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We both start at the same time, and then stop, and she smiles sheepishly, tucking her hair behind her ear. Oh, shit. Did I make her nervous?
“You go,” I tell her, trying to be a gentleman. In reality, I want to spill all of the words stuck in my brain for the last few days - but I’m interested in what she has to say first.
“I’m sorry,” she finally says, and I tilt my head in confusion.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” I pick at the edge of the container in my hands. “You had every right to be defensive.”
“I wasn’t being defensive,” she argues half-heartedly, laughing, but when I fix her with a look, she practically rolls her eyes. “Ok, maybe a little bit. But really, you don’t have anything to worry about with Dylan.” She swallows, hard, and looks down at her hands on the cart. For a second, I swear she wiggles her right hand, rings glistening the fluorescent lights overhead. “If I’m being honest, I’m feeling…” She glances around at the mostly empty store, which is small and situated below some of the apartments near hers. “Guilty.”
“What do you have to feel guilty about?” I ask, still confused.
“This.” She gestures between us, and gives a small shrug. “It has nothing to do with you, and everything with me getting in my own head.” She sighs, and then leans down against the handle of the cart. The V of her sweater falls to the point where I can see straight down her shirt, and I try my best to keep my attention on her face. “There’s this whole thing about widows, and their chapter two…” She trails off, examining her hands again.
It’s the first time I’ve heard her refer to herself as a widow, and it kicks something into place for me. Widow. Piper was a widow. She hadn’t just loved and lost. She wasn’t just a recovering alcoholic. And maybe it was hearing it come out of her mouth, but even reading that obituary, seeing those comments, it didn’t make me understand like hearing her say it did.
She’s scared. Probably more scared than I am at whatever this is. Because as much as I don’t like feelings, as much as I try to mask mine, Piper wore hers on her sleeve, and based on what she’d told me, those feelings were very much trampled into the ground.
And as much as I’m physically attracted to this woman in front of me, as much as my entire body wants to be in contact with her, it’s the conversations that matter. It’s the way she talks to me like I’m not made of stone - of marble.
“Hey,” I start, and take a step toward her. She doesn’t recoil, which I take as a good sign. I reach my free hand out to grip her forearm lightly. “Whatever you’re feeling, we can work through.” I pause, squeezing her arm. “Together.” Her mouth tips up at the corner, eyes shining slightly. “This doesn’t feel like-"
Before I can finish my thought, someone says “Piper?” And we both turn to see where the voice is coming from.
Piper
Six Years Ago
“So close!” Ken’s voice rang across the small yard, and a chorus of laughter followed as another one of his friends tried, and failed, miserably, I might add, to affix the small paper in his hand to the drawing taped up on the window.
“Clearly he’s not that bad at landing on the target in real life,” Bethani taunted, sipping at the fruity drink in her hand - something virgin that their bartender friend had whipped up and passed to the mother-to-be as she waddled around the patio. Ken and Mickey’s coworker rolled his eyes as he handed the blindfold back to Bethani, returning to his also pregnant girlfriend.
Bethani wasn’t kidding. The dude was horrible at pin the sperm on the uterus, the outrageous party game we were playing, but obviously it wasn’t an indication of actual skill. I hid my smirk behind the Mike’s Hard in my hand - the same one I’d been sipping on for half an hour while all of the guys from Ken and Mickey’s team attempted their own…implantation? I cringed to myself.
Wordlessly, Bethani held out the blindfold and another little paper sperm to the next victim: Mickey. His blue eyes brightened as he laughed, his face creasing, tighter in the last few months than before.
When he looked at me, taking the blindfold, I felt the words he was saying without actually speaking. Without hearing the country twang, the midwestern boy charm that firmly had my heart from the day he walked in my front door.
We hadn’t had the foresight to think about our future - future lives, future children - when he’d hastily started chemo at the beginning of this journey. And as his body became frailer, his hair ever disappearing and his soft features melting into jutting angles masked by now too-large clothes that we couldn’t afford to keep replacing, the chance that we would ever get a day like that, baby shower and all, became slim.
So I tipped my bottle to him, and watched Ken clap at Mickey’s shoulder, probably a little harder than he intended, because he was celebrating, didn’t you know? He was going to be a dad. So he’d said eight thousand times on that bittersweet day.
I stared at my hand in my lap, my angry, red cuticles nearly the same color as the itchy folding chair I was perched in. Another coworker helped tie the blindfold over Mickey’s eyes, and his laugh was bright again as he was spun, around and around, stopped and swaying right in front of the crudely drawn female anatomy.
Blindly, he reached out, sperm in hand.
“Cold!” someone called, and he moved to his right.
“Warmer!” another said. He kept going. “Warmer!”
“Red hot!” Bethani giggled, and without any effort at all, Mickey reached forward and stuck the tiny black figure in his hand smack dab in the middle of the uterus.
As everyone around us howled, he slid the blindfold off and doubled over, shaking his head as he laughed.
Effortless. He made most things look effortless. The way he’d kissed me the first time, soft and slow. How he’d introduced me as his girlfriend to these very people, years before. Effortless, like the way he covered up the other girls he’d talked to in the months leading up to his diagnosis.
I saw the wave of nausea hit him as he sat back up - but Ken didn’t notice. He kept laughing, handing Mickey a small brown bag topped with tissue paper.
I sipped on my drink, trying to steel myself for all the comments we’re in for. I felt like the partner of the girl who catches the bouquet at a wedding.
