Sunday morning. The light come through the window like LA light only do — flat, white, like somebody behind the building turned on a giant studio softbox at 7 AM and pointed it at my apartment. I been up since six because I can't sleep past six anymore, which is a thing that started about six months ago, and that I am pretending is just adulthood.
Alexis is still in the bed. She sleep deep. She sleep the way a woman sleep who has nothing to prove, which is not a thing I ever say to her because she would take it as a compliment and it isn't one, exactly. It's an observation. She is the most rested person I have ever met. She wake up at nine-thirty on a Sunday and the day she walk into is already on her side.
I make coffee. The good kind. Single-origin, the burr grinder Marcus bought me when I moved out here as a joke that turned into the thing I actually use every morning. Sixteen grams in. Two hundred ten grams out. The math is the same as the consulting math — small inputs, tight controls, repeatable result.
The lease is on the table.
We signed it yesterday at three. Office on Fairfax. Twelve hundred square feet. A glass door with Montgomery+Williams Consulting in vinyl letters by the end of the week. Six months from a conference handshake to a vinyl-letter door is fast. I know it is fast. I know.
I lay in bed last week and I thought about it. Quietly. Around two in the morning, when she was asleep beside me and the apartment was the kind of quiet only LA gets at two AM — distant freeway, no other sound. I thought about the speed of it. The way she handed me the partnership deck on date six and I read it in her kitchen and asked exactly two questions, both of which she answered like she had been ready for them. I thought about how the partnership math is generous to me on paper, and how on date eight I noticed that the generosity is the kind of generosity you build into a deck to make the other person say yes faster.
I thought am I doing this too fast.
I thought no. I am paying attention. I have been a consultant for eleven years. I read decks for a living. The deck is good. The math is good. She is good.
I thought Marcus would tell me if it was too fast.
I went to sleep.
I bring her the coffee. She sit up, hair messed, sweater she stole from me last week pulled over a tank top, the way she look in the morning still surprise me. Like a small private gift the day is giving me. She say thank you, baby, and reach up and pull me down by the collar of my t-shirt and kiss me without putting the mug down, which is the kind of small daring move that I think about for hours after, the kind that make me wonder how anyone do anything as efficiently as she do.
She say what are we doing today.
I say whatever you want.
She say let's drive up to Malibu.
I say let's.
I do not have a Sunday agenda anymore. I had one for years. Errands, gym, prep for Monday, a call with Mama, a long walk somewhere that wasn't anywhere in particular. The Sunday agenda was mine. It was the rhythm I built when I came out here and didn't know anyone and had to make the city feel like mine.
Now Sunday is whatever Alexis want it to be, and I'm okay with that, because the alternative — going back to the man who made his own Sunday at thirty-one because he didn't have anyone to make it with — is the man I am trying to stop being.
I tell myself this. In the kitchen. Over the coffee. While she's in the bathroom getting ready for Malibu.
I tell myself this and the part of me that is still keeping count of weeks does not say anything back.
Marcus call me on the way. Sunday is when Marcus call. He don't know about Malibu. He don't need to. He ask how the lease signing went and I say good, all done, doors get lettered Wednesday, and he say Williams, brother, that's fast, and I say I know what I'm doing, and he say I know you do, and we move on to something else.
That's the conversation we have. The one with the word fast in it. He don't push. He never push hard. He let me say what I said and he move on. Marcus is good like that. Marcus is the kind of friend who tell you the thing once and let you sit with it on your own time.
I hang up. I drop the phone in the cup holder. Alexis put her hand on my thigh and say who was that, and I say Marcus, and she say Marcus always calling, and I say Marcus always calling, and we both laugh, and the PCH open up to the right and the ocean does what the ocean does.
I am inside my own life in a way I have never been inside it before. This is what I came out here for. That's the sentence I think. I almost say it out loud. I don't say it.
Some things you don't say. Especially when they are true.
Especially when they are true.