“I wasn’t lying about us, about wanting a relationship with you. And I wasn’t lying about making changes to the way I work. But of course I’d care if I never took pictures again. I was just—” I look down, shake my head at myself. “I was scared, I guess. Lashing out. Saying stupid shit. It’s something I need to work on.”
Greer shrugs. “You should’ve seen me last week. I asked Humphrey whether he was wearing a wire to spy for my mom. I was only half joking.” She makes a grimace of embarrassment, and it’s so fucking adorable that my fingers twitch where they dangle between my knees, wanting to touch her.
“James Bond,” I say, and she laughs softly. I clear my throat, shift against the ground. “After I left the hospital, I went to New York for a couple of days. Metwith my agent.”
“Oh?” she says, that single syllable full of such practiced casualness. I’ve got to scrape my hand across my jaw, my mouth, tohide my smile.
“I am going to take some time off.” Her eyes snap to mine, wide and—fuck, I don’t know. Wary, cautious. Suspicious. I hate that, but I hope what I tell her chases that look away. “And I would’ve done that whether you’d wanted me or not. I’m not better—” I pause, reconsider the way I’ve started. “I haven’t learned to deal with the panic yet, so I need more time. More therapy. And I’m going to do this project with Jae, a—well. A book, I guess, though we’ll seewhere it goes.”
Her eyes light immediately. “A book? That’s amazing!”
“It’s…I don’t know what it is, yet. I started thinking about it before, when I was putting together the guest lecture, and the showcase. The past couple of days, I’ve looked into a few online courses for—uh. Writing. Obviously, I don’t have a lot of experience with that, otherthan captions.”
“Jeez,” she says, blinking innocently. “Bet you wish you knew someone who went back to school as an adult who could helpyou with this.”
I nudge her foot with mine, both of us smiling. Jesus, it feels good to be with her again. “I’m going to do domestic work for a while, no more than a couple of shoots a month. Then we’ll see how I feelcome the fall.”
For a few seconds, we’re both quiet, and I can see Greer turning something over in her mind, tracing a fingernail over the ridges on her cast. “So you’ll do all that…from New York? And maybe visit here, in between your shoots. Thatwould be…good.”
“No, I—” But now I’m unsure, that holding pattern feeling again, the one from the week before the showcase. I’m so—I’m soterribleat this. I fucked it up before, mentioned it at the wrong time and made her so upset that she’d turned from me and then—this. Her accident, our fight, the time we spent apart. I rub my hands through my hair, and I’m sure it looks ridiculous now, as messy as I feelon the inside.
But I’ve been a mess in front of Greer before. And if it’s going to work, I’m sure I’ll be a mess in front of her again. I love her and I want to try with her. I want to try with her forever, ifshe’ll let me.
“I thought I’d be here. As my home base. And I won’t—listen, you’ve worked really hard, to be on your own. To live on your own and do your work and arrange your life in exactly the way you want it. I’m not going to get in the way of that. Whatever your plans were, you should—do those plans, and I’ll be a part of whatever you want me to. If you want me to.”
“IfI want you to?”
“Anyways my sister is here. And Patricia. She’d probably mail me a horse head if I went to someone—”
“Alex,” Greer says, a smile in her voice. She leans forward, taps her uninjured hand on my wrist, then on the inside of my leg, subtle directions that tell me she wants me to open up, to make room for her, so that’s what I do, my heart still in my throat, my neck still warm from embarrassment. She moves—cautiously, of course, more careful with her body than usual—to straddle me, her ass against my thighs, her forearms—one casted—resting on my shoulders. Wisely, she keeps a distance between her groin and my lap, because when it comes to Greer, I can absolutely still get a hard-on when I’m nervous.
“Ow,” she says, making a subtle adjustment, the smile in her voice now on her lips. I put my hands at her waist, steadying her. Closing my eyes to take in the feel of her, the smell of her. “Alex,” she says again. “I definitely, definitely want you to.”
I open my eyes. “Yeah?”
She moves herself the tiniest bit forward, glancingly shy of where I want her most. “Remember that morning at Boneshaker’s?Two years ago?”
I smile, lower my eyes. “Oh, man. Yeah. I thoughtyou hated me.”
One minute shift closer. “I did, a little. Because I’d had this dream about you, the night before. I woke up from it.”
I can’t help but laugh. “I’ve had those kinds of dreams about you too, sweetheart.”
“No, I mean—” There’s that blush, the one beneath her freckles. “Well, yes, it was that kind of dream, partly. But also it was—it was this dream, where we were like we are now. I was this Greer, and you were this Alex. Not the Greer who was so shy and closed off that first night we met. And not the Alex who was so—I don’t know—confident and charming and worldly. Not the Alex who’d have his freedom at the expense of everything else.”
I can’t help but wince at this, at this being the way she’s seen me. At the fact that she hadn’t even been wrong. But in the weeks since I’ve been with Greer, I’ve realized she knows more about freedom than I ever have. It doesn’t depend for her on how fast she can pack or how few people are around to ask things of her. It depends on how she feels about herself. She doesn’t have it just right yet—that’s what she’s been working on, but watching her I know. I know she’s right there on the cusp of it, and I want to be there to see it. To share it.
“Listen,” she says, the fingers of her uninjured hand kneading the muscles of my neck. “In the dream, we were the perfect match. We were just together, as easy as anything. I felt so—I was completely myself. More myself than I was awake.”
Fuck it, I pull her closer to me, so everything about us is lined up, fitted together. When we’re like this her chin lines up to my forehead, my lips to the base of her throat. I feel—overcome. Ready to cry or laugh or some combination of the two. I kiss her soft skin, rub the stubble on my chin gently back and forth, a move that releases the gentlehmmGreer makes sometimes, myfavorite sound.
“Sounds like a good dream,” I tell her, my voice quiet, strained. Damn, maybe it’s closer to crying.
She moves her head so her mouth is right against my ear. “The best dream,” she says, placing a soft kiss there. “A dream come true.”
* * * *
While Greer works the next day, I check out of the hotel, go back to the studio I’m able to rent for the next month. I call Kit, and she takes a half day so she can go with me to some massive store not far from Greer’s parents’ house where they carry everything from clothes to housewares to groceries. She makes a list on her phone of all the things I’ll need that aren’t included with the place—obvious shit like extra toilet paper and hand soap and laundry detergent, but also stuff she seems to recognize as necessary even from the cursory glance she takes around the unit when she picks me up. An extra dish towel, a rubber spatula, coffee filters, a better set of pillows for the bed. I get sweaty inside the store, seeing the cart fill up; I tell her I don’t know what I’ll do with all this stuff, after the month is up. That Greer and I, we haven’t figured out everything about what’s next yet, only that we’ll be together.
