The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  I scrolled through the list of titles, squealing at regular intervals. Many of the games had become available online as browser emulations—but that wasn’t the same, was it?

  “I brought the machines with me all the way from the West Coast,” said Bennett. “Promise me you won’t tell my dad.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” I promised, still scrolling down that magnificent list. “And I’ll sleep with you for playing time.”

  “Of course you will.”

  I played Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Bank Panic—the owner of “that dungeon” had a fondness for older games. I was about to start Galaga when Bennett hooked a finger in the waistband of my pajama bottoms. “Okay, Sam. Time to put out.”

  I caressed the screen of my new best friend before I squeezed Bennett’s behind. “All right, you ugly Orc. Take me to your nasty cave and have your way with me.”

  We did tremendous justice to interspecies captive sex.

  As I was on the verge of falling asleep, Bennett said, “I could be wrong, since I’m barely a hundred pages in, but maybe the reason Zelda loves the story is that in the end, no matter his own fate, Frodo left everything better than he found it.”

  I opened my eyes, but in the dark all I heard was his soft, even breathing.

  THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, BENNETT and I spent as much time together as our schedules allowed. We played Cards Against Humanity and laughed ourselves stupid. We gave his arcade machines another workout. One evening, when I had to stay late at the office, he came and read The Fellowship of the Ring in a corner. We even met the Material Girls for drinks again, during which Daff and Lara admitted shamefacedly that they’d been to the MoMA exhibit. Carolyn alone abstained from the museum, but not from the online coverage—so Bennett made them all compliment his ass while I choked laughing.

  The notable cloud in our silver lining was the lunch with Zelda and his parents. Mr. Somerset didn’t recoil at the sight of him, but the meeting turned out to be as sterile as I’d warned Bennett it might be.

  “I thought your dad couldn’t possibly fail to see the exhibit as both ordinary and beautiful,” I said later that day, in his apartment.

  We’d been silent for some time, me wondering, with a heavy heart, whether it was possible to recover from this misstep.

  “So you think of the exhibit as both ordinary and beautiful?” he asked softly.

  Of course I did, but the thought of admitting it outright discomfited me. “Well,” I answered, drawing out that syllable, “actually, I always think of the hens. You were cuddling a pair of them in one of the pictures.”

  “Oh, Lulu and Betty?” At my widened eyes, he grinned. “Did you think our egg hens didn’t have names?”

  His experience with poultry fascinated me. I had lots of questions, from what the chickens ate to how many eggs they produced to what was done with the chicken poop.

  “That went right into the compost.”

  “Okay, that does it. Come the apocalypse, I’m sticking with you.”

  A lighthearted conversation followed on how we could bunkerize his house in Cos Cob. By the time that wound down, I was almost entirely out of my gloom concerning his chances with his father.

  But Bennett fell quiet again. And didn’t say anything else until I’d closed my laptop for good. And then it was only, “Come,” as he led me upstairs to bed.

  THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, BENNETT TEXTED, Are you free tonight? I’d like to see you.

  The text reached me at a symposium downtown. I studied the words: They seemed much more formal than was usual for him, almost as if he were arranging a business meeting, rather than a sleepover with his girlfriend.

  But that didn’t stop me from saying yes. In fact, I was so enthused about seeing him again that on my way back I hopped off at Canal Street and raided Chinatown for takeout.

  Bennett had just come out of the shower when I showed up with the loot. “Hmm, what a dilemma,” he said, taking the heavy bag from me. “I want to swoop down on both you and the food.”

  “Let’s look at this scientifically: Takeout will be cold after sex, but I’ll still be hot after takeout.”

  He smiled a little and kissed me on my lips. “Food first then, so I can have everything hot.”

  I rested my hand against his jaw for a moment. He smelled great, his stubble felt marvelous on my palm, and, of course, I still found his eyes, the green of high summer, utterly mesmerizing. My hand slid down to his shoulder—the khaki Henley he wore was made of a soft waffle-weave cotton—and then back to his nape, to play with his still slightly damp hair.

  He stared at my parted lips, and then back into my eyes. You have such hungry eyes, he’d told me once. Did I look hungry again? Ravenous? Insatiable?

  The only remedy to feeling like that was to make him fall victim to the same frenzy of lust, the same avalanche of need.

  But before I could slide my hand down his back and lift up his shirt, he moved away from me and walked toward the dining room.

  “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s eat.”

  The food was beyond delicious, but I felt off balance. It wasn’t helped by the general silence at the table, our conversation consisting only of variations of, “Try this,” and, “This is even better.”

  Between sips of a clear peppery broth, I observed Bennett surreptitiously. He seemed to be eating with a singular concentration. Did he have something on his mind? I was becoming increasingly convinced that he did. And that he was tense—and had been since I walked in.

  I’d barely eyed the soup container before he picked it up. “You want some more?”

  “Yeah, thanks. Half a bowl, please.”

  I loved it when he did little things like that for me. And he was always doing such little things. He was always—

  The thought struck me: Was it possible he was going to propose? His formal-ish invitation, his decision to forgo sex, his nerves—everything pointed to a significant decision he had come to, a decision concerning us.

  He hadn’t wanted an engagement earlier, because the timing would be suspect. But now we’d weathered the storm together. Not to mention, something needed to be done to kick-start his stalled reconciliation with his father. Knowing Bennett, he wasn’t going to tell Mr. Somerset outright that he wanted to return to the family. An engagement would be just the thing to get everyone excited and move the process forward.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” said Bennett.

  My heart lurched. “Yes?”

  “Larry de Villiers got your e-mail address from me a while ago. Did he ever contact you?”

  I hadn’t felt so deflated since he canceled our previous “engagement.” Reaching out, I scooped some stir-fried lotus root into my bowl. “He did. He sent me an e-mail.”

  “Mind if I ask what he said?”

  “He…he thanked me for talking with him that day at Mrs. Asquith’s.”

  “Did you say anything in return?”

  I hesitated. “No.”

  With his chopsticks, Bennett picked up a single peanut from a kung pao dish. “Why not?”

  Why did I have the sensation that the ground might be shifting? “No particular reason.”

  “Did you talk to Zelda about him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ask her whether she’d consider getting back with him?”

  I ate a piece of lotus root, even though my appetite was gone. “She said she didn’t know.”

  “Has he made any overtures?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  Bennett had opened a bottle of Riesling for dinner. He refilled my glass. “Is he holding back because you told him to?”

  “I don’t know,” I said instinctively. Then, forcing myself to be more forthcoming: “Maybe.”

  He refilled his own glass. “And you’re okay with that?”

  My conscience might protest once in a while, but since I hadn’t done anything about it, it could only mean I was fine with things continuing as t
hey were. But to admit that straight-up was beyond me.

  My silence reverberated in every corner of the apartment.

  Bennett gave a quarter turn to the base of his wine stem. His expression, as he studied the pale green-gold liquid in the glass, was severe, perhaps the most severe I’d ever seen of him. Yet it was also…unhappy.

  I wanted to reach out to him, but I sat exactly where I was, frozen, my chopsticks still gripped in my fingers.

  His gaze returned to me. “I’ve never asked you, have I, why you were wandering the back lanes of Cos Cob in the rain, looking like a character out of Les Misérables?”

  I quaked inside. “Why are you interested all of a sudden?”

  “I’ve always wanted to know,” he said calmly, quietly. “You know that.”

  Despite the softness of his tone, there was an implacability to his words. “Come on,” I said, feeling like a caught fish wriggling on the hook, “you got laid. Aren’t you supposed to be happy with that?”

  “No.”

  I laid aside my chopsticks at last. “Why are you asking me so many questions?”

  Why won’t you let me dodge them, as you’ve always done before?

  “Because you have never told me anything about yourself. Ever.”

  “You already Googled me up and down before I even knew your last name. What else is there to know?”

  He only looked at me. I swallowed, completely rattled. “Look, you’re a man who holds his cards close. You have a fake girlfriend, for God’s sake. And you can’t even tell your parents you want to be their son again. I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. You’re saying that I, the pot, am asking you, the kettle, why you are such a profoundly sooty shade.”

  I made no reply: That was exactly what I’d been going for.

  “It’s a valid point,” he said. “You’ve made other excellent points before on my choices. And I’ve been thinking about what you said. Today I called my dad and asked him to meet me for a drink Saturday, just the two of us. We already agreed on the time and the place.”

  This took me aback. “What are you going to say to him?”

  “What I should have said long ago.”

  I was shaken anew. “Why now? Why out of the blue?”

  “Is it out of the blue? Maybe it looks that way from the outside, but I’ve been weighing it for a while. You were right about our reconciliation going nowhere. To go on doing the same thing and hope for different results—that’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. I mean, it’s good that you’re moving forward with your dad. It’s…really good.”

  “I hope so.”

  He glanced outside. The weather had been demented lately, swinging from single digits to the forties and back again in forty-eight hours, accompanied by every kind of precipitation imaginable. Now it poured, wind-whipped raindrops pelting the floor-to-ceiling windows like pebbles, the sheets of water cascading down the huge glass panes distorting the buildings across the street into blobs of light and shadow.

  Bennett looked back at me—I realized I’d been holding my breath. “When I bowed to the conclusion that continuing along the same path with my dad would be fruitless,” he said, “I saw that the same could be said of the two of us.”

  I stared at him.

  He gave his wineglass another quarter turn. “Don’t tell me you have no idea. By now somebody must have said something to you about the ring.”

  “You insisted that it wasn’t an engagement ring.”

  “I didn’t ask you to marry me. All the same, it was an unambiguous gesture.”

  My fingers dug into the seat of my chair. “Tell me, then. What exactly did it signify?”

  I couldn’t quite believe it, that we were—or he was—going to blow the beautiful, perfect lid off our beautiful, almost perfect relationship.

  He was silent for nearly a minute. I was once again reminded of the night we met, his hesitation in the rain.

  “Do you remember what I said about the first time I saw you?” he spoke at last.

  No more hesitation on his part—and I couldn’t hold his gaze. “Central Park. June. My friend’s wedding,” I answered, looking at the remnants of our dinner. The remnants of my hopes for a wonderful evening.

  A wonderful life.

  “You forgot the crucial part,” he said.

  “What crucial part?”

  “That I fell in love with you at first sight.”

  I trembled, even though I did my best to hold still. “I never believed that. It was too outlandish.”

  “I fell in love with Moira at first sight,” he said softly. “I was watching soccer on TV, a match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, when I heard a car pull up. I opened the window for a better look. Moira was just coming out of the car, her hair in a ponytail, a bottle of wine in her hand. She saw me, smiled, and said to her boyfriend, ‘Mira, el muchacho americano.’ And I knew that instant my life would never be the same.

  “After we broke up, I went around and met as many women as I could. I wanted to fall in love again—it seemed that being into someone else would be the best way to forget Moira. Never happened. After a while I realized it was a blessing. Given how our breakup had torn me apart, why would I ever want to fall in love again?

  “By the time I moved back east, I was pretty confident that Moira had been a fluke. Which made things easy: I just needed to find a nice woman who’d get me back into my parents’ circle and settle down with her.

  “I met Julianne my third week in the city. Her mother has served on several boards with my dad. She herself is pretty, outgoing, and personable. Her company does PR for the hospital, she liked me, and she was absolutely perfect for what I had in mind—not as a fake girlfriend, by the way, but a real one.”

  Julianne must be the friend Damaris Vandermeer kept bringing up. Theirs was exactly the right demographic for Bennett: sociable, well-connected young women who would have loved taking on the challenge of reintegrating him into his family. I drained half my wine, not surprised that he had set his sights on a real relationship, only that I hadn’t realized it sooner.

  “My plans were all under way when I saw you on that bridge, looking down into the water,” he continued, his gaze no longer on me but on the storm that surrounded us. “I remember stopping dead in my tracks, staring at you, and not understanding why—it had been so long since I felt anything of the sort. You had a bouquet of pink peonies in your hand, and you were plucking out the petals and letting them fall. It was the prettiest scene imaginable, your dress almost the same color as the water under the bridge, the petals floating on your reflection—and I was unbelievably pissed off.

  “I had plans. Who were you and what the hell was I supposed to do with you? And I hated how it felt to look at you, as if I were standing on my own heart, crushing it with my weight—that kind of romantic shit was fine for a sixteen-year-old, but I was too old, too busy, and too ulterior-motived for it. So I walked away.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help my dismayed exclamation. “You left it to chance whether we’d ever meet again?”

  “All weddings in the park need permits—I could find out whose wedding you were attending and track you down that way, if I had to. But you know what I came across on my way out of the park?”

  “What?”

  “A charcoal drawing of your ‘princess’ picture, for sale by a street artist. Three days later I saw you in Cos Cob for the first time, walking Biscuit on a Saturday morning.”

  He studied me, a scowl on his face, as if seeing me again for the very first time. “I tried to proceed with my original plan, but it was hopeless. Julianne thought I was a gentleman for holding off on physical contact, when in fact I wanted nothing to do with her. Beginning of August she went on vacation with her family. I had some time to consider what to do—and guess who called out of the blue, in a panic about a dog.

  “At this point I was feeling under siege, but no dog should have to suffer for my prob
lems. So I did what you asked. That Friday, when you texted me and told me you were going back to Cos Cob, I fully intended to stay in Manhattan—away from you. Next thing I knew, I was on the train.

  “Still, when I got into my car outside Cos Cob station and started driving, I didn’t have any plans besides knocking on your door in the morning and introducing myself. But there you were, trudging along the side of the road, all drenched and miserable-looking.

  “To this day I wonder how things would have turned out if I’d kept driving and left you to your own devices.”

  I was on my feet. The idea that he could have passed me by, that we would have never met…

  “It was always a moot point,” he said quietly. “There was no way I wouldn’t have stopped to make sure you were okay.”

  Slowly I sank back into my chair. “And then you realized that I was also a pretty good candidate, since I was the one your parents had picked for you in the first place.”

  He laughed briefly, and without mirth. “No. The moment I saw you wandering around in the dark, in the rain, I knew you had to be completely fucked-up.”

  My lips moved but I couldn’t form a single syllable. Certainly not to defend myself. “Completely fucked-up” was an apt description—except I’d never heard it from anyone but myself. And even I had never said these words out loud.

  “But you were also…delightful. When you said, ‘Grandma was lying through her teeth. You’re just average,’ I knew I was in far worse trouble than I’d ever imagined.”

  He almost smiled. My heart pounded with a searing happiness.

  “I parted ways with Julianne. But I couldn’t decide what to do about you. For a few weeks I Googled you every day. And then I talked to Mrs. Asquith and she said that I should contact Zelda. So I got in touch.

  “All the while I still hesitated—still hoped that I’d wake up and forget about you. Then we ran into each other outside the Met. Do you know how many times you said no to me that day? I lost count. Every time you did, I told myself not to walk away, but run. Instead I kept doubling down. When you refused to be my girlfriend I said how about a fake relationship. When you wouldn’t take that I offered money. When even money couldn’t move you I…” He took a deep breath. “I think it’s fair to say that I begged you to come to the wedding reception with me. I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but that night was the first time I understood what batshit insane felt like.”