You’re Always Here

Thirty-five minutes and twenty-nine seconds. He walks in when the clock ticks thirty, and her heart skitters with instinctive, awful familiarity. It is the little things like these that she is never aware of on a conscious level, and is thus never able to suppress, that irritate her most about him.

She observes him, silently; his dark hair is mussed from work and tumbles delicately over his brow, and he shrugs off his suit jacket and hooks it onto the door in one smooth motion. His tie stays on. He strides to his side of the table without greeting her or at all acknowledging her presence, and though she considers reciprocating this treatment, her resolve cracks as soon as he pulls out a chair and takes his seat—there is something about the habituation of this routine, and his comfort as he carries it out, that makes his presence feel suddenly large and unignorable—and so, with an air of defeat, she asks into his day. He nods, once. Then—

“Were you waiting long?”

It’s a polite inquiry made purely out of obligation, and she knows this, and knows, too, that he knows this, because dinner has been at six-thirty precisely for the last seven years. Still, she shakes her head to appease his guilt.

Two dates into their relationship, Theodore insisted upon cooking for her, and though her mother warned her sharply against venturing alone into the apartment of a near-stranger, she felt remarkably comfortable around him—too comfortable to call him a stranger, and more comfortable than she could ever recall feeling around a man—and so she had ignored these warnings and shown up in his posh apartment lobby with her hands wrung behind her back.

The menu, he told her later, had technically consisted of crusted lamb chops basted in herb-garlic butter and topped with a balsamic reduction (he didn’t yet know she was vegetarian, or if he did, he had forgotten), bright lemon-and-sage roasted potatoes, and still-warm polenta, though none of these things were recognizable on the plate he presented her with that night—his smile lopsided and embarrassed as he explained it was a family recipe, one he wouldn’t even have attempted except he wanted to impress her (he’d given up on the polenta completely, and arranged on the plate were a charred cut of lamb and a few chunks of potato so overcooked they collapsed, watery, at the silver’s mildest press. It was the night she learned of his tendency to take things to the extreme—not from ego, of course; his ambition was just too great for his body, which wasn’t his fault—and to grow discouraged when the natural outcome was failure.

It’s so endearing, she later gushed to a friend at the time. He’s an awful cook, but he tried so hard just to impress me. Don’t you think? (this last part added when there was initially no reply). Her friend gave a very belated and slightly uncertain nod.

Now that she considers it, she has not spoken to that friend in several months.

She generally tries to keep up a veneer of frailty and patience, for she has come to understand that this is his preferred version of her. Being a version and not a facade, it is not entirely constructed; it just does not come as naturally or as frequently as he would like to believe. Tonight, she reheated the food thrice in hopes of getting it just right—imagined him walking through the door right as she pulled the tray from the oven (stuck heating itself for an hour now), steam rising where the parchment had curled in on itself, turning to him with a smile of chagrined relief and saying how thank goodness he was late, now dinner would be hot when he sat down to eat, and wasn’t it funny how well the two of them synced? or some nonsense akin to that.

“How is it?” She asks him now, fork in hand but plate yet untouched.

His tone is noncommittal. “It’s good.”

“You can be honest,” she urges.

He presses his fork into the potato, which collapses delicately under its tines. Then, after a moment’s pause— “did you forget to warm it up?”

She does not speak to him for the rest of the dinner.

She was only twenty-eight when they met, though she could not shake the hard, inextricable feeling that time was slipping through her fingers—her own mother, after all, had her at twenty-eight and enjoyed very little life thereafter. And though she did not herself have children, she figured that to preserve some semblance of justice in the world, something must even out between the child-having and the childless to set them on mutually unhappy footing. And indeed, though her career was taking off and she’d just been promoted to PD Scientist, she was exhausted, and everyone around her seemed on a different track.

It was a year into their relationship, immediately following their biggest fight to date, that Theodore appeared at her front door. She knew he had failed to make partner, even before she saw him, just from the wavering, diminutive sound of his knock; but still she gazed at his downcast, despair-trodden face for an entire minute through a slit-eyed gap in the blinds before turning the knob and peering into the rain.

He looked ashamed to be standing there, and she would have been angry at him for having the nerve to show his face so soon after their argument except that he looked so wonderfully delicate just then, like he really, truly needed her—he was damp and a little bit pathetic, and looking at him, her jealousy dissolved (would his pretty coworker still like him when he looked this way? She thought not) and she ushered him in and onto the couch.

“What is it? What can I do?”

His eyes rose softly to hers, hazel specks flaring a bright almost-green when they caught the dim overhead light.

“Nothing, nothing… I don’t need you to do anything. Just be as you are, please.”

So she cooked for him, though she had spent all day testing and developing recipes, and did not particularly want to do it. Theo’s mother reportedly had this pan-fried meatball recipe which he brought up, longingly, anytime she cooked anything resembling meat, and as she stood before the stove and fought to keep her eyes open, he lay sprawled on her living room couch with his tie thrown over the backrest. She served the meatballs on a bed of lettuce with halved and salted cherry tomatoes and cucumbers sliced so thin they were translucent.

Theodore told her later that it was on this day, after eating that meal, that he first knew he needed to marry her.

On the second day, it rains torrentially, and he is an hour and ten minutes late. She has spent this wasted time sitting near the window, cheap bubbly in hand, and hearing the rain’s thunderous assault on their rooftop. He is damp and disgruntled when he arrives home, and when she hands him the towel she has prepared, he accepts it soundlessly and pats dry the back of his neck. Then, ignoring his dripping hair, he shakes off his crisp dress shoes and slides them forward so they sit half on the foyer and half on the rug. Rainwater trickles down the heel and seeps into the carpet, staining its burgundy a deeper red. Her eyes fix on the damp spot of carpet, but she holds her tongue.

“When did you know?”

She had quit her job several months ago after a lengthy mutual discussion, and now, for lack of anything more interesting to do, she spent much of her time sitting beside various friends and stirring various shrimp cocktails with decorative sticks. She’d laid out his outfit for this wedding invitation dinner so that he could not use lack of clothing as an excuse—it was irritating how he never seemed willing to entertain events like these, though she herself attended every work dinner, however trivial or banal—but, perhaps sensing that she’d find a way around his latest series of excuses, he opted instead to stay at work until she texted him, defeated, that she was leaving for the dinner, and that she would bring him home any leftovers.

She did not understand her friend’s question, at first, but when she gathered enough to understand that it was about love, she tried to answer with some vague platitude on time and soulmateism. What sort of inquiry was this, anyway? She was herself engaged, so couldn’t she answer it on her own?

But the friend only laughed, nudging her shoulder, and insisted that she reveal more.

So she lied. She didn’t know why she did it. She invented a story about sitting beside him in some abstract park, and watching the flowers bloom, and chancing a look at his face, and just knowing that she would be with him forever. Truthfully, she no longer remembered the exact situation that had brought it on, nor exactly how she’d felt at the time, and she knew that it would be impossible to conjure up feelings that had once existed, but which she no longer recalled—she’d give herself away trying to fumble together the details. It was better to contrive a different reality altogether and immerse herself in it so well that she nearly believed it was true.

Afterwards, she excused herself to the bathroom and tried to reapply the lipstick that had blotted off her mouth and rimmed the edge of her cocktail glass, but her fingers shook so badly that its shock of crimson missed her lip and instead blurred the space between her cheek and her chin. Theodore came to the next event, though, and on being asked the same question, he recounted the real story in picturesque detail. When he was finished, her friend gave her a strange look, but said nothing, and they never brought it up again.

“You’re quiet tonight.”

Tonight is somewhere between one and two hours, but closer to two.

When he sits down to dinner, he graces her with the sort of nod one might direct towards a familiar but vaguely uninteresting business acquaintance before unfurling his napkin with a flick of the wrist so it settles in his lap. She has cooked his favorite meatballs, but he spends several minutes poking about his plate and forking bites of salad into his mouth between glances at his phone. Recalling what he’d said about the potato, she’d waited until his car pulled in to reheat the meat, and she knew it was perfect—cooled just enough not to burn the roof of the mouth.

“I’m just tired.”

She watches as he works around the meat with an astounding deliberation. Two hours. She has not yet asked him where he was tonight.

“Not hungry?” She gestures to the meat. He shrugs, forkful of lettuce halfway to his mouth, and she cannot suppress a scoff. “Of course you’re not.”

He stops, sets his fork beside his plate, and fixes his gaze directly upon her for the first time that evening, his brow furrowed in righteous confusion.

“What are you trying to say?”

She bristles. “Only that you never like the food I cook (”that’s not true” he starts flatly, but she raises her voice to speak over him) “which is fine, you’re not obligated to like it, but you may as well tell me that much, if you really feel that way.”

A disbelieving scoff falls from his lips. “Yes, because you handle criticism so well.”

“Excuse me? If anyone can’t handle criticism—” She cuts herself off and watches him icily, her tone measured. “It’s just my cooking won’t improve on its own, and I no longer have anyone else around to give me advice.”

“Why does it matter whether you get advice or not? You love cooking.”

“Sure, I like cooking for you, but you spend every dinner pushing my food around on your plate, so excuse me for wishing you’d be a little bit more responsive!”

He exhales a sigh, an irritated pink creeping up his neck and ears, and tugs lightly at his tie, which still sits around his neck; usually he unwinds it the second he is gone from work, sometimes while sitting in the car at a particularly long light, and she wonders what it says about them that he keeps it on through dinner nowadays. If she leaned across the table and buried her nose in his neck, it would not smell of another woman’s perfume; this, he thinks, is his saving grace. But she feels that it is worse. If he had abandoned her for another woman, she would have understood it on some level, especially if she was more beautiful or interesting than herself; but she knows that there is nobody else. He cares so little that he requires no alternative.

“I never know what to say to you,” he huffs, pressing his index finger to the high bridge of his nose and dropping his gaze to the table, as if looking at her is an inconvenience he cannot bear. “Nothing is ever good enough. Do you want to go back to work? Is that it? I can hire someone to help around the house.”

“Yes,” she says stiffly, “because employers famously love when there are seven-year gaps in one’s resume.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. I can get you in somewhere at the company.” His gaze turns faraway and vague. “Secretary, maybe? That’s easy enough. Criminal justice is fully-staffed, but I could make something up for you. It wouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Theodore.”

The word is breathtakingly sharp and spoken harshly through her teeth, shedding their air of any pretense and propelling his gaze from the table in a milisecond. He is looking at her, finally, bemusement clear on his face.

“Tell me where you’ve been.”

She knows it is a demand that needs no clarification, and so when he falters in answering, she takes it as her cue to continue.

“You don’t care to text me, and you don’t explain.” Her voice has lost its edge now, and she fears he will hear how it warbles on the fringes, but she pushes through still. “Why? Why can’t you do that little for me?”

He gazes at her a moment, and it is as if he is seeing her for the first time, where previously their eyes had met only through stained distortions of glass.

“It’s just,” he says, blinking once, in a voice that is slow but still somehow cautionless, as if he knows that what he is about to say will pain her, but cannot stop himself from barreling forward anyway. He lowers his head, suddenly unable to meet her eyes, and she thinks that she has not seen such shame adorning his lovely features since that night he stood at her door in the rain and told her what she already knew.

“You’re always here.”

—

The next night’s dinner is a fresh pasta salad, dressed in too much mayo and bursting with crisp vegetables that overflow the round brim of their ceramic bowl. It needs no reheating. She eats her portion alone before the fire.