THEY HAD BEEN GONE ONLY HOURS WHEN THE BAND MANAGER dropped off Ryan. Bullet huffed at the sound of the van and ran to the front door to meet him. She full-body-wagged at his entry, her hips and shoulders samba-ing back and forth. He walked right past her and asked, “Are your parents still here?”
“You just missed them. Say hi to Bullet, she’s excited to see you.”
“At least someone is,” he said. “Hi, Bullet. Hi, Andy.”
“I’m glad you’re back,” I reassured him. I closed my eyes and kissed him. “Welcome home.” As if on script.
The evening was warm and mild and we opened the bedroom windows to let in the clean new air. I sat on the bed while Ryan unpacked his three items of clothing and shaving kit from his backpack. I still couldn’t understand how he lived with so little. He said he was disappointed to miss my parents. I said, “No, you dodged a real bullet.”
He asked me what happened, how it went, how I was feeling.
“It would take me multiple notebooks to process what happened on that visit,” I said. “I don’t even know where to start. I’ll tell you when I figure it out.” I braced myself with my arms behind me. My soft belly was starting to firm up, especially when I slouched. “Look at this,” I said. “Pretty soon it won’t just look like a beer gut.”
Ryan glanced at it incuriously. I realized that he never touched my belly anymore. “Do you want to feel it?” I said.
“Is it doing something?”
“Just growing.”
He kicked his empty backpack under the bed. “I have to go shower off the travel,” he said. Most of us then reveled in grubbiness, letting our natural funk accumulate and radiate a kind of pheromone aura, punk perfume; our jeans and jackets developed a patina so thick it felt like suede; but not Ryan. He preferred to be clean.
“Tell me one thing about the visit,” he said when he returned, damp and relieved. He dropped his towel and I averted my eyes. The naked man body still embarrassed me. You get used to seeing naked women all your life, but a man’s floppy cluster looks so exposed and hapless. I concentrated on smoothing the sheets.
“We watched you on TV,” I said. “My dad thought it was ‘different.’ My mom called the singer goofy.”
Ryan laughed and pulled on his boxers and I looked up at him again. I did like his chest, firm and flat, and the trail of fine gold fur down his belly that brushed against my hand, like an animal, when I reached down to try to get myself off during sex. I couldn’t coax myself to do even that anymore. I wondered when I would ever have sex again—as in real sex, to me, not this mammal act that no matter where it started always seemed to turn down the same street and end at the same place. I was only twenty-four, how could I already be done? Meena had a theory that whatever you do to someone in a past relationship will happen to you in the next one, and vice versa. So maybe I’d become Flynn. Poor Ryan. I’d inflicted lesbian bed death on him.
“Your parents nailed it,” he said. “But now I’m worried what they said about me.”
“You? You’re fine. You’re the best news they’ve ever heard.”
“Hell yeah,” he said, zipping up his jeans. “They want me to marry you?”
“How’d you know?”
“Don’t look so shocked. Catholic parents. Pregnant daughter. Safe guess.”
“Right.” I pressed my hand to my chest and exhaled. He studied my face.
“Maybe I should.”
“Should what?”
“Marry you,” he said.
“Very funny.”
“Is it? Why’s it funny?”
My stomach flipped. Did he know me at all? “You don’t even mean that.” I forced a conspiratorial laugh.
But his face was unreadable. Eyes intent, an elusive smile. “How do you know?”
“Because you’re Ryan. You would never get married. It’s totally not your style.”
“Like how fucking a guy was totally not your style.” He bumped his knee against mine.
“I can’t marry. It’s too—heterosexual privilege.” I grasped at the nearest impersonal reason.
“Would it kill you to have a little extra privilege for once?”
“It might,” I said. I stared down at our feet, which faced each other on the floor, his long and bare and clean, mine small in black ankle socks flecked with dog hair. I started in about how I already had all kinds of privilege others didn’t—
“Oh my god. Stop. I’m just teasing you,” Ryan said.
“Really?”
“You’re way too easy to wind up. I couldn’t resist.”
“You didn’t mean any of it?” I said.
“Just testing.”
I kicked him, harder than I should have. “You scared me.”
“That didn’t take much,” he said, rubbing his sore shin, and though his tone was dry I detected a little sadness in the downturn of his mouth.
That evening Ryan wanted to go out for dinner, but he shook his head at every one of the usual spots I named. Nothing sounded right. Finally he said, “Let’s split town. Just get in the car and go somewhere.”
“Where? Like for dinner?”
“I don’t care, let’s just take off for a while. Portland is driving me out of my mind.”
“How? You just got back.”
“Back to all the same people, the same four bars, the same scene, the same weather, the same mediocre burritos, the same local politics and liberals fighting each other about shit they all agree on—nothing ever changes here. I didn’t notice as much when I toured all the time, but now, fuck, doesn’t the monotony kill you? Let’s get away from all this while we still can. Just you and me. Like we used to be. The good part.”
But I had work. The dog. The cat. And I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to tether myself to this house, this block, this town. I wanted to lock all the doors and windows and burrow in. I wanted it all to be irrevocably mine, mine, mine. I wanted to deepen my roots until they could not be ripped out.
“The good part’s here,” I said.
Every night now it happened when I switched off the light and Ryan put his arm around me. In the darkness, I backed into this warm body, this firm arm, and I could not shake a disembodied sense of disbelief: Is this really my life? Is this really what I am doing? I imagined I was in a neighboring dimension. My real life was in the next room, or just down the street, or just the other day.
Did Ryan feel my pulse pick up, my muscles tense when they should have relaxed? Could he sense how far away I could go inside my body? If only we could find that place at the edge of each of us, where we overlapped just enough to live this together.
Inside me, the quickening. First a feeling like carbonation, then the baby started to flick, twitch, thud. No one else could feel it yet, my skin was smooth and still. But underneath, restlessness churned. I was doubly alive. And kicking.
The first warm night in June, sheets tangled around our feet, a solid real punch woke me up. My eyes opened. I rested a hand on my belly and felt it again, from the outside as well as within. I reached under the sheets for Ryan’s hand.
“Ry. Feel this.”
“What is it?” He rolled onto his side and allowed me to set his hand on my belly.
Again: thud.
“Do you feel it?” I said.
“Is that—it?”
“It’s aliiiiive.”
“You’ve been feeling that all this time?”
“Yeah. A lot more than just that.”
From under his palm, under my skin, two more nudges.
“Knock knock,” he said.
“Who’s there?”
“The end.”
“You can’t stop there,” I said with a laugh. “The end who?”
He thought for a moment. “The end of life as we know it.”
“Apocalypse now,” I said. He took his hand off my belly and covered his eyes with it. I was about to laugh until I realized he was serious. “Come on,” I said. He didn’t reply.
I went to the bathroom, peed all of six urgent drops, and collapsed back into bed with pillows wedged between my knees and under my belly, the soft fortress I now required for sleep. I was drifting out of consciousness again when I heard him whisper, barely audible, “I do love you.”
I didn’t know if he meant for me to hear, or was waiting for me to answer. The words hung there like a fog until it was too late for me to say anything; the silence had accrued too much portent. So I let it melt into my own shame. I couldn’t say it back. I slowed my breath and pretended to sleep.
Ryan let go of me and turned onto his back.
I heard him ease out of bed. The hush of a dresser drawer opening and closing. Then the dog’s stretch and creaky yawn before she followed him out of the room.
It was quiet for a few minutes, as I lay there in the dark, half-conscious, half-listening. A drawer in the kitchen slid shut. Front door hinges creaked. A jingle like change in a pocket—Bullet’s tags. The screen door banged. A hiss, a curse.
I heard Bullet’s claws tapping on the hardwood floor again, and the front door latch click shut so softly I could barely detect it.
“Ryan?”
No answer. Out on the street, an engine rumbled to life.
I sprawled out in the bed then and slept without pretense.