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How long could he maintain it? How long would he be willing to exert such effort just to keep us afloat?
I tried to push those thoughts out of my mind. Rhys would smile at me and it would banish the darkness. Rhys would hold me and I wouldn’t feel alone anymore. Rhys would kiss me and it would make me feel wanted. I tried to concentrate on that.
A few days after Halloween, Rhys started talking about Thanksgiving. His parents had invited us to come, and the idea filled me with dread like someone had poured concrete into my stomach.
I shrugged and said maybe and changed the subject, and Rhys stopped himself from bringing it up again but I could see he wanted to.
He brought it up a few days later, when we were going to sleep. I felt my heart rate speed up and sweat bloom along my spine. I didn’t want to examine my violent reaction, so I grasped at the tool Rhys had given me.
“I–I hear you,” I said. And Rhys said, “Okay, baby.”
He wrapped his arms around me, like he always did, and kissed the back of my neck, like he always did. But it took me a long time to fall asleep.
Because how long would that last? How many times could I say it before he’d push the issue.
In the meantime, I’d been staying late at work, trying to jump-start the art and music supplies funding campaign on top of my caseload. I’d also been trying to convince Imari to let me work on getting shelter dogs to go visit foster care facilities, but the money wasn’t there and she advised against trying to raise funds for two projects simultaneously. I tried to cheer up Noé Caldera (and myself) by telling him about how maybe he’d be able to use a camera from Mariposa soon, but his expression didn’t even change.
I was worried I was losing him.
One day I got home to find Rhys in a pissy mood because the chorus of the song he’d been working on had collapsed, and now he had to rework the whole thing.
I went upstairs and changed my clothes to the sound of Rhys’s guitar. Usually his singing relaxed me, but tonight all the notes sounded harsh, like I could hear his irritation in the music itself. I knew he’d be at it for a while.
I grabbed Max’s leash and said I was taking him for a walk, not waiting for Rhys to answer. I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to disappear. It wasn’t like I could help Rhys with his music. Hell, I couldn’t even help my own client.
Max and I walked our regular loop and ended up in the cemetery. I let him off his leash to chase squirrels. He never went far. Had he been trained by a family? Did he have people he wished he could get back to? What if he’d gotten lost and now that we’d adopted him he’d never be able to get back to his real family again? Or had they had him and loved him and then abandoned him?
Max barked once and whined at me. I walked over to him and found him sniffing at a dead squirrel. It looked like it had been skinned.
“That’s creepy as fuck,” I said, heart beating fast. Max yipped in agreement.
I clipped his leash back on and headed the fuck out of there. We walked slowly after we cleared the cemetery, Max with his strange, crabbed gait, me not wanting to go home. I turned right instead of left.
“What the hell’s my problem, Max? Why can’t I just go to Rhys’s parents and eat some damn turkey and talk about the weather?”
Max bumped my thigh.
“I wish we could switch and I could be you for a while. No one expects you to talk. Or visit other people’s families.”
Max turned in a circle and then pooped.
“I know, Rhys is a fucking saint and I’m an asshole who needs to get it together.”
Max kind of looked like he was nodding at me.
“Whatever, I pick up your shit, don’t call me an asshole.”
We circled back toward home slowly. When I used to walk in the city, I tried not to think. Now, it seemed like thinking was all I could do.
I knew that something was wrong. I knew that all the attention Rhys and I had been paying to our relationship was good, but also that it had set me majorly on edge. I knew the threat of a holiday with his family had set the whole mess spinning and was making me feel guilty and unworthy of Rhys. I just didn’t know what to do about it, and it was a poisonous kind of not knowing.
The cottage glowed brightly in the dark, homey and inviting. And I had the strangest feeling that if I peered in through the window, I would see Rhys’s other life. The life he was supposed to have.
