I shook that off. “I did hear it. So you followed me to a bar to say sorry for being controlling?”
“I wasn’t really trying to follow you. I was just coming to apologize. My date didn’t go too well and I met up with these guys instead. When Gunnar suggested the Dollar, I thought I’d see you, too.”
“Why didn’t your date go well?” I asked, turning to look at him.
César just shrugged. “I wasn’t paying much attention to her and she got pissed off.”
I watched as women started to mass around the table of Woodsmen. It reminded me of flies swarming around cow pies, because that was my mood. I wanted to shoo them all away. “You know that you can’t regulate what I do,” I told César. “You keep trying, and I don’t like it.”
“You made me worried with what you were saying, that you were going to drink in a bar with three men.”
Ok, maybe I had let him think that. “I went to dinner with three guys and two other girlfriends. They came here to drink, but I’m not.” Now I held myself away from his body. “You’re going to have to trust me some and you can’t give me the third-degree about one night out.”
“I was concerned, but you’re right, too,” he conceded. His arm went around my waist. “I got the results today from the paternity test.”
“Oh?” I waited, like the results were somehow in question.
“It’s just like you said, and like I thought. Of course, I’m the dad.”
I blew out the air I had been holding and slumped back against him again. “I already knew that.”
“I did too, but it was pretty serious, seeing it there in black and white. It made me feel…I don’t know. I’ve been feeling protective, but it made it kick up even higher,” he said in my ear.
I felt myself leaning back more, to get closer. His lips brushed my skin.
“Camdyn, I was worried that you might do something to jeopardize—”
Derrick arrived at the table and put down a drink in front me. “The gin and tonic that the lady requested,” he announced at the top of his voice.
I felt César’s thighs stiffen and he sat up straight in the chair. The arm around me clenched. “Who the hell are you?” he asked Derrick. “Why is he buying you gin and tonics?” he asked me.
“No, he isn’t,” I said quickly. “Not really! I just ordered that so they wouldn’t…I didn’t want to tell them, but I wasn’t going to drink it.”
“What’s going on here, Camdyn?” Derrick asked. “Is this guy bothering you?” He stared around the table, frowning at the Woodsmen players and puffing out his chest.
“Am I bothering her? Are you serious, man?” César laughed, but he didn’t sound amused.
“I’m dead serious!” Derrick yelled back, puffing more. If he hadn’t already been drunk, he would have thought twice about how he was acting, threatening a bunch of guys who each outweighed him by a minimum of a hundred pounds. Derrick was wrong, César was wrong, and this whole situation was, too. I was more tired, angry again, over it completely.
I removed César’s arm from my waist and handed the gin and tonic to Jory Morin. He chugged it without questioning why. I got up, pushed past Derrick, and walked out of the bar into the freezing night. Maybe it had been a mistake to try to go out and act like things were normal, when obviously they weren’t. Maybe they wouldn’t be ever again. This night had been a total fail, and I was having a terrible premonition of the rest of my life going that same way. I drove home crying.
An hour or so later, César knocked on my bedroom door. “I’m not talking to you,” I informed him, and turned over on my side.
“You’re not talking?” He opened the door anyway. “You remind me of my sister when we used to fight. She would not-talk until she was hoarse.”
I sat up. I wasn’t a not-talker, either. “As it turns out, I do have a few things to say. Item one: I’m going to start paying you rent for this month and next month.”
He looked puzzled. “What does that have to do with anything?”
I had thought through a strategy. “It will make you feel like I’m your equal, not some waif you picked up on the street and get to boss around,” I explained.
“If you really want to, fine, but it’s not necessary,” César said. “I don’t think you’re exactly a waif.”
“I’m going to pay you,” I repeated stubbornly, “but just through February. Because item two, I’m going to move to Florida, to be with my sister. She’s lonely down there and I think she needs me.”
César nodded slowly. “What about your job here?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m going to get fired. There’s not enough for me to do and they’re already tired of my feminine issues. Anyway, I can find something else in Florida. I should be near Ellie so she’s not so lonely. I’m the only family she has, you know. She’s not speaking to our dad, either.”
“Right.” He nodded again, and sat down on the end of my bed. “This has nothing to do with what happened tonight, with you getting upset with me.”
“It has everything to do with that, of course!” I told him. “I realized that I can’t live in your house. You remind me of this guy I was seeing a little, Lincoln. He kept pushing me.”
“He got physical with you?”
César seemed to get two sizes larger, like one of those squishy grow-animals I had put in a bowl of water when I was a kid. Except he didn’t expand into a cute unicorn or a bunny; he got scary.
“No, of course Lincoln never did that!” I assured him. “Never. I meant that he kept pushing me to, you know, commit.”
“He wanted to marry you?”
“No,” I said again. “He wanted me to be, like, his girlfriend. He wanted me to settle for
