I Erased Our Marriage Timeline novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Gehry Barks Twice

"I know how it goes," I said. "I was there."

"Not this time." His thumbs moved on my cheekbones, gritty with sand. "This time you've got a guy with a protractor."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

"And a dog," he said.

Gehry lifted his head off my feet at the word and thumped his tail on the sand.

Then Abel's face changed.

"Wait," he said. "Go back."

"To what?"

"To the part where I said I was in love with you, and you said 'You're what,' and then we talked about a crane."

My face went hot all over again.

"You said it wasn't the point of the sentence."

"I lied. I'm bad at it." He didn't let go of my face. "It was the whole sentence."

The wind blew my hair into both our mouths.

He pushed it back with one finger, very carefully.

"I love you," I said. "I have since the lemon tree. Maybe since the ruler."

"The ruler?"

"You kept it a month. That's a commitment."

He kissed me on the log in front of the pier, with sand in it and salt in it.

The man with the shark kite whistled at us.

Abel lifted one hand and waved without stopping.

His apartment was in North Park, the top floor of an old house cut into four.

One room, a kitchen along one wall, a drafting table under the window and a bed against the other wall.

Every surface had a tiny cardboard model on it.

Stairs, mostly.

"You build stairs when you're nervous," I said.

"I draw them. You draw them." He set his keys down. "I build them. It's different. It's more serious."

Gehry went straight to his water bowl and drank.

I stood in the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle.

The corners of the ceiling.

The top of the bookcase.

The smoke detector.

Abel watched me do it.

He didn't make a joke.

"No cameras," he said. "I checked when I moved in. Old habit from my dad's hospice nurse. She liked to know who was listening."

"Check again," I said.

He did.

He got up on the drafting stool and looked inside the smoke detector, and on top of the bookcase, and behind the TV that he never used.

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