If no one ever knows what you want, then no one ever knows if you don’t get it.
“Sorry. I’m not mad. I knew, if you ever met someone, that—you like honesty.” Renata’s mumbling into her coffee. “And it happened. I did do that stuff. But… please don’t tell him, until I’m ready.”
I’m stuck onyou like honesty, but I move past it for her. “Of course. And you don’t ever have to be ready. I get it. I really do.”
Over in the reading corner, Rowan snaps her board book shutand slips from her barstool toward us. She goes straight to Renata’s bag, a beat-to-hell Land’s End tote stuffed with toddler life essentials, and unearths another.Inspector Paws: Working Together Is Fun!
All this time, I’ve seen Renata’s life in two pieces—then and now. Cat burglar to mom. But she’s still her, she’s been her, and I’ve been an awful friend, compartmentalizing her life because I’ve assumed everyone else likes that, too. Like I do. She might not’ve told her husband everything she did in her twenties to survive, but she never changed her name and kept her two lives separate.
Once Rowan’s re-settled with her story-time victim, I twirl the ends of my hair around my finger and say, “It kind of sucked, didn’t it? Modeling in New York was maybe not great. I think I have, like, baggage.”
Renata snort-laughs in surprise. “You think?”
“I still eat french fries. All the time.” Our comfort meals, after the agencies told us we didn’t book another gig. A large fry and a Coke.
“Me too.” A second passes, and then she smiles. “You must really like him.”
“Who?” I stare at her, and she stares at me, and then I’m saying, totally incredulous, “Faust? I don’t—it isn’t really… what I feel is unimportant.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, if he doesn’t really like me, too.”
She laughs, but quietly, like she does before she disarms my worldview. “That’s what you think?”
“Okay, Mrs. Married Woman.” I take a stubborn sip of coffee. “How did you know Bryce was interested in you?”
Her gaze shifts to the television. On the screen, a couple is yelling at each other, subtitles racing. The boys had turned themon for me. “I knew I was interested in him when I put all the traits on him.”
“The traits.”
“Yeah. Like, I like him because he’s nice, and no one else is nice. I like him because he’s funny, and nobody makes me laugh like he does. I don’t think any of that was true, you know? But I liked him, so I was rationalizing it.”
That doesn’t count, though. Faust is genuinely the only man I’ve met who gets off on playing my brand of psychosexual cat and mouse. Also, he’s just more honest than most people, when he isn’t doing—all that. And giving. And loyal. And handsome. That face. “What else?”
“Bossy. So those were my signs. But with him, I kind of picked up on… subtle stuff. He’d know things about me that were important to me before I realized they were important to me. He seemed actually excited to help me do stuff that meant a lot to me.”
My mind flips back to Faust and my’s night together, me on his lap. How quickly and enthusiastically he’s agreed to my rules. “But that’s being nice, too.”
“There’s a line between being nice and being in love, and it’s about a mile wide.”
A breath punches out of me. In love. That’s such a big phrase. Ludicrously large for a conversation about Faust and me.
“Cat?”
“Hm?”
Renata taps my mood ring. “It’s okay if you break your rules for someone. That doesn’t mean that the rules weren’t important. It just means that they have less power over you now.”
A lump forms in my throat. “I know,mother. But no chance.”
That night, I text Faust.
We’ve talked some over the weeks I’ve been in the city. Chess games. A few forwarded memes from the drivers’ group chat. But I’ve put off nailing down our schematics, mostly because I’ve been putting off this conversation.
Good morning :)
According to the internet, he’s in Azerbaijan. Eight hours ahead. And it’s eleven p.m. here, so it’s seven a.m. there, and he might be busy—he’s always busy. I click mute on the TV remote as I wait for his reply. My room hasn’t aged a minute past 1999. Tube television, red-and-white-striped ruffled bedding, green floral wallpaper.
