20. Josh #2
And that was the beginning of the calls.
They became a thing, most nights, careful at first and then less careful, two voices in the dark.
One night she was in bed with the lights off and I was flat on my back on the porch watching the sky do nothing in particular, and she told me her ADHD diagnosis had been officially confirmed.
“The medication helps,” she said. “Not with everything. But with enough. And the relief, Josh. Of finally understanding it. I wasn’t broken. I was just running different software than everybody else the whole time, and nobody handed me the manual.”
I was quiet too long.
“You there?” she asked.
“I’m here. I’m just-” I had to stop and get my voice level.
“I made fun of the best thing about you on national television. The way your mind moves. The way you get from groceries to Roman architecture in four hops and every hop is right, it just doesn’t look right until you land.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever watched a person do, and I turned it into a bit for a talk show. ”
“Josh-”
“No, I need to actually say it. Your brain is extraordinary. You’re extraordinary. I was too insecure to stand next to it, so I tried to make it smaller. I’m sorry doesn’t cover it, but I’m sorry.”
She changed the subject, which I recognized as her not being able to hold that yet, so I let her.
Told her about Jessica’s short film getting into a festival, about Maria informing me to my face that my second superhero movie was, and I quote, “mid at best, Mr. G, structurally.” She laughed so hard she snorted, then immediately threatened to have me killed if I ever mentioned the snort.
“That’s twice today someone’s threatened to have me murdered by an associate,” I said. “You and Mia should form a guild.”
“We have. There are dues.”
Somewhere in there she mentioned, offhand, that she’d run out of the Ethiopian coffee and couldn’t find it anywhere in her neighborhood. I filed it the way I file everything about her now. Two mornings later there was a bag of it on her porch, no note, nothing claimed.
“There was coffee on my porch,” she said on the next call. “Was that you?”
“Must be a good neighbor,” I said, with the full audacity of having absolutely made the drive at dawn.
She let the lie stand, and we both smiled into our phones like idiots. I could hear her doing it.
The calls were most nights now, but they weren’t the whole of it, because one evening I stopped dialing and drove.
She’d gone quiet for two days after the call about her brain, the way she goes quiet when a thing lands too hard to hold over a phone, and a year earlier I’d have filled that silence with three more voicemails until she surfaced.
Instead I got in the car and showed up on her step with no plan past the doorbell.
She opened the door and didn’t look surprised, which undid me more than surprise would have.
“This isn’t a call,” she said.
“No. I got tired of the sound quality. I wanted to see your face do the thing it does when you’re pretending you’re not glad to see me.”
She should have shut the door. Instead she stepped back and left it open, which is not an invitation and is also exactly an invitation, and I’ve spent enough time in Dr. Reyes’s office to know the difference and enough years loving this woman to ignore it.
I took the far end of her couch. She took the other.
A whole cushion of demilitarized zone between us, every inch of it live.
We talked about nothing for an hour, her mother’s terrible new boyfriend and a movie I’d walked out of and whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich, and it was the best hour of my year.
I kept my hands to myself the entire time, because she hadn’t asked me not to, and until she did, the space between us was hers to close and not mine to take.
At the door she stopped with her hand on the frame, close enough that I could have, and didn’t.
“What are we doing, Josh,” she said. Not a phone question. A standing-too-close-in-a-doorway question.
“Whatever you need us to be. For as long as you need to not know yet.”
“That’s very evolved of you.”
“I’m in therapy. It’s insufferable. You’d hate it.” I made myself step back onto the stoop. “Goodnight, Raven.”
I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the whole cab of the car full of the one fact I wasn’t allowed to do anything with yet, which was that she hadn’t wanted me to go.
Meanwhile the campaign continued, quiet and deniable.
I’d have carried her coffee across the city on foot, learned to grow the beans myself, built a little farm, gone into agriculture for her.
Distantly, I was aware that this wasn’t a well-adjusted way to love a person.
The decision had been made on purpose, with my eyes open: to be unwell about Raven Thorne for the rest of my natural life, whether she ever chose me again or not.
Dr. Reyes would have had questions about that, about the wisdom of deciding, on purpose, to love a woman past the point of your own good sense.
I’d have taken the questions, sat through them, paid for the hour, and walked out having changed my mind about precisely nothing.
Some decisions aren’t up for review. I’d made this one at twenty-four with a latte soaking through my shirt, and every day since had only confirmed it, including the days I’d spent actively destroying the evidence.
I was hers. The paperwork had simply lagged the truth for a while.
Some people get normal love stories. We got midnight phone calls and sex against walls and coffee left as an offering on a doorstep by a good neighbor who didn’t exist.
I’d stopped wishing for the normal version somewhere in there.
The normal version was what we’d had the first time, the meet-cute and the wedding and the whole clean arc, and it had detonated on a soundstage in front of the entire country.
Whatever we were building now was jagged and secret and probably diagnosable, and it was also, for the first time in years, honest, and I’d take honest and jagged over clean and hollow every single time.
You only get to be smug about a normal love story until yours ends on the internet.
After that, you learn to be grateful for the strange one that actually holds.
I’d take it. I’d take any piece of her she was willing to hand me, and I’d be grateful for the privilege, and I’d keep showing up until she believed me or told me to stop. Only one of those was on the table, as far as I was concerned.