“I understand, Harley,” I answered her. “I had to ask, baby, because your public life looms so largely in your life, given your career and everything.”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened, honey, just like anyone who’s been struck by lightning the way I … we … were, would” she responded, head cocked slightly to her left, as if thinking more about what she wanted to say. A smile teased the corners of her trembling mouth.

We fell quiet, separately thinking about what we’d been experiencing since discovering each other.

“So if your public life isn’t the important thing right now,” I started to ask, after a minute, “what is? What’s important, Harley?”

She glanced quickly at me, and smiled, and then looked ahead again. “You, Aerin. Us … this relationship … how we can make sure that we get off to a good start in all this … these are what remain important to me, at this moment.”

Me, she’d said. This beautiful, sexy woman who staggers me with her mind as well as her heart says I’m important to her. More important than anything else in her life. She, who’s been through so much in her life, who’d struggled to overcome the odds, and came out of everything with her grace and humanity intact, has opened herself to the possibility of allowing someone else take over parts of that life. Without hesitation. With complete trust. To allow me to take her places she never expected to go, to be someone she never thought she’d be, to face censure, at times, maybe ridicule, or discomfort in public, in her world, at best, or hostility, at worst.

I was awed. I was speechless. I was overcome with … love. Hope. The thing that perches on the soul, as one of the poems that Nana made me memorize while picnicking with her under a favorite tree in Central Park one fine summer’s day, put it. Hope that “sings the tune without words – and never stops at all…”

Do I love her already?

Oh, I hope so.

I cleared my throat. “Baby, what were you referring to earlier, when you brought up the story about my Nana?”

She pulled my hand to her mouth and kissed it. She looked up briefly, looking past the glass sliding moonroof that spanned almost the entire ceiling of the car. She gently let go of my hand, depositing it softly on my lap, and then re-gripped the steering wheel. We exited the I-10 smoothly, and eased into Lincoln Blvd.