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Frank peered up at her around the back of her sofa when Lindsay opened the door to her apartment that evening, surprising her.
"Oh good, you're here," she said, tossing her purse and keys down on the kitchen counter. "I was just about to text you. I thought you said you were going back to your place?"
"My office was closed today, remember?"
"Yeah," she said, pouring herself a glass of wine from the open bottle of red on the counter, "I remember you said for your day off, you were going to go back to your place for a decent shower, since my water pressure, and I'm quoting here, 'sucks ass'. You had a big day planned of sitting around your apartment not wearing pants, if memory serves."
"I achieved the no-pants part at least," Frank replied.
Lindsay snorted over the rim of her wineglass. "If you've been hanging out in my apartment in your boxers all day and expect an apology for the water pressure, you're going to be waiting a long time, buddy."
"Never did quite make it as far as the shower."
That surprised her, and she knew he could read it on her face easily. "So what did you do all day? You're not getting sick, are you?"
"No, not sick. You left a book out on the coffee table."
She furrowed her brow, trying to see where he was going with that. "You mean Aromanticism In The Digital Age? I picked it up at that seminar last month. My firm needs to update its knowledge-base on underrepresented queer identities, I've been meaning to read it."
"I read it," Frank said.
"What? All of it? It's like, three hundred pages," she said, coming around the couch to perch on the chair across from him, wineglass still in hand. Frank was indeed in his boxer shorts, his bare legs stretched out across the length of her couch and showing no signs of moving. He had a hardback book braced between his hands, one finger stuck between the pages to mark his place.
"The last twenty pages are just footnotes and information about online resources, half of which are out of date already," he said. "Why do they do that? Why print a web address on paper? You can't even call it a link if you can't click it, it's fucking ridiculous."
Lindsay finally caught sight of the cover of the book in Frank's hands, but it wasn't Aromanticism In The Digital Age. "Asexuality, Aromanticism, And The Human Need For Connection," she read, tilting her head to one side to get a better view of it. "I didn't leave that one sitting out."
"No, when I finished the first one I browsed through your bookshelves, found this one in the guest-bedroom-slash-study."
"You went looking through my books?"
"They're just sitting there out in the open. It's not like I went through your drawers or read your texts or something."
She narrowed her gaze at him. "Why the sudden interest in obscure queer identities?"
"I think this," he gestured with the book, "might be me."
"...Asexual?" she asked, feeling her eyebrows rise towards her hairline.
"No," Frank said on a snort. "No, that seems to be more or less human standard for me, as much as I hate to admit it. I mean the other one. Aromantic."
"Ah," Lindsay said, about the most she could manage in that moment. She'd been through sensitivity training for this sort of thing, of course she had, given her firm’s client base. But suddenly Frank was the expert on something she'd been putting off educating herself about, and it made her feel off balance. "Didn't figure you were much for labels," she said when the silence stretched on too long.
"I'm not. I haven't been, anyway. But this makes a lot of sense to me."
"So that's just—" She cut herself off, sensitivity training finally starting to leech back into her brain. "You're aromantic? That's cool, that's good. Thank you for, for trusting me with that information." That was what you were supposed to say, right? He'd more or less just come out to her, that was the thing to say, seemed like.
Frank made a face. "Don't do that, don't go all politically correct on me. This can't have been a surprise for you."
She scoffed incredulously. "Oh I don't know, I can be a little shocked."
"But that's not what's bothering you."
"I'm not bothered! Why would I be bothered? Because I am so not bothered. I have never been bothered by queer identities, why would I be?"
"You're not bothered, but you're on the brink of tears," he pointed out.
She deflated slightly. "Are you... breaking up with me?" she asked, pushing the words out in a rush. "Is this because I keep making jokes about us falling in love? I can see now how that was insensitive of me, it won't happen again."
"Stop," he said, waving her into silence. "I'm not breaking up with you. I just, I thought you should know."
"Why?"
"Because it's something that's true about me, and I think it's always going to be true."
He said it matter-of-factly, in his usual dry tone, but Lindsay wasn't quite sure how she was meant to react. "But what does it mean for us?" she pressed.
He paused a long moment, looking down at the book in his lap before raising his gaze back to hers. "I’m not in love with you. I'm not sure— I don't think I can love you."
"Oh," she said, swallowing thickly. She'd thought— she'd hoped, that maybe they really were falling in love, Frank's ongoing protests notwithstanding. That maybe she really could have a second chance at this, with someone who really saw her. That maybe she'd earned this little miracle in her life.
"But," Frank went on, gaze dropping away again, "and I can't believe I'm going to say this: there's a silver-lining to all of this."
"Yeah?" she said, hating that she could hear the tears in her voice. "What's that?"
"I'm never going to fall out of love with you, either," he said bluntly. "I'm never going to fall in love with someone else. I'm never going to leave you for a younger woman — or an older woman. I won't decide, six weeks before the wedding—"
"Five weeks."
"Five weeks before the wedding, that I just can't do this. I'll never do that to you. This is it, this is me, take it or leave it. It's not going to change."
"So you don't... feel anything for me?"
"I didn't say that. I'm not— I have feelings after all."
"Then how do you feel? About me? About this... whatever it is that we've been doing the last several months?"
"How do I feel about you?" He stared at her across the width of the coffee table, looking half bewildered and half annoyed as he gathered his thoughts. "I go to work every day, to a job that I hate. I hate the people, I hate the work, I hate the fucking office park I have to look at day in and day out. I've always hated it, and I never expect that to change. But now I spend all day thinking about the specific parts of it that I want to bitch about to you at the end of the day. And for some fucking reason, that's made the whole thing so much more tolerable. It's... unnatural.
"I've developed this twitch," he went on without pausing. "When someone says something stupid, I look down and to the side, because at some level I expect that you'll be standing there, and you'll do that thing where you half roll your eyes, but only in that tiny circle so no one can see it but me. Last month when you went out of town for that seminar, I didn't leave my apartment for three days. I watched a marathon of old Jeopardy episodes and yelled about how fucking stupid the contestants were, but it was hollow because I was yelling about it alone, like some old man who doesn't realize his family has all left him.
"I don't like anybody, but you're the only person I've known since college who can genuinely make me laugh. You're the only person I've ever dated who hasn't made me feel like I have to put on a mask and pretend to be a good person, a nice person. When I want to be alone what I really want is to avoid the world and talk shit about it with you. When I couldn't take that Jeopardy marathon anymore, I went flipping through channels, and I happened across the end of Jerry Maguire, did you ever see that steaming turd of sentimentality?"
Lindsay snorted, her tears starting to recede as she listened to his rambling. "It was kind of hard to avoid for a few years there."
"Do you remember that scene at the end, the stupid fucking scene everyone quoted for months without stop? That 'you complete me' bullshit? It was that scene, and I almost changed the channel just on principle, but then I thought, 'I wonder if Lindsay hates this movie as much as I do?' And then, the stupidest fucking thing — Tom Cruise said something about how his great sports victory wasn't nearly complete, because he couldn't share it with Renée Zellweger."
"Jerry Maguire, his name is— it's Jerry Maguire."
"He was Tom fucking Cruise. He's always Tom Cruise."
"It's the name of the movie! It's right there!"
"My point is, as trite and idiotic as that scene is, I fucking understood it. Maybe for the first time in my life. If I can't tell you about something that pissed me off, it's not complete. My hatred, is not complete. I spent years, decades, content to be alone with my hatred of everything and everyone. Then you came along and upset that balance, made me externalize all of this so it's something that lives outside of me now, something that we share. I should hate that, I should hate that you made me dependent in that way. But I don't. I can't hate you. I can't love you, but I can't hate you either. And I think that means something, given the shit-show the rest of my life is. Out of seven billion people on this dung-heap of a planet, you're the only one I don't loathe the idea of seeing every day between now and my inevitable lingering death. It's not love, and it's never going to be, and I still don't believe in miracles. But it's something, something that wasn't there before you."
"...Oh," she said, eloquently, when he didn't go on.
"And I figure, since you're a professional and all," he gestured with the book again, "maybe you won't be a complete asshole about this whole aromantic thing."
"Well," Lindsay said, still trying to wrap her head around all of that, trying to figure out what to say that wouldn’t make him run for the hills. Humor, she needed humor. "Since you don't love me and can't hate me, I suppose I can't really move the needle much if I say..." She looked up at him and held his gaze, aiming for more mock-sincerity than she felt as she said, "'You had me at hello. You had me at hello.'"
He groaned dramatically. "Please just promise me you'll never say that again."
"On one condition," she replied, trying to stifle her grin, feeling nearly giddy. "You find where you left your pants and get them back on. I ordered a pizza on my way home, and if I have to see one more person who isn't you today, I might murder them, so you're on door-duty."
Frank smiled at that, lopsided and genuine. "Deal."