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He gave one brief and almost insignificant nod. “Serious enough for your mom to mention him again.”
Her lips twitched. She should be honest. Enrique was in the past, Levi was in her present, and she wanted Levi to be in her future. But... She sighed. But didn’t matter. If she wasn’t up-front, Levi might think there was something she was hiding. She sighed again. “I was in love. And he broke my heart, because I wouldn’t announce to the world that I was positive.”
She must have startled Levi, because he leaned away from her, though the coughing fit his surprise started was short-lived. “Why?”
“He was positive, too, and active in community activism. He wanted us to be this power couple, doing speaking engagements, writing articles, etc. I didn’t want that. I just wanted to be a professor and an artist and live my life.”
“Who dumped who?”
“Oh, he dumped me. Called me a coward. Sometimes, I wonder if he was right.”
“Because you wouldn’t tell the world your own medical business?”
“I guess.” When Levi put it that way, her position seemed so reasonable. It was her business to tell or not tell, not everyone’s business to know. But when Enrique had dumped her, she’d felt just the opposite. And some of those doubts lingered. What if she hadn’t made the right decisions? What if she’d been unreasonable?
It hadn’t helped that her parents had loved Enrique, especially her mom. Strangely, they’d seemed to find comfort in his positive status, like he could understand her better, or life would be easier if they were both positive.
Meanwhile, she’d just been annoyed that her disease seemed to define their entire relationship. And maybe she’d been unreasonable about that, too.
No, she thought, looking at Levi. Or even if she had been unreasonable about Enrique, she was in a good place now and the past was worth the present.
“Was it easier to date someone who was also positive?”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “They would know how you feel.”
She sat back as if slapped. Had he not been listening? She’d just said how Enrique didn’t understand her, and how she didn’t understand him. That they’d fought over what he thought a person with HIV should do with their lives versus what she wanted to do.
“By that logic you should date men.”
He blinked several times. “That’s not,” he said slowly, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hands, “what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” she asked, arching her voice.
“I guess...” He rubbed at his face again, then shook his head like he was clearing dust out from between his ears. “I guess I’m not sure.”
“We still had to use condoms, if that’s what you mean. There are different strains of the virus, you know.”
“I know.” Levi made strange clicking noises in the back of his throat. “Sometimes, I would look at Kimmie on the days she couldn’t get out of bed, and I wondered what it felt like to be her. I would know in my mind that depression was an illness, and she needed treatment, and treatment wasn’t an instant fix or even a permanent fix, but I still wondered why she couldn’t just put her feet on the ground and walk out the door.”
He sniffed. “Those thoughts weren’t fair to either of us. I guess I wondered if I would better understand what she was going through if I could go through it, too.”
She arched an eyebrow. “That may be one of the most self-centered things I’ve ever heard. Do you want to get HIV so you can understand me better? That can be arranged,” she said, before her sense caught up with her mouth, and she stopped talking.
He blinked several times, then rubbed at his eyes again. “I’m not making myself clear.”
“I don’t know what you could say that would be any clearer. You wanted to be sick so that you could understand your sick wife. You have the flu. Do you understand what I was going through last week any better?”
He coughed, and Mina’s words sank into her head like a thousand pieces of glass, tearing her apart. “I’m sorry.” She curled her legs under herself, and the bag of chocolate chips fell to the floor, fortunately not spilling any. “I had the flu last week, and I could barely think through my name. I shouldn’t be yelling at you for not being able to enunciate a complicated feeling about you and Kimmie. I should be offering to make you tea.”
