“Okay, shit. I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, genuinely contrite. “Look. I work at ten. I . . .” Squinting past me down Mariposa, he says, “I was hoping we would have time to talk a little before then.” When I don’t say anything in reply, he bends to meet my gaze, pressing, “Do you have time?”
I look up at him, and our eyes hook, tunneling me back to every other time we shared an intense, silent exchange. Even this many years later, I think we can read each other pretty fucking well.
Breaking the connection, I glance down at my watch. It’s just after seven thirty. And although no one upstairs would complain if I showed up to work an hour and a half before I was scheduled, Elliot would know that if I said I had to get inside, I’d be lying.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I have about an hour.”
He tilts his head, slowly leans to the right, and, as a smile curves his mouth, he takes one shuffle-step, then another, as if luring me with his cuteness.
“Coffee?” His smile grows, and I notice his teeth, how even they are. A flash of Elliot at fourteen, wearing headgear, pulses through my thoughts. “Bakery? Greasy spoon?”
I point to the next block and the tiny four-table café that has yet to be overrun with residents and family members anxiously waiting for news postsurgery.
Inside it’s warm—bordering on too warm, the theme of my morning—and there are still two tables empty up front. Seating ourselves, we pick up the menus and peruse in tight silence.
“What’s good?” he asks.
I laugh. “I’ve never had breakfast here.”
Elliot looks up at me, blinks leisurely, and something in my stomach melts into a liquid heat that spreads lower. What’s weird, I realize, is that Elliot and I ate out together only a handful of times, and never alone.
“I usually scarf a muffin or bagel from the cafeteria.” I break eye contact, and decide on the yogurt and granola parfait before putting my menu down. “I bet everything is pretty tasty.”
Covertly, I watch him read, his eyes scanning quickly across the words. Elliot and words. Peanut butter and chocolate. Coffee and biscotti. Love matches made in heaven.
He reaches up, idly scratching his neck as he hums. “Eggs or pancakes? Eggs or pancakes?”
As he leans forward on an elbow, his shoulder muscle bunches beneath his cotton T-shirt. He rubs a finger back and forth just below his bottom lip. His phone buzzes near his arm, but he ignores it.
Have mercy. The only thought I have—bewildering and breathless—is that Elliot has become a man who knows how to use his body. I didn’t notice it yesterday, couldn’t have.
As he grins in his decision,
as he slides the menu gently back into the holder,
as he reaches for his napkin and lays it carefully across his lap,
as he looks up at me, pursing his lips slightly in happiness,
I suddenly feel grateful for the eleven intervening years, because would I have noticed all these little things otherwise? Or would they have blended together, blurring, known as the constellation of tiny mannerisms that slowly becomes Just Elliot?
I blink away when our waitress comes to the table and takes our order.
When she leaves, he leans in again. “Is it possible to catch me up on a decade over breakfast?”
Memories reel through my thoughts: Leaving for college in a fog. Living in the dorm with Sabrina and, later, in a small apartment off-campus that always seemed to be full of books and beer bottles and clouds of weed smoke. Moving with her to Baltimore for med school and the long nights I spent pseudo-praying that I would be matched at UCSF so I could live close to home again, even if home was empty. How does one condense a lifetime into the time it takes to share a cup of coffee?
“Looking back, it doesn’t feel all that busy,” I say. “College. Med school.”
“Well, and friends and lovers, joy and loss, I assume,” he says, hitting the nail directly on the head. His expression straightens with awareness.
An awkward silence grows like a canyon between us. “I didn’t mean us,” he says, adding in a mumble, “necessarily.”
With a dry laugh, I lean back in my seat. “I haven’t been marinating in bad feelings, Ell.”
Wow, that’s a lie.
When his phone buzzes again beside him, he pushes it away. “Then why not call?”
“A lot happened.” I shift back a little in my seat as our drinks arrive.