by Melissa Ford
“I don’t think so,” I say, and then internally kick myself for going first. “Not because I have anything to hide—because I don’t—but just . . . I don’t know . . . I mean, I think it’s good to keep some thoughts to yourself. Like white lies.”
“So you do think those jeans make my ass look fat,” Ethan admonishes me. “I’d drink it if Arianna made it for me.”
Gael takes a long sip of wine. “Absolutely not! I’m not Alice in Wonderland. I don’t consume liquids just because they say, ‘drink me.’” His Spanish accent makes his words sound playful. Sexy. I feel like the only person at the table with a guilty mind.
“So, mi hombre hermoso,” Gwen says, touching the side of his face, “where were you really on Tuesday night?”
I look at Ethan, too, waiting for an answer, but Gael slips and slides under her question like a skilled ballroom dancer, as if this is a tango with practiced steps.
ETHAN PAYS CASE, the babysitter, while I duck into Beckett’s room to check on him sleeping. He sleeps crunched into the top of his crib, his cheek resting on a damp binky. I slide him into the middle of his bed, taking care to smooth his baby-soft hair from his forehead. He doesn’t even stir.
I wander back into our living room and watch Ethan sorting our mail. “Is it just me, or do you also feel nervous around Gwen? Like she’s trying to catch us in a lie. It’s sort of like how I feel around police officers, even though I’m completely innocent. I see them and suddenly feel like my every move is being watched and I’m unknowingly committing a crime.”
“You have a guilty mind. Gwen doesn’t stress me out,” Ethan says, tearing up a credit card offer. “I’m mostly truthful.”
I latch on to the word mostly and follow him into the bedroom. “So when you say mostly, you mean that sometimes you do lie.”
“Everyone lies, Ari.” He slips his arms around my waist, pulling me toward him. In between kisses, he reminds me that I once told him I love the framed photo of spilled coffee that he gave me for the wall space over the sink that I’ve yet to hang up.
“I do love that,” I insist.
“Anyway, you’re the one who won’t drink the truth serum. What are you hiding from me? That your name isn’t Arianna Quinn? That you secretly work for the CIA?”
He flops down on the bed and watches me get undressed. I carefully fold my top and replace it in the drawer, and shed my skirt so I can hang it in the closet. I close the closet door neatly, smoothing out a space on the carpet with my big toe.
“Anyway, you realize that it was hypothetical. There is no actual truth serum,” Ethan informs me. “Now love potions on the other hand . . .”
“Did you go to the movies with Gael on Tuesday?”
Ethan looks me in the eye and shakes his head. He stares without blinking, the universal signal for I’m not telling you the truth but I want you to believe I’m telling you the truth because don’t I look truthful when I stare straight into your eyes?
“Please don’t make me ask the ‘right’ question to get the truthful answer,” I sigh.
“We didn’t go to the movies,” Ethan insists.
“So if I look in your wallet right now, I won’t find a ticket stub?”
“You shouldn’t, since we didn’t go to a movie.”
“Then where did you go?” I question, pulling on a silky tank top and shorts that I usually hate wearing because the bottom rides up my back, making me look as if I’m wearing blousy granny panties. But Ethan bought them for me, telling me that he thinks they’re sexy, so I throw them on. Though now this whole conversation makes me wonder if he really thinks they’re sexy or if he’s too polite to tell me that they look ridiculous.
Ethan shrugs. “It was a party at a bar thrown by Nikon. We grabbed a drink and checked out some lenses.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I ask him, sinking down onto the bed next to him. “I don’t understand why you’d make up a story about a work event?”
“I didn’t think you’d like me going. Scantily dressed models mixing with photography geeks?”
When he puts it that way, no, I don’t love the idea of some beautiful woman draped all over my boyfriend while he fondles camera lenses. But it’s not as if I’d tell him not to go. I’m more annoyed that he lied to shirk off helping with Beckett, and I tell him so.
“How am I supposed to know that you really needed help that night?” Ethan questions. “You usually seem to want to do everything on your own.”
“On my own?” I scoff, feeling my anger transferring from the lie to the fact that he didn’t help with Beckett to the idea that he’s putting it all on me, as if my anger is an hors d’oeuvre tray being passed around the room. “I asked you to pick up Beckett that night. You’re the one who lied to get out of helping.”
“You give off this impression that you’re an island. Independent Arianna. That you want to do things your way. If I thought you were really stuck, I would have stepped up to help. But I thought you were only throwing me a bone. Good boy, Ethan, you get to play with Beckett.”
I’m stunned, and perhaps Ethan can read that off my face because he starts rubbing my knee, as if he’s erasing his words out of my body. “Come on, Ari. You know you’re independent. That’s a good thing. It’s just that sometimes you push people away because you’re so hell-bent on proving that you can do things on your own. I didn’t know you really needed me that night. I wouldn’t have gone to the Nikon thing. I’m sorry that I lied about it. I didn’t want you to hear that it was in a bar and call me a slacker or something. That’s where these photo companies hold these types of events. I really just wanted to see their new lenses, but I was embarrassed about the event itself. I mean, the models were sort of annoying.”
Any other time, I would have laughed at the thought of models desperately trying to get Ethan’s attention while he’s holding them at bay in order to look at photo lenses. But I feel like he just told me I was something akin to an ice queen, standoffish and inflexible, demanding that I take care of everything myself.
“Ari,” Ethan says softly. He wraps his arms around me, and I squelch my instinct to stiffen my body, instead melting into him even though he’s the source of my hurt feelings. “I love that you are an island. That you’re fiercely independent. That you take care of yourself and everyone that you bring on your island with you. I’ve never minded that you’ve held me at times at arm’s length because that is part of who you are, and I love you: I love every part of who you are.”
“But I don’t hold you at arm’s length,” I insist. I’m secretly proud of everything I’ve done on my own from building my own life in New York despite coming from the suburbs of Minneapolis to having a child as a single parent by choice to now kicking off my design career. I’ve done it all on my own, without any help, and that’s an amazing feat, not something to feel apologetic about. But am I too proud? Too set in proving to the world that I can do everything without anyone else’s help, thank you very much?
I get the sense sometimes that Ethan is mentally part of a bygone era, and he’d like me to swoon like a damsel in distress so he can rush in and save me. That I keep him from some deeply ingrained desire to be the most helpful person in the room. Nothing would make him happier than to hear me admit how much I need him and can’t live without him.
Maybe we aren’t meant for one another: my fierce independence will always be at odds with his need to care for me. I instantly feel contrite; it wouldn’t hurt me to let him take care of a few small things. In exchange, he could always tell me the truth.
While I love his company, I want to be with Ethan—I choose to be with Ethan—but I don’t need to be with Ethan. That, to me, is more a statement of my love. So why does he see that fact as island-like, repelling him like the wrong end of a magnet? I insist again that I’m not holding him at arm’s length.
; Ethan pulls back and looks at me doubtfully, but he at least has the decency to lie to tell me that he believes me. I don’t need to give him a truth serum; his inner thoughts are written all over his face.
We finish getting ready for bed and slip under the covers, having what Ethan calls make up sex, even though my heart isn’t into it. My brain is filled with images of sexy models dragging their tongues up the side of lenses, and my boyfriend trying to get close to me while my arms keep inadvertently popping up to push him away. I don’t bother faking an orgasm; I think we’ve had enough lying for one night.
Chapter Six
THE NEXT MORNING, the space between us feels tender, like new skin, and Ethan and I move around each other as if we’re afraid to jostle it and reinjure our relationship. He pours coffee and asks me if I want a cup, and I take one not because I really want another cup of coffee, but because I’m too afraid to turn down any gesture from him right now. He then offers to take Beckett to the park to give me some quiet space to work, but they’re only gone for twenty minutes before they come back, loud and sweaty, filling the apartment with complaints about the heat outside while Ethan guzzles down water at the kitchen sink.
“Those are really good,” Ethan tells me, hanging over my shoulder. I can feel my neck muscles tensing from having someone lean over and look at my work before I’m ready for anyone to see it, but our fight from the night before slides into my mind and I will my shoulders downward. “That’s cool how you took the flame shape from the woman’s dress and subtly brought it into the man’s lapel.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, moving my pencils further into the middle of the table so Beckett can’t reach them. He screeches in protest but is soon distracted by a stray animal cracker he finds on the floor.
“That beadwork is insanely cool,” he mutters, picking up the loom where I’ve been threading tiny red beads onto a red fabric. “Maybe you could do a red tie and cummerbund.” He’s proud of himself for his suggestion, and I swallow down my retort that I’m dressing Emmy-nominated writers and not waiters.
“I’ll think about that. Thanks for the idea.”
Ethan goes into the living room and plops down on the floor, turning on the television to a baseball game. Beckett makes another grab at my pencils, and I look over at Ethan with exasperation. “Hey, sweetie, are you watching Becks?”
“Yeah, I’m on it. Come here, Becks.”
Beckett ignores him and continues to root around the table. I can feel the tension moving up my neck from my shoulders, like liquid being dragged up a straw. I want to point out that I have clearly asked for help, admitted that I can’t do the parenting and working thing on my own this weekend. And while he’s given me a whole twenty minutes of silence, I need a lot more than that if I’m going to turn in a second set of drawings to Francesca this week and do everything I need to do to prep for the spring line.
Almost as if he can sense my thoughts, Ethan drags himself away from the television and comes over to scoop up Beckett. “Come on, Becks. Yankees are playing the A’s.” Beckett willingly goes with Ethan, who takes a few of his toys out of the toy box in the corner of the room and spreads them around the television area so he can continue to watch the game while he plays with Beckett. I bend my head over the sketchpad, trying unsuccessfully to tune out the announcer’s voice.
“If it’s okay, I’m going to go out to work. It’s sort of hard to concentrate with the television,” I tell him.
He doesn’t look away from the screen, but he shrugs his shoulders and mutters, “sure” to indicate that he heard me. I pause for a moment, watching Beckett move toward the laptop cord, but Ethan’s hand shoots out and grabs Beckett’s leg playfully as he passes, distracting Beckett from his quest to pull down a computer on himself without even breaking his gaze at the batter on the television. The game breaks for a commercial, and Ethan looks at me while he makes a toy giraffe dance on Beckett’s head. “I’ve got this, Ari.”
“I know you do,” I insist. I slide my sketchpad and my travel sewing kit into a bag along with the loom. Before I leave, I cross the room to give my boys a kiss. I breathe in the scent of Beckett’s hair, the fine strands moving gently under my nose. And then I straddle Ethan’s lap, putting a hand on either cheek so I can draw him forward into a long kiss, the sort that makes him give off little moans of pleasure.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
“Hurry home. I mean . . . unless you want to . . .” He looks meaningfully toward our bedroom door.
“And what would we do with Beckett?” I ask him, amused.
“Early nap?” Ethan suggests.
“I’m not sure he’d be willing to cooperate. Anyway, I really do have to work.”
“It’s the weekend, Ari. Don’t Davis & Howe believe in a day of rest?”
I can tell by the way he wiggles underneath me that rest is the last thing on his mind. I take a deep breath and will myself to be patient. “Ethan, I have too much on my plate at work.”
“Maybe you need to cut back.”
“I can’t,” I say stubbornly. Not unless you’re going to get a different job, I want to add.
Ethan shrugs as if he doesn’t believe me, and we’re saved from delving deeper into the conversation by the baseball game resuming on the television. I stand up, picking up my bag. “I’ll be home by two o’clock, and then we can all go do something together.”
I duck out of the apartment, closing the door gently behind me, and then take the steps at a quick clip as if I’m Cinderella trying to squeak under her midnight curfew. I have three hours in which to finish my drawings, finish beading my sample, and get everything together for Francesca to review on Monday. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a little bit of time left over to get started on the fringe samples Nigel Howe wants by Monday afternoon.
I toss my bag higher on my shoulder, looking upward at my building even though all of our windows are on the other side. I sheltered Ethan from Fashion Week last February because the relationship was still so new, and I had a lot of excuses with Beckett being so young. Maybe that was a bad idea since he truly has no clue how much worse it’s going to get in a few weeks. He acts as if I’m a workaholic, but this is my job, and either I put in the hours or there is another person who is more than willing to attach seed beads and knot fringe. Plus, this is about building my career as much as it is about paying the rent. Five years from now, when I have my own line and we can really afford Manhattan on one full salary, we’ll be happy that I put in these extra hours of work.
I walk a few block away, intending to duck into the Starbucks by the loft, but at the last minute, I wrench open the door to Volt. It’s busy but there are still a few tables open, mostly by the front door where the hot air blows on you every time someone goes in or out of the shop. I am setting down my things when I see Noah Reiser, sitting at a table surrounded by stacks of paper.
He’s bent over the pages, marking them up with a blue pen, so he doesn’t notice me slip into line or purchase my drink. I debate whether to ignore him completely, but as I’m walking back to my seat, I swing by his table and tap on one of the pages, startling him. “Fancy meeting you here,” I tell him. “Being a . . . what did you call it again? Those people who sit in a coffeehouse all day?”
“A seigneur-terraces!” Noah seems delighted that I remember the definition if not the word. He stretches backward, almost touching the man sitting behind him, and then takes a sip of coffee. “Meeting a friend?”
I motion toward my bag lying forlorn atop the table. “Hot date with my sketchpad so I can design your suit in time. It’s all your fault I’m working on a weekend.”
“You love it,” Noah comments. “Come on; good coffee, air-conditioning, sketchpad, burst of creativity.”
“Maybe a little bit,” I admit. “The burst of creativity moments. Not so much the staring at a blank sheet of paper and wo
ndering how I’m going to dress the award-nominated head writer of a hit television show.”
“I heard that guy is devastatingly handsome,” Noah jokes. “Can I see what you have so far?”
I shake my head. “Not ready yet. You know how showing someone too soon can screw up your whole process?”
“Say no more. I completely get it.” He taps the papers in front of him with the end of the pen. “I’m working, too. Making notes on these scripts for Monday. I end up here most Saturdays. If I don’t, my week is hellish.”
“Most Saturdays. Doesn’t leave you much of a personal life.”
“What can I say? The Nightly is my girlfriend? I would ask if Davis & Howe is your boyfriend, but you don’t look like the type that’s into threesomes.”
“And, you know, there’s also that actual boyfriend back at home with my kid.”
“Nice guy,” Noah comments.
“He is. Even when he’s also insinuating that I’m a workaholic and making me feel guilty for doing . . . work.”
“Ah, that was a problem with Ellie, too,” Noah says. “She didn’t enjoy my BlackBerry going off while we were out. Or all the Post-it notes I had littered around the apartment with sketch ideas. She was pissed off that I never brought her with me to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She felt like she got all the bad parts about dating someone married to their job and none of the cool side benefits.”
“I’d be pissed, too, if I didn’t get to tag along to the White House.”
“The Correspondents’ Dinner. It was in a hotel. And we couldn’t bring a guest. The point is that Ellie didn’t really get that I wasn’t being a workaholic. I was just being head writer for the Nightly. Those hours come with the job.”
