by Gray, Ace
“And, I dunno, it’s hard to explain but it’s something about the way he loves me. Like he understands every little part and rather than see them as weaknesses or reasons to leave or things to give up on he cherishes them without coddling. He makes me a better woman.”
As she finishes, the words become heavy, weighing me down with truth. She was right. It does clear up my perspective listening to someone else. It shows me that the feeling in the pit of my stomach, multiplying like my own type of cancer, might be exactly what kills us.
I keep trying to find something to fill my hands in the brewhouse, hoping it’ll fill my time. Today is Luna’s surgery. All signs point to catching her ovarian cancer early but we won’t know until today when she has a hysterectomy and the doctors can run some tests.
Mina has been keeping me updated on her mom. It’s one of the only things we speak about anymore. A sentence here, a tidbit there, then nothing.
At first I tried researching treatments, studies, doctors, anything that might be of value but when I tried to tell Mina about them, she got up and walked away, my words left hanging in the air. Sure, the information was a little selfish, a way for me to cope with everything, to feel like I had control in some small way, but I thought Mina liked that about me. I thought she liked a lot of things about me…
I started researching grief counseling after that.
And I let her feel anything she wanted while all I felt was alone. Neglected. Unloved. Just when I was about to break down and tell her how it hurt, she fed me something small. A maybe orgasm, a pinky wrapped around mine, and I convinced myself it was enough.
For now.
But what if Luna’s cancer spread? If they found it in her lymph nodes coming and going? If she was sick, really sick, would those small signs of Mina’s stop? Would she move so deep into that cave of grief that I couldn’t find her? Find us?
Tanner seems to think that’s a hell no.
No matter how busy I try and keep my hands, it’s not enough. Not today. Not when we find out what Luna faces and that determines what I do. Not when none of it is fair. I blow out a deep breath.
“It went well!” Mina yells, life suddenly filling the brewhouse. “Really well. They didn’t even have to take more. They don’t think it spread.” She’s waving her phone wildly as she runs for me, light and life back in her face.
I’m not ready for her when she jumps into my arms and wraps her legs around my waist. I’m not ready for her being back to bright and sunny and head over heels either.
“That’s great, Meen.” My words are muffled with the momentum of her but that doesn’t make them any less true. Being happy about her mom isn’t something I’m teetering on. Just the edge of everything else. “The surgery went well?”
“Looks like it. The lab work they did while she was under came back clear. They have to wait a few weeks for the full biopsy, but the doctors don’t anticipate any news.” She kisses me as the punctuation to her sentence and just like every time before, I kiss her back. Unlike every time before, I want to pull away. I can’t get there right now, that euphoric state from before. “We should celebrate.”
I don’t want to. I want to finish up the last bits of my work then sip a beer in silence while I contemplate what this means. Where we’ll go. I want to be alone. I want some quiet in my head.
“Sounds great, anything you want,” I say instead with a hollow smile on my face and a hand sliding down to the small of her back.
“How about going out with Courtney?” she asks, pulling her phone out and texting before I answer. Of all the things we could do tonight, this sounds the worst. “She’s dating someone new, we’ll double date.” Correction, this is worse.
“We could just stay home?” I offer even though I know she and Courtney already have a time and a place picked via text.
“We’re young and our whole lives are ahead of us.” She smiles down at the screen rather than at me. “We’re going out.” She flashes me a smile almost as winning as the one she sent the screen. One that almost makes me weak at the knees. One that would have if she hadn’t already busted my metaphorical kneecaps with those goddamned letters.
I go home and get dressed in haze—why I even change is beyond me, but I do. Courtney doesn’t need clean pants. If Mina remembered me, us, she wouldn’t care either.
When did this divide between us become insurmountable?
I feel it widen as we make small talk in our kitchen, doing that dance that we’ve perfected with all the steps around rather than toward each other. And when we walk to the bar and she doesn’t brush her hand against the back of mine. When I fell for Mina McLennan one of the reasons was that she didn’t make me go out with other people, or if we did, she made me feel like I was the only person in the room. All it would take is a singular knuckle brushing against mine…
But tonight she didn’t do it.
She didn’t remember. Either that or she doesn’t care. So I’m left standing on the precipice, staring at that ever-widening divide.
“Hi guys.” Courtney’s voice pulls me from my thoughts. I give her a half hug and a smile, and she sends back the same courtesy. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Mina answers. “We’re great,” she corrects.
“Fine or great or somewhere in between?” Courtney asks with a laugh and then they’re off. Running like the wind.
I don’t dislike Courtney—on her own we can talk beer and camping and have some decent debates—but her and Mina together can be overwhelming. But Mina always remembered that I was here. Past tense.
The lump in my throat just won’t swallow down.
“And what do you do, Jim?” the guy with Courtney asks; I’ve missed his name, why he’s here, why I’m supposed to care—all of it.
“It’s James,” I correct.
“He’s a brewer,” Mina jumps in. “For Gold Mine Brewing. He worked in Olympia before that.”
“What does a brewer go to school for?”
I suck in a deep breath ready to tell him my story as banal as I think jobs and degrees and such small talk actually is but Mina jumps in.
“He studies all the time.” She laughs and slaps me on the shoulder. “I mean on his phone, computer, even when I’m talking.”
She doesn’t even mention that I have a philosophy degree. And I study, sure, but Mina is lying. I never sit on my phone with her. Not after I found out how badly that hurt her three years ago. My anger makes the tips of my ears hot.
“Do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day in your life,” he answers and the very sudden urge to punch him balls my fist beneath the table.
Mina brushes her finger tips across the dips and valleys of my wadded up hand. I pull it away. It’s not even remotely comforting paired with her barbed words tonight.
“What are you brewing now?” Courtney asks, shooting Mina some seriously arched eyebrows before looking over to me, eyes wide with sympathy.
“A few—”
“Stouts,” Mina interrupts. “Ya know those barrel aged ones that Gold Mine does each year? They’re getting the 2021 ones into barrels this week.”
I arch away from her and my face pinches. She’s officially short circuited. In the entire time I’ve known her, Mina has never stopped my words short. Matter of fact, I always got the sense she hung on my words. Tonight, I have no idea why she’s steamrolling my sentences, why she’s flattening me.
“Do you like the barrel aging program?” Courtney tries again and I can hear in her tone and tell by the crinkle of her face, she can see the metaphorical sparks flying from Mina’s smoking brain.
I wait a few deep breaths to answer. A few deep breaths when I look over at Mina and wait for whatever she’s about to say. Her eyes meet mine, holding them for just a second before her smile turns sullen in the most beautiful way. Her gaze falls to the floor and her shoulders round at whatever she finds written on my face.
She’s usually so beautiful like this, tragic in a way I wa
nt to cradle gently, but tonight I don’t know the woman sitting next to me. I turn back to Courtney and answer, “Usually I’d rather just brew an IPA for Mina.”
“What in the hell was that?” I ask Mina as I walk beside her, hands shoved deep into my pockets beneath the crisp fall moonlight of Pyramid Peak.
“I was just trying to help.” Her arms are woven around her stomach as she walks beside me, not once shifting to reach for me. She’s right there but she’s a million miles away.
“Help me what? Make sentences? I’ve been known to manage once or twice.” There’s an edge to my voice I don’t mean. It’s weeks of pent up frustration, it’s Tanner, and her absence. It’s something that I don’t mean for her to see but it’s peeking out anyway. I take a deep breath and try and pull it back in. “Sorry, Meen, I haven’t felt that stupid in a long time. Or like I wasn’t good enough.” I sigh, pulling one hand from my pocket to rub my temples.
“That’s not…I’d never…” She chokes on her words.
I sigh. “I know,” I say because I do. I know that she wasn’t trying to hurt me but it doesn’t change that she did. “I’m just particularly tired of us accidentally being wrecking balls in each other’s lives today. First it was me, now it’s you. Isn’t it supposed to get easier?”
“I’m a wrecking ball?” she asks softly, her words still rough as they work their way out.
“No, Meen, that’s not…it’s just that…” I growl in frustration. “I’m not good articulating emotions but I’m trying. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t feel like I’m enough lately and tonight really didn’t help.” I don’t mean to be yelling by the end of it, but I am, and she shrinks back from it. From me. “Fuck,” I snarl as I drop down into a crouch and take my head in my hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell.” I steady myself and my voice.
“I knew you were miserable.” Her voice is so timid, she sounds so far away. “I just wanted to make it as painless as possible.”
My heart cracks. Of course that was her motive, of course I was an ass for misinterpreting it. Are those letters making me crazy? Have I built this all up wrong in my head?
“And the last few weeks?” I have to know. I have to know if this chasm between us is real or imagined.
“My mom was sick.” It’s her only defense.
“And when she gets sick again?”
“Fuck you, James. Fuck you so much for saying that.” Tears spring to life on her face, rolling down her soft skin and leaving shimmers in the moonlight.
I close my eyes and inwardly curse myself. The way I phrased that might as well have been a spear I decided to hurtle straight at Mina’s heart. I stand up from my crouch and step toward her. She grips herself tighter and backs away.
“I’m screwing everything up again,” I say softly. “I only meant, what happens when life gets hard again. Are you going to push me away then too?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that you did.”
The knock on the glass doors of the brewhouse drags me from the mire of my thoughts but when I find Courtney standing in the doorway, they’re just as muddy.
“She’s not here, Courtney,” I lead, assuming that she’s looking for Mina.
“I know. She’s at the restaurant, that’s why I came.” She shoots me a look that says duh even louder than the tone of her voice.
“You came to see me?” My disbelief is so strong it’s a third person in the room with us.
“After last night? You betcha.” She walks in and settles onto a keg a foot or two from me. “What in the hell is going on?”
“Nothing.” Sure she knows but she’s not going to hear this all from my lips.
“I’m not an idiot,” she counters.
“I never said you were.”
“So, talk to me,” she urges. “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for Mina.”
“How does me talking about Mina, help Mina?” I shoot her a look as I go back to tinkering with the hoses in front of me. “Sounds like a nightmare to me.”
“I didn’t say talk about Mina. I was hoping you’d tell me your side of the story and maybe I could help referee.”
I eye her for a minute and feel my brow crinkle up. Courtney and I don’t always see eye to eye, but she’s never been cruel. She’s never kept Mina from me despite her hesitations. Maybe I could… I shake my head, disbelieving that I even consider spilling my guts to her.
“This stuff with her mom…” I don’t look at Courtney when I say it.
“She’s not handling it well,” she finishes as she takes a seat on a keg. “She’s not doing great with me either if that helps.”
“It doesn’t.” I start coiling up a hose. “Luna told me to be patient but…” Maybe I can get Courtney’s insight without ever finishing a sentence.
“But it’s super hard when someone who usually requires little patience, requires it in spades?”
I don’t answer. I don’t even shake my head. I just grab a couple of clamps and dump them in the sani bucket.
“She didn’t treat you very well last night.”
I purse my lips into a thin line and feel my forehead wrinkle.
“I’m sorry about that.” She sighs.
“What do you have to be sorry about? I appreciated the lifeline.” I toss a couple more things into the bucket.
“I shouldn’t have to toss you a lifeline. Mina’s always had a monopoly on James Larrabee’s needs.”
“Well, like you said, she’s going through a hard time.” I grab my gloves and shove my hands into them harder than is strictly necessary.
“And are you guys?”
I freeze. Is it showing? Are all our problems out on display for everyone to see? Shit.
“Are you guys okay?” she asks.
“It’s nothing, Courtney. Really.”
“It’s not nothing. There’s some hole in your ship—I mean there always has been—but one of you has always spent all your energy, down to the very last drop, trying to bail the damn thing out. Until last night. Last night I watched you both chuck your buckets into the ocean and decide to watch it sink.”
She’s right. I know she’s right.
“I don’t want to lose her, Courtney. Not yet,” I admit against my better judgement.
“I don’t know whether to focus on why you think you might, or why you think you might not care later on.”
I can’t explain the letters. If I were to even try it would mean showing Courtney the deepest parts of me, the parts that Mina spoke to when no one else could, and I’m not ready for that. I don’t think I’ll ever be. It would also mean admitting that I read them and that I gave a damn about what Tanner had to say. That I read them without telling Mina.
“What’s going on, James?” Courtney asks again, this time with equal seriousness and fear in her voice.
“Nothing, Courtney. Really.”
“So I’ve been thinking…”
Mina leans over the back of the couch and I’m caught up in the line of her neck, the dip of her collarbone. I still love that skin and everything it holds, even if it’s incredibly difficult right now. She notices my attention and smiles then brushes her knuckles against my upper arm.
This week has been marginally better. Mina is here with me for the most part, but me? I’m having a hard time returning the favor. The little bits of myself I hid behind that wall that Mina built, are having a hard time coming back out.
“We should go camping,” she finishes her sentence then punctuates it with a kiss at the curve of my neck and shoulder. I close my eyes. “Just you and me,” she says softly before kissing me again. This time I lean in. “Under the stars and away from all this.” It sounds as good as the kisses feel. I just purr like a kitten beneath her hands no matter the moron it makes me seem. “Why don’t you grab that yellow campsite book from the far end of the shelf and bring it to bed. Maybe we’ll pick where to pitch a tent then get some practice.”
Sh
e waggles her eyebrows before she slips away and I watch her go, appreciating the full and incredible view as she pulls off her shirt. Just because my brain is having a hard time with us, doesn’t mean my body is. When she disappears up the stairs, I scramble off the couch. This isn’t just an invitation to bed but an invitation to what has always—well, almost always—made sense between us.
My fingers brush along the books on the shelf, as if they’ll help me muster whatever little cognitive power I have left. I’m so busy thinking about her, about the silhouette of her skin and the low sling of her shorts that I almost miss it. The yellow campsite directory. The yellow campsite directory that I inadvertently shoved the letters in.
I close my eyes as the heavy weight of the words presses on me. It hadn’t really gone anywhere but I’d gotten used to carrying it. But now… Now I sigh. Will it ever not feel like this? Will it ever not hurt to know she loved someone else as much as me, then left him? Will I ever be able to trust this? Trust us?
Will the guilt from having the letters, from reading them ever fade?
“Are you coming?” Mina calls and the sound should be so seductive that I forget everything except how much I want her. Need her. But as I pull out the letters and put them in a different book, I can only think of how they started like this. Her and Tanner. And how eventually they stopped being like this. They stopped being in love.
I slide the letters in the next book down—some photography something—then turn for the stairs, determined to lose myself in Mina. In her body. Today isn’t that day for us but I feel it hanging like a guillotine.
I look up at the mountains looming above Lost Lake and breathe in deep for what feels like the first time since I read those letters. There’s nothing to cage me in.
My shoulders fall again when I realize that’s what I’ve started to think of my relationship with Mina as. A cage. Or maybe trap is better phrasing. Forever with her—her that I still love—is dangling right there, but at some point, something will snap. It did before.