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We listen to the stairs creak underneath his climbing feet. “Oh my God,” I say when he’s traversing the hallway over our heads. “Bridge.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t make me talk about it.”
“I kind of think we should talk about it.”
“Yeah, I know. I just …”
She covers her face with her hands, and I wrap my arms around her, hoping that’s the right thing. It feels like the right thing, even though I’m having trouble switching gears from my own reactions to caring about hers.
It gets easier when I realize she’s shivering.
“How long has this been going on?” I ask.
“I don’t know if it’s going on.”
“It looked like it was going on.”
“It’s complicated. I would have told you, but it’s so complicated, and I could never tell if we were on or off or neither, so I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know what to say. At all.”
“Can I say what it looks like?”
“Ugh. No.”
“You sure? Sometimes it’s good to hear what it looks like.”
“It looks like I’m in love with Krishna and he’s just fucking me because I’m around all the time, and he’s going to break my heart and then pretend he doesn’t care because he’s a guy and that’s what guys do, and meanwhile I’ll be moaning about how he has hidden depths and you just don’t understand, but you’ll know better because you think Krishna’s only good to be friends with but not someone you can count on, and you’ve never really been able to like him as much since he let West get arrested, because you’re hopelessly in love with West and you’re always going to take his side in everything forever.”
Her hair drips on my neck.
I give her a squeeze.
“Okay,” I say. “So at least you know what it looks like.”
“I am fully aware, on every level you can possibly imagine, exactly what it looks like.”
“And you’re saying it’s not like that?”
“Unfortunately, no. It is like that. Sometimes.”
“What’s it like when it’s different?”
She inhales deeply. Bites her lip and casts her eyes at the ceiling, searching for words. “It’s like falling into …”
She shakes her head. “It’s like …”
A chill runs up my spine. I’ve known Bridget for over two years. I’ve never seen her at a loss for words. “Bridge—”
“I can’t describe it,” she says with a shrug. “But it’s good enough to be worth all this other crap, apparently, which I can’t even tell you the epic amounts of crap I’ve been dealing with. What he just did, walking out of the room like that? That’s nothing compared to what he’s been dishing out every time he gets spooked, which is fucking constantly, and if we weren’t—”
“Constantly fucking?” I interrupt.
She hides her face behind her hands. “Yes. God.”
“Go on.”
“If we weren’t constantly fucking, I would have so many bad things to say about him.”
“You can say the bad things and also fuck him constantly.”
