I snapped, “It’s not like you’re being crowned the king of monogamy anytime soon.”
He just looked at me.
“I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore, you know.” It was illogical, but I couldn’t do to Jay what he was doing to Nia.
His expression seemed practiced. “I’ve made peace with that.”
Anger seized me, shook me. You didn’t make peace with living without someone you loved. You suffered through it, survived it. You didn’t make peace with a violence.
He said, “In a supremely fucked way, you and Jay are two of the most important people to me. I know you don’t actually want to lose each other. Wasn’t this experiment going to end eventually?”
My chest was heaving then, like I’d just raced up a flight of steps. “Stop calling this a fucking experiment. Like it’s some stupid science fair project. Like it’s something you pour into a test tube. You monogamists areso goddamn arrogant and judgy. And Tristan, you—” My voice cracked. Saying his name filled me with emotion. His eyes searched mine, big with concern. I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want to lose Jay. I didn’t want to lose Nia. I wanted the choice of not having to choose. But I had already lost. It was as simple and painful as that. I started sobbing, gasping. My hands flew up to hide my face, which made me cry harder. I hadn’t even considered that I might cry then, but as I did it seemed obvious this grief had been gathering inside me for months.
“Look at me.” He gently pried my hands from my face. He saw my nail-bitten fingers but didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s”—palming my eyes with the inside of my wrist—“we don’t have to talk about it.”
“I want to talk to you.”
I shook my head.
“Can I say something else, then?”
“Okay.”
“Jay might’ve told you we had a fight in college.” He paused. “He ever tell you why?”
“No.”
“I cut as a teenager. Jay was the only one who knew. We fought about it. I mean, he was worried. But it, it drove me nuts. He’d say stuff like, ‘Why do you want to die?’ and I’d keep telling him I don’t want todie, I want toget out. But he never got it. I sent articles, YouTube videos—” He raised a hand. “I’m not saying being poly is the same. You can accidentally kill yourself with cutting, which is the problem. I don’t do it anymore. But he told the girl I was dating then. I was good at hiding it. Having sex with long-sleeved shirts on, making up shit about being anemic. He told her thinking it would help, but… that wasn’t a good relationship. It wasn’t Jay’s fault, but I took it out on him. Fuck, I can’t even remember my point.”
I dragged my chair around and hugged him. “I’m sorry.”
“I was making a point.” His head dropped on my chest like a sleepy child’s. Then he said, quietly, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I know.” This resolved nothing, I understood that. But in that moment, resolution seemed tangential to the ongoing act of caring for someone.
He watched me carefully. “You know nail-biting can be a kind of self-harm.”
I paused. “I know.”
He brought my pink ugly fingers to his lips, ran them along the broken skin. “I think what I was trying to say is not everyone’s gonna understand you. But that doesn’t mean they can’t love you.”
His eyes spilled over me, soft and unsure. I swallowed so hard it hurt me. I knew what was coming then. I knew, too, that it would change the chemistry of everything.
Tristan said I love you. Without even thinking, I said it back.
Chapter 61
We graduated two months into the pandemic, not knowing we’d be the last class to walk for two years. Campus shut down, going online. A few weeks later, the country crawled with protests over the killing of a man named George Floyd. But we didn’t know him yet. Milan had a mild cough in January, I’d had that fever in March. We’d beaten the virus, we thought. Our lives wouldn’t have to be lopped off to accommodate this feral, lethal thing lurking in our sneezes, sleeping on the rough skin of our tongues.
On graduation day, Jay, Milan, and I piled into Jay’s car to join our classmates on the football field, screaming as we crossed the stage to a future that wouldn’t exist by the time we turned our tassels, that was gone before we could grasp how gone it was.
We had a joint celebration on the patio of a soul food spot. It was closed for general dining but open for private events. Milan and I waded in our matching sundresses through the onslaught of “Congratulations!” tipsy on wine, murmuring about moving to Atlanta. Or New York. Anywhere, when the pandemic ended. DC, the setting of our childhoods, was simply a hostel to pass through while we searched for jobs elsewhere. Jobs that didn’t exist for women’s studies and sociology majors (mine and Milan’s, respectively). How were we supposed to know we’d wind up working at a grimy sausage restaurant for the next four years?
Jay was teaching elementary school in the fall over Zoom. (“Like that PBS show from the nineties?” we joked. No, not like that PBS show from the nineties.) He stood at the front of the patio, tapping his glass with a knife like people did on TV. It shattered. Blood slipped down the sleeve of his shirt. Everyone gasped. Like a true politician, he kept going.
“I want to thank everyone who made this trip to Houston to celebrate me, Cat, and Milan. I know many people, understandably, had to stay back. I know these are strange and scary times. But today the sun is out. So let’s bask in it. We don’t know what lies ahead, and frankly, we never have, have we? But we have each other now. So let’s celebrate that, more than anything else.”
