my heart that I don’t have the courage to lean into him, brush my lips back against his like on that Friday night at Chutes and Lattes, feel his arms encircle me, his hands at the small of my back. I am so desperate for that I want to scream. But not desperate enough to risk what we have now. Because this is priceless.
So I turn the conversation around, hoping my voice is steady. “When will you get to see her next?”
And I hope it’s sometime in the spring, when I’ll (hopefully) also be in Paris. Because Paris with Zeke? It’s more than anything I can imagine.
It’s that image, the two of us strolling down the Champs-Elysées, that keeps me going when he calls moments before we’re supposed to go out on Wednesday night and says he’s stuck in Boston. Thankfully, we didn’t have a whole evening planned; we were just going to listen to old French folk songs and decode them.
“Can I call you when I’m driving back?” Zeke asks, and I want to say no. I want to stop myself from playing the familiar game of waiting up and having him maybe call or maybe not call. But then he says, “Please,” in a quiet voice, and I relent.
“Did you take the CDs or did you download the music?”
“Both. I’ll try to listen to them first and then maybe we can talk about the vocabulary together,” he says, and once again I hear the clattering of dishes and the sound of a restaurant in the background. I’m about to ask him where he is when he promises to call me in a couple of hours. Promises.
He doesn’t call until almost eleven. I’m already in bed, reading, convinced he was going to stand me up again.
“I’m so sorry,” he says as soon as I say hello, the dinging seat belt indicator in the background.
“Are you still in Boston?” I ask, trying to swallow the yawn that overtakes me.
“I left a little while ago. I just stopped to grab some coffee,” he says, his voice pretending to be upbeat when really he sounds completely exhausted.
“Are you okay to drive?”
There’s a pause, and I wonder if I lost the call, but then I hear the GPS voice, and I know he’s still there.
“Zeke?”
“I’m okay,” he says, but he’s not certain. And that scares me. “Are you in bed already?” he asks. “We can talk in the morning.”
“No, no,” I say. Alice is fast asleep, and I know that as long as I keep my voice down, she’ll sleep through everything. I point my desk lamp to the wall to mute the light and sit up. “I’m here.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m here,” I repeat. I don’t say: I’m afraid of you falling asleep driving. “Do you want to go through the songs?”
“Sure,” he says. “I listened to them a bit on the ride down but then I got a call—”
A call. Always a call. What’s with the calls?
But I don’t say anything; instead I pull out the papers on which I’ve created vocabulary lists for each song. “Let’s go.”
We talk for almost an hour as French music plays in the background. We discuss each of the songs on the list, from the ultra heavy metal to the slow folky songs my parents might have once listened to, if they were those kind of parents. Which they’re not.
We review the vocabulary words, Zeke testing me on the ones he can remember, me reviewing the rest over and over until he can almost predict which I’ll say next. And even though I’m in the safety of my warm bed with the sounds of Alice sleeping across the room, and Zeke is alone on a dark highway, the French words draw us together. They make me feel like it’s just us up in the middle of the night, a world of only us. I want to snuggle down into that world, let it lull me to sleep, but I’m responsible for making sure that Zeke doesn’t do the same, and the thought keeps me sitting upright, keeps my voice from getting wispy.
“You must be exhausted,” he says when we’ve gone one more time through all the words and neither of us even pauses. Épuisée, exhausted.
The clock reads midnight, and I wish I were the type to stay up until whenever, to get my second wind, but apparently I’m more the type to be able to sleep through anything, because I don’t even remember what we