With My All – Chapter 2 – Easy

We didn’t have a conversation about what we were.

I want to be clear that this was not an oversight or an avoidance – it simply didn’t come up, because the thing we were was already apparent to me and I assumed it was therefore apparent to Damian. We were together. We had been together since the Saturday of the farmer’s market. The Saturday became a Sunday and the Sunday became him coming over on Thursday and the Thursday became a weekend and the weekend kept accumulating until it was simply the shape of things.

I was happy about this.

Damian appeared to be happy about this, in the way Damian appeared to be happy about most things, which was with a mild, receptive warmth that was neither enthusiastic nor reluctant. He was simply – present. Available. There when I suggested things, willing to do the things I suggested, comfortable in my space in the specifically undemanding way of someone who has found a warm place and sees no reason to leave it.

I organized our first proper date.

I say our first proper date because the farmer’s market Saturday was more accurately described as something that happened – a series of good decisions made by me in quick succession with Damian’s benign participation. The proper date was a deliberate thing: a restaurant I had been wanting to try, a booking I made, an evening I had a plan for.

“We’re going to Cellar on Saturday,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said. “What is it?”

“New restaurant. Wine cellar converted into a dining room. The menu changes weekly.”

“Sounds good.”

“Do you have a preference about wine?”

He considered this with the specific, careful expression of a man accessing a preference he was not certain existed.

“Not really,” he said. “Whatever you think.”

I thought about this response for approximately half a second and then I chose the wine.

At the restaurant I also chose the dishes – not because he deferred, exactly, but because when I suggested things he agreed with them and when I asked his opinion he said “whatever you think sounds good” with the consistent, pleasant equanimity of a man for whom the content of a meal is genuinely less interesting than the company.

I found this easy. I want to be honest about that. I liked choosing. I liked having opinions and acting on them and having the evening go the way I had envisioned it because I had planned it that way. With Damian, there was no negotiation required, no competing preferences to navigate, no discussion of whether the restaurant I had booked was the right one. There was just – yes, and the evening I had imagined.

This felt like compatibility.

I understand now that it was something different. But it felt like compatibility.

We talked about his job situation that evening – the logistics coordination had ended the previous week, which was not entirely surprising given the timeline, but which he mentioned with the mild, untroubled tone of a man reporting a traffic update.

“It just wasn’t working,” he said.

“What wasn’t working about it?”

“The management style. They had a way of – “ He paused. “It was quite micromanaged.”

“What are you going to do next?”

He picked up his wine. “Something will come up.”

“Are you looking?”

“I’m keeping an eye on things.”

This was the conversational equivalent of whatever you think applied to his own professional situation, and I received it with the same accepting warmth. Something would come up. I believed this, with the generous faith of someone who has always found that things come up and assumes the same is true of everyone.

We split the bill.

This was the last time we split a bill, though I did not know this at the time.

He came home with me afterward because this had become the natural conclusion of our evenings. We lay in bed and he put his arm around me and I lay in the warm, specific contentment of a person who has found something good and is not looking past it.

“This is nice,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

The weekends became ours. I planned them because I liked planning and because Damian had no competing plans to offer – his social life was, I gathered, relatively sparse, which meant that my social life became our social life, my friends became our friends, my weekend structures became the infrastructure of his weeks.

He was liked. This is important. He was genuinely liked by my friends, by my colleagues at the work event I brought him to, by the neighbor whose name I knew but whose laundry dispute was ongoing. He had the easy, pleasant manner of someone who is warm and unhurried and does not compete or challenge or demand anything of the people around him. He made a good addition to rooms.

He showed up to everything I invited him to.

He suggested nothing.

I noted this in the way I noted the bill on our second dinner – as a fact, filed, not acted on. He was always there. He always showed up. He said yes to everything.

If he stays, he loves me.

I did not say this out loud. It was not a conscious thought. It was just the background logic of my life, running quietly underneath everything, converting his continued presence into evidence of something.

The presence was real.

I was right about that.