“Handle what exactly? Because she’s been coming to this floor for two years treating me like dirt and nothing’s changed.”
It came out sharper than I meant it. He went quiet. I kept typing. After a second he went back to his office. I stared at my screen, feeling guilty and angry at the same time, which was becoming a regular combination when it came to Lorraine.
That night I sat on my porch and tried to read and couldn’t focus. The words blurred on the page, my brain stuck on the way Lorraine left without her usual parting shot. No jab, no smirk, no last word. She just looked at me and walked out, and that bothered me more than anything she’d actually said because at least when Lorraine was insulting my clothes I knew where I stood.
I closed the book and pulled my knees up. The porch was quiet. No Fin, no warm body pressed against my leg. Just me and the night air and a knot in my stomach that wouldn’t loosen no matter how many times I told myself it was nothing.
16
— • —
Andrea
I was happy and it was freaking me the hell out.
I’m not built for sustained happiness, never have been. Good things in my life came with expiration dates stamped in ink you couldn’t read until it was too late. My parents died on a highway when I was fifteen, I left Whitebrook because I needed money, every foster animal I brought home I had to give back. I learned early to hold good things loosely because gripping too tight just meant it hurt more when they were gone.
But it had been weeks now. Weeks of Finneas driving me to work with his hand on my thigh, his palm finding the small of my back as we walked across the floor, reading in the library while the fire crackled and he pretended to work. His kitchen had become my kitchen, his coffee machine knew my order, his mornings belonged to me. I sat on his counter in his shirt while he stoodbetween my knees and kissed me and neither of us rushed to get anywhere.
The other morning he’d been making eggs, shirtless because he’d just gotten out of the shower. Apparently putting on a shirt before cooking was optional in his world. I sat at the counter with my coffee watching the muscles in his back move while he scrambled, must have been staring pretty hard because he said “you’re burning a hole in my back” without turning around. “Then put a shirt on,” I said. “You like it,” he said. I didn’t argue because he was right. He slid the plate in front of me, leaned across the counter, kissed me with one hand in my hair. The eggs got cold. I didn’t care.
That was my life now. Cold eggs, warm kisses, a man who knew my coffee order, who smiled at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was terrifying.
I caught myself humming at my desk on a Wednesday. Humming. What the hell. I hadn’t done that since I was a kid, since before the accident, since before I learned that being happy was just the setup for losing something. I stopped the second I noticed and looked around to make sure nobody heard.
Maryjane noticed during our phone call that week.
“You sound different,” she said.
“Different how?”
“Happy. Like, annoyingly happy. Like a person in a commercial for yogurt.”
“That’s a terrible comparison.”
“You’re humming.”
“I was not humming.”
“You were humming when you picked up the phone. Peter heard it too. He said, and I quote, ‘is that Andrea? She sounds like she’s in a yogurt commercial.’”
I laughed and covered my face even though nobody could see me. “I hate both of you.”
“You love us.” She paused, her voice shifting into that careful tone she used when she was about to say the thing I didn’t want to hear. “And you love him. You can say it, you know. Out loud. To another human person.”
I went quiet. My chest did that tight warm thing it always did when someone put Finneas and the word love in the same sentence. I pulled my knees up on the couch and wrapped my free arm around them.
“You do love him, right?” Mary asked, softer now.
“Yeah.” My voice came out as a whisper, but I was sure of the answer. “I do.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that every time something good happens to me, the universe follows it up with a bus. And this is really, really good, Mary. So whatever bus is coming is going to be really goddamn big.”
“That’s not how life works, Andrea.”
“That’s exactly how my life works. Name one good thing I’ve had that didn’t come with a receipt.”
