I didn’t want to know what that meant. I could already feel the beginnings of jealousy. Frustrated, not sure why, I went to send a text to Robin. My first instinct was just to say “hey,” but then I knew that wouldn’t give me the response I wanted. So I started surfing for a kitten picture as Tyler watched me.
“Phoenix.”
“Yeah?”
“If Robin isn’t in a good place, if she isn’t, you know, emotionally healthy or whatever, is that really the best person for you to be involved with? Don’t get pissed. I’m just asking because we’re blood. And I care.”
He looked uncomfortable with what he had just said, and I appreciated the effort. “I don’t know, man. But when has that ever stopped anyone for falling for a girl? Logic’s got nothing to it with it.” I shook my phone. “Hell, I’m searching for kitten pictures for her because she likes them. I mean, what the fuck does that tell you?”
“That you’re whipped.”
I gave my cousin a rueful look, not at all offended. “Exactly. Ty, you know what we did yesterday? We had a picnic in the park. A picnic. Who does that for me? No one.”
“A girl who likes you.” He shot me a grin. “Though God knows why.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Did you shower?” He made puckering lips at me.
I recoiled. “Dude.”
Tyler laughed so hard he started coughing. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Dick.”
“Pussy.”
Quality family time. That’s what we were having. It felt good.
Jayden came out of the house with an unholy grin on his face. Then we got drenched with water as he let loose with a water gun. It actually knocked Tyler’s cigarette out of his hand. I shook my hair out of my eyes and tried not to laugh.
“I’m going to kill Jessica for buying him that.”
Tyler didn’t really look mad. But he did leap off the picnic table and go after his brother, who screamed and ran into the kitchen, pulling the door shut behind him.
Wiping my now wet phone on my jeans, I sent Robin a picture of a cute and fluffy white kitten. I typed “you” in the message. Then I sent her a grumpy cat image. “Me.”
Having saved two pictures of her off her page, the one of her at work looking so tired and an earlier one of her wearing a clinging red dress, spray tanned and arms up in the air as she danced, I was studying them side by side when she responded.
It was an image of two adult cats leaning shoulder to shoulder on each other. “Us,” was all she had written.
Fuck me. I wanted that.
Despite what everyone seemed to think, I did have emotions other than anger.
I just didn’t know what to do with them.
Chapter Six
Robin
I wasn’t playing it cool with Phoenix. I knew that. I just didn’t care. What did playing head games with guys get me ever? A boyfriend who cheated and a lot of casual dates. There was no flirt left in me. She seemed to have disappeared with the vodka. So I was just being honest with Phoenix and he seemed okay with it. Maybe in another three days he would get bored with me, but then whatever. It was better than pretending that I was too busy or too in demand to spend time with him.
But I did feel a twinge of embarrassment that maybe I had overreached with the cat picture. His response came right away, though, and had been to ask me if he could see me later, so I felt reassured. More than that. I felt pleased. Excited.
The way he had kissed me . . . like I was precious, fragile. Like he wanted to meld us together into one person. Like he genuinely liked me, like he looked at me and saw me and wanted me. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t what I had ever experienced.
Then Kylie and Nathan had shown up and I had immediately felt guilty. Not only did I feel guilty about Kylie, but I felt guilty that Tyler knew and that Phoenix didn’t. Plus I felt a little sick to my stomach at seeing Nathan, who had acted weird about Phoenix being there. I hadn’t seen Nathan since that morning in his room, and I hadn’t been with a guy since then, but here he had to go and see me in bed with someone? I knew he was thinking I was a slut and I didn’t really blame him. There was no point in telling him the truth. I didn’t want to talk to him and it didn’t really matter what Nathan thought of me.
It couldn’t be good. Not in the ways that mattered.
Having dinner with my parents tonight, I texted. Classes start 2morrow but maybe we could do something 2morrow nite?
I start work. 3 to 11. Lunch?
That was disappointing. I had wanted to see him tomorrow night and have him spend the night again. I liked having him there with me, especially with my roommates around. I was becoming resigned to the fact that I couldn’t move out without causing huge drama. I was stuck. But it would be easier to see Nathan around the apartment with Phoenix there.
Which sounded so pathetic. And unfair. I hated myself for even thinking about it in those terms.
Maybe I didn’t deserve to see him. Yet that didn’t stop me from texting back.
I only have an hour free. 12:45 to 1:45.
I’ll be there. Where should I meet you?
On campus. University center. Text me when you get there.
I wanted to add something. Like an x or an o, or a heart or a smiley. All of which seemed too much.
K. See ya then.
K.
He didn’t respond, because uh, why would he? And then I felt like a jerk.
Damn it. I decided right then and there that I was going to continue to do and say whatever I wanted with Phoenix. That this was my chance to have a totally pure experience with a guy, in the sense that I wasn’t going to censor what I said or did. I was going to treat him exactly the way I would one of my girlfriends.
So I went for the smiley.
And he sent me back, get this, a rose. Swoon. Seriously, of all the guys I had ever dated, no one, not a single sucky one, had ever done that. It was simple. It was nothing much. Just a tiny graphic that required nothing more than him tapping it on the screen and hitting Send.
Yet it meant everything to me that the guy who was supposed to be such bad news was actually kind of charming. He reminded me of the Beast in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Rough around the edges, a little bit grumpy, but well meaning. Sweet.
When I went off to my parents’ house for dinner, I smiled as I sang along in the car to some Taylor Swift. The lyrics didn’t suit my mood, but the upbeat tempo did.
The smile lasted even through my grandmother starting in on me about eating more.
“Skin and bones, it’s disgusting. Men don’t like a woman who looks like a chicken,” she said to me, scooping more rice onto my plate.
“No thanks, I’m full,” I told her, knowing I was offending her and, in her mind, offending my mother as well by refusing her cooking. But I was going to burst if I ate anything else.
She clucked. Her hair had gone gray before I was born and she refused to dye it. She also refused to say how old she was, but by my father’s best geusstimation, she was eighty-nine, having had him at twenty-seven or thereabouts, because she had left Puerto Rico to come here for college and had married immediately. But whenever you asked her about any of it she gave vague responses and said things like, “Age is a state of mind. And muscle tone.”
“I’m going to die before any of you are married,” she said, looking tiny and forlorn in her chair at the foot of my parent’s enormous and very traditional dining room table.
“Probably,” my brother Eric said, which earned him a slap on the back of the head from my dad.