She stared at me for a second, and then at the flame, before she groaned, settling back to a seat on the grass, looking up at the sky. “Not looking to get in trouble inviting too many people around to the house. Or going out too much. And Charlie is sore with Cat, so she’s not likely to approve it.”
“Approve it?” I felt a sinking weight settle in my stomach, looking at that hard-edged expression on her face, her eyes off on the long, thin clouds above us instead of me. I recognized the feeling all too well—needing to run everything by your partner, get permission to invite people around, permission to have friends, permission to associate with the right groups. Losing friendships because of your partner and not wanting to admit to it, because the last thing anyone wants to do in a hard relationship is admit they got themselves into a hard relationship.
I should have picked up on it earlier—all the little comments Linda made about tending to the house the way Charlie liked it, about doing something so she didn’t get in trouble, how she would wear pretty dresses when shewas hosting someone at the house but then dress more androgynously when she was out on her own, manicures she always seemed vaguely uncomfortable in. Jesus, I of all people should have been able to see it. Maybe I just liked Charlie and didn’t want to compare her to Sawyer.
“Right,” Linda said, her voice tight. “Don’t need to say a word. I can already see you’ve drawn the same conclusion as Jade.”
“It’s not—”
“Just because I have one issue, suddenly she’s a predator and I’m a stupid hapless child who can’t advocate for herself.”
I shook my head. “Linda, I wasn’t—”
“Be my guest,” she said, pushing herself to stand up. “If you want to sit around with your little group and talk shit about me behind my back, I’m not—”
I turned off the stove. She paused halfway to standing, frowning at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you to sit your butt back down if I have to be petty to do it.” I gestured to the stove. “You turn it back on.”
She scowled, but the look in her eyes was more curious than angry. Slowly, she sat back down, her hand on the dial. “If this doesn’t work for me again after it worked just fine for you, I’ll be pissed off.”
“You just have to believe in yourself. It can sense your feelings.”
“You’ve been hanging out with Skye, huh?” She turned the dial, and it lit up. I smiled.
“See? You just have to believe in yourself.”
“Just have to fix the fuse, more like, but believing in yourself doesn’t hurt, I guess,” she muttered, but she didn’t move to leave. Still held herself defensively, but the hard edge left her features.
“Can I tell you an anecdote?” I said. “You can be annoyed at me after and tell me to shut up if you want.”
“Uh… yeah. Why not,” she said.
“I had a friend back in Boston. Her name was Trisha. She was a good friend. Worked as a physician’s assistant. Wicked smart, as they’d say in Boston.”
“Is that actually a real thing?”
“Eh… it depends on what circles you’re in. Some people don’t stop saying it. Trisha was a lot smarter than me, and she could see that Sawyer—my ex-boyfriend—was being a controlling dick long before I could. She got on my case telling me to dump him. She’d get really mad about it.”
“So you’re the wicked-smart Trisha in this situation.”
“Jeez, let me finish. I said you can get annoyed at me after if you want to.”
She put her hands up. I went on.
“I didn’t dump him,” I said. “I dumped her instead.”
“You were cheating with her?”
“Jesus, I dumped her as a friend, I mean. Sawyer told me to, and I believed him that she was just jealous because her relationship didn’t work. I know now I should have listened to her, but now that I’ve had some time to look back on it and reflect, I think she was wrong. Not about Sawyer, but in that she was so harsh, so all or nothing about it, that my only options were to either dump Sawyer right away or to defend him. And nobody who needs to leave a bad situation is ready to just up and leave that same day. So I defended him. And the thing is that once you start defending someone, you need to keep justifying that to yourself in your head. I think I ended up giving Sawyer more chances than I would have if she hadn’t done that.” I shifted closer to the stove, feeling its warmth against the deepening chill as the sun sank lower. “I don’t think your relationship with Charlie is necessarily bad. It just sounds likemaybe there’s some issues to talk through, just like there are in any relationship, but because someone was coming after you and criticizing the relationship, you had to defend it, and now… maybe you feel guilty admitting to having issues, because then it feels like agreeing with someone who positioned Charlie as a predator.”
She sighed, hunching forward, looking down at the ground. After a long silence, picking at a patch of grass, finally, in a low voice, she said, “You know something?”
“Mm?”
“Maybe you’re wicked smart yourself.”
