I found the email years later, while looking for something considerably less interesting.
There was no subject.
“Hey did you get my email? Can we go out for a walk?”
I looked across at my husband.
He was trying to open a packet from the end that did not open. I let him work on it for a moment before asking whether he remembered.
“The walk?”
“Yes.”
“Which walk?”
A fair question. An infuriating question.
We weren’t dating then.
I wanted to get out. That much was true. I had been inside long enough, and the evening seemed to be happening somewhere else.
But there were other people I could have asked.
I did not write that part.
Something about him made me want a little more time than the conversation we were already having. I couldn’t have explained it without making it sound larger, and more certain, than it was.
So I asked for a walk. A manageable request. Shoes, pavement, perhaps a turn at the corner. Nothing in it that would frighten a man who was still deciding what to do tomorrow.
He thought I wanted a walk.
I can hardly criticise him for this. I had been quite explicit.
Still, there are ways of hearing “Can we go out?” that leave a little room around the words. He had chosen the version requiring footwear.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere.”
This did not clarify things for him.
He was good at enjoying what was in front of him. If the evening was pleasant, that was the evening accounted for. Tomorrow could introduce itself when it arrived.
I liked that about him. I also occasionally wished he would look a little further down the road.
Because I was already wondering.
Not about a wedding. I wasn’t walking beside him secretly choosing table linen. I wondered what he would be like on an ordinary Tuesday. Whether we would run out of things to say. Whether the quiet would feel awkward, or like somewhere we could stay.
These were not questions I intended to ask on the pavement.
I had only just persuaded him outside.
In my memory, that street has more windows than it used to.
Behind one, two mugs wait on a kitchen counter. Behind another, a pair of shoes has been left exactly where someone will complain about them. A light comes on in a room neither of us has seen yet.
I know those rooms now. I have lived in them.
But the girl walking beside him couldn’t see all that. She only knew she didn’t particularly want to turn back.
He said something that made her laugh.
She took the longer way without explaining why.
He came along without asking why.
“Were you asking me out?” my husband said.
He had abandoned the packet.
“I was asking you to come for a walk.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Yes. I know.”
He read the email again, searching those two lines with the attention I might have appreciated at the time.
“You could have said.”
“I did send a follow-up.”
He laughed.
So did I. It is easier to be amused by a missed hint when the person who missed it is sitting in your home, wearing the slippers you bought him.
I don’t remember every word of that evening. I wish I did, but I mostly remember wanting it to last a little longer.
At the time, it was a walk I hoped he would say yes to.
I closed the old email.
“Shall we go out?” I asked.
He looked towards the door, then back at me.
“For a walk?”
“Yes.”
This time, he smiled before he went to find his shoes.
