Type-cast (part 2)
April 13, 2007
At 10:30 a.m., once they had both chosen to admit to the other that they were awake, he tried to pull his usual stand-up routine. He walked her to his dorm’s entrance in his slippers and kissed her. “We’ll do lunch or something; I’ll call you later.” He gently removed his arm from around her delicate shoulders, already pivoting to his escape.
She caught his hand as he twisted around, pulling him back towards her. “No, no you won’t.”
“How do you know that?” he smiled playfully, tilting her chin up to facilitate eye-contact.
“Because you didn’t even ask for my number,” she countered, jerking her chin out of his clasp and raising her eyebrows with defiance, finesse, a coy grin, and a challenge. She circled behind him, allowing her fingertips to trail over the geography of his back. She paused in her route and stood on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear, “nice try though, sport.”
Point taken, he thought, recoiling as though from an unexpectedly brisk wind; touché.
Rather than engaging in the notorious walk of shame, she insisted that they go to brunch together. At first, he resisted, hammering out worthless excuses. He didn’t want to go to brunch with her, but how does a guy explain to a girl that sometimes a hook-up is just a hook-up. That rarely is it about the “emotional connection” made infamous by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romantic comedies. Most of the time it’s just about the rhythm, the soft skin and the feeling of a warm body next to you in the amorphous, unassuming darkness.
Turns out that by the end of the brunch, he couldn’t even understand these arguments anymore, let alone recite them to her. Over scrambled eggs and fruit salad, they voraciously devoured the op-ed section of the New York Times and discovered a mutual obsession with The Simpsons. She told him about her father’s unrelenting disappointment with her because she hadn’t continued crew in college and he told her about how his brother had died as an infant in a car accident. They fleshed out their life stories—past up to the present—and shared their fears, eccentricities and dream jobs. It was 2:30 by the time they left.
Later that day, he went over to a frat to watch football with some of his friends. He didn’t have the balls to admit that with Liz baseball was more than just a sport and that he intended to stick around in the stadium for a helluva lot longer than 9 innings.
Now, just a few years later, loving words spewed from his heart reflexively in both the darkness and the daylight, in the bedroom and the Whole Foods grocery store. He knew that he and Liz would never be the kind of couple that slept in separate beds, even if they were married for 30 years and one acquired a sonorous snoring problem. His thoughts drifted back to earlier that morning.
He was sleeping when all of a sudden he felt weight on either side of him, a finger trail lazily from his hand up his forearm to his shoulder and finally to his chest. He groaned, as he felt a light kiss on his forehead.
“Good morning, sunshine!” she sang, straddling him and arching over him. She was wearing his blue and green flannel pajamas; they gaped in the front and gave him an enticing view. She placed a glass of orange juice on the bedside table for him.
“Mornin’,” he mumbled, struggling to open his eyes.
“You know,” she whispered, nibbling his ear lobe and planting kisses all over his stubble chin and cheeks. “I’m the best alarm clock you’ll ever have.”
“Snooze!” he managed groggily and poked her nose with his index finger. Turning over playfully and clutching the down comforter to his chest, he faced the other direction.
“You meanie!” she said, hitting him over the head with a pillow and yanking the covers off of him. “Come on, you gotta get up, mister; places to go; people to see. Chop! Chop!” she clapped her hands.
In one sweeping motion, he wrapped his arms and legs around her to bring her closer. “The only place I want to be is right here, and the only person I want to see is you.” He stared into her green eyes and tucked a rebellious strand of blond hair behind her ear.
“Why?” she questioned playfully.
“Because you’re just…I don’t know…” he trailed off. How could he explain that even after years of dating and seeing her at her best and worst, she still never failed to give him the butterflies? How he even thought her angry face was the most adorable thing in the world. How more often than not, he woke up with his fingers crossed that this wasn’t some trick of the mind.
“What? The screenwriter, speechless? Did I miss the apocalypse?” she looked around, eyes widening and darting wildly as though searching urgently for the nearest emergency exit.
He put a finger to her soft lips and pulled her closer, kissing her lightly. “I love you.”
Sitting at the coffee table, he wondered how she would receive the M-word, but he had realized a long time ago that it was better to wait and see with Liz than to wonder without her.
Kate handed him his coffee to go, assuring him it was on the house; he slipped a five dollar bill under the table leg anyway. His teeth bit off the pen cap and he scrawled one final sentence with the excited resolve and the patient euphoria of a swimmer about to jump off of the high dive. Equipped with his props—a Styrofoam cup gripped in one hand and his courage in the other—he pushed open the door and exited stage left as the lights faded to blackout.