Chapter 60
My body was a bundle of nerves walking to meet Tristan at Tryst, the coffee shop’s name now hilariously on the nose to me. This was the longest we’d gone without seeing each other.
Dropping my bag in an empty chair, I said, “You didn’t tell me you were going to LA.”
“It was last minute. Jay was pretty stressed, you know. He didn’t have any food in his house. I brought him some groceries. I was actually gonna ask you about that.”
I wasn’t sure how much to reveal. We felt oddly allied then, like two friends banding together in concern for another friend.
I wanted to stay in this feeling of alliance.
“I think he’s worried about his dad, his cousin, you know, and just”—I waved a hand—“everything. He was all right when I spoke to him yesterday.”
“So you guys are back to normal, I guess.”
“No.”
Tristan nodded but didn’t seem to believe me. “At least I convinced Mr. Wright to go to the follow-up appointment I made.”
“Who knew you were a caretaker?”
He rolled his eyes, unwrapping a salmon bagel. But when he glanced up at me, everything about him was soft, his eyes, his mouth, as though in an act of repentance.
“Did you know that Georgetown professor who got detained last month?” I asked. “I felt like that one flew under the radar.”
“Not personally. But it’s terrifying, I mean they’re just picking up people off the fucking street, wearing sweatpants, like, how do you even know they’re who they say they are?
And the guy they accidentally sent to El Salvador, like?
” He paused. “It’s—I mean, if people were looking for some sort of turning point—”
“This is it.” We looked at each other as if to acknowledge, silently, the scale of it.
He said, “I meant to say sorry about what Nia said at the protest. She doesn’t get it.”
“She wasn’t wrong.”
“She has money.”
“Like, she’s rich-rich?”
“No. But she’ll never have to work at a restaurant.”
“Do you treat me differently than her?”
He bit into his bagel, chewing, swallowing. “Yeah.” Seeing my face fall, he said, gently, “I treat you differently because you’re two different people.”
We were quiet, seemingly unsure how to have the conversation we needed to have.
“I actually wanted to talk to you about something,” I said. “Nia told me that… sometimes you guys have threesomes?”
A laugh burst from him like a cannon. “What?” He shook his head, but gleefully, like he couldn’t believe his luck, bagging such an unpredictable, fun girlfriend. “Why would she tell you that?”
“She asked me to have a threesome. With you two. For your birthday. She wanted it to be a surprise. But obviously, I wasn’t not going to tell you. It’d be too weird.”
Leaning on his forearms, “So, what’d you tell her?”
“Nothing yet.”
“I mean… do you want to?”
I glared at him. “Clearly you do.”
He scratched the patch of hair on his chin that was considering becoming a beard. “I don’t not want to.”
“There’s also the whole Jay monogamy thing.”
“Are you gonna say yes?”
I toyed with my cardboard coffee cup sleeve. “I’m not sure. But, yeah, I think I am.”
He gave me an odd look. “I think you should. Say yes.”
I blinked. “Why?”
He slid me a look of genuine sorrow. “There’s a girl he’s been dating, I dunno what you tell each other. It sounds serious.” He kept his eyes carefully on mine. “It sounds like, like…”
Like she was willing to be what I wasn’t.
I didn’t move. My body ached, like I’d worked it too hard.
People always said, “Why don’t you and Jay just break up?
” No one ever felt this way about their own relationships.
They could say this so simply, so stupidly, only about yours.
Jay and I had grown, twisted, around each other.
There was no breaking up. That phrase didn’t get at the brutality of what it would be like.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Tristan said. “You should give the answer that’s honest. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.”
He smiled weakly. “I’m no mind reader but it doesn’t sound fine.”
He was trying to make me laugh, but it wasn’t working.
“Is being monogamous so bad?”
I snapped, “It’s not like you’re being crowned the king of monogamy anytime soon.”
He just looked at me.
“I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore, you know.” It was illogical, but I couldn’t do to Jay what he was doing to Nia.
His expression seemed practiced. “I’ve made peace with that.”
Anger seized me, shook me. You didn’t make peace with living without someone you loved. You suffered through it, survived it. You didn’t make peace with a violence.
He said, “In a supremely fucked way, you and Jay are two of the most important people to me. I know you don’t actually want to lose each other. Wasn’t this experiment going to end eventually?”
My chest was heaving then, like I’d just raced up a flight of steps.
“Stop calling this a fucking experiment. Like it’s some stupid science fair project.
Like it’s something you pour into a test tube.
You monogamists are so goddamn arrogant and judgy.
And Tristan, you—” My voice cracked. Saying his name filled me with emotion.
His eyes searched mine, big with concern.
I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want to lose Jay.
I didn’t want to lose Nia. I wanted the choice of not having to choose.
But I had already lost. It was as simple and painful as that.
I started sobbing, gasping. My hands flew up to hide my face, which made me cry harder.
I hadn’t even considered that I might cry then, but as I did it seemed obvious this grief had been gathering inside me for months.
“Look at me.” He gently pried my hands from my face. He saw my nail-bitten fingers but didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s”—palming my eyes with the inside of my wrist—“we don’t have to talk about it.”
“I want to talk to you.”
I shook my head.
“Can I say something else, then?”
“Okay.”
“Jay might’ve told you we had a fight in college.” He paused. “He ever tell you why?”
“No.”
“I cut as a teenager. Jay was the only one who knew. We fought about it. I mean, he was worried. But it, it drove me nuts. He’d say stuff like, ‘Why do you want to die?’ and I’d keep telling him I don’t want to die, I want to get out.
But he never got it. I sent articles, YouTube videos—” He raised a hand.
“I’m not saying being poly is the same. You can accidentally kill yourself with cutting, which is the problem.
I don’t do it anymore. But he told the girl I was dating then.
I was good at hiding it. Having sex with long-sleeved shirts on, making up shit about being anemic.
He told her thinking it would help, but…
that wasn’t a good relationship. It wasn’t Jay’s fault, but I took it out on him. Fuck, I can’t even remember my point.”
I dragged my chair around and hugged him. “I’m sorry.”
“I was making a point.” His head dropped on my chest like a sleepy child’s. Then he said, quietly, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I know.” This resolved nothing, I understood that. But in that moment, resolution seemed tangential to the ongoing act of caring for someone.
He watched me carefully. “You know nail-biting can be a kind of self-harm.”
I paused. “I know.”
He brought my pink ugly fingers to his lips, ran them along the broken skin. “I think what I was trying to say is not everyone’s gonna understand you. But that doesn’t mean they can’t love you.”
His eyes spilled over me, soft and unsure. I swallowed so hard it hurt me. I knew what was coming then. I knew, too, that it would change the chemistry of everything.
Tristan said I love you. Without even thinking, I said it back.