chapter fourteen
They startled awake at the knock on the door. It was just as ridiculous as the movies, with the canned look at each other and the shared disbelief, and two disorganized bodies jumping out of bed in alarm.
Shit. Tara. Nick. What had they done?
Laurie rummaged through her things for her phone. Her heart sank at the dead screen. What time was it? At least it was a Saturday, so she wasn’t missing work, but she’d meant to tell Nick she was staying over at Mal’s and hadn’t.
“Charger?” Mal handed her the wire’s end. Rubbed her neck awkwardly. “You always did forget.”
Laurie gestured towards the blossoming red mark there in the shape of her lips. “Do you have something to cover that?”
Mal’s eyes widened, and she tossed two piles of shirts to the floor in her search for a scarf or a turtleneck.
“Third hanger from the left,” Laurie said, recognizing the glimpse of plum-colored wool. She set her phone to charge and looked around for a mirror. Of course there wasn’t one.
She opened the door a fraction and said to Tara, “We’ll be right out.”
“Okay,” Tara said. “It’s… um, noon. I’m getting kind of hungry.”
Mal went out first, and if Tara wondered why she was wearing a sweater over her pajamas, she didn’t ask.
Laurie checked fervently in the bathroom mirror for any traces of last night. Finding none gave her no relief. She turned on her phone, taking note of the nineteen missed calls from Nick, and the anxious messages from everyone including her boss.
She called Nick first, rambling an apology that made her cringe. He was silent.
“Nick?”
“This isn’t working.”
It was her turn to fall quiet, waiting at the edge of the bed.
“I’ll move out at the end of the month.”
“That’s next week,” she said.
“I’m sure Mal can foot next month’s rent,” he said bitterly. “It won’t be long until she moves back in. I don’t understand the two of you and I’m not sure I want to.”
She didn’t argue. She couldn’t even think about last night without feeling dizzy and slightly nauseous. She didn’t know what it meant, if Mal even remembered. She’d thought nothing of comforting her. Hadn’t even remembered to feel guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, biting at the stubs of schoolboy nails. “I wanted to make it work.”
“I believe you believe that.” He sighed. “I need to be with someone who doesn’t take independence to the blackout level.”
He was right. She’d never given him a chance, never told him about Sophia, or anything that mattered about herself. She’d willed this relationship into being, driven hard by a flinty, unrelenting pragmatism.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“I’ll see you later,” he said. “I’ve got to start packing.”
For a long time after the call ended she stared blankly at the wall. Eventually Mal knocked at the door.
“Aren’t you hungry? Lunch is here.”
She wasn’t hungry, but she ate in a daze, unable to follow the conversation between Mal and Tara. She snapped back when someone called her name, urgently, as if they’d been calling for a while.
“Are you all right?” Tara asked.
“Just hungover.”
Then she realized what she’d said. Mal looked guiltily at Tara, who hung her own head over her pizza.
“I guess I owe you an explanation,” Tara said.
A sharp twinge went through the space between Laurie’s shoulder blades. This was too much like the climactic reconciliation that came at the end of an episode of Full House—super-saturated colors, flawless skin and gentle tones—and she’d never been able to watch a single episode without hearing her parents fighting as background noise. It made the quiet dignity of Tara’s confession terrifying because there was no shouting. Yet. That was the thing about trauma—even when you knew this moment was not the same as what had come before, your mind had been trained to expect danger to follow signal.
Sounds hollowed out, became echoes. Past superimposed on present. One minute it was Micah, furious with her for not handing over her savings. “You’re a child! What do you know of fiduciary management? Can you even spell fiduciary? I’m your brother! You don’t trust me? Are you stupid?” Another moment and it was her mother, clapping a hand over her mouth, holding up a Minnie Mouse backpack and whispering, “Don’t say a word. Just get your shoes on. We’ll stop to pee.”
Laurie’s fingers clutched the tabletop. Hold still. Avoid attention.
“You don’t owe us, but we’d love to understand,” Mal said, her tone collected, as if she were solving a math problem.
They were sitting at the same table but they seemed so far away Laurie wondered if they saw her. Aunt and niece were having the Full House conversation while she was the invisible audience that laughed and said Aww in the right places.
“It’s strange,” Tara said. “All this time I was worried I was leaving them behind. My friends. That they’d resent me for going away, for choosing a private college, when really I’m the one who got left behind. They were so real , all of them, talking about things that mattered, doing things that matter, and I—I felt like a geek, some disembodied poser who’d never really lived or loved or done anything worth doing.”
Don’t faint . This isn’t about you.
“It takes time for some of us,” Mal said thoughtfully. “I used to think people were crazy, getting into bad relationships and worse breakups, backpacking across Europe and staying in sleazy places, destroying themselves as fast as they could with alcohol and drugs. If I tried to help, they got angry and called me a robot or a bitch or worse.”
“What changed?”
Laurie didn’t miss Mal’s sidelong glance. Infinitesimal, but gratifying. Hopefully Mal couldn’t tell she was on the verge of an anxiety attack.
“Writing helped,” Mal said. “In fiction, my characters could feel the things I couldn’t. I also took baby steps. Maybe I didn’t feel like the protagonist yet, or even the villain or sidekick, but I was a supporting player in the overall story, maybe even the glue, or what they call the fifth business in an opera.”
A supporting player? Ha. A tornado masquerading as a breeze. Anger had the benefit of cutting through the fog a little.
“So you think I tried to jump straight to tortured protagonist?” Tara asked with a small smile.
“Sometimes you can’t climb out of the ivory tower; you just have to fall. But it’s less lonely out here.”
Silence fell, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Silverware clinked against Mal’s hideous egg-white Corelle bowls. Mal’s priorities—sturdy and dishwasher-safe—had resurfaced as soon as they’d started living apart. Laurie found her feet, and they found the cold uninviting tiling of the SoMa new-build floor.
“What shall we do today?” Mal asked.
“I should call my parents,” Tara said in a small voice. “To arrange a lawyer, and pick up the car, and whatever else.”
Laurie brought out the tow receipt and other paperwork. “I should head home, but you know you can always call me, any time.”
Mal called her an Uber and walked her out. She was quiet, but Laurie could tell she was thinking hard.She didn’t interrupt to thank Mal for the Uber; it meant as little to Mal as the five dollars she left to tip room service at hotels. Perfunctory; the noblesse oblige of someone who had always had servants and paid for those servants’ school and hospital bills.
Stopping mid-stride, Mal took a sharp breath in. “Last night—”
“Nick and I broke up this morning,” Laurie said, before Mal could say they’d made a mistake.
“You told him?”
“No. It was mostly unrelated. I didn’t need to hit him while he was down. He’s moving out next week.”
Mal nodded, then looked up, worried. “Do you need me to cover for next month’s rent?”
“It’s not your fault he’s moving out.”
Well, it was, but not because of last night.
“Do you want me to move back in? I don’t want to presume, but if you need to find a roommate fast…”
Fast .
She’d floated from Cam to Sophia to Adam to Nick with an ocean of Mal all around her. She’d gone from treading water on her own to cruising along with the tech wave, buoyed constantly by Mal’s gleaming generosity. Now here she was in sudden financial straits and Mal held out the lifeline that could draw her back to the comfort of a world she knew, one where she felt the relative stability of a surfboard at speed… at least until the next wipeout.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want that.”
“Laurie? I’m not offering out of guilt. Just being practical here.”
A sudden surge of orgasmic rage nearly lifted her off her feet.
“Mal,” she said slowly, “I think you’re talking logistics because you don’t want to think about what we did.”
Mal flinched, proving her right.
“Last night… wasn’t an accident. Not for me. And I can’t go back to us being just roommates .”
“We were never just roommates.”
“You bought a house in another state without telling me.”
“What does the house have to do with anything?”
Laurie felt terribly hungover, exhausted and dangerous as a cornered animal. She finally said it all in one loud rush. “Were you living with me because my apartment is rent-controlled? Just so you could save up for it?”
Mal gaped. At least that was a relief. The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind.
Tears stung Laurie’s eyes. She needed to get out of there.
“Mal, I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you. But it doesn’t matter, because, unlike you, I need to get married. To feel safe . And that’s just not in the cards for us, for many reasons.”
And she turned and walked away, towards the BART, speeding up as she went. She didn’tlook back even when Mal called to her.