10. The Framework
THE FRAMEWORK
I wake up before her and lie still.
I get up without waking her. I find my shirt on the hallway floor. We didn't even make it to the bedroom until the third time we moved. I pad barefoot to the kitchen.
She’s my girlfriend now. And I need to make sure she’s glad she’s with me.
So I make her hot chocolate. Two marshmallows. Stacked, not side by side—she said that once, that she likes them stacked because they melt differently. A ridiculous amount of whipped cream. The aerosol kind, because it's all she has.
I make breakfast. Scrambled eggs—creamy and soft. Toast with avocado.
Coffee for me—black, no sugar. The exact opposite of her hot chocolate.
She appears in the kitchen doorway in a T-shirt that comes to her mid-thigh, bare feet, sleep-creased cheeks. She looks at the two mugs on the counter and the breakfast on the table and she has a big smile on her face.
"You made me breakfast!"
"I did.”
"Rhonda."
"The whipped cream is the aerosol kind. I'm sorry."
She takes the mug. Wraps both hands around it. Sips. Closes her eyes.
We eat breakfast. She compliments the eggs. We sit across from each other and I'm trying to remember how to breathe normally.
Then I set my coffee down.
"I want to talk about last night," I say. "I think we need to talk about what this is."
"Sure." She sets her mug down too, mirroring my gesture.
"I want this," I say. "I want you. But I want it to be ours."
"Ours?"
"I want it to be just ours."
She's quiet for a moment.
"You want to keep this a secret," she says, frowning.
"I want to keep this private. But I don’t mean it to sound like I want to hide you."
She looks at me. "Is there a difference?"
"Jo and Rebecca relationship is internet content now.
Fan edits, ship accounts, paparazzi hunting for the next unguarded moment.
Everything they do together is consumed by people who don't know them.
I feel like they've lost the ability to have a relationship. It’s like they have a performance instead. "
She listens.
"What happened with them?" she asks. "Before they went public?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, were they private first? Did they make the same choice we're making and then change their mind?"
"I don't—"
"Or were they public from the beginning? Did they just jump in without thinking about consequences?"
I move past her question because I'm not ready to examine the answer.
"There’s also Sandy. Her personal life is in the tabloids every other week.
Every girlfriend, every night out, every photo becomes a headline.
The label calls me about it like I'm her manager.
I spend hours managing media response to her life choices.
It's exhausting. And I watch what happens when people become content, and I don't want that for us. "
"So we're content if we're public?"
"Yeah. We become a story that other people tell about themselves. Our relationship becomes something that belongs to everyone instead of just us."
She's still listening, I see her looking down at her drink.
"If we go public—with the band, with our friends, with anyone—we lose control of the narrative. The industry eats people's love lives. I've watched it hurt people I care about. I don't want to become someone's content. And I don't want to do that to you."
This way I’d be able to protect her.
Lena looks at me over her cooling hot chocolate. She has a counter-argument forming.
She says: "Okay."
I look at her.
"Okay," she says, and the word is too fast, and the agreement is too easy.
I release a breath. Yet I feel dread at the pit of my stomach.
"How long?" she asks, and the question surprises me because I wasn't expecting clarification.
"Until it feels safe."
"And how will I know when it feels safe?"
"I'll know. When I know, you'll know."
She nods like that's a reasonable answer.
"What about our friends?" she asks. "Ravita and Marnie will figure it out eventually."
"Then you tell them it's private but not secret. That it's just not public yet."
"I don’t like lying."
"I think it’s okay to have boundaries for now."
She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. The touch is soft and accepting and I feel like I've gotten away with something.
The next week is the best week of my life.
Thinking about you.
Same.
She sends a voice note from her commute.
"The guy next to me is eating a sausage roll and I'm jealous of his sausage roll and also I miss your face."
“I’d be your sausage roll if you’d like.”
The giddiness is unfamiliar to me.
And yet here I am, grinning at my phone in the back of a van heading to a session while Sandy is chatting with Jeremy's about hair gel, and my grin is involuntary and constant and obvious enough that Jeremy catches it.
"Good news from a girlfriend?" he asks.
I say no without thinking about what that word means.
Lena: The guy two desks over is eating a sausage roll with such joy that I’m considering a career change
Me: I can be your sausage roll.
Lena: You’re not even here
Me: I could be right there
Lena: Don’t. I’m at work and you can’t say things like that
Lena: Also Gerald asked if I’d thought more about dinner. It felt good to say no.
Me: It felt good to me too, for the record
The good week has a Wednesday in it, and on Wednesday the band meets for a session I’ve been dreading.
Jo hasn't apologized for calling me a manipulator. I haven't apologized for shutting her down. The silence between us has calcified into something structural. But she's there when we arrive at the studio—arrived early, ten minutes ahead of schedule. Coffee is on the desk with a cookie.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey."
We don't hug.
We communicate the way we always have—through bass lines and drum counts.
“That was a good session,” she says afterward, as we’re packing up. “Your low end on the second track. It had a such a good vibe to it..”
“No way. I loved the bridge you did..”
“…Thanks.”
We track two of the arrangements clean and send the stems to Conor—our manager, our producer—who fires back a wall of notes at midnight the way he always does. It’s the most normal the band has felt in weeks.
Lena texts on a Thursday:
I miss you. Do you miss me too? I hope you do.
I miss you too. Let’s do something stupid.
Like what?
Let's watch a movie.
We dress like fugitives—my hat and mask and flipped collar, her beanie pulled low and glasses she doesn’t need. We look insane. Like two people who robbed a bank and fell in love during the getaway.
For an hour and a half it’s perfect. Her hand in mine in the dark.
Her laughing at the wrong moments. The way she narrates the plot holes under her breath like a director’s commentary nobody asked for.
I don’t watch much of the film. I watch the side of her face lit blue by the screen and think: this.
This is the thing I’ve been holding out for without knowing it had a shape.
Then the lights come up, and a girl two rows down goes still, and lifts her phone, and I feel the exact second recognition crosses her face.
“Are you—from the Belladonnas?”
“Wrong person,” I say, already up, already reaching for Lena’s hand.
We walk very fast, out the side exit, down an alley that smells of rain and fryer oil, her hand tight in mine, both of us running and laughing. We don’t stop until we’re three streets over and out of breath.
“That,” Lena says, hands on her knees, “was the most fun I’ve ever.”
My apartment swallows the noise of the city when I shut the door. She stands in the middle of it, cheeks still flushed from running, and I turn the deadbolt and lean back against it and just look at her for a second.
“Rules,” Lena says, and there’s a smile in it. “You’re the one who wanted rules, remember.”
“One,” I say, crossing to her. “You tell me the second anything is too much.”
“Two,” she says, letting me back her toward the bed. “Same goes for you.”
“Three—” I get my hands in her hair and lose the thread entirely. “There’s no three. You made me forget three.”
She laughs into my mouth. We take our time about it.
I learn her by touch and by the sounds she doesn’t mean to make; she pulls me down and says my name.
When I put my mouth on her she goes quiet, one hand fisted in the sheets and the other holding the back of my head like she’s afraid I’ll stop, and I don’t, not until she’s shaking and saying please and then not saying anything at all.
Afterward she returns the favour with a thoroughness that undoes me, unhurried, watching my face the whole time.
We end up tangled, her head on my chest, my hand tracing nothing up and down her spine.
In the morning she leaves before I want her to—she’s staying at her sister’s, keeping the story straight—and an hour later my phone lights up.
Lena: I just had lunch with Jani. She wants to know who the mysterious friend is I keep staying with. I told her I’d tell her, just not yet. I said you’re shy.
Me: I’m not shy.
Lena: I know. But “she’s a Belladonna and she’s my girlfriend.” felt like a lot for a diner booth.
Lena: Also told Ravita and Marnie I was visiting family all weekend. Which was true. I hate how good I’m getting at this.
I hate how good she’s getting at it too. I put the phone down and feel the guilt at the pit of my stomach.
The next weekend I head over to Lena’s.
She cooked stir fried noodles. We eat in her kitchen and she tells me about her week.
"I feel like I'm lying to everyone," she says.
"You're being private."
"It's the same thing and you know it."
I swallow the guilt along with the noodles.
"What happens if someone figures it out?" she asks. "If the band sees me here too much? If Ravita recognizes my car?"
"Then we tell them we're private."
"That's still a lie, you know that."
"But it’s the only way to keep us from becoming public."
She nods, looking away.
And then she goes very still, takes a deep breath, puts her fork down, and looks at me.
“I love you,” she says. “I need you to know that. Whatever this is, whatever we’re doing. I love you.”
My heart slams against my ribs. I want to laugh and I want to cry and I want to write it down somewhere I can never lose it.
“I love you too.” And I do, so much it frightens me.
“Then why are we hiding?”
“Because I love you, I need to protect you.”
“From what?”
I don’t have a good answer for that.