Perfect Together by Kristen Ashley

And thus, I saw it was everywhere, in everyone, with one key component that was the same for all.

The people who had it knew they did.

If you thought you were beautiful, you just were.

When I realized the key to being beautiful was knowing you were, I realized I was beautiful.

And that was the end of it.

So there I was in Remy’s kitchen facing a version of us in food form.

Remy had his turkey and chicken, I had my beef and pork, and that was who we were. It always had been.

And it worked.

Not because he didn’t mind if I stole some of his, or I wouldn’t complain if he took a forkful of mine.

And not because I was a together twenty-something when he met me, and I got I was all that.

But because that was the place Remy put us from the minute he met me.

And he’d never moved us from that place.

Not even when he left me (no, I had not missed the admiring glances or even the smirks during birthday parties or Christmas Eve, not to mention some of the times he came over to pick a fight, I was just determined to think they were about something else).

If he’d been a different man, I might not ever have come to terms with my body, face and style. Say he’d been Bill, who was a nice guy, but I’d always cringed before he’d broken it off with Janelle and we were around them, and he’d say things to her like, “Babe, maybe you should lay off the fries.”

Remy would never do that, and not because it wasn’t nice or appropriate.

But because it wouldn’t occur to him. If I wanted fries, he’d want me to have them, and if they landed on my ass, he didn’t care because he loved my ass however it came.

Because how it came was with me.

“I’ve got a Zinfandel or a Bordeaux here,” he called, breaking into my thoughts. “But I can go to the wine room and grab something else.”

“Zinfandel,” I told him, getting out of my head and into piling the food on the plates.

He arrived with the uncorked wine and the glasses.

He poured through an aerator as I finished with the food.

That was more Guillaume in Remy.

He knew good wine. He understood why it was good. And he knew it was important to aerate a young wine to relieve the tannins.

I had an aerator. But I rarely used it. I just opened the wine, poured and drank it.

Though, I did taste how much better it was when it was aerated.

Remy set the glasses at the end of the countertop where there was a large seating area with four stools, instead of taking them to the round dining table in the corner of the family room with its smoked glass top sitting on a thick, geometric walnut base.

I was relieved he didn’t treat this as formal.

We were far from casual, hanging out, talking.

But it still felt nice—comforting—that he went that route.

And I wasn’t surprised when he got out cloth napkins with lime green and robin’s egg blue boomerangs and chocolate brown lines with coral and aqua balls on the ends.

Remy had outlawed paper napkins, plastic cutlery, straws and any but necessary use of paper towel in our house around the time he switched to committing to using at least sixty percent of reclaimed materials for all his builds.

He never, however, gave up on the Ziplocs.

This thought meant I was smiling to myself when Remy hustled me out of the way to commandeer the plates and grunted, “Sit.”

I sat, he set my plate in front of me, grabbed cutlery while I put my napkin on my lap and he asked, “What’s with the smile?” as he sat beside me and nabbed his napkin.

I pulled mine from my lap and held it up to him.

That was when he smiled and said, “Manon. Last year. Christmas. As a joke. I told her I was not George Jetson. She told me they worked with my house vision. I think she thought I’d bury them in a drawer. But I use them because they make her smile. I have a service that does my laundry, and when they go in, I request they come back ironed.”

That made me laugh.

It also made my heart swell.

He really did love his daughter.

All his kids.

But there was something sweet about the fact Manon was Daddy’s Girl.

It was sweet because I had a sister.

And we both knew how beautiful it felt to be Daddy’s Girl. I loved that my daughter had the same thing.

While I was laughing, Remy invited, “Dig in.”

I did that next.

Remy did too, but he also started the conversation.

“Before we get into the nitty-gritty, I have—”

“Can we not?” I blurted, the words coming out even before the thought behind them hit my brain.

“Sorry?”

I put my fork down, grabbed my wine, took a sip (excellent) and set it down before I looked to him.

We were at corners from each other, and I knew, if I shifted the right way, my knee would touch his.

I didn’t know for certain what I wanted. In between bouts of Remy, I was staying busy with life and keeping whatever was happening with Remy to happening with Remy.

It was hard, but it was also the best way forward.

Reflecting about where my mind had gone and finally being honest about my behaviors (and his) was one thing.

But there was no use obsessing about Remy when he had the answers, or we could work on the answers together, or we could see there were no answers, but that had to happen together too.

But now…