“She’s giving me permission for a onetime threesome. It’s different.”
Milan asked the bartender for two glasses of frosé from the slush machine (it was finally working after being broken for a month). He put them in shot glasses as if to insult us.
“Maybe this is your opportunity to show them why we should all abandon monogamy. This is your chance to fuck your way to freedom.” She laughed, hitting the counter. I wished she’d leave the counter alone.
An email from Anwar popped up on my screen.
from: [email protected]
What’s it like living in Washington? Do you like it?
I replied immediately. I asked him how he liked Ramallah. He said he loved it, the vibrant nightlife, the traditional coffee shops to pass the hours on a warm afternoon. He and his brother Yusuf shared an apartment in the city, while his family and their farm were in a village outside Jenin.
Milan glanced over at my phone. “Who are you messaging so intensely?”
“I adopted this olive tree from a family in the West Bank, and their son is coordinating stuff with me.”
“One, what does that even mean? Two, what the fuck is there to coordinate?”
“He has to print a shipping label. I don’t know! It’s a lot.”
She glared at me. “He must be hot.”
“Stop.”
“So, he’s hot.”
Rah walked by us on his way to the bathroom.
Milan cried, “Cat needs advice on a threesome.”
“Milan! Stop!”
Rah leaned on the bar. I recalled those early sparks of attraction and felt guilty that we hadn’t hung out in a while. He didn’t seem upset. Grinning, he said, “You ain’t ever done a threesome before?”
“The problem is she’s already fucking the guy behind his girlfriend’s back.”
“OH MY GOD, MILAN.”
Rah gave me a strange look. “This the dude from that art thing?”
I peered into my shot glass, wishing I was small enough to crawl inside it.
Milan said, “Oh, I forgot you met that man. Messy.”
“They didn’tmeet,” I said. “They just stared at each other.”
Rah said flatly, “I told you he liked you,” then left for the bathroom.
Jay called while I was walking to the train. It felt like a sign that I was meant to compromise with him, the person who kept showing up. I’dheard nothing from Tristan, another sign. One stable relationship was starting to feel like an answer to the fear mounting me each morning, biting my nails while I waited for the bad news that always came.
I descended the hot, dark Metro escalator listening to Jay’s turn signal. The sound unearthed memories of us driving around Houston for hours before parking in some artificially bright Walmart lot to split a bottle of Yellow Tail. How we thought ourselves grown for sipping white wine courtesy of his crappy fake. We talked about the novels I’d write, about his big political ambitions. How much we thought we mattered back then.
On the train, a middle-aged man was reading a physical newspaper, which fell apart when he tried to turn the page. Jay’s dad’s surgery had gone well, but he was still wound up, worried about his cousin. NPR was playing low in his car, a host delivering terrible news in a measured voice made of satin: the administration was targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I remembered when it opened, thousands of people flooding the city to see it.
Jay turned the radio up. “When will it end?”
