She, Myself & I by Whitney Gaskell

asked.
    “Whichever. Do you have a preference?”
    “I’ll take the turkey,” I said, and handed Zack the pâté and cheddar.
    We ate in a companionable silence, putting the open containers of pasta salad and green beans between us and picking at them with plastic forks. The sun had been low in the sky when we started out, and now it began to sink down into the horizon, leaving behind a gorgeous sunset of pinks, aubergines, and hazy grays. The colors reflected on the glassy surface of the water. The lights of the fine houses facing the lake were glowing, illuminating the perimeter of the lake as the sky darkened.
    “It’s so beautiful out here. I had no idea. I would have gotten into a boat earlier if I knew,” I breathed, soaking it all in. The colors, the view, the pleasant bite to the breeze as the night cooled.
    “I know. That’s why I decided to build out here,” Zack said.
    I turned to him, surprised. “I thought you were living with your parents,” I said.
    “God, no. I did for a few months, but I could only take so much of listening to them having the same argument every single morning about who reads which section of the paper first. Now I’m renting a house over near Ramsey Park and trying to find the time on weekends to finish my house. I thought I was going to have a chance last week to work on it, when the job I had scheduled fell through, but your sister talked me into doing her kitchen. She can be pretty persuasive,” he said.
    “That’s a nice way of saying that she’s a spoiled brat,” I commented.
    Zack laughed. “No, not at all. It just seemed really, really important to her to get it done. I’m glad I could help.”
    “How does it look? I haven’t been over there since last week. Have you finished?”
    “I’m just about done with the cabinets and countertops. I’m going over tomorrow to install the backsplash,” Zack said. He squinted at the sunset, and glanced over his shoulder to see how far we’d wandered from the dock. “I think that we’d probably better turn back before it gets too dark.”
             
    I considered it to be a good sign when Zack parked his car outside my building and walked me in.
    This is it, I thought, my pulse picking up. I normally hate this part, the first time with a new lover. There’s so much pressure. Not just performance anxiety, but having to worry about how to play it: Is it too soon? Too late? Does he think I’m easy? Neurotic? Cold? I think that our mother’s generation had it easy in comparison—nice girls waited, fast girls put out. So all you had to do was figure out which category you were in and proceed accordingly.
    But with Zack, I already knew that we weren’t going anywhere, so there was no pressure. I could be as brazen as I liked and not worry about the repercussions. I felt a surge of energy flood through me, a loosening of limbs, an openness in my lungs.
    “Do you like living here?” Zack asked me as we walked through the navy blue carpeted lobby of my building and stood by the elevator bank. We looked at our distorted reflections in the brass elevator doors while we waited for the elevator to arrive. Zack hadn’t put his arm around me or even taken my hand, which seemed a little odd. Most men aren’t exactly subtle at this stage.
    “Yeah, I do. It really suits my needs. There’s a gym in the basement and a pool in the back, and I don’t ever have to worry about mowing the lawn.”
    The elevator doors opened with a bing, and we stepped inside.
    “The thing I never liked about apartment living was always being able to hear my neighbors walking around or fighting or having sex. When I first moved back to Austin, my girlfriend and I had an apartment near campus, and we used to call the guy who lived above us the Sixty-Second Man. It was hard to look him or his wife in the eye,” Zack said.
    “Ah,” I said, not sure where to go with that one. Maybe this was his way of being subtle, of introducing the topic