Page 135 of Cackle

“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.”

“Please don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not saying it’s all on you. I did things, too. Or didn’t do them. I didn’t make time for you. I didn’t take you out on dates. I could have taken you out on dates. Had a date night or something. That just seemed like—I don’t know—an old-person thing to do. To have a designated date night. I don’t know. I don’t want you to think I’m blaming you.”

“No, no,” I say. “I don’t.”

Why do I work so hard to appease him? It’s exhausting. I’m so quick to kowtow to his every need. Was it always like this?

“It happens, I guess. You get comfortable, stop putting in that effort. If we could work out that part of it. Be with each other again, like we were at the beginning. I think it’d help us figure out if we should get back together.”

“You want to get back together?” I ask, and I hear it in the pitch of my voice. A flimsy, pathetic hope.

I know if he says yes, it’s a done deal. I’ll pack my shit, quit my job. I’ll go back to the city with him. I’ll stay with him as long as he’ll have me.

A few months ago, I would have been able to do that without any doubts, without any modicum of shame. But now, turns out the idea of abandoning my new life just because he asks me to completely vandalizes the sense of self I’ve been slowly and painstakingly assembling.

“If,” Sam says, and I feel like Wile E. Coyote looking up to see the anvil about to fall on his head. “If we’re able to be with each other again. Get back to how it was.”

“Right,” I say. “Can you be more specific?”

“Let’s just hang out for a while,” he says. “Remember when we’d lie in bed for hours and just hang out?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I remember everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yep.”

“What’d we do on our third date?”

“We got dollar slices, then went to Sly Fox and split a pitcher of beer.”

“They should study you,” he says. “Let’s sit on the couch.”

It’s strange to be near him again. I imagine it’s like returning to your childhood home as an adult. The comfort and nostalgia eclipsed by the distortion of the dimensions. You remember it being bigger than it is. Because you’re bigger than you were.

“This really is a nice place,” he says. “You like it here?”

I shrug. If he’d asked me, say, eight days ago, my answer would have been yes. I would have said the people are nice, a little strange, quirky but endearing. My apartment is great; maybe I wish the bathroom were a little bigger, but it’s otherwise perfect. I’m minutes away from amazing coffee, and when the weather is warm, there’s a farmers market every Saturday. And I have a caring, smart, funny friend. A friend who saw something in me that no one else ever did. Not even you.

But . . . a lot can change in a matter of days.

“How’s work?” he asks.

I tell him about my job, about how the pushy vice principal set me up on a blind double date. I tell him because I want to see how he’ll react. If he’ll get jealous.