Instead, when he finally looks at me, his eyes are damp, wet in the corners, and his gaze ripples rather than burns. I sink into it. Melting as I surrender. My bones are lava. Molasses. There’s no fight left in me.
He looks at me for the longest time. Minutes. Hours. A lifetime. And then his hand moves. Mine is on the stone wall we’re both sitting on. My palm is flat, fingers spreadout on the cool, rough surface. Holding on like a man desperately clinging to his last shards of sanity. He moves his hand closer in increments so gradual I feel myself evolving as he does it. The side of his hand touches mine. It’s a brand. A hot, sizzling brand. His pinky climbs over mine, curling around it and tightening. Strangling me, stealing my air as sure as if he were holding his hand over my mouth and nose.
“What happened to us, Romeo?” The words fizzle out of my mouth in a frantic gasp, followed by the panicked exhale of a man who’s been held underwater for so long that he didn’t think he’d survive it. “Why did you do it?Why?We were good. Why did you break us?”
The muscle in his jaw bunches. The finger he has wound around mine tenses and releases.
He unleashes a long, pained sigh. One that skips over the paved garden path and takes off, flitting into the air and telling the night sky all about what a dumb fuck I am.
“You have a funny way of remembering things, Jude.”
22
“Give me my Romeo”
Now
We’re back home, andSelby’s even drunker than I am. She’s bouncing around topics, starting and stopping, talking loudly enough to strip paint off the walls. “I’m telling you, Rome, if they don’t get that print delivered by Monday, they’re going to regret it. I’ll go down there to speak to the manager. Don’t think I won’t.”Rome? Rome?My blood boils.He’s not a fucking Italian city! He’s a lover. The world’s best, most passionate lover.I turn to correct her, but fortunately, she’s moved on to the next topic already. “Did you give it to him?”
“Give him what?” asks a tired-sounding Romeo.
“His birthday present, dumb-dumb.” She laughs and slaps her thigh but misses, momentarily upsetting her balance. She corrects with some effort. “You took so long to find it, and now that he’s here, you’ve forgotten to give it to him. I swear, you’d forget…” She looks around the room, mentally ticking off things Romeo has forgotten or misplaced in the past, laughing so hard she hiccups. “Holy shit, I can’t see a single thing in this room you haven’t already lost or forgotten.”
Romeo smiles thinly and says, “It’s late. I’ll give it to him tomorrow.”
“Noooo,” wails Selby. “Now!Give it to him now!”
I’m watching them, my head flicking back and forth between them, and the room spins slightly each time I do it. I can’t tell exactly what I’m feeling about the fact that Romeo seems to have bought me a birthday present without knowing he would be seeing me, but I’m definitely feeling something.
“Now!” Selby says again, this time landing a hard, tacky slap on Romeo’s ass to spur him on. She turns to me conspiratorially. “It’s terrible, Jude. Tell him you hate it so he knows I was right. ’Kay? Will you do that for me?”
Romeo returns, his mouth a hard line, and presses a gift into my hands. The paper is thin and crumpled and there’s a rip in it where a card has been torn off. I open it before I’m sure of where I’ve landed on telling him I hate it or not. I can’t quite decide who I want to upset more right now, Selby or Romeo. The paper tears easily, exposing soft, buttery fabric and a loud, garish print. It’s pants. Pajama pants. Orange with a black stripe.
“Whoa,” I say as the biggest, dumbest grin of all time takes over my face. “Tiger pants. Neat!”
“Oh, Jude.” Selby shakes her head in a cocktail of sympathy and disgust. “They’re so ugly. Try them on. You’ll see. Go.” She waves me down the hall to the guest room and takes a purposeful step or two toward me with her arm swinging back. I take one look at her face and set off at a brisk trot before she has time to swat my behind as well. “Go, go, go!”
While I’m in my room changing, I make three frantic calls to Lexi. I’m shocked and outraged when she doesn’t answer, despite the fact it’s well past midnight and I know full well she has her phone on downtime between nine p.m. and seven a.m. She calls it balance and Adulting 101. I send her several messages, the urgency cranking up with each one, and then check Romeo’s Instagram out of pure habit. Nothing has changed. He still hasn’t posted in years. Not since he posted the photograph of me and him sitting on the couch at my house, mouths stuffed full of popcorn, the summer I thought would never end. After that I scroll through my followers, trying yet again to work out which one of them is Romeo’s alternate account. Again, I can’t find one that stands out.
When it finally dawns on me that I’m keeping everyone waiting, I step out into the hall, shirtless and barefoot, the drawstring of my tiger pants still undone.
Romeo leans against the wall opposite my bedroom door. The house is darker than when I went into my room. Most of the lights downstairs have been turned off. Only the stair lights are still on.
“Where’s Selby? I thought she wanted to see me in the new pants.”
He shrugs and tilts his head toward the stairs without breaking eye contact. “Guess she got bored of waiting.”
“Oh.”
The mood has changed. It was light and loose when I went into my room, but now it’s different. That’s probably my imagination. It’s probably more a product of me being a drunken idiot than anything else. I suddenly feel more stupid than usual, and self-conscious on top of it too. “W-what do you think?”
Romeo’s gaze slides down my body like something hot and runny. Something I feel on my skin just as surely as if he were touching me.
Huh?
Hang on. Did that really just happen, or do I need to add hallucinations to my ever-growing list of mental health concerns?
Jesus. How drunk am I? Of course he didn’t look at me like that. His wife, the woman he married, is waiting for him upstairs. In bed.
