chapter twenty-nine

“Don’t bother to lie!” he barked, as if I’d so much as opened my mouth. Nuts. I was still here.

“My sex life—”

“Ha!”

“—is none of your business. And my point was, I’m grateful to have my baker in my life. Why wouldn’t I be? He’s gorgeous, smart, and rich, and he loves me. He knows about the crazy, as you so nastily put it, and knows the crazy could spill over and get him hurt or God forbid killed and he even…” I lowered my voice. “I told him about BOFFO losing its funding and he already had a plan in place to cure my MPD.”

George, who’d been leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling some more, jerked forward so hard he almost fell on the floor. “Sorry, what the fuck?”

“I know! He offered to pay for everything so I could just concentrate on therapy.”

“And you still didn’t shoot him in the face?”

“Oh, very nice!” I snapped. “Yeah, it came off as a little ignorant and controlling, but he was thinking about me. He wants to help me.”

“He wants to fix you,” George corrected. “Big diff. C’mon. We all get warned about this.”

I said nothing. George was right. There were people who were drawn to people like us. People with, um, problems. They didn’t love us for ourselves, or in spite of our foibles. They loved us for them.

“He’s not like that. He knew what he was getting into. He’s not afraid—not of what I am, not of any of me. Do you know how many guys have been scared off by Shiro and Adrienne?”

George laughed again. “I never said Aunt Jane was scared. It’s the one thing I gotta give him. Let me tell you something you don’t know about your baker boy. He won’t ever scare easily. He won’t scare off. Someone like that? Who made himself rich and famous and skilled? That person, you threaten to bankrupt them, ruin them, they’ll always think they can do it again. They can be eighty and hacking out their last breath and they’ll think they can do it all again. You can scare someone like that, but not the way you think.”

I studied my partner for a minute. We weren’t friends. Much of the time we weren’t even friendly. But we were something. “What happened to you?” I finally asked, which was a sizeable no-no in BOFFO politics.

“Life. Same thing that happens to everyone.”

“I don’t think so, George. Look, I appreciate what you said—”

“No you don’t.”

“All right, you’re right, but I know what you’re trying to do. I think I know what you’re trying to do. But I don’t think you can understand the situation from my per—”

“Sure I can. You want to get married and settle down and ruin a family with him. Hey, I’m for that. It’s so romantic! Your kids should just start seeing a shrink in the womb, by the way.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“I’m mean, not crazy. Sociopathy is not insanity. Check your Dee-Sum, honey.” In his usual horrible manner, George was referring to the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders or, as we sanity-challenged liked to call it, the Bible. And he was right. He was not insane by technical definition.

“You could try,” I said patiently. “You could try and get well.”

George’s laugh was so shrill and short he sounded like a small dog. “Then I really would be crazy. Have you ever seen the news? You know what? Forget the news. Never mind the stuff that happens to strangers; how about the stuff that happened to you? Who’d want to be back in the middle of that? Don’t you know how often I thank God my remorse button was burned out by the time I was ten? Why would anybody trade freedom for nightmares and feeling shitty and crying because you can’t do what you’ve got to because you’ll feel bad?”

I said nothing. For once George wasn’t showing me a sliver of light; he’d jerked open the whole window. It wasn’t like him, and it made me both sympathetic and nervous.

I didn’t answer and he dropped the topic. It was just as well, as I was too polite to say anything anyway. Maybe that was my superpower.