You lean into me and bring my hand to your Murakami and you send me to your Lemonhead and you missed me. You want me. I kiss you on the neck. “Mary Kay,” I murmur. “How could I tell anyone that you were here when you’re not here?”
You wrap your legs around me and I carry you to my bed—YES—and you wiggle out of my arms and jump onto my bed and you bounce. You feel the mattress with your hands and smile at me. “You’re such a liar.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Joe,” you say. “Your bed is much nicer than the one in your guesthouse.”
First you want me on top of you and then you want to be on top and you grab my hair. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you kidding? I’m not complaining.”
I am inside of you and I am holding you and you hold on to me. “I just want all of it,” you say. “I want all of you all at once.”
* * *
Sneaking around is fun and we’re good at it, Mary Kay. You “loved” the first night that we got back together, but you’re right. It’s too risky for us to be in my bed when the Meerkat is right next door. So we improvise. You come home for “lunch” and you go to work and “forget your phone” so that you have to rush back home to me and you always let Nomi go to Seattle to visit Peggy and Don because Peggy and Don have so many pictures of Phil and so many stories about him. Their shop was a shrine to Phil before he even died and I agree that it’s good for Nomi to be with people who loved her father.
There’s truly nothing sleazy about our sneaking around. We’re looking out for Nomi. I’m happy. You’re happy. Hell, even Oliver is happy—When Minka and I have a kid, I’m gonna pitch this whole two-house setup—but the Meerkat is having a hard time, she is. And I get it. She misses her house, she misses her father—she’s been wearing the same Sacriphil T-shirt since the two of you moved in—and sometimes, like right now, you get nervous. One minute ago we were laughing, but then the dark clouds roll into your eyes and you sigh.
“I’m worried she knows.”
“Nah,” I say. “She doesn’t know. And school’s not out for another hour and twelve minutes. I set an alarm.” You smile at that—you like me—and I tickle your leg but you pull away. I stop. I pull away. “Do you want to stop?”
“Yes,” you say, as you caress my fucking leg. And then you bang your head on my leg and groan. “You know I don’t want you to stop but I’m her mom…” And I’m her stepdad. Almost. “She just lost her dad. Maybe she’d be okay with this, with us, but if she wasn’t okay with it and it made her feel worse than she already does… Well, Joe, I would feel like such a fuckup that I wouldn’t even want be with you. I’d hate myself too much.”
“I get that, Mary Kay. And if it’s easier to stop until she goes to school, you know me. You know I’d be happy to wait.”
I offer to wait and you respond by straddling me right here in the living room, as if the mere notion of us breaking up is so terrible that we have to fuck it out of our systems. After we finish, you button up—so cute—and you stop at my front door. “You want to know my dream?”
Yes. “Yes.”
“It’s pretty simple. No more changes for Nomi right now. She gets a few months where it’s all status quo. We stay in the guesthouse, she has a nice summer, and she goes off to school. Then, before she comes home for Thanksgiving, I tell her about us and she has time to process it before she has to see us together.”
I kiss your right hand. I kiss your left hand. “I promise your dream will come true.”
You leave and I’m a man of my word and a couple hours later there’s a knock on my door. It’s the Meerkat.
“Nomi!” I call. “Come on in.”
“Can I use your oven?”
“Of course you can,” I say. “And I meant what I said. You don’t have to ask. I know the kitchen in your place needs work.”
“You can say that again,” she says, carrying a Pyrex container of brownie mix. “The fridge is loud and the windows are fogged over and I know the cats don’t go in there but it really smells like they do…” Her father just died. Let her vent. She gulps. “But it just feels weird barging into your house so I’m gonna knock first, okay?”
“You got it, Nomi.”
The kid’s not wrong about the guesthouse. It’s in rough shape because I thought I had years before Forty would show up. The main house has three bedrooms and you and the Meerkat could live in my house—and you will soon—but right now, we’re all about boundaries, and that’s why I love you, Mary Kay.
Nomi preheats my oven and sighs. “Why do you have so many books?”
“Well why not?”
“My mom hates when I say that when she asks me something.”
I pull out a copy of The Road. “You ever read this?”
She takes the book. “I saw the movie.”
“The book is better and it does really help after you lose someone you love.”
“Who did you lose?”
I look at the oven and nope, not hot enough just yet. “My uncle Maynard.”
“Who was he?”
In truth, I only met my “uncle” Maynard once. I asked him if I could move in with him and he said he would pick me up the next day and I packed a suitcase and he never showed up. He just ghosted me and then a few months later he was dead but I know the kid wants to picture me with a family. “Well, he was a ghostwriter. Pretty cool stuff.”
“Was he nice?”
“He was the best. We’d go to bookstores and he taught me to play pool and he had this harmonica. You would name a song and he could play it. And he wrote books for famous people who wanted to tell their stories but couldn’t do it on their own.”
The lie makes me feel good, as if I really did have an uncle like that, and the lie makes the Meerkat relax. The oven beeps and I’m closer, so I put the brownies in and set the timer and Nomi sighs. “My favorite ghost story is about this hotel in Concord where there’s one room that’s haunted and it used to be a slaughterhouse downstairs.” She gets distracted, fucking phones, and loses all interest in me, in ghosts, and asks me to text her when the brownies are done and this is rude, but this is good, less crap for me to remember in case you ask about my “uncle” and she’s gone and I text you: Hi
You: Hi
Me: Later?
That’s code for “Do you want to fuck in the Whisper Room?”
You: Well, I don’t know. What did you just say to her? I REALLY think she’s onto us.
I never get impatient with you because you have an active imagination. And I love how much you care about people, even when it’s a little fucking annoying.
Me: I promise you. She doesn’t know. She was just here and believe me, I can tell.
You: I don’t know… I think I was wrong. It makes me too paranoid. We have to stop.
That’s not fair.
Me: That’s fair.
You: You’re really okay with it? I feel bad… You know what I said, I don’t want to stop but ahaahhaha. I can’t live with this paranoia.