I was in a camp chair, nursing a cold cup of coffee, and freezing my native Phoenician, thin-blooded ass off.
“Is everything cool?” I called.
“Nothin’,” he answered, dropped the binos and turned to me. “Seems like everyone’s asleep.”
“I didn’t mean with the camp, I meant with you.”
He glanced back at the camp before he returned his attention to me and declared, “Eric and Jessie are together.”
“What?”
“Eric and Jessie are together,” he repeated. “They’re a couple. It’s done. He’s claimed. She’s claimed. The crew is moving on.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said carefully. “I’m not sure why you’re telling me something I know.”
“We said we’d keep us to us so no one would be in our business. We’ve done that. Everyone was in Eric and Jessie’s business. Now their business is a done business, and so is ours. And it got to me you pitched a fit about doing this surveillance shift with me.”
Taken off guard that he was ready to out us so soon, I explained, “I just…we’re still in that zone, and I didn’t want to seem excited about having a shift with you, which might give people ideas and maybe even lead them to guessing we’re together.”
“Why does it matter now that they get ideas?” he fired back. “We’re a thing. It’s a done deal. We don’t have to hide it anymore.”
“Okay then, maybe we should talk about this, because personally, I’d like more time.”
“More time for what?”
“More time for you and me to be just you and me.”
“Right,” he muttered, returned to the window and lifted the binos to his eyes.
“I’ve got a big posse I love, Knox,” I told his back. “But I’m kind of a private person.”
He didn’t respond.
I kept at him.
“I work. My shift ends, I leave it all behind. I get my dog. I go to you. We have dinner. We watch TV. We have sex. We cuddle. We share. That’s my happy place. Nothing gets in, unless we want it to get in by talking about it. I love that. When they know about us, we’ll still have it, but we won’t have it the way we have it now. Is it selfish for me to want you all to myself, just for a little while longer?”
Slowly, he turned back to me. “That’s what it is?”
“What else would it be?”
For a second, I thought he was going to answer me.
And he did, I simply sensed it wasn’t the answer he’d been going to give me.
“That’s it? You just want more us time?”
“Well…yeah,” I said. “Again, what else would it be?”
He didn’t address that.
He asked, “How much time?”
I shrugged. “A week?”
“Just a week?”
What was going on here?
