Relationship Goals

by Christina C Jones

  “It’s fine,” I said, then thanked him for the bottle of water he handed me. “Although, I feel like you should’ve stayed in your date clothes too, in solidarity.”

  His eyes had only been half-open, but they went wide then. “Shit, my bad. Do you want a tee shirt, or—”

  “I’m messing with you,” I told him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “My dress is actually pretty comfortable, but I am going to take the shoes off, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  I handed him my water, then bent to unstrap my shoes. When I was done, I tucked my feet under me, angling myself in Nick’s direction as he laid his head back on the cushions.

  “Is this why you canceled on me? You had a flare up?”

  He nodded, but didn’t look at me. “Yeah. The flight, plus the change in the temperature between here and there. I did everything I could to get myself in a condition where I could make it, but it was too much.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked, propping my chin on my fist as I leaned into the couch. “I wouldn’t have been upset if I’d known what was going on.”

  Nick scoffed. “I haven’t had the best experience with telling women I’m interested in about being sick. Not that it’s something I was going to keep from you forever, but it’s not easy telling someone you have a chronic illness. Especially one like this, where it’s volatile, and I can’t make any guarantees about how I’ll be feeling from day to day.”

  “But nobody can do that,” I countered. “Nobody can promise what they’re going to be like from one day to the next, so who would hold that against you, when it’s something you can’t help?”

  He laughed. “Uh... anybody who would potentially date you. You gotta understand, Noah... this affects every part of my life, even though I try my best to live fully despite it. There are days I can’t even sit up in bed, let alone take you out for your birthday, you know? I’m lucky I don’t have those occurrences often, but I never know.”

  “Why do you sound like you’re warning me?”

  “Maybe I am,” he shrugged. “It’s a lot to overlook for somebody you just kinda like, early in a relationship. In my experience nobody wants to deal with it.”

  I frowned. “I get it, nobody wants to see someone they care about suffer. And if they can avoid that, I... I guess I understand that, too. But your illness isn’t something to “overlook”. You’d lived your whole life with it – it’s part of the fabric of who you are, but it’s the totality. It’s not even a character flaw. Why get so caught up on this one element that you rule out the possibility of anything?”

  Finally, Nick turned his head, pinning me with his gaze. “I don’t know, gorgeous. You’d have to ask them.”

  “Screw them,” I said, pushing myself up on my knees to move closer to him. I tried not to put thoughts in other people’s heads, but I could only imagine what he must be thinking, being faced with revealing something that usually drove people off.

  He let out a dry chuckle. “Noah, I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, but you don’t have to make it seem like it’s nothing.”

  “I’m not making it seem like anything,” I told him, from so close now that I was practically in his lap. “And I’m not trying to diminish your experience. I’m letting you know your condition doesn’t make me any less interested in you.”

  His eyebrow went up. “... seriously?”

  “Yes,” I laughed. “Seriously. I mean we’ve been on two dates, so we still have some developing to do, but I’d like to do that developing. Get to know each other... see if there’s something here.”

  I didn’t say it out loud, but the chemistry and connection I felt around him were too strong to let a little something like a genetic flaw get in the way.

  Nick didn’t say anything. He just gave me this sexy, sleepy-eyed stare for several seconds before he lifted his hands to my face, drawing me into him.

  His lips were as good as I remembered.

  I whimpered a little, melting under the heat of the soft, unhurried kisses he used to prime me up before he slipped his tongue between my lips. I sent thanks up to heaven for the mint I’d popped in my mouth in the car. He devoured my mouth like he was chasing that minty-cool flavor, pulling back to nip and tease my bottom lip before he dove in again.

  We stayed like that, trading kisses back and forth until it was obvious Nick was barely staying awake. I asked my way to the bathroom to clean up the lipstick that was all over my chin, and somehow on my nose. When I came back to the couch, he was asleep.

  I smiled a little as I leaned over him, using the towel I’d brought to clean my lipstick off his face. I was nearly finished when his eyes opened, and after a moment of looking dazed, he pulled me down onto the couch with him, tucking his arm around me before he promptly fell back asleep.

  It happened so quickly I was comfortably nestled against his side before I knew what was happening. But once I realized... I reached for the blanket draped across the couch and pulled it over both of us.

  I was going to go with it.

  7

  #NICK

  I couldn’t help looking for signs the novelty had worn off.

  Sure, Noah had reacted well to the revelation of my illness, but she wasn’t the first to have a good initial reaction. Not by a long shot. The uneasiness usually settled in once a woman had watched me take handfuls of pills – prescriptions, supplements, the things that helped me be as active as I was – or completely lose steam in the middle of the day one too many times, or once I requested we chill at my place, because I wasn’t in any shape to go out for a date.

  Or, the guaranteed potential relationship killer - a trip to the emergency room.

  It was especially fun if I needed to be driven.

  But Noah... she hadn’t seen enough yet. Or at least, that’s what I told myself to make sense of the profound interest on her face as she watched me dole out my pills for the week. She was perched – legs crossed underneath her – on a barstool at the end of my kitchen counter. Goddess was the word that ran through my head as I looked at her, perfectly balanced atop that stool, thick hair floating around her bare shoulders.

  Three weeks.

  That’s how long it had been since my “big reveal”, and if anything, Noah seemed more interested. Maybe it was the natural progression after finally having our second date, but experience had me looking sideways at it. Not that I didn’t enjoy our random ongoing text conversations throughout the day, or phone calls that ran late into the night – I looked forward to it.

  I was hesitant, I guess, to read too much into it.

  Which was hard as hell.

  Especially when she did things like call from her hotel at six in the morning to see if I was awake, because in her words, she “couldn’t wait to see me”. The feeling was mutual, and because she was too eager to wait for me to get up, shower, dress, and get to her, she came to me.

  And now, she was sitting in my kitchen at six-thirty in the morning, after we hadn’t seen each other in person since the night I told her I was ill.

  Really hard not to read into that.

  “Your hair is longer,” she said, out of nowhere, as I tossed today’s pills in my mouth, chasing them with a swig of water. “That’s what’s different about you. I’ve been trying to figure it out. Why didn’t you mention that?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize it would interest you.”

  “You growing out your hair, growing out your beard, looking all sexy and rugged is of very high interest to me, actually,” she quipped, grinning. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to formally request that as of today you begin sending me a daily picture documenting this process.”

  I laughed. “There’s no process. I’ve been too preoccupied to take my ass to the barber. It’ll be gone soon.”

  “Why would you do that?” she asked, no longer grinning. Her expression was completely serious. “I feel a little attacked right now.”

 
Shaking my head, I replaced the pill bottles in the cabinet. “By me cutting my hair?”

  “Yes,” she said, from closer than she’d been before. When I turned to grab my weekly dispenser, she was coming around the counter. “As the woman you are in the very early stages of dating, I forbid it.”

  “Oh damn, forbid?” I chuckled as she came right up beside me. “What advice would you give a woman who had a man forbidding her to do something with her hair?”

  My question was met with a low moan, and Noah slid her arms around my waist, pressing herself into me as I turned to face her. “Oooh. I love it when you point out my internalized sexism.”

  “Your ass is silly,” I murmured, meeting her halfway as she pushed herself up on her toes for a kiss. Once again, she tasted like fruit for breakfast – strawberries specifically – which made it only seem natural to deepen the kiss, gripping her at the waist to pull her closer. She moved her hands too, pushing them up and over my chest to hook around my shoulders.

  “Seriously,” she said, when we finally pulled back. “Don’t you want to keep this?” Her fingers went to my overgrown facial hair, gently gliding through before she cupped my ears – something she couldn’t have known would make me want to bend her over my kitchen counter.

  “I’ll take your feedback under advisement,” I told her, then stepped away to put some space between us. “What do you want to do today? How many days did you say you were here?”

  “Today and tomorrow, but I have meetings tomorrow. I’m all yours today though, and I want to do whatever you would normally do.”

  I expected her to stop at the door to my bedroom, but she followed me inside, leaning against the wall by the dresser as I flipped on the light to the closet. “Well,” I called from inside as I grabbed some clothes, “I’m guessing you don’t have balls to sit around and scratch with me, so that’s probably out.”

  “Nick, eww.”

  I chuckled as I stepped out of the closet to find her frowning, arms crossed.

  “Just saying. But nah, I would usually be fixing myself some breakfast around this time, but my neglect of my routine extends to the grocery shopping. I was gonna say we could grab something, and go explore the city a bit, but you probably aren’t hungry.”

  She sucked her teeth. “Uh, why would you think that? I’m definitely hungry.”

  “Oh, I thought you already had breakfast?”

  “A couple of strawberries from an airport convenience store fruit bowl. I grabbed it on the way out, but I didn’t want to eat in the Uber, and by the time I got to my hotel room, I was too exhausted to eat, period.”

  Shaking my head, I pulled off the tee shirt I’d only put on after my shower this morning because Noah was coming by – answering the door shirtless hadn’t seemed like a good way to put her at ease. “I still don’t know why you wouldn’t let me give you a ride from the airport.”

  “Because I knew I’d see you today,” she argued. “And that was a pretty late flight. I didn’t want you having to get all the way across town to chauffeur me, and then having to go all the way back.”

  “I wouldn’t have been tripping about that.” Once I had the new shirt pulled on, I stopped to look at her. “But if you haven’t eaten, we should start with breakfast.”

  “I like that plan. I’m starving,” she groaned, putting a hand to her bare stomach for dramatic effect. For a second, I’d considered sticking with the basketball shorts I was already wearing, but I couldn’t.

  Not with her looking like she was, in skinny jeans that rode low on her hips, and a gauzy crop top that put nicely defined abs on display.

  Damn she’s fine.

  “Well, let me finish getting dressed, and find some oil or something for this hair so I’m not looking raggedy, then we can go.”

  “You do not look raggedy,” she laughed. “But okay.”

  I left her in my room and used the bathroom to finish getting ready. When I stepped out after I was done, she was still in there, staring out of the window at the park my apartment overlooked.

  “You ready?” I asked, and she glanced back, smiling.

  “Yeah. We can go.” She said that, but then halfway across the room, she stopped. “Hey – I know I’ve been super busy this week, leading up to this trip, but what has had you so preoccupied you’ve been skipping haircuts and groceries?”

  “You mean besides texting you all day?”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “Yes, besides that.”

  Instead of speaking, I flipped open the box on the dresser, pulling out my father’s list. My fingers hesitated for a moment over the slips of paper I was reasonably sure no one – besides my father – except me had ever touched. I pulled them out, turning over to the back of one of the pages, where between the two of us, there was only one item that hadn’t been crossed off.

  “Capture the sensually mundane,” she read aloud when I held it out to her, pointing out the item that had been causing me so much grief. “Uh, what does that even mean?”

  My shoulders went up. “That’s a good ass question.”

  “What do you mean it’s a “good question”? You wrote it, don’t you know the answer?”

  “I didn’t, actually.” I grinned at the obvious confusion on her face. “This is my father’s list. He wrote all of this out – things he wanted to do before he died. A lot of these things, he and I did together, but he, uh... we didn’t get to finish. The last thing he crossed off was two years ago.”

  Noah’s expression shifted from confused to concerned. “Nick, I didn’t realize it was just two years ago. Two years is nothing.”

  “I’m good,” I said, shrugging it off. “I mean, no lie – I miss the hell out of my Pops, but we knew it was coming long enough to kind of mentally prepare, I guess. That was why he wrote the list. And it’s why I’m finishing it.”

  “What?!” Noah’s eyes were wide in alarm as she made those last steps across the room to get to me. “Are you...?”

  “No,” I told her. “I mean... everybody is, but I didn’t mean that how it came out. My father died from complications of sickle cell. I’m lucky enough that I’ve not had to deal with much of that yet. Or maybe never. The thing is, I don’t know what my body is going to do, so I’m trying to live the best I can, take good care of myself and make sure I finish this list before I can’t.”

  Noah pushed out a sigh as I wrapped my arms around her, offering the comfort it seemed like she needed. “Don’t scare me like that.”

  “I wasn’t trying to scare you,” I told her, pulling her against me tighter. “But that’s reality for me, living with this condition. You’re going to have to be able to cope with that, if we’re...”

  With her face buried in my shirt, she nodded. “I know. It’s just hard to hear.”

  “Not easy to say, either.”

  She pulled back a little, turning her face up toward mine to meet my eyes. “Thank you, for trusting me enough to share.”

  A smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. “Thank you for listening. Now let’s go get some breakfast.”

  #

  “Wanna know what I’ve been thinking about all day?”

  Noah’s eyes were pointed up, toward the pink bougainvillea blossoms spilling from the huge arbors that towered over us. We were in the central garden at the Getty Center, a place she’d insisted on coming after reading an article about the best views in L.A. Now that we’d seen the view, she wanted to do a little exploring around the museum itself.

  “Yes, I do,” I told her, hooking an arm around her waist to pull her out of the way of a stampede of kids, all in green tee-shirts, with two tired-looking handlers rushing after them.

  “The sensually mundane. I’m trying to work it out.”

  “Join the club,” I grinned. “I keep thinking maybe I’m not considering it from the right angle or something. All it usually takes is a tiny spark of an idea for me to run with, but I’m not getting anything from it. And I can’t move on – I have to figure it ou
t.”

  She turned to me, and nodded. “Okay, so mundane is like... boring.”

  “Right. But when I think sensual, that’s far from boring.”

  “Maybe boring isn’t the right connotation. Maybe ordinary. Or normal. Or... everyd—hey, that could be it!” Noah said, suddenly excited. “The sensuality of everyday things. Maybe it’s about finding... I don’t know, some new appreciation of things we’re so used to, we overlook them.”

  I nodded. “Hmm... maybe. But I think that’s a little too abstract for my Pops.”

  Noah pursed her lips. “That paper said “capture the sensually mundane” and you wanna tell me your father doesn’t deal in the abstract?”

  “Nah,” I answered, laughing. “What I mean is like... he used the word sensual. I don’t think he would’ve if he meant appreciation. I feel like he’s referring to beauty, sex, eroticism, etc. I feel like it’s deeper.”

  “Okay so, come on with it then,” she challenged. “Everyday sexy. The ordinary, presented as erotic. What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”

  “You.”

  Blushing, Noah shook her head. “Nick Davison, you do not have to flirt this hard, okay? I already like you.”

  “Is it flirting if it’s the truth though?” I asked. “Seriously, you get to be in that skin every damned day. When I think about that, it’s sexy. Maybe I should film you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious though, Noah. I think it could work.”

  She crossed her arms. “Okay, let’s pretend you’re serious – film me doing what?”

  “Being you. Doing every day, ordinary shit. Grocery shopping or something. Noah vacuums. Sensual, mundane.”

  For a moment, she didn’t say anything, but then she busted out laughing. “So, am I wearing lingerie while I’m doing this sensual vacuuming, or...?”

  “What? Nah,” I chuckled. “You’d be in whatever you usually vacuum in, a tee shirt and leggings, or shorts, I don’t know. And what the hell is sensual vacuuming?”