“God, you love him,” she said in despair, almost a wail.
I shrugged and drank coffee, because talking was making it worse.
“Maybe,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, no, your face goes all soft when you talk about him. You love him.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at me like I’d betrayed her somehow.
“Look, Micah moved in gradually, but I didn’t feel crowded the way you did with Louie. I like having his things in the bathroom. I like having a his and her side of the closet. Seeing his stuff with my stuff gives me a full cupboard feeling.”
“A what?” she asked.
“Getting a T-shirt out and realizing that it’s one I bought for him because it brings out the green in his eyes gives me that I’ve got my favorite foods in the cupboard and it’s a winter night, and I don’t have to go out in it feeling. I’ve got everything I need at home.”
She looked at me in soft horror.
Hearing myself say it out loud was a little frightening, but mostly it was thrilling. Because I’d answered my question, in trying to answer hers, I’d answered my own. I was smiling, even as she looked at me in shock. I couldn’t help the smile, I was feeling better than I’d felt in days. But another thought occurred to me. I wasn’t smiling when I said, “Remember how you couldn’t understand why I didn’t just jump at Richard when he asked me to marry him?”
“I didn’t say marry him, I just said dump the vampire and keep the werewolf.”
That made me smile. “I remember coming home, and Richard had used his key to get in to cook me dinner without asking, and I hated it. I felt all grumpy and like my privacy had been invaded.”
She nodded. “That’s it, it’s like putting on a new sweater that’s just the right color and fits perfectly, but the next time you wear it, you realize it’s scratchy, and unless you wear a shirt under it, it itches you. It’s a great sweater, but you need a little distance between it and your skin.”
I thought about it and had to agree. “That’s pretty good, scratchy, yeah.”
“But you didn’t feel that way when Micah moved in?” she asked in a voice that had gone soft and small.
I shook my head. “It was very weird. I knew nothing about him, really, but it just… clicked.”
“Love at first sight,” she said, softly.
“’Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ they say.”
“But you didn’t marry him,” she said, “why not?”
“One, neither of us has asked, and two, I don’t think either of us feels the need.” There was also the matter of Jean-Claude and Asher, and Nathaniel, but I didn’t want to muddy the waters, so I didn’t bring them up.
“Then why does Louie want to get married?”
“You’d have to ask him, Ronnie. He did say he’d offered to just live together, but you didn’t want that either.”
“I like my space,” she said.
“Then tell him that,” I said.
“I’ll lose him if I tell him that.”
“Then you’ve got to decide whether you like your space or him more.”
“Just like that,” she said.
I nodded. “Just like that.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“I don’t mean to,” I said, “but Louie wants the two of you to go to bed together every night and to wake up beside you every morning.
That doesn’t sound so bad.”
She laid her head on her arms, so that all I could see was the back of her head. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t crying, but…
“Ronnie, did I say something wrong?”
She said something I couldn’t understand.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear that.”
She raised her head enough to say, “I don’t want to go to bed every night and wake up every morning with him.”
“You want separate bedrooms?” I asked before my brain could tell me it was a stupid question.
“No,” she said and sat up, brushing at the tears that had just started. She seemed more angry or impatient than tearful. “What if I meet a cute guy? What if I meet someone I want to sleep with, and it isn’t Louie?” The tears were gone. She was just looking at me with that appeal on her face. That, Don’t you understand? look.
“You mean, you don’t want to be monogamous,” I said.
“No, I mean I’m not sure I’m ready to be monogamous.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that one, because it wasn’t something I’d had to give up. “Most people want to be monogamous, Ronnie. I mean how would you feel if Louie slept with someone else?”
“Relieved,” she said, “because then I could be mad and kick his ass out. It’d be over.”
“Do you mean that?” I asked, and I tried to see past the pain and confusion, but there was too much of it.
“Yes,” she said. “No, oh, hell, Anita, I don’t know. I thought we had a good thing going, if I could get him to slow down a little, then he suddenly puts it into high gear.”
“How long have you guys been dating?”
“Almost two years,” she said.
“You never told me about feeling crowded before,” I said.
“How could I? You were drowning in domestic bliss. All the things that I didn’t want, you were enjoying.”
I remembered that Louie had said maybe Ronnie hadn’t distanced herself because I was dating Jean-Claude, but because she had problems with me not having problems with Micah. I’d thought he was wrong, now I wasn’t so sure. “I’m always willing to listen, Ronnie.”
“I couldn’t, Anita. You fuck this guy you’ve just met, and suddenly he’s living with you. I mean, it was everything I hated.
Someone moving in, and taking your space, and losing your privacy, and you just lapped it up.” Again, there was that feeling in her voice that I’d betrayed her.
“Am I suppose to apologize for being happy?”
“Are you happy, really happy?”
I sighed. “Why do I think you’d be happier if I said no?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t mean it like that, but, Anita,” she took my hand, “how can you let all these people in your house, all the time? You’re never alone anymore. Don’t you miss that?”
I thought about it, then said, “No, I spent my childhood alone in a crowd of family that didn’t understand me, or didn’t want to understand me. I’m finally with people that don’t think I’m the weird one.”
“No, because they’re weirder.”
I took my hand back this time. “That was mean,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it that way, but isn’t Jean-Claude jealous of Micah the way he was of Richard?”
“No,” I said, and left it at that, because Ronnie wasn’t ready to hear the arrangements among the three of us. She thought we were weird already. If she only knew.
“Why isn’t he?”
I just shook my head and got up to get more coffee. She thought my lover was weird, she had always hated Jean-Claude, I wasn’t about to share intimacies about them with her. She’d just lost her privileges.
And that made me sad. I’d thought this crisis with Louie might help Ronnie and me rebuild our friendship, but it wasn’t working out that way. Shit.
I poured coffee and tried to think of something useful to say. I finally realized that if I let her last remarks go, then we’d never be friends again. It was truth or nothing.
I leaned against the cabinet and looked at her. Something must have shown on my face, because she said, “You’re mad.”
“Do you realize by saying that my lover is weirder than I am, it says you think I’m weird. You don’t think your friends are weird, Ronnie.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Then how did you mean it?”
“I didn’t mean it, Anita, I’m sorry, but I am weirded out, I mean, I didn’t like Micah coming out of nowhere. And that Nathaniel is living here, cooking and cleaning, what is he, like a maid?”
“He’s mypomme de sang,” I said, and my voice was as cold as my face.