And my hand holds hers back.
CHAPTER 20
OUR LIFE
As soon as we went back inside, Jani confronts me.
"Rhonda you better treat her right," Jani says, "or I'll kill you with my bass."
Rhonda, beside me: "Noted."
"I'm serious. I've got a P-Bass and I'm not afraid to use it. I've been perfecting my swing for years."
"I believe you," Rhonda says. "And I'm terrified."
Jani smiles and she hugs me. I hold on.
"You have to tell me everything," Jani says into my shoulder.
"You already know everything."
"No I don’t,” She says. “I only found out recently and I want to know the whole story. How you met. The first kiss. All of it. I feel like I've been left out of a year of your life and thats just not right."
"Alright," I say. "I'll tell you everything."
"Good. But not tonight. Tonight we're going to celebrate, and you're going to hold her hand in front of everyone, and then next Sunday you're going to call me and we're going to talk for three hours."
"Deal," I say.
Sandy raises her glass high enough that people turn to look. "I KNEW IT. I didn't know it was her, but I KNEW IT."
"You didn't know anything," Jeremy says, laughing with everyone else. “You guessed almost everyone except her.”
Months later. My apartment—our apartment now, in the way that gradual accumulation makes a place shared without an official date of merger. Keys on hooks. Clothes in drawers. The toothbrush staying in one place.
Lena is on the couch, reading something on her phone, and I'm watching her from the kitchen doorway. The light is coming from the west-facing window in that perfect afternoon angle. Her hair is down. She's wearing the sweatshirt I left here two weeks ago and has apparently claimed as her own. It's the grey one with the hole in the sleeve. There's a mug of cold tea on the coffee table. She's been reading for twenty minutes.
I've been watching her for maybe five.
"You're staring," she says, without looking up.
"Yeah."
"That's creepy."
"I know."
She looks up. She smiles. The smile is soft and real and knows exactly what I'm doing. She knows I like watching her when she doesn't know she's being watched. She knows I'm memorising this—the ordinary moment, the visible life, the freedom to just be in a room with her without calculation or distance.
She sets down her phone.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
I cross the living room. The distance between the kitchen and the couch is ten feet. But now I can cross it without checking over my shoulder. Now I can sit down next to her without making sure nobody's watching. Now I can reach out and touch her face and nobody needs to know about it because we're not hiding anymore.
She shifts on the couch so I can sit down. Her back against the arm. My legs stretched toward the other end. The position we've perfected over the year of secret couch moments, except now it's not secret. Now it's just sitting together. Now it's ordinary.
