The First Version of Him

The first version of Darius arrived by telephone.

Before he ever touched me, he learned the hours when I was least guarded.

During the day, I could answer a question while returning an email, choose a restaurant between meetings, listen to a complaint without offering to solve it. By eleven, my shoes lay beneath the chair where I had dropped them. Traffic thinned outside my apartment. I would carry a glass of water to bed and leave the day's correspondence unanswered on the kitchen table.

That was when he called. Before long, I kept the phone beside my glass.

At first, we spoke mostly about grief. He was still in Atlanta dealing with his father's death, and I was checking on Nadine, who was packing the belongings she could agree were hers. Darius asked whether she had eaten, whether she was sleeping, whether she had said anything about him. I heard concern in all three questions. A man keeping track of his people.

Then he would ask about me.

"What do you do when you aren't rescuing everybody?" he asked one night.

"Sleep," I said.

"I don't believe you know how."

"You've known me four days."

"I pay attention fast."

I liked that he had been paying attention. I let it stand for more than it did.

He called the following night, then the night after. Sometimes we spoke for forty minutes; sometimes the blinds had begun to pale before I checked the time. He told me about the military, about learning to be useful before anyone could decide he was unwanted. His mother had died when he was young. Different relatives had taken him in, and he remembered the rules of each household. When he spoke about music, his voice grew quicker, less careful. I began to listen for the man he might become, not only the one describing himself.

I told him less. He stayed on the line and tried another question.

"You always answer the question beside the question," he said.

"Maybe you ask too many," I said.

"Maybe nobody asks you enough."

I had not told him I was lonely. That made the sentence feel earned.

He remembered the presentation I dreaded, the colleague who spoke over me, the aunt in Trinidad whose voice could make me feel nine again. Before the presentation, he called while I stood in a restroom stall, my notes balanced on my bag, rehearsing under the fluorescent hum. "Slow down on the second slide," he said. "That's where you know more than everybody in the room." He was right. Afterward, he wanted to know which part I thought I had done well. I sat at my desk with the slides still open and told him.

"I'm building too," I said.

"That's why I see wifey in you."

I laughed. My hand stopped moving over the trackpad.

"You haven't even taken me on a date," I said.

"A date is logistics. Recognition is different."

He could make a reasonable objection sound like an unnecessary delay. I had mentioned a date; he had offered something grander, and suddenly I was the one being practical.

Near the end of the month, he told me about his past with women. He called it his "hoe phase" and laughed, then paused as if waiting for me to laugh too. There had been women who wanted the uniform, women who needed saving, women who expected more than he had promised. He admitted mistakes without dwelling on any one of them. Now he wanted a family, a shared home, a woman who would not require him to have everything settled before she loved him.

"And you think that's me?" I asked.

"I know what I feel."

"Feeling is not knowing."

"Then let me prove it."

He offered to buy my ticket so we could spend a weekend together after he left Atlanta. Before I had agreed, he was asking which departure worked with my schedule. That readiness pleased me more than the offer itself. There was no joke about the fare, no suggestion that I should be grateful.

I declined and bought my own ticket. I preferred a reservation I could change without asking permission. He paused when I told him, then asked for the arrival time.

"You don't let anybody do anything for you," Darius said.

"People can do things for me. I just don't like owing strangers," I said.

"I'm not going to be a stranger long."

I found his confidence restful. I had spent years listening to men qualify their interest, leaving themselves room to deny what I had heard. Darius said marriage without lowering his voice. He asked about a life together before he asked about sharing a bed.

He was precise about what he wanted to be called: husband, father, veteran, artist, provider. I could picture each version of him. I had not yet seen what he did on an ordinary Tuesday.

On the thirtieth night, I fell asleep with the phone against my pillow. Before dawn, I woke with a warm cheek and saw the call timer still running.

"You there?" I whispered.

His breathing caught, then settled closer to the receiver.

"I'm here," he said.

I put my head back on the pillow. I did not end the call.

For a while, I lay listening to a room I had never seen.

After our first weekend, Darius walked me to the security line, carrying my bag until the last place he was allowed to stand. He promised we would not have to keep doing this.

"I don't do halfway," he said.

"We're still learning what this is," I said.

"I know what it is."

I had a boarding pass in my hand and a life organized around documents that expired. I knew the language of conditions and renewals. He spoke as though permanence required only a decision.

He bent and kissed my forehead, his hand still closed around the handle of my bag.

"Let me take care of you," Darius said.

I believed he wanted to. He called when he said he would, remembered the details of my work, listened to the answers he asked for. He had offered to buy the ticket. I would not later make a fool of myself for having noticed these things.

Trusting him then was not the part I came to question.

It was how long I would keep returning to that airport, that offered ticket, that hand on my bag.

When I had arrived for that first visit, Darius was waiting outside baggage claim in a black sweater and dark jeans. Behind him, a luggage carousel sounded its warning buzzer. He saw me before I waved and came forward with both hands out.

He seemed taller than he had in Atlanta. At dinner there, he had sat with his shoulders rounded; now he stood straight, smiling. He took my bag without asking. When he hugged me, his beard brushed my temple. I rested against his chest a moment longer than I had intended.

"You real," he said.

"Were you expecting a hologram?" I asked.

"I was expecting you to cancel."

"Why?"

He looked down and shrugged. "Good things usually do."

I had done no more than board the flight I had booked. Yet I felt I had already given him something important. He kept looking at me as we walked to the car, as if checking that I was still beside him.

His apartment was clean where a guest would look first. The counters shone; bleach lingered in the bathroom. When I opened a kitchen cabinet for a glass, I found a stack of unopened mail pushed behind the mugs, one envelope bent against the hinge. On his desk, a music session stretched across two glowing monitors. A framed photograph of his daughter, Lena, stood beside the keyboard.

"She looks like you," I said.

"Poor child," Darius said.

"I was going to say beautiful."

He picked up the photograph. His mouth softened, and he ran his thumb along the frame before setting it back at a slightly different angle.

"That's my heart," he said.

We spent the afternoon borrowing the habits of a couple. At the grocery store, he put a jar of pasta sauce in the cart; I took it out and read him the ingredients. Back in his kitchen, music played while water rattled in the pot. He reached past me for a cabinet and left his hand at my waist after he had what he needed.

I already knew the low note his voice took when he was amused. Now I could see him trying not to smile. He watched my mouth as I spoke; I watched his hands, the clean line of his beard. When I held his gaze, he sometimes looked down first.

That night, he kissed me slowly, drawing back just far enough to look at me before kissing me again. I took his pace for confidence and let him set it.

In the bedroom, his ease left him. He made a joke, pulled me close, then began explaining how tired he was, how little he had slept since his father's death. I did not ask him to keep explaining. I held him beneath the sheet. His arm tightened across my ribs.

"Don't think it's you," he said into the darkness.

"I don't," I said.

That was true. The first time.

In the morning, he made eggs and scraped the burned edges of the toast over the sink. While the coffee brewed, he danced with the spatula in his hand, deliberately missing the beat until I laughed. Then he asked whether I could imagine waking up beside him every day.

"You ask dangerous questions before caffeine," I said.

"I'm serious," Darius said.

"We barely know each other."

"You know enough."

I looked toward the desk. Lena's photograph stood beside the music session he had left open overnight. I knew he had served, that he missed his father, that there were tracks he wanted to finish. Over coffee and eggs, those separate facts seemed to make a whole man.

On the way to the airport, Darius turned off the main road to show me neighborhoods he liked. He slowed beside houses with deep porches and pointed out a park where Lena could play. Outside a vacant commercial building, he leaned across me to look through the passenger window, already deciding where a recording booth would go.

"You always tour women through imaginary real estate?" I asked.

"Only the ones I can see in it," Darius said.

At the terminal, he pressed his forehead to mine. Wheels clicked over the seams in the floor around us.

"Next time, let me buy the ticket."

"We'll see," I said.

"There she go. Always needing control."

He smiled, and I smiled back. I was still close enough to feel his breath on my face. I did not ask why buying my own ticket had become a fault.

On the flight home, with my bag beneath the seat, I arranged the weekend into an account I liked. He had been nervous because the visit mattered. The mail was only mail; busy people let it accumulate. The music would be finished. He would make good on the things he had described from the driver's seat.

I thought this was fairness: leaving room for his grief, his unfinished work, the difference between a man on the telephone and a man trying to make breakfast.

In truth, I was helping him edit.