by Kris Ripper
“This pint is a dud.”
More filler about ice cream. More conversation about nothing in particular. More passing the time while the sun barely warmed the parts of us that chilled in the wind.
And through it all I missed Jamie’s arm through mine.
Chapter Twelve
LEAVING THEM AT night made me ache, and in none of the good ways. Yes, it was right. But it was also a brutal, dull-edged thing, gnawing at me as I lay alone and thought of them. Alex had continued to act reserved—not angry, and not petty, but somewhat more reticent than usual—but the show Jamie and I put on, pretending to be normal, made up for it.
Except I was reminded constantly that they were them and I was merely me. On the outside, as always. On the outside, where it was safest for everyone. On the outside, face pressed against the glass, cold wind at my back, wondering if they even knew how good they were together. You probably didn’t really have the capacity to understand that, if you were on the inside.
The unholy bitch of it was that I’d skated for years never caring about being on the inside of anything. It wasn’t interesting to me. Looked messy and out of control; who the hell wants that?
I hadn’t felt superior about it, more anthropological. Look at the homo sapiens in its natural habitat, as it forms various alliances with others of its kind. Pay special attention to the fascinating way these pairings interact with other pairings, and the occasional shake-ups and realignments over time. Obviously, David Attenborough probably wouldn’t have said “shake-ups,” but that’s what it often looked like. With a roll of the dice, people spilt apart and reformed with others.
God, being around the two of them for so many days in a row was making me fucking weird. Fucking weirder.
We spent a lot of time on the back porch. I spent a fair amount of time reading more Hazeltine. His heavy political essays were a little hard to trudge through, for reasons mostly of context (I googled Jesse Helms, after which I had to pick a fight with Jamie until I felt a little less sick). And also because reading the fury and passion of a life and death struggle when one already knows the story’s a tragedy—not a feel-good film—makes everything hurt. Every essay lambasting Congress for being a bunch of wimpy homophobes, every description of a death room where loved ones gathered for a final party, and most of all, every small moment in which Hazeltine wrote about his own mortality.
He’d been an at times terse essayist, almost taking on the tone of a war correspondent, writing from the trenches of a battle that he wouldn’t live to see the end of.
That we still hadn’t seen the end of. Though we had PrEP now, and decent antiretrovirals. Strides had been made since Enrico Hazeltine’s friends had passed around his beloved Polaroid and taken pictures of his body, all life gone.
“You’re crying,” Jamie said, stretching out beside me on the porch and pillowing her head on my thigh.
Good lord, the proximity of her to my—
I banished all thoughts about what’d I’d almost been slightly tempted to maybe think about and cleared my throat instead. “It’s just how helpless it feels, reading shit from the eighties, you know? Like, not fucking knowing what was happening, or how, or why, or how to avoid it, and knowing that it was all somehow tied in to what had been this feeling of relief. Being able to live a normal life, to not be afraid, and then having to be fucking terrified all the time.”
Way better than a cold shower. I was crying again.
She caught up my hand and pressed it to her lips. “Maybe you should yell at me about something.”
“Good idea. Too bad I can’t think of what you’ve done since two hours ago that fills me with rage.”
“Look, just because you like your meat cooked until it’s black—”
“—by which you mean no longer bleeding—”
“—doesn’t mean I should have to eat charred hockey puck burgers.” She kissed my knuckles again. “Still with the no sex rule?”
“You mean, have I decided it’s a good idea since I made the decision like the day before yesterday?”
“Well. It didn’t take me any time to know sex was a good idea. Your whole ‘issue’”—her voice supplied the air quotes—“isn’t about the quality of the fucking, Jus.”
She had me there. “It’s clearly a very bad idea, as anyone with a brain can see.”
I expected her to fight back, or to act insulted, even though she knew I didn’t mean it.
Instead she gazed up at me, all hazel eyes and dark brows and little lines at each corner of her lips that meant she was holding back. “Well, lad, I’ve another thought, then. Since you’re being irrationally pigheaded about the last one.” She raised her voice. “Alex! Make popcorn!”
He appeared at the kitchen door so quickly he’d almost certainly been listening to us. “What kind?”
“At least one sweet and one salty.”
“Or one salted caramel,” I suggested. “That’d be sweet and salty at the same time.”
“I’ll see what I have in the pantry.” His dark form receded from view.
I brushed fingers through her hair. “I just remembered why I keep you around. You order popcorn, Alex does your bidding.”
“That’s not the only order he follows, babe. He’d follow your orders, too, if you gave him any.”
We were staring at each other so intently that it was a little uncomfortable. “You think I should demand cocoa?”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Cork.”
“Don’t ‘Cork’ me in that tone of voice, Queen of Sheba.” She brushed my fingers down the side of her face. “He’d issue the orders, too. And I know you’d like that.”
I looked away. “The topic is closed.”
“Okay. I don’t want to be creepy. And I don’t want this to be a thing where you have to be pressured into the thing you want. So I’ll shut up now.”
“Thank Christ.”
But she kissed my knuckles once more, and closed her eyes, and stayed there until Alex called out that the popcorn was done.
“Well?” I snapped my fingers. “Where is it, minion?”
“In the living room. I set up a movie.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, hoping I looked forbidding. “It better be a good one.”
He smiled. “Promise. Come on.”
I poked Jamie. “Your boyfriend is up to no good.”
“God, I know. He’s the best.” She stretched outrageously across my lap, arms over her head, arching her back, breasts pressing against her shirt.
I groaned. “Fuck me. What the hell is wrong with my life right now?”
“Hmm?” she asked innocently, and did a little…wiggle. Which was anything but innocent.
My fists clenched with the desire to touch. “You’re a horrible tease. Usually I think that’s a fucked-up thing to say to a woman, but right now, I’m reconsidering my policy.”
She wiggled again. “Aw, Jus, I didn’t know you cared. Anyway, aren’t we supposed to be going inside?” This time she straightened up, smacking my thigh where she’d lately laid her head.
It shouldn’t have been a thing, certainly not through light cotton pants when she wasn’t even trying. Except I jumped—not with pain, but with the briefly envisioned promise of pain, the tantalizing rediscovery of something I once had and wanted again: the simplicity of a transactional sexual relationship. Instead of all this muddled feelings crap.
I vowed to get laid as quickly as possible. Once I was back home where such things were easy.
“Tease,” I muttered again.
She laughed.
He’d made the futon into a bed and piled all the pillows from their bed and mine against the back of it, a nest of softness that smelled like the three of us. Not that I was sniffing the linens or anything quite so pathetic as hoping that traces of them lingered on my pillowcases after we sorted everything out later.
I saw the movie and balked. “No.”
“Yep.” Alex, insuffe
rably serene, gestured to the bed-like-not-bed. “Get comfy.”
“No, seriously. Not watching this.”
“Mmm, Minnie Driver, though.” Jamie made herself comfortable on one side and I immediately sensed a trap. She patted the pillows next to her. Which would put me in between them.
I didn’t want to be in the middle, goddammit. But I didn’t want to watch motherfucking Good Will Hunting either. “It’s a dumb movie. Wah wah wah, tragic backstory, so sad.”
“Yes, but Minnie Driver,” Jamie repeated. “What about Minnie Driver are you missing?”
Alex tapped on the edge of the computer. “The sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be over.”
“I’m not fucking watching that drivel.”
He tilted his head to the side, eyebrows raised just a little. Fuck. It’s so fucking wrong when people know you really well. I needed to cultivate more strangers in my life.
I heaved myself on the other side of the bed, as close to the edge as possible. “I despise you both. Almost as much as I despise this movie.”
I’d pushed it too far. Alex turned a sweet smile on his lady. “That means he finds us charming and we make him have feelings he resents having because he’d rather just dismiss us.”
The only response I could possibly have to that was burying my face in the nearest pillow. Stunningly accurate. On both topics.
I mustered what fight I had left, along with what scraps of dignity I could gather, and raised my head. “This movie is trite as fuck. It’s a bromance with a tertiary female character to keep it from being too gay, but the meaningful relationships in the film are all between men. It’s obsessed with shallow notions of worth and success. It’s the most offensive kind of redemption narrative, in which the broken character is essentially fixed by a big hug from a father figure. And the ending is a cop-out.”
There. Done. Analysis delivered.
Alex hit play and snuggled down beside Jamie. “It’s like I can feel him trying to hate the movie, but not quite making it. Can’t you?”
“I mean, all that’s true?” She paused. “But in another way, I think the things that make it flawed are also the things that make it feel real. Like, I bonded with professors sometimes because they were old dudes who expected me to have my shit together. I sometimes even hugged them. Maybe just because, or maybe because I had a totally crap father figure and some part of my brain wanted to replace him with someone who wasn’t crap.”
Alex raised a hand like the smartest kid in class. “Yeah, and also, I have a best friend I’ve known since childhood who I’d do anything for.”
She nudged him. “Is it a bromance?”
“Sometimes. When he lets it be, it’s more than that.”
I sighed so hard it hurt my chest. “Shut up, both of you. I’m busy watching a very stupid movie. Against my will.”
“Uh oh,” she whispered. “We’re non-consensually movie-watching with Justin right now.”
“He secretly loves this movie, I told you.”
“Even though he thinks it’s stupid?”
“Nah. Even though he thinks loving it makes him stupid.”
“That’s tragic, babe.”
“I know. He’s super broken.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud. Then I clobbered Alex with the closest pillow.
He opened his arms. “Hug it out, Jus.”
I hit him again and grudgingly settled in for the stupid, stupid movie. Which I really didn’t love. And I certainly didn’t tear up at the hugging scene. Whatever. I ate more than my fair share of popcorn in order to punish them, which lost a little of its impact when I realized they were letting me.
Chapter Thirteen
WE HAD NO idea when we’d be able to get back to the Saints house again, and we’d never stayed so long before. Closing up the house felt oddly final, as if we were packing it away for months instead of the few weeks that were far more likely.
Alex seemed to be thinking the same thing. “We need another project.”
Jamie laughed. “This house is nothing but projects.”
“No, I mean, a big one. Like the back porch. Something to kind of drive us, you know?” He glanced my way.
“The kitchen?” I suggested. As it was, the kitchen was pretty…bare. It was a rather narrow rectangle, with L-shaped cabinetry. We’d put a small table on the long wall, trying to break up the feeling that the kitchen was a glorified hallway from the living room to the back door, but it had really only compressed the space further. “Did we ever decide if this wall is load-bearing?”
“We could go under the house to make sure, but our bedroom runs this whole side of the house. Denny said if it was load bearing, it’d go up through the bedroom, too. And even if they’d done a dangerous remodel, there would be supports up through the attic. Though I might still ask her to come out and make sure.”
I nodded like I was totally not about pulling out walls without regard to their load.
Alex shut the fridge he’d been ostensibly cleaning and stepped back. “I still think that’s the only way to go with this room, but I think it’s pretty much beyond our abilities right now. Like, do we still want a downstairs bathroom? I just learned how to use a saw. I can’t do…electrical, or plumbing.”
“Jus says there’s nothing YouTube can’t teach us.” She shot me a wink, which I returned.
See? Everything was normal and under control.
“We need a list.” I pulled out my phone, which was where I kept my lists for Chad. “So the kitchen’s on the list. What else are we doing?”
Alex sat down across from me. “We could paint. We want to paint pretty much everything.”
I typed it in. Then added subtasks for different rooms. “We’ll skip the kitchen and living room, since we want to do a whole kitchen remodel. Dining room, uh, what’s the other living room called?”
“Family room? Sitting room? Parlor?” Jamie suggested. “Is it weird that we basically never use that side of downstairs?”
“Hey, that’s a very important room. It’s where we keep lumber and tools. Plus, what else would we use it for?”
“Hmm.” She leaned over my shoulder, but close, like she was making no effort to keep a casual distance between us. “I could think of some things. Would people find it odd if we converted the dining room to a BDSM playroom?”
“Cork,” I said. Repressively.
“All for you, baby. Anyway, add staircase and upstairs hallway, bedrooms one, two, and three, and bathroom. Do you want paint in the attic?”
“No. Maybe on the wall parts, but not the roof. I like the kind of rustic thing.”
“We could get some mounted animal heads if you wanted, do it up like a hunting cabin.”
I mock-elbowed her and she laughed.
Alex cleared his throat. “At some point we’ll want to do something with the floors. At least clean up where it still looks like carpet was pulled out.”
The previous owner—lovely though Jamie assured us he’d been—had liked cats. Not in a hoarding way, or anything so sensational. Just he’d had some cats, and the house smelled a little catty when we walked in, especially after being shut up a long time. Pulling the carpets had been the first thing we did, and the wood floors were pretty awesome, but still needed at least a light sanding and a coat of stain or wax or whatever it was one did to old hardwood floors to make them look good again.
I tapped it in to my list. “I’m not going to list off the rooms for that one. Presumably if we were renting a sander, we’d do the whole house at once.”
“Either long before or long after we paint,” Jamie added. “For reasons of dust.”
“Clever girl.”
“I think you’ll find—” breasts pressed against my shoulder “—I’m a woman.”
I swallowed hard. “Excuse me, madam. I apologize.”
“You’re damn right.”
“If the two of you are done flirting, I have more things for the list.”
Shit. I g
lanced up at Alex, who was frowning a little. It couldn’t be jealousy (there was nothing to be jealous of), but it was definitely something, and it made me feel a little sick. I slid out of my chair and handed off my phone to Jamie. “Using the facilities. You keep going.”
Then I escaped upstairs to hide in the bathroom, like the hero I am.
* * *
If I’d thought they would lay on the pressure to sleep with them for the last night, I would have been disappointed. If I’d expected, for instance, arguments along the lines of We don’t have to have sex and There’s no rule against cuddling. Or if I’d even allowed myself to kind of assume it would happen, my mind exploring the fringes of a very secret fantasy, in which nothing really happened but I could feel their bodies around me as I slept.
I don’t know why that. The only time we’d shared a bed it hadn’t been like that at all. I’d been so fucking drunk—and so fucking terrified of what we’d done—that I mostly lay there feeling guilty and like the sky was falling, both literally and metaphorically. What a waste.
But now might be my time to make up for that, to enjoy it, to enjoy them. It was so real to me that they would cajole and beg for my presence in their bed that when they didn’t, I was…
Not gutted or anything. I wasn’t stupid. And they weren’t mine. It would have been ludicrous to feel entitled to them.
I was surprised, though. And, okay, slightly disappointed, if I was being brutally honest with myself. I would have argued against it, obviously, if they’d brought it up. But it wouldn’t have taken much to get me to give in.
I’d killed any sense of possibility between us by saying no. I didn’t regret it. It was the only reasonable thing. But apparently that amorphous potential had meant more to me than I realized; I missed it, now that it was gone.
The next morning—Sunday, our last morning at the beach—I trudged down to the kitchen a little later than usual. I hadn’t slept in exactly. More lay there for an extended period of time thinking about the quality of the light in the attic, and the lingering scent of dust, and how much warmer I’d’ve been downstairs in their room.