She held up a hand. “No, listen. The dream? Getting married, having babies, building a life with a man who doesn’t break you? Maybe that’s not ours.”
“Wow, this pep talk issouplifting. Keep going, Carter.”
“I’m serious,” she said, nudging my leg with her foot. “Maybe we grow old together. Just us. We buy a house on a piece of property with big windows and trees that don’t get cut down. We adopt kids, teenagers, maybe... the ones no one else takes in. And we raise them into the kind of men and women the world needs more of.”
I blinked at her, waiting for the punch line that didn't come.
“You’re serious.”
“I’m dead serious. We can be each other’s forever. You’re already stuck with me.”
I tried to smirk. “I’m not into you that way, Rem.”
She made a face. “Obviously. But wouldn’t it beeasierif we were?”
“Yes,” I said. “God, yes.”
She sighed dramatically. “Fine. Then we’ll just have to find men we can climb like trees when the need arises for consensual, mutually beneficial orgasms... and then send them packing.”
I laughed, an ugly, broken sound that caught me off guard. "Or we never let them know where we live, we go to their place and fuck them and then leave them..."
She grinned, triumphant. “Exactly. Because the only men allowed on our property are the boys we raise into them.”
There was silence between us after that. But it was warm. Whole.
The kind of silence I didn’t have to earn or apologize for.
Eventually, I stood and stared at my reflection in the microwave door.
Tired. Worn down. But still here.
He said I was jaded.
Maybe I am.
But maybejadedis just another word forawake.
And if that’s true...
I’ll never close my eyes again.
I didn’t plan it.
But then I saw his hoodie again.
The one I stole the first night I stayed over, when I passed out on his couch and he covered me with it. Since then, we had joked that we needed a custody arrangement for the hoodie.
My fingers brushed the worn cuff, and something inside me cracked.
Before I could think better of it, I grabbed a box from the hall closet and set it on the table.
And then I started pulling pieces of him out of my home like splinters.
The picture of the three of us from Christmas.
His spare toothbrush.
The book he’d left on my nightstand, the one he promised I’d “love, if I ever actually gave myself five minutes to breathe.”
