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“Fucking Tinkerbelle,” Emery said.
A laugh slipped out of Tean. “Fucking Tinkerbelle.”
When a lull came on the TV, Emery fixed his gaze on Tean again. “Jem seems…complicated.”
“That’s putting it mildly. Although, to be fair, he could say the same about me.”
“He’s clearly intelligent. He’s resourceful. He has a certain charisma. I don’t trust him.”
“Jem is devoted to the people he cares about.”
“But he’s not safe, is he? He’s not…tame, for lack of a better word.”
The question took Tean by surprise. The word was a surprise. He hadn’t thought it before, hadn’t brought the issue to himself in those terms. But he understood, in that moment, some of the internal workings that had been going on in the dark part of his brain. He understood what he’d wanted to be true.
“No,” he said quietly. “He’s not.”
“But he loves you.”
Tean rolled one shoulder.
Emery gave a laugh. “That wasn’t a question. John says he’s…well, the word he used is besotted, but you’ll have to forgive him because he reads an ungodly amount of romance novels.”
“I think he loves me. I love him. I think we’re ok; I don’t think—I mean, I think everything will work out. But it’s been hard, the past few days. Learning things aren’t…resolved, I guess. I’d believed—I’d hoped—we’d resolved everything.”
Emery snorted. “You’re talking to the master of unresolved emotional bullshit. You know what I’m starting to think? Heat death.”
“Maybe this is what Jem feels like,” Tean said. “Maybe this is exactly what it’s like.”
“The first two laws of thermodynamics: energy is always conserved, and entropy is always increasing. Eventually, the universe will reach a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Everything distant, drifting, cold. All the energy in the universe spread so thin that it can’t do anything. Heat death.”
“I know what heat death is.”
Emery seemed to ignore that. “That’s resolution. Resolution is closing things off. Shutting things down. The end.”
“Right, but that seems like an oversimplification and perhaps a conflation of resolution as I mean it, in relationship terms.”
“Of course it is. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Life is messy. Life is a crazy fuckfest where you can die because an elephant did a headstand on you. And relationships are even messier. Resolving things is all well and good, but if you think you’re going to resolve everything, forever, then you need to be in a relationship with a body pillow.”
Tean thought about that.
“John is going to kill me when I repeat this conversation to him,” Emery said, and he sounded strangely proud of himself.
“That is the best relationship advice I’ve ever gotten,” Tean said.
Emery sat back, a tiny, almost imperceptible smile, playing across his lips. “Damn straight.”
20
In the dream, everything was still ok. In the dream, they were back home, and the girls were playing in the living room, and Scipio was nudging his leg to get some of the breakfast sandwich Jem was preparing. In the dream, there were biscuits. In the dream—in all dreams—there was sausage.
Jem woke to Tean rubbing his leg. Jem made some suitable waking-up noises. He wiped his mouth and discovered a strand of drool connecting him to the pillow. He closed his eyes and fell back onto said pillow.
“Complete and total emotional resolution,” Tean said, “is like the heat death of the universe.”
“No,” Jem said and pulled a second pillow over his head. “Go away.”
Tean laughed quietly.
