Say It Again

The tomatoes were past their best. I had the trowel in one hand and a split fruit in the other when Simon stopped at the end of the row and didn’t pick up the watering can.

Late sun sat on the harbor beyond the fence. A motorboat went by and the wash slapped the bulkhead. He was red to the ears.

“I’ve wanted to tell you something for eleven years,” he said.

I set the tomato on the path. “All right.”

“I’d like it if you were with another man.” He looked at the basil. “If I knew about it. If I could watch, maybe. Not instead of us. With us in it. Me knowing.”

I put the trowel down in the dirt.

He waited for the laugh. I could see him waiting for it.

“Say it again,” I said. “Slower.”

He did. The same words, slower, his hands empty at his sides. When he finished he finally looked at me.

“That’s the whole of it,” he said.

“Eleven years.”

“I was afraid you’d think I didn’t want you.”

I brushed soil off my knee. “Do you want me?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can talk about the rest.”

We didn’t finish the tomatoes that evening. We sat on the back step with lemonade until the mosquitoes drove us in, and he told me he’d rehearsed it in the shop between clocks and lost his nerve every time.

The questions started the next morning, over coffee at the kitchen table. The harbor light came in flat and white. Simon had his mug in both hands.

“What do you picture,” I said. “Exactly.”

“You happy,” he said. “Someone who likes you. Me in the room, or just outside it, hearing you. After, you telling me.”

“Which.”

“Both. I don’t know yet.”

I drank. The coffee was too strong, the way he always made it. “And if you’re jealous.”

“I will be. A little. I think that’s part of it.” He turned the mug. “If it turns mean, I say so and we stop.”

“We stop if either of us says so.”

“Yes.”

In the car, a week later, stuck behind a tourist bus on the way to a job site, I asked what he was afraid of.

“That you’ll like him more than you like this,” he said. “That I’ll have handed you a door and you’ll walk through it and not come back to the kitchen.”

“I’m not leaving the kitchen.”

“I know that in my head.”

“Say the other part.”

He smiled at the windshield. “That I’ll like it so much I won’t know what to do with my hands.”

I teased him then, small, because the quiet in the car had gone warm. “You’ll sit where I put you and you’ll behave.”

He laughed. Really laughed, the shy one that starts in his chest. “Yes. That. I like when you do that.”

“I noticed.”

I noticed more than that. I started looking forward to the next question the way I look forward to a good drawing, the moment before the line goes down. At the sink. On the porch with the fan going. Once, late, with the windows open on the creek smell, I asked if he wanted a name yet.

“No,” he said. “Not until you do.”

“And if I never do.”

“Then I told you, and you didn’t laugh, and that’s already more than I had.”

I kissed his temple and left it. I was not ready to leave it. I kept finding new corners of the thing, and every time he answered I wanted another.

Nico came back to town in the last hot week of August. I had known him in our twenties, before Simon, before the house. He made sails. He had been gone for years, working yards farther south, and now he had a bench again on the creek and a rented room over a shop. I asked him to Sunday dinner because that is what you do, and because I had been thinking about the garden conversation every time I laughed at something and turned to see if Simon had heard it.

We ate on the screened porch. Corn, tomatoes, chicken, a pitcher of lemonade sweating onto the table. The fan ticked. Nico told a story about a spinnaker that had gotten away from a client in a squall, and he told it with his hands, big and easy, and I laughed so hard I had to put my glass down.

I looked at Simon.

He wasn’t tight around the mouth. He was lit. His eyes were on me, not on Nico, and when I met them he didn’t look away. He looked grateful, and a little wrecked, and pleased with himself for being both.

Nico didn’t notice. He went on about the harbor, the work, the heat. He asked Simon about a clock in a church somewhere and listened to the answer. He was the same as he had always been with me: cheerful, direct, no lean in his chair toward mine. When he left he hugged me the way old friends do, quick, and shook Simon’s hand, and walked off down the path with the porch light on his shoulders.

We stood in the kitchen with the plates. The fan kept ticking.

“Is it Nico,” I said.

Simon stacked two plates and set them down again. “Yes.”

“Since when.”

“Since he sat down and you laughed like that.” He rubbed his neck. “Before, a little. I didn’t have a name. Then I did.”

“So do I.”

He went still. “Bea.”

“I watched you watch me. You weren’t jealous. You were happy I was having a good time, and you wanted to be let in on it. That’s the thing you told me in the garden.”

“It is.”

“I like him. I always have, as a friend. Tonight I liked the way you looked.” I dried my hands. “I’m not asking him tonight. I’m telling you what I want to do.”

We went back out. The porch was dark except for the light over the sink behind us. The garden held the day’s heat. Somewhere past the fence a halyard rang against a mast.

“If you still want this in the morning,” I said, “I’ll ask him. Plain. Both of us in it, nothing hidden, and he can say no and we’ll still have dinner sometime. If he says yes, how it goes is my call. You get to be there, or hear it, the way we already talked about. You don’t get to pretend you didn’t ask for it, and I don’t get to pretend I didn’t decide.”

“In the morning,” he said.

“I want you sure in daylight. Not just now, with the fan and the lemonade.”

He nodded. His ears were red again.

I put my hand on his jaw. He turned into it, the way he does when he’s been holding a sentence too long. I kissed him. Slow. The porch rail was at my hip and his wrist found my wrist and stayed there. I slid my fingers into his hair. He kissed me back, open, a little unsteady, his other hand coming up to my face like he needed the proof of it.

We stayed like that until the halyard rang again.

He rested his forehead on mine. “Say it again.”

I laughed, because he had given me the line I’d given him in the garden, and because I meant every word of it.

“If you still want it in the morning, I’ll ask Nico,” I said. “And it’s my call how it goes.”