That’s inconvenient.
“You comfortable?” Damian asks, clearly talking to Cove.
“Yeah, thanks. You’re really warm.”
I frown.
The bus isn’t as well insulated as a house, but it does have heat and air conditioning. If she’s that chilly, she could have bumped up the heat.
“Your feet are like ice. Jesus, woman,” Damian says, and there’s some shuffling on the couch. “There. I’ll warm them up for you.”
It takes everything in me not to swivel my chair to check out what’s happening.
“Does Ravvi live on the other bus now?” Cove asks, keeping her voice low. Maybe she was hoping I wouldn’t overhear, but I have acute senses, even when I’m slightly intoxicated. “How am I ever supposed to fix stuff with him if he can’t stand to be around me?”
My teeth grind together, and I sigh.
I’m not feeling sorry for her tonight. She’s been downright awful to Ravvi the last couple months. If she was anyone else, I would have had a conversation with them about it, but Cove and I aren’t in a place where that would have helped anything.
“He’ll come around,” Damian replies, equally soft. “You just have to give him the chance to cool off. His feelings are hurt.”
Cove sighs. “I don’t know why, but I swear, he gets under my skin like no one else can.”
“He can be a lot,” Damian says.
This entire conversation is none of my business. There’s every possibility that I should see myself to my bunk.
“Do you have any advice for how I can go about fixing things between us?” she asks. “Even getting back to a point where we can stand to be in the same room would be an improvement.”
Damian laughs. “You know how much he cares about you. Apologize, tell him you love him, and he’ll sweep all that past shit under the bridge. That’s a guarantee.”
“Love?” Cove sputters.
“Don’t you get tired of pretending you don’t?”
“Jesus Christ, Damian,” she squeaks.
“Let’s be real here, Clover,” he says, calling her by her nickname. “If you were to see my brother flirting with a chick, you’d lose your mind.” There’s some rustling, and he goes on. “No, don’t try to deny it. I mean, you can lie to me, but can you really lie to yourself? What’s the good in that, anyway? You say you don’t want him, but you don’t want anyone else to have him either. And if he did date, that would only prove to you that you were never meant to be. Do you see what I’m saying? There’s no way he can win, so he stays stuck in limbo, hoping at the very least, he won’t make things worse.”
That shit has to be torture.
I remember what it was like to live with someone I could never make happy, no matter how hard I tried. Granted, that was my mother, and the situation is completely different between them, but it’s emotionally exhausting.
When you’re constantly on alert, conscious of everything you say or do because you don’t want to risk setting the other personoff… It’s like being in triage modeall the time. It wreaks havoc on your brain chemistry until your system rewires. Or that’s what the shrink said when Dexter and Love forced me to see him when I first went to live with them.
Hell, I’m drunker than I thought. Projecting my fucked-up childhood trauma onto their dynamic when it’s not even remotely the same thing.
Ravvi is an adult. He might not like it, but he could walk away if he was truly tired of trying to make amends. They’ve both built up some toxic coping mechanisms, and even if they’re miserable, neither is willing to walk away completely.
They’re still young, busy figuring out what it means to be an adult with adult relationships. Not that I was in any better shape at their ages.
I’ve never had a serious relationship that lasted longer than six months. Maybe I shouldn’t be judging how they deal with one another.
There’s silence for so long that I start to wonder if he’s still blocking her mouth or something.
“No, you’re right. I wouldn’t like that at all,” Cove finally says. “I really do care about him.”
If I was sober, maybe I could keep my jaw from falling, but in my current state, I don’t have a hope in hell of covering my reaction.
