Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

I’m feeling so festive, in fact, that when I pass Intimissimi, a popular lingerie company, I decide to stop inside.

I think about sex, about David. About how it’s good, solid, satisfying, and how I’ve never been someone who wants her hair pulled or to be spanked. Who doesn’t even really like to be on top. Is that a problem? Maybe I’m not in touch with my sexuality—­which Bella, casually——too casually—has accused me of on more than one occasion.

The shop is filled with pretty, lacy things. Tiny bras with bows and matching underwear. Frilly negligees with rosettes on the hem. Silk robes.

I choose a black lace camisole and boy shorts, decidedly different from anything I own, but still me. I pay without trying them on, and then make my way over to Haru. I call in our order on the way. No sense in waiting.

I can’t believe I’m doing this. I hear David’s key latch in the door and I’m tempted to run back into the bedroom and hide, but it’s too late now. The apartment is littered with candles and the low stylings of Barry Manilow. It’s like a cliché sex comedy from the nineties.

David walks in and drops his keys on the table, sets his bag down on the counter. It’s not until he reaches to take off his shoes that he notices his surroundings. And then me.

“Woah.”

“Welcome home,” I say. I’m wearing the black lingerie with a black silk robe, something I got as a gift on a bachelorette weekend eons ago. I go to David. I hand him one end of the belt. “Pull,” I say, like I’m someone else.

He does, and the thing comes apart, falling to the floor in a puddle.

“This is for me?” he asks, his index finger stretched out to touch the strap of my camisole top.

“It would be weird if it weren’t,” I say.

“Right,” he says, low. “Yeah.” He fingers the strap, edging it down over my shoulder. From an open window a breeze saunters in, dancing the candles. “I like this,” he says.

“I’m glad,” I say. I take his glasses off. I set them down on the couch. And then I start to unbutton his shirt. It’s white. Hugo Boss. I bought it for him for Hanukkah two years ago along with a pink one and a blue-striped one. He never wears the blue one. It was my favorite.

“You look really sexy,” he says. “You never dress like this.”

“They don’t allow this in the office, even on Friday,” I tell him.

“You know what I mean.”

I get the last button undone and I shake the shirt off him—one arm then the other. David is always warm. Always. And I feel the prickle of his chest hair against my skin, the soft folding my body does to his.

“Bedroom?” he asks me.

I nod.

He kisses me then, hard and fast, right by the couch. It catches me by surprise. I pull back.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “Do it again.” And he does.

He kisses me into the bedroom. He kisses me out of the lingerie. He kisses me underneath the sheets. And when it’s just us there, on the precipice, he lifts his face up from mine and asks it:

“When are we getting married?”

My brain is scrambled. Undone from the day, the month, the glass-and-a-half of wine I had to prepare myself for this little stunt.

“David,” I breathe out. “Can we talk about this later?”

He kisses my neck, my cheek, the bridge of my nose. “Yes.”

And then he pushes into me. He moves slowly, deliberately, and I feel myself come apart before I even have a chance to begin. He keeps moving on top of me, long after I’ve returned to my body, to my brain. We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.

But there is something I cannot shake. Some reckoning that has burrowed into my body, through my very cells. It rises now, flooding, probing, threatening to spill out of my lips. The thing I have kept buried and locked for almost five years, exposed to this fraction of light.

I close my eyes against it. I will them to stay shut. And when it’s over, when I finally open them, David is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen before. He’s looking at me as if he’s already gone.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I go down to Bella’s and make her tens of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—the only thing, really, I know how to “cook.” The gallery girls come by. We order from Buvette, and Bella’s favorite waiter brings it himself, along with a bottle of Sancerre. And then the results of the surgery come back. The doctors were right: stage three.

It’s in the lymph system, but not the surrounding organs. Good news, bad news. Bella starts chemo and impossibly, insanely, we continue wedding planning for two months from now: December in New York. I call the wedding planner, the same one a young woman at my firm used. He wrote a book on weddings: How to Wed: Style, Food, and Tradition by Nathaniel Trent. She buys me the book, and I flip through it at work, grateful for the environment, this animal firm where I work, that does not require or ask me to ooh and ahh over peonies.

We choose a venue. A loft downtown that is, as Nathaniel tells me, the “best raw space in Manhattan.” What he doesn’t say: Every nice hotel is booked, this is the best we’re going to get. Some couple called their wedding off and we got lucky.

The loft will mean more decisions—everything has to be brought in—but all of the available hotels are bland or too corporate, and we agree to follow Nathaniel’s lead and end up with something that splits the difference.

At first, the chemo goes well. Bella is a champion. “I feel great,” she tells me on her way home from the hospital after her second session. “No nausea, nothing.”

I’ve read, of course, that the beginning is a lie. That there is an air of suspension. Before the chemicals reach your tissues, dig in, and start really doing their damage. But I am hopeful, of course I am. I’m breathing.

I’m reading over the IPO offering for Yahtzee. Aldridge has already been to California to meet with them. If I choose to, I’ll leave in three weeks. It’s the dream case. Young female entrepreneurs, a managing partner overseeing, complete access to the deal.

“Of course, you should do it,” David tells me over a glass of wine and Greek salad takeout.

“I would be in LA for a month,” I say. “What about the wedding? And what about Bella?” What about missing her doctors’ appointments, not being here?

“Bella is doing well,” David says, reaching over the question. “She’d want you to go.”

“Doesn’t mean I should.”

David picks up his glass, drinks. The wine is a red we bought at a tasting on Long Island last fall. It was David’s favorite. I remember liking it fine, which is the way I feel about it tonight. Wine is wine.

“You have to make choices sometimes for yourself. It doesn’t make you a bad friend, it just means you put yourself first, which you should.”

What I don’t tell him, because I suspect, I know, that a lecture would follow, is that I don’t put myself first. I never have. Not when it comes to Bella.

“Nate said that we should go with the tiger’s lily and that no one does roses anymore,” I say, skating to the next subject.

“That’s insane,” David says. “It’s a wedding.”

I shrug. “I don’t care,” I say. “Do you?”

David takes another sip. He appears to be really considering. “No,” he says.

We sit in silence for a few moments.