It's Complicated (19 page)

Once she’d transferred to the Boston area, she’d been able to breathe for the first time, a giant exhale of victory.

It was a big, giant
fuck you
to the rundown house she’d left, the trailer parks, the poverty, the misery of where she’d grown up. And most of all to all the people who had told her that her dreams had been foolish, that she had been overreaching or snobbish, or too full of herself. She’d had to struggle against it within herself—one part of her saying
give up
, another telling that part to fuck off. It shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. The true Josie had won, though. She had, indeed, said, fuck you to the other part, the part that was essentially the king crab pulling hard on the crabs that tried to escape the cooking pot. If she could have lifted a giant middle finger, tall enough to be seen the six hundred miles from Boston to northeast Ohio, she would have constructed it.

Instead, she faced a rather large structure of her own making that she needed to deal with—and that was nearly six figures in student loans. When you came from where Josie came from, people didn’t have college funds, or grandparents who helped out, or even well-established scholarships. A local credit union had thrown $500 a year her way for four years, and she’d managed to get the full Pell Grant three out of five years. She’d spent four years chipping away at her associate’s, and one of those years, her mom had never bothered to file her taxes. In the ensuing mess, Josie, still a dependent, had lost out on her Pell Grants. Community college and branch campus tuitions were low, but not
that
low.

It was so worth it, though. All worth it. Her graduation day—their graduation day, hers and Laura’s—had been such a triumph for her. In spite of her mom, Marlene, showing up looking and acting like an older, drunker, version of Daisy Duke. It hadn’t been pretty. A day of massive pride for Josie had turned into unrelenting embarrassment. Rather than striking a chord of fury, though, the embarrassment had actually given way to gratitude. A deep, intense, sense of gratitude that she had made it, that these past six years doing everything possible to change who she was, to defy the trajectory that everyone had assumed she would follow, had paid off. She was not her mom.

If Laura had been there, she could have talked about all of that.

But Laura wasn’t.

She’d moved on.

Inviting Alex over to her apartment for dinner was turning out to be a colossal mistake. First of all, she actually had to clean the place. Her apartment looked like early thrift shop, circa 1994, with a definite hippie tone to everything. She kept it
neat
, she just didn’t keep it
clean
. So she had spent most of the day dusting baseboards, pulling things off shelves and wiping under them, cleaning the crud out of the corners of the bathroom and making sure that everything that didn’t really have a place appeared to have some kind of a place. She opened the windows and aired the place out, and burned a little essential oil in an oil burner to fill the house with eucalyptus and lavender. It made her feel more alert, and calmer at the same time, excited to have a man over in her apartment for the first time in forever. Her cat, Dotty, was not a good helper, instead finding various sunny spots on the windowsills to curl up in.

She’d invited Alex for a 7:00 dinner. It was now 6:30. She’d bought all of the groceries earlier that day, but now panic set in. What if he didn’t like her cooking? What if this really was just about sex? What if she’d been too forward in making that joke about the movie? What if he didn’t like her apartment? What if he was a serial killer and he was going to empty her freezer and put little chopped-up bits of Josie in there to snack on over the next month, and no one except Laura would ever know that she went missing, and all Alex would have to do is say, “Oh, I’m enjoying Josie thoroughly, don’t worry,” and Laura would think that was a sexual innuendo? What if?

As charming as all those thoughts were, Josie shoved all of those insecurities aside, and was grateful that she hadn’t planned to cook any form of meat that looked like it might be human. Tonight, it was a simple pasta dish with an alfredo sauce, a rosemary focaccia, and a tossed salad, with something chocolate from a bakery for dessert. It was
great
first-date food.

Was this a first date? Second date? Was the coffee shop the first date? Was the on-call room the first date? Boy, if you counted all of those she was somewhere around her seventh or eighth date and she should have been putting out anal by now. Technically, though, she supposed that the coffee shop was date one, and that therefore, this was date two.

Phew, no anal yet. Time to put away the butt plug. Her bedside table was well equipped for what she assumed would be the real dessert. She had condoms, and lube, and a few toys, in case he turned out to be that adventurous. She had hidden her giant black rabbit, though. No man needed to be intimidated by something that made her come like she was riding a Sybian while being licked by four tongues.

Everything was set up in the kitchen, the salad was tossed, the bread was ready and sliced, cooling on the counter, and she had the pasta and the water and the salt all ready to assemble and boil once Alex arrived. The sauce was done, and so she found herself rearranging candles on her mantle, making sure that the remote control was next to the television, and shooing the cat off the bed.

Why was she was so nervous when this was a sure thing? It drove her a bit batty. If she could fuck the guy against a brick wall under a canopy of ivy, while people kayaked nearby, what the hell was making her so nervous about making love to him in her own bed? This wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t a Dan Savage column, although…hmm…maybe it could be, that depended on Alex. It was just a guy, and her, and a basic “come over to my house and let me make you dinner” kind of date. The kind that Laura had gone on when Dylan had cooked for her and Mike, and the three of them had solidified a lot of goodness and hope in their relationship.

Bingo! That’s what made her so nervous. This was more than just a dinner date at her apartment, this was a trial for real life and real love. Alex wasn’t just coming over for dinner and sex, he was coming over to give her companionship and depth, and to trade in that little back and forth, where you give a little piece of your integrity to someone else and see if you can trust them with it. That she looked forward to this scared and thrilled her all at once. Maybe she really was ready for the kind of love that Dylan and Mike showered Laura with. Alex seemed capable of it. She had to let him in enough to give it a whirl, to watch him in his natural habitat. Innuendo, and looks, and touches, and caresses could tell her some things. But silence and tension and stress would tell her more than any of the fun stuff could.

The test of a person comes when they’re at their worst, that’s when the soft underbelly of people gets revealed. Josie had learned that the hard way when her dad had died when she was eleven. She’d watched her entire world fall apart. Her mother had spent six weeks in the hospital, all the way up in Cleveland, recovering from a brain injury. And she’d come back different. When people get hurt, they come back different, Josie had learned. And Josie had gotten hurt, not injured, but hurt by that tragedy, and she had never been the same, either. The doorbell rang, shaking her out of her reverie, and the cat ran to answer it, like a demented, furry butler.

Alex stood on Josie’s front porch and rang the bell. When she’d given him her address, he knew it sounded familiar, but he hadn’t realized that he could walk here from his own apartment two blocks around the corner. They’d both picked East Cambridge for whatever reason, probably the cheaper rent, and he smiled to himself, realizing that the right person may very well have just been right around the corner. The door opened and he found himself being evaluated by a
very fat
cat at his feet. It seemed to be unable to decide whether to rub up against him or to run away and hide, and as his eyes lifted to look at its owner, he realized that Josie had an expression on her face that said just about the same thing. They were both nervous. Was that how the whole night would be? The lazy casualness with which he carried himself most of the time seemed to disappear around her. The scent of something good hung over the air between them. He’d had a long day, getting off shift at 7 a.m. and sleeping through most of the daylight so he’d be well rested for this.

Breaking the silence, she smiled and opened her door all the way, stepping back with an arm outstretched toward the hallway. “Please, please Alex, come in.”

He’d walked through the door holding a bottle of wine. He hadn’t been sure, red or white, and had made a last-minute guess at the wine store, going for
rosé just to be safe. He hoped she wasn’t a wine snob. Then again, if she were, maybe she could teach him something. The idea that there would be another time like this, and another, and another, and another, stretching on with her, wound his brain into a giant knotted string ball. He felt like a nervous schoolboy around her, and all he needed now was to have sweaty palms to complete the picture of a fully besotted, hopeless romantic.

He held up the bottle of wine, hand gripping it like an anchor. “I brought this, I hope it goes with dinner.”

She took it out of his hands and her face softened, shoulders lowering, her body relaxing. “It’s wine,” she said.

“Yeah, you do
drink
…?” He leaned forward, arm outstretched, his face a mask, as it occurred to him for the first time that maybe she didn’t consume wine. What if she were an alcoholic and in recovery, what if she abstained for other reasons? He should have called ahead, maybe bringing a tiramisu, or something chocolate would have been a better idea. Flowers weren’t even safe nowadays. He’d gone on one date where he’d brought a bouquet that had daisies in it and the poor woman had ended up sucking down Benadryl and leaving early, her flower allergy triggered by what he had thought was a romantic gesture.

She laughed. “Of course I drink, are you kidding me? Do you know anyone in the medical profession who doesn’t drink?”

He chuckled. “Fair enough.”

Her turn to laugh. “The wine’s lovely, thank you. I have no idea whether it matches this dinner, but I figure it’s wine, it matches everything.” She walked down a long, narrow hallway, leading to a kitchen. She didn’t seem to be in the middle of rushing around cooking, and yet he saw that a lovely meal seemed to have been prepared. A salad, some sort of bread, and pasta, about to be boiled. He liked it. Simple, to the point, no frills. Like Josie.

Just as she had on the day that they’d met at the hospital after the baby’s birth, she looked like she put some effort into her appearance. He liked that, but she didn’t need to. The way she’d looked when they’d met at the hospital
during
the birth had actually appealed to him more. Earthy, no makeup, no pretense, just very, very real. That didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate what she wore right now: a soft, heathered lilac v-neck top, coupled with some nicely tailored pants. He noticed she was barefoot, with a little toe ring wrapped around her second toe, a tiny opal set in silver. He couldn’t remember a tattoo from that brief interlude down by the river the other day. Tonight, he hoped, he’d be able to explore every inch of her body and find out what sort of imprints were on it.

She set the bottle of wine down on the counter and turned to him, reaching her arms up for his neck. The embrace was a bit awkward as she planted a kiss on his cheek. He was surprised that she’d made the first step, and he stumbled, then reached around her, hands flat against her back, and pressed against her. From the way her muscles melted, he could tell that she was letting herself sink away from the anxiety and the nervousness. She inhaled deeply against his neck, and he wondered if she liked the cologne he’d chosen, a scent he’d worn since high school, something spicy and citrusy that he didn’t think twice about putting on, on days he didn’t work.

Her kitchen was tiny, but so was everyone else’s in Cambridge. She didn’t seem to cook much, he thought randomly; his mind was trying to catalog the room. He shut it off and turned on the animal inside, instead. He wanted to sink with her into a different state of being, letting his desire run untamed now as he pulled her back and settled in for a kiss.