At turns hilarious and gut-wrenching, this is a tremendously fun slow burn

I know —
I know —
I know what’s coming.
“Macy?” He looks over his shoulder at me. “Do you love Sean?”
I knew it was coming, yeah, but the weight of his question still propels me up off the bench and two
paces away.
“I’ve seen you in love,” he says gently, not standing. “It doesn’t look like you’re in love with him.”
I don’t answer, but he reads me anyway.
“I don’t get it,” he growls. “Why are you with him?”
I turn back around to catch his expression, brow furrowed, mouth tight with emotion. It takes a few
breaths for me to put the words together in a way that doesn’t feel supremely melodramatic.
“Because,” I tell him, “we have the totally fucked-up agreement of emotionally messed-up people – that
was unspoken, I guess, until recently – that we only give each other a fraction of ourselves. Losing him
would never wreck me.” I shake my head and look down at my shoe, toeing the dirt. I feel my epiphany from
earlier about a robust, shared life starting to fade as Elliot pokes at my self-preservation instincts. I hate
that Sabrina was right. I hate that retreating to my cocoon is my first reflex. “I realize how cowardly that
sounds, but I don’t think I could take losing someone I love again.”
“It hurt that much,” he says quietly, not really a question. “What I did. When are we going to talk?”
“I didn’t just lose you,” I remind him.
I stop, needing a second to breathe. The memories of the last time I saw Elliot used to make me
physically sick. Now they just send a wavy lurch through my body.
I can see he’s processing this. He studies my face, turning the words around in his mind and looking at
them from different angles, like he knows he’s missing something.
Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.
“What’s his story?” he asks.
“You mean Sean’s?”
Elliot nods, picking up another twig. “He was married?”
“Yeah. She was in finance, and got addicted to cocaine on a work trip.”
His head shoots up, eyes shocked. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Terrible, right?” I look past him, out into the parking lot. “So, I think part of it for him is that he
has his daughter, and he never really got to get over Ashley. It’s been… really easy for both of us to just fall
into something permanent without really needing each other.”

---

Elliot leans forward. “Macy.”
“Elliot.”
“Are you staying because of Phoebe?”
I stare at him, genuinely confused. “What?”
“Phoebe.”
“No, I heard the name. I just don’t understand how – Oh.” I get what he’s saying. “No.”
“I mean, she’s this sweet little girl without a mom…” He says it like it’s obvious why I’d stick around, and
okay, from the outside I can see why he’d think that. But he doesn’t know them.
“She doesn’t need me,” I reassure him. “She’s got an awesome, involved dad. I’m this…” I wave my hand
around, unsure. “This accessory. I mean, let’s be real: I don’t really know how to… ‘mom’ anyway, so she
doesn’t seem to need anything from me.”
He grunts a little, looking down at the twig he’s slowly and methodically shredding. “Okay.”
I glare. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”
“It means okay.”
“You can’t think that long before giving me an ‘okay.’ That’s a condescending ‘okay.’”
He laughs, and tosses the stick to the ground before looking up at me. “Okay.”
A challenge. He wants to engage me, I can tell.
“Goddammit.” I turn and stare up at the education center and the gray clouds rolling in behind it.
“She might need a mom when she gets her period,” he says quietly. “Or when her friends are jerks.”
“Maybe she’ll have a friend in a closet who listens to her instead,” I counter, and then turn to look up at
him, suspicious. “Why does it feel like you’re trying to talk me into staying with Sean? Are you reverse-
psychologizing me?”
Grinning, he relents. “Come on, let’s talk about something else. Favorite word?”
Heat ripples across my skin. I’m so unprepared for this that my mind stalls and suddenly, there are no
words, anywhere. “I’d need to think… What about you?”
His laugh comes as a low rumble. “Mellifluous.”
I scrunch my nose. “That’s a mouthful.”
“It most certainly is, ma’am,” he growls, with a meaningful lean to his words.
He gets a pebble tossed at him for that.
“Your voice is mellifluous,” he murmurs, pushing off the bench to stand and move toward me. “And come
on. Your turn. You don’t get to think too hard on this, cheater. You know the rules.”
I watch his lips part as he looks at my mouth. Watch his tongue dart out.
“Limerence.”
There’s no other word like it: The state of being infatuated with another person.
Elliot’s eyes shoot up to mine, pupils dilating like a drop of ink in a pond. “You’re terrible.”
“I’m not trying to be.”
He nods to the trail marker, beckoning me to follow. We hike down the path, and it reminds me of
walking with him through Armstrong Woods, or along the dry creek bed in summer. It’s so weird how it
feels like another lifetime, and also like it was two weeks ago. Slowly, our steps converge into the crunch…