“I dig you too.” He squeezed my hand. “All right, as long as you’re not hiding me from Kristen out of, like, shame. Which I would totally understand, to be clear.” He waved away my protests. “Naw, it’s sweet that she has super-high standards for her friends.”
“I guess that’s true. It’s nice that she cares.” I leaned back. “My parents just say vague things about how I should probably ‘settle down.’？”
“Ooh, have you told your parents about me?”
“No, not yet…but please don’t take that personally, ’cause I don’t tell them anything.” Settle down. It’s the same thing we tell a fussy three-year-old—stop making noise, stop annoying me. Make yourself someone else’s problem. “Wait, do your parents know about me?”
“Sure do! Just that I’m dating someone new. They’re not, like, driving down from Appleton to meet you tomorrow.”
A waiter scooped up our plates. Aaron excused himself and I sipped my jammy wine as if I could drink in his sweet words. They reached my belly and sat there, sparkling.
I hoped I’d convinced Aaron, made him see that Kristen’s whole not-good-enough-for-Emily thing was just a front. It was about keeping me all to herself. I was only now realizing how wide her territorial streak really was.
But wait. Whether it was conscious or not, I’d been keeping Kristen away from Aaron from the start. Even in Chile, before he and I were a couple, I hadn’t mentioned him—I’d only brought him up on the last night. I’d told myself it was because I didn’t want to jinx it, but it was more than that.
A distant thought began to form, like a thunderhead rolling in.
When I did tell her about Aaron, something changed. And I hadn’t done it delicately—I’d rolled the announcement into my rejection of her plan for us to backpack together.
The thought sailed closer, larger, taking shape.
I heard it as she must have heard it: No, Kristen, I won’t go along with your plan. No, I don’t want to spend half the year with you. And, in the same breath: There’s someone special, someone I’m choosing over you.
I could sense its shadow now, the last millisecond before the revelation slid into place.
It made a terrible kind of sense: Kristen was used to getting what she wanted. She saw Aaron as a threat. And she’d do anything to bind us together—to create another secret, the one thing I couldn’t ever tell him, a wall separating him from me. From us, Kristen and myself.
My God. She’d do anything.
Aaron returned and I rearranged my face into a smile.
“Did they bring the dessert menu?” he asked, spreading the napkin over his lap.
“Not yet.” I crossed my legs and the lotus flower tattoo on my ankle winked up at me.
* * *
—
“I think there’s something wrong with Kristen,” I said, then blanched. “Er, wrong with our friendship.”
Adrienne nodded and waited for me to go on. It was nice of her, fitting me in for an emergency session, but now that I was here I realized I couldn’t actually voice any of my fears. Finally she said, “Wrong how?”
“Maybe our relationship isn’t super healthy,” I said. “I always thought of her as protective, like, she always had my back. But now…”
The pieces were all coming together. Evidence accumulating. Bodies piling up.
A trail of failed relationships—even some female friendships, now that I thought about it—in my wake.
“The way she talked me out of dating certain people in the past…I think you’re right, I think she’s possessive.” Possessive and possibly dangerous. A hell of a combination.
“I remember you brought her up when you told me about your last boyfriend,” Adrienne said. “Colin, right?”
I pressed my fist to my lips. “That’s right. Everyone liked him—everyone but Kristen. She pressured me to end things with him, but when I look back on the relationship, he didn’t do anything wrong.” I shook my head. “I don’t want the same thing to happen with Aaron.”
I can’t let her near him. I thought it so quickly, so confidently, it shocked even me.
“So you’re trying to break the pattern this time,” she said.
“Right. But I don’t know how. I’m…the idea of getting out of the friendship scares me.”
Of course I couldn’t mention everything riding on our alliance. The slayings that yoked us together. The ghosts of the rough-handed backpackers hovering between us.
“What do you think will happen if you set some boundaries?”
There was a soft thump in the hallway and we both turned toward it. My heart vroomed as the fears whorled: Though it wasn’t logical, I pictured cops breaking down the door and violently arresting me for murder. My life ruined, my cozy, rose-colored future snuffed out like a candle. My world collapsing.
And then the thoughts climbed higher, a key change: I’m afraid of my skull collapsing, cracked like an eggshell by blunt-force trauma. Or my lungs collapsing in a deadly house fire, singeing from the inside as smoke fills every air sac.
“That was probably the next client looking for the bathroom,” she announced, turning back toward me. “So you were saying. You’re ready to set new boundaries?”
I nodded. “I want some distance. I don’t want all our baggage coming between Aaron and me.”
“Simply acknowledging that is huge.” Her fingers brushed the side of her clipboard, then dropped. “I keep doing that.”
“What happened to your notebook?” That’s what felt odd about today’s session: In place of the typical spiral-bound pad was a sheath of printer paper stuck to a clipboard.
“Oh, it’s somewhere in my back office.”
I tilted my head. “So it’s missing?” She’d assured me that all we talked about, everything she jotted down, would remain confidential.
“No, I—I didn’t see it when I got here, but I was running late and didn’t want you to wait.” She leaned forward. “So. It’s going to take some strength to change the dynamic. Because she’s going to push back, and you, too, will be tempted to return to what’s comfortable.”
I nodded slowly. “I know. But things are different now.” Now I had Aaron. And now the scales over my eyes were thinning by the day. “Aaron and I started dating while Kristen was in Australia. And things were great. Our relationship didn’t feel fragile until Kristen showed up in Milwaukee.”
Had she flown all the way to Wisconsin to come between Aaron and me? After all, she’d materialized on my doorstep, abracadabra, just a week after I told her about him and, in the same breath, said no to her backpacking pitch…
A new thought popped: God, was it really a coincidence that she lost her job the second our trip ended? Or had she quit her job and switched to plan B when she noticed I wasn’t calling her every hour, like I had after Cambodia? When she realized I was diving headfirst into a new relationship—one that might really go somewhere with her nine thousand miles away, unable to call the shots? When she figured out that the ties of fresh trauma hadn’t bound us together like she’d hoped?