There is a stretch of two lane road not far from where we live that winds through mountains and small towns, the kind of road that exists alongside the interstate rather than instead of it. Most people take the highway. We take the back road.

We always have. Partly because neither of us has ever been in much of a hurry to get anywhere in particular, and partly because there is something about those roads that the highway cannot offer. The pace of them. The way they move through places rather than past them. The sense, driving through a small town with its shops and its church and its one set of traffic lights, that time moves differently here than it does on six lanes of concrete going seventy miles an hour.

It reminds me of before. Before the interstate made it unnecessary to know the names of the towns between here and there. Before convenience became the only thing that mattered.

These are the drives where we talk. About everything and nothing in particular. About things we have been thinking and have not yet said. About things we disagree on and things we have always seen the same way. The conversation unfolds without effort on those roads, the way it does when two people have been talking to each other for long enough that silence is just another form of the same thing.

Because sometimes we do go quiet. The radio on low or just the sound of the road and the air coming through the windows. And that silence is not awkward or empty. It is comfortable in the way that only happens between people who no longer need to perform for each other.

It is on those drives that he puts his hand on my leg.

Not every time. Not as a habit or a routine. Just sometimes, wordlessly, his hand moves from the gear shift or the wheel and rests on my leg and stays there. And I will place my hand on top of his. And we will sit like that for a while, not saying anything, just driving.

It feels like a sigh of comfort. That is the only way I know how to describe it.

I have written in another essay about wanting more spontaneous tenderness. About wishing he would come up behind me in the kitchen without being asked, or motion for me to come closer on the sofa rather than waiting for me to move toward him. Those things are true and I have not stopped wanting them. I mentioned it to him once or twice over the years. He made a joke of it, gently, the way he tends to deflect things he does not quite know how to meet directly. I understood. I did not bring it up again.

We have been together long enough that I know the shape of how he loves. It does not always look the way I imagined it would when I was younger and had ideas about what love was supposed to feel like. It is quieter than that. More practical. Less given to grand gestures or spontaneous declarations.

But on a two lane road through the mountains, windows down, going nowhere in particular, his hand finds my leg and stays there.

And I have come to understand that this is not the absence of tenderness. This is what tenderness looks like for him. Wordless and unhurried, offered without announcement, on a road that takes the long way round.

Twenty years in, I think I would rather have that than flowers.

— Kate