“I do not mean to hurt Max Husband with my jagged edges on my jigsaw piece.”
“I don’t think you can love someone without hurting them sometimes,” Max confessed. “I think I hurt you by pushing you to talk, and I will try to stop. Sometimes I feel like I can fix any problem if I understand it, and I love you so much that I want to fix things for you. But you have a right to privacy and to work through your problems the way you need to.”
Rick didn’t have an answer for that, and Max lay on the couch running his fingers up and down the closest tentacles. Maybe Rick wasn’t a matching jigsaw piece, but he was the other half of Max’s heart. And if they hurt each other sometimes, they would have to learn to be more careful.
“I am a bad son,” Rick said after a long, long silence.
“Sometimes I am, too,” Max said. Then he bit his tongue to avoid asking a million questions because Rick was kind and smart and wonderful. If his parent didn’t appreciate that, Max was happy to spend a lifetime telling Rick how special he was and how stupid his parent was. They lay tangled in each other until Max was dozing in Rick’s embrace.
Chapter Thirteen
Max followed Rick into the room they had transformed into a communal mess. Apparently having a space dedicated to eating was a human thing, but Rick had helped fit out a small lab with extra food dispensers and tables for a proper dining room. Dee was already sitting at a table with actual fruit that had grown on an actual tree, or what passed for a tree on this world. They were short and scrubby and had a lot of vines. But the fruit was good. “Are you two better this morning?” Dee asked.
Rick slid into the mess. “Query. Better in relation to what?”
“I think she means better than yesterday,” Max said.
Rick slowly rotated, various eyes sliding past Dee. “Objectively I have found no solutions to bridge over troubled waters,” Rick said, “yet happiness is Max husband and I agreed to allow each other to swim in similar but not identical waters.”
Dee had a puzzled expression, and she turned to Max. “What?”
“We decided to give each other some space. We love each other and we are still swimming in the same waters,” he translated, “but we don't have to know all of each other's business. Sometimes a little space is a healthy thing.”
“Don’t let anything fester,” Dee warned.
Rick’s tentacles screamed confusion, at least they did to Max who had learned to read all the curves and twists and twitches.
“Fester is a term for the introduction of bacteria to a wound causing damage to the tissue and resulting in a failure to heal,”Max said. Rick's tentacles turned to curly fries before he grabbed Max and poked at him rather violently.
“Where is the wound of festering?” Rick trumpeted.
Max tried to fend off a dozen tentacles at once, and he managed to intercept exactly one, leaving the other eleven to continue poking him. “She doesn't mean an actual wound,” Max said. “She's talking about problems festering if people don't talk about them.”
Rick stilled, which was good because Max might have one or two bruises already, and he would have more if Rick continued on his quest to save Max from a nonexistent festering wound.
“Lack of talk is not introduction of infection.”
“Sometimes it is,” Dee said, “metaphorically speaking.”
“What she means,” Max said, “is that people have strong emotions, and if they don't talk about those emotions, it's like introducing bacteria to the wound. Their feelings get bigger and darker and they hurt more.”
Rick’s tentacles curled. “Does Max husband require I inform him of my discontent with my home planet to avoid the festering of emotions?”
Max knew that if he said yes, Rick would tell him everything. And a small, unkind part of him wanted to do exactly that. After all, the secret was a pebble in his shoe. An annoying pebble. However, that would not be fair to Rick. “I don't have strong personal feelings attached,” he said. “I trust you to understand what might make me feel strong emotions, and share if anything is in danger of festering.”
Dee looked at him like he was insane.
“What?” Max asked her.
“Do you even know how a marriage works?” she asked with exaggerated horror. “People get frustrated with each other. They yell. They keep secrets and try to figure out the other person'ssecrets. They fight. There are rules about how this is supposed to work.”
Max snorted.
“The definition you provide is less than ideal,” said Rick.
“Exactly.” Dee’s smile was wistful. “Marriage is less than ideal. It's messy and hard. Understanding that makes it easier to make it work because you don't look for everything to be pleasant.”
“My parents had a perfectly pleasant marriage for thirty years,” Max said. They fought sometimes and his father hid cigars in the garage and smoked them when his mother had a girls’ day planned, but there was something solid and warm and safe about their marriage.
