“I don’t,” he says. He clears his throat. The moment stretches out to the horizon. “I mean, I haven’t, in the past.”
I know what he’s saying — what he’s hesitant to say now, even to me. He’s in love with her. My best friend. I look over at him, and his eyes are fixed out on the ocean.
“Do you surf?” he asks me.
“Really?”
He turns back to me. He wears a sheepish expression. “I thought I might be embarrassing you with this bleeding heart.”
“You weren’t,” I say. “I think I brought it up.” I walk a few paces down to the water’s edge. Aaron joins me. “No,” I say. “I don’t surf.” There are no surfers out there right now, but it’s late. The real ones are usually gone by 9 a.m. “Do you?”
“No, but I always wanted to. I didn’t grow up around the ocean. I was sixteen before I went to the beach for the first time.”
“Really? Where are you from?”
“Wisconsin,” he says. “My parents weren’t big travelers, but when we went on vacation it was always to the lake. We rented this house on Lake Michigan every summer. We’d stay there for a week and just live on the water.”
“Sounds nice,” I say.
“I’m trying to convince Bella to go with me in the fall. It’s still one of my favorite places.”
“She’s not much of a lake girl,” I say.
“I think she’d like it.”
He clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “Thanks for earlier. I don’t really ever talk about my mom.”
I look down at my feet. “It’s okay,” I say. “I get it.”
The water comes up to greet us.
Aaron jumps back. “Shit, that’s cold,” he says.
“It’s not that bad; it’s August. You don’t even want to know what it feels like in May.”
He hops around for another moment and then stops, staring at me. All at once, he kicks up the retreating water. It lands on me in a cascade, the icy droplets dotting my body like chicken pox.
“Not cool,” I say.
I splash him back, and he holds up his towel in defense. But then we’re running farther into the ocean, gathering more and more water in our attacks until we’re both soaking wet, his towel nothing more than a dripping deadweight.
I duck my head under the water and let the shock of cold cool my head. I don’t bother taking off my hat. When I come back up, Aaron is a foot from me. He stares at me so intently I have the instinct to look behind me but don’t.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says. “I just…” He shrugs. “I like you.”
Instantly, I’m not in the Atlantic anymore; we’re not here on this beach but, instead, in that apartment, in that bed. His hands, devoid of the sopping towel, are on me. His mouth on my neck, his body moving slowly, deliberately over mine — asking, kneading, pressing. The pulse of the blood in my veins pumping to a rhythm of yes.
I close my eyes. Stop. Stop. Stop.
“Race you back,” I say.
I kick up some water and take off. I know I’m faster than him — I’m faster than most people, and he’s weighed down by ten pounds of towel. I’ll beat him in a flash. When I get back to the blanket, Bella is awake. She rolls over, sleepily, shielding her eyes from the sun.
“Where did you go?” she asks.
I’m breathing too hard to answer.
Chapter Seventeen
September is busy season at work. If everyone agrees to take a collective breath at the end of August, then September is a full-on sprint. I come back from the beach to a pile of documents and don’t look up from them until Friday. Bella calls me on Wednesday, gasping with laughter.
“I told him!” she says. She squeals, and I hear Aaron there next to her. I imagine his arms around her, around her chest, careful with her, with this life now between them.
“And?”
“Dannie says ‘and,’ ” Bella says.
I hear static, and then Aaron is on the line. “Dannie. Hey.”
“Hi,” I say. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Are you happy?”
He pauses. I feel my stomach tighten. But then, when I hear him speak, it’s the purest, most obvious resonance of joy. It fills up the phone. “You know,” he says. “I really, really am.”
On Saturday, Bella and I pick up coffees at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway because she wants to go shopping. I expect we’ll hit up the stores on lower Fifth, maybe pop into Anthropologie, J.Crew, or Zara. But, instead, I find myself, Americano in hand, standing outside of Jacadi, the French baby store on Twenty-First Street.
“We have to go in,” she says. “Everything is too adorable.” I follow her.
There are rows of tiny onesies with matching cotton hats, knit sweaters, tiny overalls. It is a shrunken department store — full of petite Mary Janes and patent-leather loafers, all in minute, pocketable sizes. Bella is wearing a pink silk slip dress with an oversize white cotton sweater tied at the waist. Her hair is wild. She is glowing. She looks beautiful, radiant. Like a goddess.
It’s not that I don’t want kids, but I’ve just never felt particularly drawn to motherhood. Babies don’t make me coo and weaken, and I’ve never experienced any sort of biological clock about my reproductive window. I think David would be a good father, and that we’ll probably go ahead and have kids one day, but when I think about that future picture, us with a child, I often come up blank.
“When is your doctor’s appointment?” I ask her.
Bella holds up a little yellow-and-white-polka-dot jumper. “Do you think this is gender neutral?”
I shrug.
“The baby will be here in the spring, so we’ll need some long-sleeved stuff. She hands me the jumper and pulls two off-white cable-knit sweaters from the table in different sizes.
“How is Aaron?” I ask.
She smiles dreamily. “He’s great; he’s excited. I mean it’s sudden, of course, but he seems really happy. We’re not twenty-five anymore.”
“Right,” I say. “Are you guys going to get married?”
Bella rolls her eyes and hands me a pair of socks with tiny anchors on them. “Don’t be so obvious,” she says.
“You’re having a baby; it’s a legitimate question.”
She turns to me. Her whole body focused now. “We haven’t even discussed it. This seems like enough for now.”
“So when’s the doctor?” I ask, switching gears. “I want to see that sonogram pic.”
Bella smiles. “Next week. They said not to rush coming in. When it’s this early, there isn’t much to do anyway.”
“But shop,” I say. My arms are full of small items now. I shuffle toward the register counter.
“I think it’s a girl,” Bella says.
I have an image of her, sitting in a rocking chair, holding an infant wrapped in a soft pink blanket.
“A girl would be great,” I say.
She pulls me in and tucks me to her side. “Now you have to get started, too,” she says.
I imagine being pregnant. Shopping in this store for my own tiny creation. It makes me want a cocktail.
On Sunday, I go over to her apartment. I ring the bell twice. When the door finally opens Aaron is there, or at least his head is. He pulls the door back, and I’m met with at least a dozen packages — boxes and baskets and all sorts of gifts — littering the entryway.
“Did you guys rob a department store?” I ask.
Aaron shrugs. “She’s excited,” he says. “So she’s shopping?” I watch his face closely, looking for signs of judgment or hesitation, but I find none, only a little amusement. He’s dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, no socks. I wonder if he’s moved some stuff in yet. If he will. They’ll have to live together, won’t they?