Her bed’s unmade. Books, dirty clothes, and used towels straggle across the floor. Her desk groans with half-drunk tea mugs, crumby plates, bound notebooks thrown open, and various Apple devices. And to top it all off, she’s asleep on top of her keyboard. Her giant monitor shows a screen almost half-full of the letter E. Bean wags her tail at me from the bed.
“Stevie? You okay?” I ask.
One of her blue eyes pops open. She sits up slowly, and blinking in the late afternoon sun, squints at me.
“What? What time is it?” She sounds like an elderly frog.
I check my watch. “Six.”
She peers at the screen and leans back in her chair. She’s still wearing the same clothes as yesterday.
“Late night last night?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She rubs her face. “I got started on a new project.”
I want to laugh at the keyboard key marks imprinted on her cheek, but instead I nod, understanding the subtext. New projects envelop Stevie like a comfy blanket, soft couch, and satisfying Netflix binge might for a normal person.
After our salads last night, we’d made a pint-sized chocolate-caramel gelato peace offering for Rosa and taken Bean for a quick after-dinner stroll. Then, I’d gone to bed. The workday comes early in the accounting world.
Stevie’s room was quiet this morning, so without peeking in, I’d let Bean out to use the yard, escorted her back in, and left for work. Stevie had probably worked feverishly until she sacked out on her desk.
She stands, stretches, shakes her head of wavy dark blonde hair, and finally looks more alert. “I need to grab something to eat so I can get Bean over to City Park by seven.”
“I can meet you there after my run,” I say.
She brightens. “Lovely! It’ll be fun. I decided it will count as number seven on my list. C’mon Bean, dinner time.”
The collie jumps up, tail swishing wildly.
I follow them into the kitchen. “Your list?”
She sticks a thumb out at the paper on the refrigerator. “My thirtieth birthday bucket list. I’m finally going to start on it.”
My muscles tense. The list has been there for so long, constantly falling off the fridge door, that I’d almost forgotten about it. It’s like old wallpaper or a piece of neglected furniture. Invisible. What’s driving Stevie to go after it now?
“Right,” I say. “Sounds good. See you at the park.”
When I grab my AirPods and phone out of my room, it’s impossible not to notice how different my space is from hers. My bed is made, clothes hang neatly in my closet, my bathroom is spotless, and not an item is out of place. As an accountant, I thrive on order.
Which has sometimes caused conflicts with the creative down the hall.
I breathe deeply as I start my run, partly to fill my lungs and prepare them for the exertion, partly to release the pent-up frustration with Stevie that seems to grow with every passing year.
I don’t care that she’s not a great housekeeper, that she leaves her stuff lying around in mismatched piles, that I’ll sometimes find her asleep in a patio chair or in the middle of the living room floor if that’s where she’d been inspired to work the night before. All of that stuff makes her fascinating to me. What I mind is that I’m thirty now, and she’s close enough to thirty to touch it, we’re approaching thirty, and she hasn’t said a word about our agreement.
My feet pound the ground a little harder than they should and sweat breaks out on my forehead. It’s a lot warmer today than yesterday. No clouds cover the sun, and for the first part of my run, I’m on asphalt, passing brick and stucco homes built sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. There are also a growing number of modern homes and a handful of actual McMansions on too-small lots.
The crown jewel of this area, though, is City Park, which is where I’m headed now. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science sits at the eastern end of the park, the Denver Zoo runs along the north side, and there’s a lake and pavilion in the middle, along with several playgrounds and plenty of green space for picnicking or lolling.
I rarely loll.
As I run, I wonder what it means that Stevie’s finally tackling her bucket list. She’s ignored that thing for so long, I’d thought about hiding it to see if she’d notice. She’s always been a procrastinator, and thirty is around the corner, now.
Some of the items should be doable, like trying something new and flossing, but others aren’t so easy to accomplish. I think about her item number ten as I speed across Colorado Boulevard to beat the pedestrian signal count down. Fall in love.
Stevie hasn’t even dated anyone since Enrique last year. He was a nice guy, but when they’d broken up, she’d said he’d texted and called too much. Most women would be happy about that. Not her.
I run a hand through my hair. Stevie drives me up a wall. Many walls. I try not to think too hard about why.
But a memory swims to me of a friend’s wedding up in Vail that we went to a few years ago, the last time I brought up the bargain our six-year-old selves had made.
We’d been dancing with friends and decided to take a break outside. The sun was setting over the mountains, and the view was spectacular. I’d had one too many cocktails from the open bar, and Stevie looked drop-dead gorgeous. Tendrils of her hair escaped from the loose knot she’d twisted it into, and she wore one of her two dresses, the low-cut black one, and a rare pair of high heels that I don’t think I’ve seen since. She was pink faced with champagne and laughing, and I’d touched her soft cheek without thinking.
“So, are we still going to do it?” I asked her.
Her forehead wrinkled, but she giggled. “Do what?”
“Get married.”
Her smile faded, and she turned away to look at the peaks as the sun tipped behind them. “Sure. Of course we will. We agreed, right?”
My heart pumped hard in my chest. “Okay, let’s shake on it. If we’re still single by the time we’re thirty, we’ll get together.”
She turned toward me, her face pale. “Thirty?”
“We need a deadline,” I joked, “or we’ll never make a decision.” I stuck out my hand, and, hesitatingly, she shook it.
That would have been the perfect time for a kiss to seal the deal . . . but I’d left it at that, and I haven’t mentioned it since. I’d met Felicia soon after anyway, and we’d dated until six months ago. She was an attorney, a great girl and a lot of fun, and she’d talked about moving in together.
But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Moving in with Felicia would have meant moving out of the house that Stevie and I had shared since graduating from college. Probably unsurprisingly, Felicia had broken up with me a few weeks later.
Stevie and I have a good thing going. I don’t want to mess with it. But I feel a clock ticking ominously somewhere inside me, telling me time is running out. Not for marriage or family or anything like that. The time until she turns thirty.
I’ve known since I was six years old that I’d marry Stevie Watson, but we don’t seem any closer to taking any action on our vow than when we were kids. I’ve been waiting for her to show me she’s ready.
Is it time to make my feelings for her clear?
Or should I keep waiting?