forehead, and she gazed up at me with those beautiful brown eyes, smiling, and I couldn’t not say it. It came out like an exhale, like something that was always there, only now I was finally giving it a name and breathing it into the universe and acknowledging that it existed.
“I love you,” I whispered. And then everything changed.
