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“I know. She called me right when I got home from your house on Sunday. I was still shaken. Which doesn’t excuse what I did.” The tops of the pancakes started to bubble. Levi pulled a spatula out of the crock by the stove and flipped them.
“You were only thinking of yourself,” she said.
“I wasn’t even thinking, which is worse. I’m sorry.”
Disbelief stopped her from being able to say anything, so she stared at him in silence as the pancakes he was making sizzled on her stove until he stacked them onto a plate and slid them into the warm oven. In the little bit of time she’d known him, he’d walked out on her once and told her biggest secret to his sister.
And he was standing in her kitchen making her pancakes, and she hadn’t thrown any at him.
She didn’t know which surprised her more.
“Did you just come over here to make me pancakes and apologize?”
“I didn’t expect to make pancakes,” he said, nudging the new batter he’d plopped into the pan into nice circles. “I came over here to apologize.”
“And?” she asked, her fingers tapping on the cabinets at her side.
“And to ask you about your illness. Maybe to ask for a date.”
“Only maybe?”
One of the pancakes hit the side of the griddle as he flipped it. “I don’t know. It was hard to lose Kimmie.” He paused, and she could see him fighting to slip his reserve back on, like it was a sweater that didn’t fit anymore. “I hadn’t believed it could happen. No matter how bad her depressive episodes got, suicide seemed like something that happened to other people. So facing a relationship—even a date with a pretty girl—where premature death is in the cards, I just don’t know. It’s cowardly, and I’m sure it’s foolish, but if I’m not honest now, how will you trust me?”
His back straightened, and despite little movement in his face, she could tell he’d recovered himself. “I’d like to hear about the disease from you, not the internet.”
“This is still all about you. What about me?” Honesty was nice, but it wasn’t enough. People could be real mean in the name of I’m being honest.
“You?” He looked up from his pancake-making in surprise. “Even if I had all your creativity and imagination, I don’t think I could have ever imagined someone as intriguing as you moving in next door.”
The warm air that slid out of the oven door when he opened it to add pancakes to the stack melted some of her irritation, but not all of it. “And you didn’t leave on Sunday because you’re afraid of catching the bug?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t know much about HIV, but I know the condom part. You tell me what else I need to know.”
“I don’t need to convince someone to be in a relationship with me just because I have HIV.” She’d fallen for the trap of settling for less before.
“I didn’t ask you to. I just want you to educate me about HIV.”
There was still a small, hurt part of her that wanted him to define the difference between convince and educate, that wanted him to beg her for the information. But most of her wanted to get back to where they were on Sunday night, with his face a breath away from hers and her body tingling with anticipation. Being suspicious of how much she wanted it didn’t mean she was willing to argue semantics.
“I wasn’t born with HIV, if that’s part of what you’re asking,” she said, getting the most damning portion of her story out before he could imagine her as some innocent lamb done wrong by a blood transfusion. Not that she deserved to be HIV positive—or that anyone deserved to get this disease—but people had funny notions about sex and cosmic punishment, and if Levi was one of those, she wanted to know that as soon as possible. “I got it because I had unprotected sex with a man I trusted. I was a little drunk, and in the back of my mind I knew better, but that doesn’t change what I did.”
She gave a hollow laugh at her past self. “I remember being so glad I wasn’t pregnant, because besides not using a condom, I wasn’t on the pill, either. The guy ended it pretty much immediately after, so it took my roommate three months to convince me to go to Planned Parenthood and get on the pill, which meant STD tests.” She looked up from her hands to catch his eyes and dare him to judge her. “It’s a good thing I wasn’t pregnant.”
