“You're not worried about regretting stuff, though,” I say. “You're worried about not trusting yourself from before that you made the right decision.”
“Does it matter?”
“Well when it comes to us, yeah, because you're still working off the assumption that past-Josey made the right call.”
“It's just...not that I'm not thinking about it, that's all.”
“I don't know if we can go back,” I say. “I don't know if you can.”
She closes her eyes. “And with that, she vacuums out a fetus.”
“I'm not going anywhere.”
She breathes out and closes her eyes as the door opens and the doctor comes in. “Okay,” she says.
The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. The doctor gives Josey a pill that makes her drowsy but doesn't put her to sleep, and when the suction part is happening Josey says it hurts but it's not so bad. The doctor takes her feet out of the stirrups and pats her knee a little and tells her she can lay there for as long as she wants until she feels ready to go. Josey's sitting up as soon as she's out the door.
I help her into the backseat of the car and tuck her in with the blankets and pillows and give her a bottle of water to sip. I don't know what I'm going to do with her; it would be hard to explain to her parents why she went out for two hours and came home sedated.
So I just drive around for a while, letting her nap, kind of like she's a baby and I'm her mom, which should probably feel like a strange comparison, but when you're with someone who's somehow your sister and your girlfriend at the same time, adding another association doesn't feel so bad.
Ex-girlfriend.
She sleeps for about half an hour and then stirs, kicking her feet a little. I watch her in the rearview mirror. “Hi,” I say. “How'd you sleep?”
“Good.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired.”
“You were crying in your sleep a little.”
“Ugh.” She wipes her cheeks off. “Just drugs and hormones.”
“I know.”
She sits up, rubbing at her face. Her hair is a mess. “Are you okay?” she says.
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you say a prayer?”
“I did just now, while you were sleeping.”
She nods and we're quiet for a while as she stretches herself out, shakes her head a little, works her body out.
“I miss you,” I say. Without meaning to, without thinking about it first. “And I don't mean...I mean I do miss you, as you, but I mean that I miss you in our relationship. I miss you in the context or whatever of me and Theo. Because I love him and I love him just as much, but I love being with him and I loved being with him more when you were here. I loved the relationship more when you were in it.”
This is probably not the best time to be putting pressure on her.
“The point is that I'm still happy,” I say. “I want you to know that.”
“I don't think that's what your point was,” she says.
“Okay, but it is a point.”
“I didn't really know you felt like that,” she says.
“Like what?”
“Like...I don't know. That you were really enamored with this polyamory thing. I knew it was worth it to you because you love him and you like me and this is the way that you can have him, but I guess I thought that really if you could have designed the perfect situation than it would have been just the two of you.”
“I...that's not how I feel anymore.”
“I grew up in this lifestyle, you know?” she says. “And if the three of us...when the three of us don't work out, what are you going to do? Are you going to go back to just being with one boy, or one girl, and this will all just be a weird thing you did in high school?”
“I don't know.”
“This is what I want,” she says. “To be like my parents are. I never wanted to just marry the one person and have the two little people on the wedding cake and the two little people at the parent teacher conferences or whatever the hell.”
“I like this current relationship,” I say. “Well, the slightly-less-current version that had you in it. That's what I know.”
“I don't want to be dumped in three years because you decide we were an experiment.”
“I don't want to be dumped last month because you're so sure we can't be.”
She crawls back under the blanket. “Maybe it's all a big metaphor for how I don't want to be rejected again.”
“I love you,” I say, softly.
“I love you too.”
“And we can't keep spending time together.”
“But today was so fun,” she says, and I laugh a little.
“Go to sleep,” I say, and she does.
I drop her off at her house a few hours later and call Theo once I'm in my room. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi. Do you want to go out tonight?”
“Yeah.” He pauses. “How'd it go?”
“She's okay.”
He breathes out. “Good.”
We make plans to grab burgers and eat them on the soccer field where there's this amazing view at night, and it all sounds lovely, and then we hang up and I call Aanya.
“Hey, lady,” she says, and I start crying like she flipped a switch. “Taylor, what the hell? What's wrong?”
“It was horrible,” I sob, and she talks me through it for a long time.
25
Theo and Josey are talking more. I see them in the hallways between classes. It's still that chit-chat kind of talking we've been forcing, except it doesn't look as forced anymore. They look like just genuine friends.
This should make me happy,
