“Damn, Cash.”
“I followed him and wondered how I could get so deep with a man that I knew when his smell changed. He went only two blocks from here. He met his wife for coffee only two blocks from the bed he left me in. My bed.” I shook my head. There were tears the day I discovered his other life, that I was the other life. I let them come until there were none left, until I was sure I would never cry again. “It was worse because I could see that he loved her, worshipped her. Worse because I could see she loved him, but she was like me. She could smell that something was different. But she wouldn’t follow. It would drive her insane.”
He wrapped his hand around mine. “Fuck ‘em. Fuck both of them.”
I looked down at the scars on his hand. Half a smile. The sad smile. “Yeah. Fuck ‘em.”
Cahir
When I told Cash about Zion, I felt like origami. A whole thing that folded in on itself over and over and over again until something small and visually pleasing and less than was left. When she told me about Kevin, she expanded until I wondered if I would choke. Everything was pushed out. Everything but her.
There was no sorrow. No anger. No shame. Just a fullness that said she was whole and right. Someone to be feared. I was grateful all over again that she was my friend. I was reminded all over again that nothing was stronger than a woman who decided survival was beneath her-she would thrive.
I knew what happened to her and what happened to me were different. She was lied to. She was spun into a world that didn’t exist where others could see. I was…violated. And that still made my stomach turn. I still shook my head and tried to point to all the ways Zion was broken and not really to blame. But when I pointed it was with less conviction.
I didn’t know what that meant.
I thought about it in the car when I drove home. I thought about it in the elevator and when I walked down the hall to my apartment. I thought so hard I didn’t see. I almost tripped over them: a book and Tupperware. Still warm. I opened it. Pasta. Hand cut. Uneven. Fatter in some places than others. It smelled good. And wasn’t that a bitch?
There was a book. A biography. Those were the books I picked out for her when she took me back to her book store, the one she took me to on that first date. Stories of people as powerful as she was. She would give them back to me and ask me to read them as well, to read the parts that interested her. I flipped open the book and tried to keep the popcorn and M&M’s down. Yes. There was her handwriting, small and fine, in the margins.
I went into my apartment and dumped it all on the kitchen counter. I fished my phone out of my pocket. Cash. Cash would understand.
“I don’t miss you, Cahir. Jesus.”
It would have made me laugh any other time. I knew it was supposed to make me laugh. “She was here. She left pasta. And a book.”
The silence dragged, and I was drowning again. It was familiar. Welcome.
“Are you hungry?”
I laughed. Because I was surprised. Because I wasn’t drowning for just a second.
“If you aren’t hungry, throw it away. Throw away the book too.”
I looked at the bowl. “I am a little hungry.”
She sighed. “Then eat, Cahir. I hope it makes you feel better.”
“It won’t.”
She hung up.
I was a coward. The worst kind.
Seven
Cahir
“You’ve got thirty minutes to get dressed.” Cash hung up the phone.
I stared at it. She woke me out of the Zion dream. At the wrong place-the happy place. When all I could feel was the squeeze of her body as she pulled me deeper into her, eyes open to stare into mine and banish me from my own reality. I didn’t need that. I needed to wake with the anger and the shock. It was the only way I could lay still and feel justified about being in my bed alone. It was the only way I stopped myself from reaching for her.
My phone pinged with an address and a message: twenty-seven minutes.
I laughed. It took me twenty minutes to get dressed and fifteen to drive to the address she gave me.
I parked under the bridge and stepped out of my car. I looked around until I saw her reddish-brown halo of hair.
“Farmer’s market?”
She peeked at me over her sunglasses. “We should do something about how hungry you are.”
I almost cried. I threw an arm around her shoulders. “You’re a good friend, Cash.”
“Your best one.” She bumped me with her hip. “Let’s go.”
The market sprawled out under the heavy overpass. Box trucks ringed the outside with the names of farms blazoned on their sides. Oil popped and sizzled. There was the scrape of metal spatulas on griddles. Long plastic and wooden tables and large colorful signs.There was laughter and children and their tired but happy parents. There were couples and groups of friends. There was Cash and I.
We didn’t start with food. I bought her a purse and didn’t know when I took my wallet out. I had a lemonade with something that made me widen my eyes. She laughed at me.
“Elderflower, mint, a little lemon. Auntie Beulah does it right,” she said.
“Auntie?”
“A friend of my grandmother’s.”
“What’s your grandmother like? You talk about her a lot.”
“I should. She’s my favorite. I barely had to ask her to let me have the apartment over her shop.”
I blinked. I knew she lived over a store. I never asked whose store it was. Never cared. There was parking and a set of steps that led up to Cash’s apartment. The store didn’t matter. Dumb of me. “What kind of shop?”
Cash wagged her finger. “Uh-uh. We’re not here to talk about me.”
“But it’s fun.” I put a little petulance and whine into my voice and hoped she would-
Yeah. She laughed. That was good. Real good.
“I want to know-”
“I’ll tell you,” I said.
“I know you will.” She led me over to a table full of flowers. I didn’t think she realized she wandered to it. She ran her hands over the flowers, buried her face in them, smiled at them.
I slipped the florist cash and pointed at two of the bigger buckets. She beamed at me. I put a finger to my lips and mouthed that I would come back to get them. Like I had to go back and get a pallet of little succulents and tomato vines that Cash cooed over the way most women cooed over babies.
I didn’t recognize myself.
I didn’t know if I was grateful for that or miserable.
“What do you want to know?”
She looked up from the flowers. There was pollen on her nose. I brushed it away. And I brushed away the urge that came to me.
“I want to play pretend.” She looped an arm around my waist and picked up the basket we hadn’t put a single bit of food in.
“What are we pretending?”
“That tomorrow we’re letting Zion and Kevin back into our lives.”
Two things burst in my chest- the hope I kept buried because it was foolish, dumb, would probably get me killed and the wrongness of Cash going back to that man.
“Tell me what it’s like to have Zion back.”
We went to a table heavy with root vegetables. We didn’t talk. Just picked up sweet, red, and purple potatoes. Golden beets. She pulled out her money. I put it in my pocket and paid.
“Zion’s back.” I took the basket out of Cash’s hands. She put tomatoes in it. “Okay. Um. Zion’s back.”
“You can do it.”
Could I? I closed my eyes and stood still. Blocked out the scent of Cash’s perfume. Vanilla and caramel and maybe apples.
“It’s quieter. Muted. Tight like violin strings.” I shake my head. “I feel like my head’s under water, and I’m probably going to drown in all the shit I’m feeling. Part of me is relieved that she’s back. Part of me is angry with myself for being so weak. I took her back. She broke me and didn’t try to fix me, fix us, fix herself. But I took her back. I told her it was all
okay. Again. How will she break me this time?”
Cash’s fingers were slim and long. Cool when they slipped between mine. I put apples and pears in the basket. Blackberries. Odd. Blackberry season should have been over.
“That’s what I think when I wake up in the morning.” I smiled when Cash pulled my wallet out of my pocket for me. I pointed to the card I wanted to use. She put my wallet back in my pocket and after she signed the receipt she kept the card and put her hand back in mine.
“What do you think?”
I liked the color of her eyes. We walked through patches of sun that lit them up. Cinnamon brown. As spicy as her personality and as warm as her laugh. The perfect match to the freckles over her cheeks and nose.
I shook my head. “How will she break me this time? She’s contained. I’ve always known it, but now I always see it. Every time she touches her stomach I want to force a pregnancy test in her hands. But I don’t want to know. If she’s pregnant, she’ll keep it, and I’ll really drown. I can’t be a father.”
“Why not?”
I pushed her hair out of her face when she wouldn’t look up at me.
She laughed and pushed my hand away. “What? I think you’d be a dope father.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Probably.”
She laughed again.
“Before, it was that I was busy. When I have a family, I want to be able to come home at the same time every day. I want to be there on weekends. I want to be there for games and practices. For nights when they’re still a baby and won’t sleep. Chicken pox.”
“Do kids still get that?”
“Fuck. I don’t know. But I want to be there. I don’t want to be the one that shows up with just money. I want to be a parent. I want to actually raise my child.”
“And you can’t right now?”
“No. I’m stretched in too many directions, too many places. Too many people depending on me. And I love it. I don’t want to stop yet. A couple years?” I shrugged.
“I’d have to leave her. I’d have to leave a kid.” I shook my head. “Or there’s no baby and I watch it pull her apart from the inside out. Now we’re drowning together and there’s shit I can do to stop it. She won’t help herself. Not in a way that fixes it. She just decides and does. Fuck me and if it hurts me or kills my happiness.”
Cash rubbed the hand that held hers. Rubbed the fingers I turned mottled pink and white.
I loosened my grip a little. There was shame in that, shame that I couldn’t let go. But when I tried her fingers tightened over mine. I looked into her eyes. She was my friend. My best one.
“I um-” I sighed. “There would be some magic moments. Maybe the sex would be what it used to be.”
“Men.” Cash rolled her eyes.
I laughed. I never laughed when I talked about Zion. “But I’d spend almost the entire time angry and disgusted with myself for letting her back in my life after what she did.”
“What would you be doing the rest of the time?”
“Worrying if she were pregnant and terrified that she was going to poke more holes in condoms or do something else to make me feel like I wasn’t even important enough to have a say.”
She stopped me. In between the donut cart and the gyro stall. She hugged me. Arms tight around my neck and her whole body flush to mine. Hair in my nose. I put the basket at my feet and wrapped my arms around her waist, waist so small I thought I could probably encircle it with my hands. Everything about her was so small. And yet she took up every available space in my mind in that moment. She took up all the air and replaced it with something I liked better and couldn’t name. I closed my eyes and prayed that we could stay like that forever or at least a lifetime or two.
She loosened her arms when someone bumped into us. They muttered a hurried apology when they saw her face.
Her hand came to my cheek. I leaned into it and kept my eyes on hers. I hoped and waited for her to just tip her head back and-
Because I couldn’t do it. And I didn’t know why.
Instead her hand slid back into mine. I picked up the basket and stepped out of the sun with her.
“What would it be like if Kevin came back?”
She shook her head. “Kevin isn’t coming back, Cahir.”
It was a long while before I remembered to breathe again.
Eight
Cahir
“How can you live in a place that doesn’t have a single plant?” Cash slid mushrooms into the pan.
Things changed after the farmer’s market. Not in any kind of dramatic way. Our routine just tilted, slipped, a little bit. We cooked after the farmer’s market in her kitchen. She turned on some producer from Brazil and bopped around her kitchen. Loose hips and long arms that called then screamed at me until I was there with her. We ate. The next day when I called her about lunch she sent me a recipe. I grabbed the ingredients and was at her apartment, grateful that we could have so much control over our schedules.
It was easy to be in the kitchen with her. Our knives never clashed and our hands never reached for the same things. I learned her music and sang along with her. We danced while fish and seafood simmered. While chicken thighs were weighed down and made the oil pop in protest.
We never made pasta.
I shrugged and stirred the mushrooms until they were all coated in butter. “I never thought about it. I’ve killed so many plants.”
“Murderer.” She bumped my hip with hers so I would know she was joking.
“My problem is I want to give them too much love. I water and water and water them even though I don’t have to, even though they didn’t ask for it.”
“Hmm. How interesting.”
I shook my head. “Shut up.”
“Shutting.”
I laughed and took over stirring the rice.
She sprinkled salt and cracked pepper over the mushrooms and grated more parmesan into the rice. “I can’t remember the last time I had risotto. I’m excited.”
“I’ll be excited if we don’t fuck it up.”
She grinned. “We don’t fuck things up.”
And we didn’t. I sat across from her at the dining table that I never used in the studio apartment that was all concrete and way too much space and poured us wine. I watched her eyes slide shut when she took the first bite. I grinned when she danced in her chair and thought of all the other kinds of risotto we could make, the other things I could cook without her help that would make her dance like that.
I wanted to move. I wanted to sit beside her and have the most awkward meal of my life because I kept her left hand in my right. We didn’t even need to talk. I just wanted her skin against mine. I wanted to press my ear to her chest to hear her heart beat and her voice before it was released from her body.
I really didn’t recognize myself.
“Come to a thing with me this weekend,” I said.
“Okay. What’s the thing?” Her eyes didn’t leave the risotto.
“Casual. Just some food. Friends.”
“Here?”
“No.” I cleared my throat. “My parent’s house.”
There were her eyes. Wide with alarm. “You want me to meet your parents?”
“I want you to hang out with me and my friends on my parent’s back deck while I take over my father’s grill and smoker.”
“Ugh. A smoker.”
“I’m thinking about smoking some fish.”
“A snapper. We could stuff it with something.”
“Grill some crabs?”
Her eyes were wide with amazement, curiosity. “I’ve never had grilled crabs before.”
“I baste them in a butter Old Bay sauce.”
“I love Old Bay.”
“Of course you do, Baltimore.”
She laughed. “Fine. You’ve bribed me well. I’ll meet your parents.”
Cassidy
He picked me up and smiled at my outfit. “You look like O’Shea.”
“Do I?” I looked down at my m
om jeans, crop top, and favorite Doc Martens. “Crabs come with their own dress code. I don’t make the rules.”
He laughed and pulled away from my apartment. We went to the supermarket. Then the farmer’s market. Then the wharf. My hand rested in his almost the entire time.
I liked it. Liked that that was where our friendship was. I slipped a hand into Junie’s once. I looped my arm through hers. She shook me loose and said she needed both hands free in case “someone ran up on us.”
Cahir reached for my hand sometimes, and I didn’t realize it. It was that natural to me. Or he threw an arm around my shoulders and I only wondered why it took him so long to do it. Sometimes he smiled down at me. Just smiled. Sometimes he looked at me, and I didn’t want to ask what the looks meant.
Whenever I gathered the courage to ask, he was Cahir again and there was laughter between us, sunshine between us, something precious.
He drove us to the home he grew up in. A sprawling, graceful brick Tudor with ivy and a garden that made my grin break into a smile.
“I thought you’d like that,” he said.
I was out of the car, my head bent to smell the eucalyptus that must have been a labor of love to grow. “I can’t believe you kill plants.”
“It was my one great failing as a mother,” a soft, lilting voice said.
I knew Cahir was adopted. We talked about it more than once. And still the strawberry-blond woman with her open smile was a surprise to me.
“I’m Maeve.” She came to me with her arms open.
I stepped into them. “I’m Cassidy.”
“Oh, sweet darling, I know. He told me he was bringing a friend I hadn’t met before, and I pumped him for information. Cahir’s had the same friends since high school.”
Better as Friends Page 4