DRAFT 1
He fussed in the kitchen and I flipped through his latest version of The Economist with one hand, my other hand cupped around the skinny hazelnut latte I'd grabbed on the way over. I wasn't an Economist sort of girl. I was a People or Us Weekly girl. But he didn't like talking about celebrities, and so I had learned to talk about the one or two stories in this magazine that didn't make me yawn.
We'd been together for two years, two years of Sunday night dinners where I sat and flipped and yawned and he made his mother's chicken and green beans. I hated green beans, but I ate them. I was thirty-seven. At this stage of the game, I ate green beans. I read The Economist. I wore my hair long when I knew I looked better with short. Because it made him happy, which made me happy.
Two years of compromise and lip biting, but they were two years well spent. A woman who was thirty-seven and still wanted, at minimum, three children, couldn't hold out for Fabio. Not someone who looked like him, but someone who acted like the character he played in all those romance novels he'd been on: strong, kind, passionate, loyal, and just jealous enough to be romantic.
Ian was no Fabio, but he was a good Ian. Forty-two, never married, two-bedroom loft apartment with views that would make any real estate agent climax a bit.
"The red or white tonight?" Ian stood beside the chrome-and-glass coffee table, a bottle of each in his hands.
I liked milk. But that wasn't the answer that would make him happy. "White."
He looked down at the story I had stopped on, one focused on why people married other nationalities. It was the only story that hadn't acted like Ambien on m. "That was a godawful article. It was a Psychology Today article at best."
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