a kid.” I shook my head. “Do you even care that the video makes people happy?”
“I’m not here to make people happy.”
“Well, what if your ex-wife is expanding her business because of being on these programs? Would that make you even a little happy? What if she wanted to make people happy?”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to show you something.” My breath was still short. I hadn’t shown anyone, or even talked to anyone, about what I’d been up to this past week—staying up past midnight and getting up at five to work again.
I gestured at him to follow me. He stood. I walked him into the office.
Where Sebastian’s desk used to be, a long folding table now resided. On the closest end was my sewing machine in front of a chair. In the middle was an empty space where I stood when I flipped through magazines, searching for inspiration, but rarely having to do so for very long.
I walked toward the far end of the folding table, Sebastian following me. There lay piles (organized by color) of plain, inexpensive dog collars and leashes, along with rolls of ribbon and small plastic boxes of embellishments.
I explained to Sebastian how people had been contacting me since the day of the video. “At first,” I told him, “they wanted to order the Superdog collar or leash, sometimes both. It took me hardly any time to make them. Then things started expanding.”
“Expanding how?” Sebastian stood with his hands behind his back, bent over my materials as if he were in a museum studying a display case.
I held up a few sheets of paper with print on them. “These are all the orders I have to fill in the next week.”
Sebastian scanned the first page, then the next. “There are at least forty.”
“I know. And I bet when I check my email, I’ll have another five or ten.”
He looked at me over the sheet. “Do you have a website?”
“Not for this. I have that static one for my styling business. People have been tracking me down through that. Like I said, first, they wanted the Superdog stuff. Now they’re putting in their own ideas. It’s like I take their idea, track down the materials and make it.”
“Wow,” Sebastian said. “That’s amazing.”
“Thanks. It’s not technically that hard. The tough part is keeping track of everything and responding to everyone and then getting it shipped. But it’s fun and creative, and now I’m starting to get all these ideas about designs for other dogwear and accessories.”
“Dogwear?”
“I’m coining a new term. And no, I don’t want your opinion on it.”
He smiled, but barely. “Can I sit down?”
I waved my arm at the room and slightly shrugged like, I can’t stop you.
Sebastian took the order sheet and sat on a light blue chair that had been his grandmother’s. He’d never liked it, so I got to keep it. He didn’t look at the order form, though. At first, his eyes roamed the office, maybe taking note of the loss of him in that room. The rest of his family’s handed-down furniture was in his new apartment in Roscoe Village. Whenever I visited him there, I felt a little jealous, because the neighborhood was charming. There were wine shops and restaurants and boutiques of all kinds, and people strolled happily with their kids or their partners.
As Sebastian kept assessing the office, I wondered if he was noticing the things I’d added—like a painting of a ballerina I bought in New York when I was twenty-four and which Sebastian had found too feminine. It now hung in the spot that had once held Sebastian’s framed map of Colonial America.
Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder, and a summer storm started pounding the windows, the room darkening. But strangely, neither of us moved. Sebastian’s eyes kept sweeping the room, quickly taking stock the way he always did, taking mental notes. His eyes stopped when they reached mine, and again neither of us moved. An energy seemed to hold us there, one that felt both powerful and calm, no anger bubbling around the edges.
We were, I felt in that instant, observing a marriage that once was.
He uncrossed his leg and nodded at his lap.
A mix of surprise and longing arose within me. That nod was what Sebastian used to do when he wanted me to sit on his lap. Often the reason was to discuss something, other times it was because he wanted to kiss me. I didn’t know which reason was applicable here. I hesitated.
“Jess,” he said in a voice that was tired but caring.
I walked across the room and perched on his legs, a movement that felt so familiar it caused an ache. Sebastian felt warm. He smelled faintly of the fragrance he wore that was part leather, part something like lavender. That scent alone had made me swoon many a time. I leaned back a little.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he said. “Block Island.”
I took a breath, emotions coursing through me. Block Island was where I first told him I loved him.
I had actually known that I loved him just a few months after meeting him, but I kept quiet. Turns out I didn’t have to wait long. Just a few weeks after my realization, we were at a party and he stopped me when I came out of the bathroom, no one else in the hallway. “I love you, you know. So much.”
I pretended to ruminate upon that revelation, said I needed to warm up to the idea of love. Technically, it was true. Because I knew—all too well—the destruction that could result from love.
But then one summer night, I returned the sentiment. We were lying in a rented room in Block Island—sandy sheets, candles in hurricane lamps—and I said it into his chest. “I love you, too.”
He was so happy. He squeezed me hard. He kissed me on the top of my head, then pulled me up and kissed my forehead, then my eyes, then my mouth. We murmured the words to each other over and over.
Soon after, he fell asleep quickly, as if hearing those words from me had finally allowed him to relax. I watched as his sable brown eyelashes fluttered with dreams, and it hit me. I will lose him.
I understood, in that moment, or maybe I should say that I remembered, that all things end, especially good things. At some point, either Sebastian would die or I would or we would break up. At some point, I would lose him. That recognition cut sharply through me, so exquisitely painful.
Tears sprang from my eyes that night on Block Island. I choked on a quick-rising sob.
“What?” Sebastian said, waking fast. A confused look around, his journalist eyes taking in and registering the details of where, what, who and when.
His eyes had looked at me, those eyes the same chestnuty-sable color as his lashes. “What is it, baby?” he said.
I took a deep breath, let it fly. I explained what I was thinking, feeling, realizing, about the eventual end of us.
He pulled me tight to him again. He brushed my bangs off my forehead and kissed my temples, my eyes. “You won’t lose me,” he said.
I knew that Sebastian meant what he’d said. I also knew that, unintentionally, he’d been lying.
“Block Island was great,” I said now, in my apartment. I stood up.
Block Island is over. And I am alive without you.
After a moment, Sebastian stood, too. He walked to the end of the folding table and fingered the various collars, leashes, embellishments.
He held up a pink string of flowers that would be placed on a white collar for a teacup poodle. “Promise me,” he said, “that you won’t put this on Baxy’s collar.”
“I promise.”
“So you like doing this?” Sebastian gestured with his hand at the dog