Chapter 40 #2
Jamila's quiet for a moment. Processing. Not the shocked kind of quiet — the recognition kind. I knew that she would get it. And I hate that she does. That she's had to live in that world too.
She nods, slow and a little sad. "When Kerry and I first started going out together," she says, "the looks were.
.. educational. Women were mostly fine. Curious, sometimes.
Weird about it, occasionally. But the men?
" She shakes her head slowly. "The men looked at us like we were performing.
Like we existed for their benefit. This one guy at a restaurant told Kerry she was 'too pretty to be a lesbian. ' Like it was a compliment."
"Jesus."
"And the worst part wasn't the comment. It was that Kerry barely noticed.
She'd been out for years. She'd built up this — armor, I guess.
But I was new to it. I was tracking every look, every whisper, every guy who stared too long.
And I couldn't explain to her why it was eating me alive because she'd already made peace with it. "
"That's exactly—" My throat closes. "That's exactly it. They don't see it because it doesn't land on them the same way. And I'm carrying all of it alone and I can't even explain why because they'd just want to protect me from it, and they can't."
"No," she says quietly. "They can't. Because it's not about any specific guy. It's about what it feels like to be a woman inside other people's assumptions."
The takeout is going cold. Neither of us is eating anymore.
"It's not the relationship," I say. "I need you to know that. What I have with them — it's the best thing in my life. When we're home, when it's just the three of us, it's—" I search for the word. "It's right. It's so right it scares me."
"I know."
"But when we're out there and I can feel people looking at me and I know what they're thinking—" My voice drops.
"It makes me feel dirty, Jamila. And I hate that word.
I hate that I'm even using it. Because there's nothing dirty about what we have.
But those looks — they get in. They leave this.
.. residue. And then I'm at the farmer's market holding both their hands and feeling brave and beautiful and then someone looks at me and suddenly I just feel—"
"Reduced."
"Yeah." The word comes out small. "Reduced."
Jamila reaches across the counter and puts her hand over mine.
"That's what happened with Joyce," I say.
"At the market. It wasn't about Joyce. Joyce already knew.
Joyce was wonderful." I close my eyes. "But I'd been carrying every look from every stranger all morning.
And when I saw someone I love walking toward me, my body just — it simplified.
Drop a hand. Make the picture smaller. Stop being the woman with two men. Just be... normal."
"And Blake was the hand you dropped."
"Blake is always the hand I'd drop." My eyes are burning. "Because Reid and I have history. He's familiar. And Blake — Blake is where the math starts. He's where the picture gets complicated. And I hate that. I hate that I've turned him into the complication when he's—"
I stop. Press my hands to my face.
"When he's what?" she asks gently.
"When he's the reason any of it works." It's true. He's the stability. The quiet presence that makes us make sense.
We sit with that for a while. The food's definitely cold now. Jamila tops off both our glasses without asking — from her bottle, because mine wasn't worth finishing.
"So what are you going to do?" she says.
"I don't know. Keep practicing. Keep showing up. Get better at not—"
"I'm not talking about the market, Laine."
She's looking at me. That steady, clear-eyed look that probably makes her terrifying in a boardroom. It's a look I can't escape.
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about—" She looks around the apartment. Slowly. Deliberately. The clean counters. The empty dish rack. The bare windowsill. "This."
"Mila—"
"When's the last time you actually ate a meal here?"
"I eat here."
"When?"
"I had—" I stop. Think. "There's chips in the—"
"Oh, perfect." She's already up, opening the pantry. She moves aside the tea bags, the jar of crystallized honey, a sleeve of rice cakes. Pulls out the bag of tortilla chips. Opens them. Bites one.
Her face does a thing.
"Laine."
"What?"
"When did you buy these chips?"
"I don't know. A few weeks ago?"
She turns the bag around. Reads. Looks at me with those eyebrows up again. I swear she could have a whole conversation with those things.
"These expired last month."
"They did not."
"They did."
"...They're probably fine."
"They are not fine. They taste like salted cardboard." She sets the bag down. "Laine. Do you actually live here?"
Well there it is. The thing nobody's talking about. The big hairy worm in the cereal bowl.
"I live here," I say. Yeah. I don't believe me either.
Jamila just looks at me.
"I pay rent here."
"That's not what I asked."
I take a long, slow sip of wine. "I'm here twice a week. Sometimes. To grab mail and—"
"Check that it still exists?"
"...Yeah."
"That's not living here. That's visiting a storage unit."
"It's not a—"
"How many nights have you slept here in the last month?"
I open my mouth. Close it. Actually count.
"Two," I say. "Maybe three."
"In a month."
"It's been busy."
"It's been busy." She repeats it. Flat. Not buying it.
"Mila—"
"Where do you sleep the other twenty-seven nights?"
I don't answer. She knows where.
"Okay." She leans against the counter. Crosses her arms. Not aggressive — thoughtful. "So you're paying rent on an apartment you sleep in three times a month, with expired chips and a dead plant—"
"The plant was alive when I—"
"—and you're spending every other night at a house with two men who love you, and you're telling me this apartment is... what? What is this place, Laine?"
The wine glass is empty. When did that happen?
"It's my apartment."
"That's a fact. Not an answer."
God, she's relentless. "It's my space. My—"
"Your backup plan."
The words hit the center of my chest.
"It's not—"
"It's your exit strategy." Jamila's voice is gentle, but her eyes aren't letting me go. "It's the thing you keep so that if it all falls apart, you have somewhere to land. So you never have to be the woman with nowhere to go."
My throat is tight. "Is that so wrong?"
"It's not wrong. It's smart, actually. Very practical. Very Laine." She pauses. "It's also a message."
"A message."
"To Blake. To Reid. To yourself." She uncrosses her arms. "Every month you pay that rent, you're saying this might not last. And maybe they don't know that consciously. But they feel it. Trust me."
"How would you—"
"Because I did the same thing."
I look up.
She picks up her wine glass. Turns it by the stem. She's not looking at me now — she's looking at the countertop, at some middle distance where the memory lives.
"When Kerry and I moved in together, I kept my storage unit. Had furniture in it, some boxes, stuff I didn't need but couldn't let go of. I told myself it was practical. We'd just moved in. What if it didn't work? What if I needed my own space again? Better to keep it. Just in case."
"That's reasonable."
"That's what I told myself. For four months." She takes a sip. "And then Kerry found the receipt. On the counter, with the mail. And she got very quiet and she looked at me and she said, 'Do you think we're going to fail?'"
The apartment is so quiet I can hear the fridge humming.
"And I said no, of course not, it's just practical, it's just in case. And she said, 'In case of what?' And I didn't have an answer. Because the answer was — in case she wasn't enough. In case I wasn't brave enough. In case the world was right about us and we were wrong."
"Jamila."
"I canceled it the next day." She meets my eyes. "Not because she asked me to. She didn't. She would never. But because I realized I was keeping one foot out the door and calling it independence when it was actually just fear."
"It's not the same—"
"No. It's not the same. Your situation is different, your risks are different, all of it's different." She sets her glass down. "But the math is the same. The people you love can feel your exit strategy, Laine. Even when you don't mean them to."
I think about Blake in the yard. "Plant whatever you want." The way his voice stayed steady while his eyes didn't. The way he said "Take your time" when what he meant was please stay.
I think about Reid, shredding his water bottle label into confetti, floating the idea like a joke because making it a joke meant nobody had to be vulnerable if it didn't land.
They feel it. Of course they feel it.
"If I move in — officially, no safety net, no apartment to come back to — it's real. In a way I can't undo."
"Isn't it already real?"
"It's real for us. But the rest of the world..." I pull at a thread on my sleeve. I can't look at her for this part. "My parents know about Reid. They don't know about Blake."
Jamila's quiet for a beat. "At all?"
"They know he exists. They think he's Reid's friend. Our friend. Back when things were really bad I told Mom a little about how Blake was treating me." If I don't leave this thread alone I'm going to unravel my whole darn shirt. "They don't know what he is to me now. They don't know there's an us."
"Are you going to tell them?"
"I'm supposed to. We're going to visit them this summer. Guatemala. And I keep telling myself I'll do it before then, but every time I pick up the phone—"
"You can't."
"I can't." My voice is barely a whisper. "Because as long as I haven't said it, as long as I haven't moved in, as long as I still have this apartment and a life that fits into a shape they'd recognize — I'm still their daughter. I'm still the Laine they raised. And the second I say it out loud—"
I stop. Because the end of that sentence is a door I'm not ready to open.
She reaches across the counter again. Takes my hand. Holds on.
"You're always going to be their daughter," she says.
"You don't know that."
"I know you. And I know that anyone who raised you did something right. Give them a chance."
"That's terrifyingly optimistic coming from you."
"I have my moments." She squeezes my hand. "You don't have to figure all of this out tonight. The apartment, the parents, the big scary future — it doesn't all have to be decided right now."
"I know."
"But the chips do need to be thrown away."
I laugh. Watery, shaky, but real. "If you melt some cheese on them it'll disguise the taste."
She stays another hour. We finish the wine.
We talk about other things. Kerry's new patient who keeps calling her "buddy.
" Their fight over microwaving fish too long and stinking up their house.
Normal things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that reminds me I have a life outside the big terrifying questions.
When she leaves, Kerry's waiting in the parking lot. Jamila hugs me in the doorway. Holds on longer than usual.
"Whatever you decide," she says, "I'm in your corner. You know that."
"I know."
"And tell Blake and Reid I said hi. And that the boxwoods look terrible."
"How do you know about the boxwoods?"
"Reid sent Kerry pictures. Don't ever let that man near them again, Laine."
I'm still laughing when the door closes behind her.
The apartment is quiet.
Not the good kind of quiet. Not the kind at the house, where the silence has texture.
The hum of the fridge. The distant sound of Blake doing something in the workshop.
Reid's phone playing something too loud from another room.
That silence is alive. Full. The comfortable quiet of a space that's actually being lived in.
This silence is just sad and empty.
I clean up the takeout containers. Wash the wine glasses.
Wipe down the counter. It's tidy in seconds.
This place, this life, is tidy. My guys are great at keeping the house, but there are always random things on the counters, stray clothes strewn across every surface like they're marking territory.
If I lived here all the time, it would be so easy to keep clean. Just me, myself, and I.
What a depressing thought.
The bed is made. Of course it is. I pull back the covers and climb in, still in my clothes. The sheets are cool — not fresh-cool but vacant-cool. The particular temperature of fabric that hasn't touched a body in weeks.
I lie there.
The ceiling has a hairline crack I've never noticed before. Or maybe I noticed it months ago and forgot. Hard to say. Hard to track the details of a place you're only passing through.
I pull out my phone. Open the group chat.
Staying at my place tonight. Goodnight
Send.
Reid's reply comes in eight seconds. A sleeping emoji, a heart, and: Don't let the bed bugs bite. Do apartments have bed bugs? That feels like an apartment thing.
Then Blake. Just: Goodnight, Laine.
One word more than he needs. One word fewer than he wants.
I can feel it — the restraint. The careful way he doesn't ask why are you there or when are you coming back or is everything okay. He promised not to push. And Blake keeps his promises, even the ones that cost him.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
The fridge hums. A car passes outside. Someone in the apartment above me is watching television — muffled laugh track bleeding through the ceiling.
This is the sound of the life I'd be choosing.
I roll onto my side. Close my eyes.