20. Our Life
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.
"I was thinking about going to Siren’s next show," Lena says. “Want to come? Just know you’ll have to be part of the pre-show rituals. I have a mask with your name on it.”
I laugh. "That sounds perfect."
She settles against my shoulder. Her hand finds mine on the couch cushion.
"I love you," she says.
"I know. You've been very patient about that."
"I'm not patient anymore." She turns to face me. "I'm just so happy you’re here. Everybody knows about us. Jani knows. My friends know. My parents knows. And you're still here."
I reach over and tilt her jaw toward me.
I kiss her. Her hand comes up to my neck. My hand goes to her waist. The sweatshirt is soft.
When I pull back, she keeps her eyes closed for a moment.
"That was nice," she says.
"Yeah."
"Do it again?"
I do. This time, when I kiss her, she shifts so she's straddling my thighs.
The couch dips under her weight. My hands find her ribs, the soft give of fabric and the warm skin underneath.
I can feel her heartbeat. I can feel her breathing.
She pulls back just enough to peel off the sweatshirt—my sweatshirt—and drop it on the floor. She's wearing nothing underneath.
I pull her back down. We're skin to skin now.
Her breasts against my chest. My hands on her spine.
The sensation of her moving against me, the freedom of it, the visibility of it, the absolute luxury of not having to hide.
I kiss her neck. Her collarbone. The soft spot where her shoulder meets her throat.
She leans back to give me better access, and my mouth follows the curve of her, and she gasps when I reach a sensitive place, and the sound is open and unguarded because we're not hiding anymore.
"Let’s do this in our room." Her voice is rough.
I kiss her mouth once more. Then I lift her and carry her to the bedroom.
The mattress takes her weight, then mine. She’s soft everywhere, and when my fingers slide into her she’s rocking up to meet my hand, her nails in my back, marking me, holding me where she wants me. Her voice is loud, my name spilling out between gasps.
When she comes, it’s with my name and her body arching up off the mattress and her hand locked around my wrist, keeping me right there.
The sight of her like this—unguarded, visible, mine—sends me over the edge with her.
She holds me through it, her arms around my neck, her breathing in my ear, my name in her mouth over and over.
After, we lie still. Her head on my chest. My hand on her back. Sweat cooling on skin. The light from the window washing over us.
The first photo of us ran three days after the party. Someone got a shot of the kiss and sold it, and by Thursday there was a blurry, backlit picture of me holding a woman’s face in both hands on a music blog, under a headline that spelled my name wrong. I waited for the panic. It didn’t come.
Rhonda handled it the way she handles everything—out loud, and once. A single line from the band account: Yes, I’m seeing someone. Yes, I’m happy. No, you don’t get the rest of it—please respect that. Then she put her phone in a drawer for two days and let it be true.
And me—I started wearing a face mask again when we go out. Just so the two of us can eat a burger in peace.
A text from Marnie: Guys, lets have Sunday brunch? I really want to eat those jiggly pancakes.
Ravita: I’m keen.
I'm in. I send back. Rhonda might want to come too.
YES. Bring her.
The next day at lunch Ravita is across from me with her salad and her coffee.
"Your girlfriend," Ravita says, spearing a cherry tomato, "has terrible taste in bass strings, by the way."
I look up. "What?"
"Flat-wound on a P-Bass. Who does that? Round-wound or nothing."
"You don’t even play bass.” I laugh.
"I don’t but I’m a fan now." Ravita grins. "I'm glad she's treating you right."
"She is."
"Good."
I'm on the couch—our couch, the one that started as a sickbed. Rhonda is in the kitchen, making dinner.
"Tell her the bridge on the new single should have been longer," Jani says through the phone.
Rhonda, from the kitchen: "Tell her she's wrong about everything."
"She can hear you," Jani says.
"Good."
I put the phone on speaker and Jani and Rhonda argue about bridge construction while I eat my dinner.
Rhonda sets down the spoon and comes to sit behind me on the couch, her chin on my shoulder, still arguing with Jani.
I interlace my fingers with hers. It’s just the two of us now, finally, in the open.
On the shelf by the door, the old siren mask still sits—cracked scales, snapped strap. I keep it there on purpose. As a souvenir to remind me of the time when I met my favourite person in the world.