I grinned at my phone.
Me:For an Oompa-Loompa.
Jamison Duschene:Fuck you! Are you saying I’m orange? I’ll have you know that my self-tanner doesnotstreak orange.
Me:Omg wait you use self-tanner? That might be the gayest thing I’ve ever known you to do, and that includes having buttsex with me.
Jamison Duschene:You just made me snort my Coke. Rude. See if you ever get buttsex again.
Jamison Duschene:BUTTSEX.
Jamison Duschene:Butttttt….sexxxxxx.
Me:You ok over there, dude?
Jamison Duschene:I can’t believe you’re pushing forty and you literally just used ‘buttsex’ in a conversation.
Me:Thirty-five isnot‘pushing forty’, thank you very much. And sometimes you just gotta say ‘buttsex’. BUT BACK TO YOUR SISTER.
Jamison Duschene:Can we not put ‘buttsex’ and ‘my sister’ in the same text tyvm. But yeah I don’t even know what to say to her, or should I just ignore her? Is she worried or just being bossy? I mean of course she’s probably worried but is the right answer to reassure her or fight with her?
I thought about that as I worked at my sanding. I tried to put myself in the headspace of someone whose younger sibling just confessed that there was a chance they had contracted a life-changing disease following a sexual misadventure. Yeah, I’d be lecturing my sibling, but what would make me feel better?
Me:Trying to put myself in her shoes, I actually wonder if it might make her feel better to know you’re still in contact with me and we’re sort of in this together? Like, it somehow makes it feel less like ‘risk and run’ when you can say ‘and my partner and Iare still actively trading test results and occasionally just staying in touch to chat.’ I mean, that doesn’t fix the ‘omg safe sex’ stuff, but it might calm down her internal freaking out. Or, well, external.
Jamison Duschene:So I should just drop in conversation with her, ‘And by the way, when I was talking to Hen last night…’?
Me:Yeah? Worth a try, right?
Jamison Duschene:Ig except that means I need to talk to her more and I’m kinda done at the moment.
Me:Just next time it comes up. And you know it will.
I leaned over to blow some sawdust off the table and gauge the smoothness of the edge. Was I satisfied?
Mrow?
The quiet noise nevertheless made me jump. I’d forgotten that my cat, Curie, had followed me out to my workshop this morning. Usually she was a housecat, but every now and then she got very insistent about coming with me to work in the shed, and since she’d never strayed off the path between my house and my workshop, I let her follow me when she got like that.
“You’re a good girl,” I told her, leaning down to scratch her rump where it rose into the air as she uncurled from her pillow and stretched. There were an embarrassing number of pillows and cat beds scattered throughout my workshop and home; the princess required soft surfaces at all times.
She chirruped at me and gave her butt a little wiggle, then leapt gracefully from her floor pillow onto the table I’d been working on.
“No, girl,” I protested, trying to brush her off the surface, “we don’t get fur on Daddy’s work, remember?”
The cat, being a cat, ignored me and extended a tentative paw toward the corner I’d been working on. I hoped I’d gotten it smooth enough to avoid splinters, because prying a splinter out of a cat’s paw pad was an activity I never wanted to repeat after the first dozen times.
My phone buzzed, startling both Curie and me. Her fur rose along her back and she hissed at the device as I grabbed for it.
Jamison Duschene:I guess. Maybe it’ll make her feel better to know you’re a friend and not just a nameless hook-up?
Me:Aw, I’m a friend?
Jamison Duschene:Not with questions like that, you’re not. *tongue-out emoji*
Teasing or not, it did sort of warm me up inside to think that Jamison thought of me as a friend. Friends of circumstance, sure, but friendship could rise out of some weird places and this was just another one of them. I smiled to myself and plopped down in a half-constructed chair that I’d been working on as a side project.
Me:But seriously, I do feel like we’re friends. It was either never talk to or think about each other again after the embarrassment of The Mistake (™) or bond over it, you know?
