I fill the glass and hand it to him. He drinks it down, then puts the empty glass in the sink.
“So,” he says, “this is where you’ve been.”
“This is where I’ve been,” I repeat. Somehow, I didn’t anticipate reuniting with my ex being so awkward.
I’m amazed by my own mind. What it’s able to accept. What it’s able to overlook.
I stare at the empty glass in the sink. I hate myself.
“I’m tired,” Sam says, yawning.
“You want some coffee? There’s a place nearby.” I realize as soon as the words leave my mouth that I can’t just go waltzing back into town, into the Good Mug. Oskar might try to stone me in the street.
The thought yields a surge of empathy for Sophie. I mean, didn’t she say she was thrown down the well? That couldn’t have been fun. And she’s alluded to worse. Attempted drownings, watching her friends get burned at the stake. What must it have been like to be ostracized and attacked, harassed, villainized?
I realize I don’t know what she’s been through. So much of her past is unknown to me. I think back to all the times I caught her staring off into the distance, all the times she went quiet, lost in thought.
I’ve been so preoccupied by my own pain; not once did I ever stop to consider hers.
“Nah,” Sam says, sauntering over to the window, perusing the yard. “Just got here. I want to stay here.”
“Okay,” I say. I should be relishing the sweet relief that Sam doesn’t want to leave the apartment, but I’m still thinking about Sophie.
Am I being hypocritical? I made Dan spit bones when he was being a jerk to me at dinner. I didn’t mean to, but I did it. What would I do if someone seriously tried to hurt me?
Is it really so wrong to stand up for yourself? To punish those who deserve it, maybe take a little revenge?
“You got any food?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, trying to shake Sophie out of my head. “Sorry.”
“What you got?”
“I could make you a sandwich,” I say.
“Tell me more about this sandwich.”
We end up eating chicken-and-tomato sandwiches while sitting at the table in total silence. I give him my crusts, and he eats them.
The only thing worse than the excruciating lack of conversation is the fact that now instead of thinking about Sophie, I’m back to thinking about Ralph. I can’t stop picturing his cute, fuzzy little face. His delightful smile.
“So,” Sam says, wiping a crumb from his bottom lip, “this is weird.”
“Yeah,” I say, “just a bit.”
He laughs. It’s dull and polite.
I need to get my head in the game. If this is a test, I’m failing. I need to do something to show him that I’m worth loving.
“I think we could make it work,” I say. “I think we should give it another shot. I’ll try harder. I’ll be better. Tell me what I need to fix, and I’ll do it.”
He laughs that laugh again. It’s a sterile laugh.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s just . . . I’ve been thinking a lot about us. Our relationship. When anyone asked me, when I told my parents, I always said that we broke up because we were more like friends than like a couple. But lately, I wonder why that was a bad thing, you know?”
“I know.”
My anxiety begins to evaporate, to fizz away like an Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving into fine grains of nothing.
He sighs. “I should have said something sooner. We could have talked about it.”
“Yeah,” I say. I should leave it at that, a simple agreement. But my time with Sophie has encouraged both confidence and the desire to seek what I believe I deserve. And I have a question that I want answered. So I ask it. “Why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what? Talk to you about it sooner? I don’t know. It’s a hard subject. How was I supposed to bring it up? Just out of the blue say, ‘Hey, can we not wear our pajamas all the time?’？”
This disrupts the ascent of hope.
“Yeah,” I say, “I get it.”
“Obviously that’s not the best way to put it. But you wore pajamas a lot,” he says.
“I did,” I say.
It’s true. I wore pajamas a lot. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know.
“I wanted to ask you not to, but it felt like a dick thing to say,” he says. “It’s hard to be attracted to someone in pajamas.”
“They make sexy pajamas,” I say, looking down at my lap. I turn my fingers into the itsy-bitsy spider, climbing, climbing. I really miss Ralph. “I guess I should have invested in sexy pajamas. Would have saved me a lot of trouble in the long run. If you’d asked, I would have gotten them.”