Page 64 of Just This Once

“Yes. I’m just old.”

“You’re not old.”

“Old enough to be in perimenopause.”

“Don’t you go through that when you’re, like, sixty?”

“And this is why men should not be legislating women’s bodies,” I grumble with a push of his shoulder to pull the sheets of the bed.

He helps. “I don’t disagree. But in my defense, I’m one of three boys, and I’ve never had experience with a woman in perimenopause.”

“Because you’re thirty, and I’m forty-two.” When he doesn’t respond, I yank the sheets from his hand and throw them to the floor. “You might as well go home.”

“Nah. I’m still tired.” He curls his arm around my waist and pulls me down to the bare mattress. It feels so good on my overheated skin. Dante moves so we’re facing each other on our sides and yawns again. “I wouldn’t care if you were fifty-two or sixty-two. I’m here because I like you.”

“You would definitely care if I were sixty-two.There is such a thing as being in different places in our lives, and sixty-two is hip replacement surgery age.”

“I’d get you one of those scooters so you could zoom around.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“So are you if you think a little bit of sweat is going to scare me away.”

It’s more than a little. It’s buckets. Gallons. An ocean.

“I can’t have kids anymore,” I tell him because it is too early for my brain to be fully functioning, but it seems important he knows that I am at a different place in my life than he is. I’ve been married and divorced with two kids. I’ve buried my mother. I’m solidly in the middle of my life, while his frontal lobe only reached maturity a few years ago.

“Cause of perimenopause? I’m gonna need you to explain all this after I’ve had some coffee because?—”

“I had my tubes tied after Maddie.”

He’s quiet for a moment, his hand sliding under his pillow. And then, “Okay. Again, are you trying to scare me away or…?”

“I’m trying to explain that I’m too old for you. Whatever we’re doing here… Don’t get any ideas. It’s not going to work out. It can’t.”

His hand brushes my hip, like he’s going to settle it on me, but then he must feel how hot I am because he places it back on the mattress between us, shifting his pillow, resettling his head, getting comfortable.

Almost as if he’s ignoring everything I said a moment ago.

It’s infuriating.

And I’m about to tell him so, but then he says, “I think you know, but to be sure you really do know… I can’t read. I mean, I can, but not very well. School was always hard for me, but I wasn’t diagnosed until third grade. I have both a visual processing and reading comprehension disorder, and I hate reading.Hateit. I’ve never read a book in my life.”

“Not even as a little kid?”

“No.”

“What about it being read to you?”

“I get bored. I’ve tried audiobooks, but I make it twenty minutes and then find something else to do. I’d rather do literally anything else than read a book.”

“That’s okay. Some people aren’t readers.”

“Yeah, but most people can read.”

“Debatable. I don’t know the statistics off the top of my head, but most people in America read at a seventh-grade level.”

“I’m one of those people.”

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