Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [18]
On the weekends, Maggie worked from home, trying to finish her novel, and occasionally writing other people’s online dating profiles for extra money. She had written one for a friend as a favor a year earlier, and then that friend’s sister had asked her to do one, and then a co-worker of hers.
“You could actually make some mad cash on this,” Gabe had said to her once, and she had told him to stop being crazy.
But she kept getting offers, and had even been asked by a friend at New York magazine to write a step-by-step guide to the perfect profile. (She had declined, as few things seemed more mortifying than being known as an authority on online dating.)
Maggie had briefly joined Match.com before meeting Gabe. She went on four or five dates, but every one of them felt artificial, as if she and the guy were two characters going out to dinner in a play. Maggie could never remember their real names and thought of them exclusively by their screen names—they were always WarmLover10 or BookNerdSeeksSame, instead of Alex or Dave. And she quickly tired of translating their profiles: A guy who said he was six foot two was most likely five foot eight. If a guy actually claimed to be five-eight, it meant he was four and a half feet tall.
Now the door to the apartment opened and shut with a slam: the unmistakable sound of Cunningham arriving home. She cringed, wishing she had gone into the bedroom so she wouldn’t have to talk to him.
Maggie heard Gabe turning off the water in the shower. She was grateful at least that she wouldn’t have to be alone with Cunningham for long.
“Hey there,” he said. “What’s happening, lady?”
“Just hanging out,” she said.
“I thought you guys left for Maine already,” he said.
“Nope. Tomorrow.”
“Cool cool. So, what’s the word?”
“Not much,” she said, always unsure of how to answer that particular question. “How’s Shauna?” Her reliable fallback.
“She’s okay,” he said. “She took a new nursing job in Westport.”
“But I thought she was moving here soon. She’s going to commute to Westport from New York?”
He shook his head. “No ma’am, and thank God for that. I’m not ready to give up our bachelor pad yet.”
She started to say more, but Gabe appeared then, wrapped in a towel from the waist down.
“What up, my man!” he said, giving Cunningham a high five.
“Honey, Ben says Shauna got a new job in Connecticut,” she said, feeling her words heavy with implication.
“Yeah? Good for her.”
She tried again. “Shauna’s not moving to New York then.”
Gabe walked into the bedroom, and she followed behind. She closed the door. Her chest tightening, she said, “Gabe, please tell me that you’ve already told him I’m moving in.”
“Keep your voice down,” he whispered.
“You haven’t told him yet,” she said, weighing in her head whether this was simply bad or worse than that.
“I wanted to wait until after Maine to talk to you about this whole living together idea,” he said. “Do you really think we’re ready?”
She sat down on the bed. Heartburn rumbled up into her throat.
She pulled a couple of Tums from her purse on the floor and chewed them slowly. She wanted to tell him she was pregnant, then and there, but she knew she could say it only once and the moment needed to be perfect. Instead she said, “You asked me to move in.”
“Whoa,” he said. “All I said was I had been thinking about it, and then you ran with the idea.”
She breathed in deeply. “Please tell me this isn’t happening,” she said.
“Babe, chill out. You haven’t given your landlord notice yet, right?”
“Right. But Jesus, Gabe, I was just about to.”
She wished that she already had.
“But you didn’t! So we live apart one more year. What’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that I’ve already told everyone I know—every person