All Chapters of How I Met My Wife.: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

He took off his shoes.I want you to know that. Of all the things that happened in the next forty-five minutes, that is the one I have not stopped thinking about. He took off his shoes without being asked. He set them next to the small mat I have by the door, where the cello neighbour's deliveries sometimes get left. He did it like a man who had been in this apartment before, or who had at least thought about being in this apartment before, and who had a small mental file of the kind of person he was going to be when he got here.He put the takeout on the counter. The ice on the table. He stood in the middle of my studio with his hands at his sides, and he did not look at me, and the apartment was suddenly way too small for the kind of man who was standing in it.He was too big for the room. Not physically. Although, yes, physically. He was six-two, six-three in the right light, and my studio was four hundred square feet on a generous day, and he was a tall, tired, dressed-down versio

Three oh seven a.m.I am going to tell you exactly how this happened because I do not want anyone to think I am a person who has her life together.Three oh seven a.m. on a Tuesday night. Koreatown. The building is quiet. The cello neighbour has been silent for hours. There is a single car on the street outside. A dog, somewhere, is doing the small late-night bark that dogs do. The fridge is humming. The candle on the counter is out. The umbrella is in the closet. The sunscreen is in the bathroom. I am in bed. I have not slept. I have been staring at a piece of text on my phone for over an hour.Why are you doing this to meI had typed it. I had deleted it. I had typed it again. I had deleted it again. I had typed it a fourth time. I had deleted it a fourth time. I had typed it a fifth time. I had not deleted it a fifth time. I had let it sit there, the cursor blinking, the words I was not brave enough to send living on the screen like a small confession I could not take back.I was l

He didn't move.His hand was still there. By my face. By the small place just below my ear. Not on it. By it. The air between his fingers and my skin was the size of a single breath, and I have been thinking about that breath for fourteen days."Aiden," I said. My voice was a whisper. "Pick something."He closed his eyes.He closed his eyes the way a man does when he has been awake for two weeks and is finally, finally, being given permission to stop. He closed them slowly, like a man letting go of a thing he had been holding in both hands for a very long time. His jaw worked. His breathing was loud in the small room. The small window made a soft sound against the parking lot outside. The clock on the wall did the tick it had been doing the entire time we had been in this room, the entire time I had been in this room, the entire time I had been a person who was sitting on a mat in a PT room with a man's hand hovering near her face.He opened his eyes.The professional mask was gone.I

Friday, 6:47 p.m.I have been getting ready for forty-seven minutes, which is approximately forty-five minutes longer than it takes me to get ready for a normal human activity, and approximately forty-four minutes longer than it takes me to admit that I am not, in fact, a normal human being right now.The little black dress. The one that has been in the back of my closet for eight months, ever since I bought it on a hopeful Tuesday in February for a man I was dating who turned out to be a man I was dating in the wrong way. The dress has been waiting. The dress has been patient. The dress has been folded in a square that was slightly less wrinkled than the rest of the closet, like a piece of clothing that has been saving itself for a moment.This is the moment.I am wearing it. I am standing in front of my bathroom mirror in Koreatown, in a little black dress, and I am panicking. It's not the kind of panic that involves tears. The kind of panic that involves a person looking at her own

Monday, 9:58 a.m.I am standing in the parking lot of the Silverlake Clinic, holding a small paper cup of coffee, looking at the building, doing the small kind of math that a person does when they are about to walk into a place that is, technically, not a place they should be walking into.PT with Carlos. 10:00 a.m. Monday. My new official physical therapist. The man whose name is on the form that says patient transferred from Cedars-Sinai, A. Black, MD, recused. The man who does not know that I kissed my old surgeon on Friday night in the hallway of my Koreatown apartment. The man who is going to be entirely professional and entirely kind and entirely the kind of man Aiden Black is not in public, which is to say, normal about me.I go inside.The fountain is doing its fountain thing. The front desk woman, whose name I do not remember, smiles at me. Carlos is already in the PT room. He is a man in his late thirties, with a kind face, with strong hands, with the kind of calm that makes