“I'm pretty sure you're a traitor,” I tell Theo on the phone after school.
“How did you know!”
“I mean about Josey.”
“I'm trying to respect her choices.”
“Ew.”
“I know. It's the worst. I don't know. If she wants to be friends I'll be friends. It's not like it's a consolation prize.”
“That's very sweet.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You've ruined me for non-feminists, you know,” I say.
“Then my work here is done.”
“I actually do have to go,” I say. “Tutoring sessions.”
“Ew, speaking of non-feminists.”
I laugh, gathering up my stuff. “He's not that bad, actually. And hey, he's family.”
“Ooh, you're getting good at that.”
“Right? Family family family family. I can say it without feeling like a faker. Almost.”
“I love you,” he says.
“Well, I never felt like a faker saying that. I love you too. Now go away.”
When I get to Lucas's house, his mother opens the door before I'm even up the stoop, startling the hell out of me. “I heard your florist cancelled,” she says.
God, this woman. It's like she has an attenae implanted in her head for maximum importing and exporting gossip potential.
Though she could stand to check her accuracy. “No, he thought he'd have to, but it turns out his son can handle us, so he just passed us over to him.”
“Oh.”
“With a discount,” I add, which is a blatant lie, but I sort of want to see if she can see through it. She narrows her eyes just a little, like she's trying to, but then nods and stands aside to let me in, screaming Lucas's name up the stairs as she does.
He gallops down the stairs, smiles at me. “Hi,” he says.
“Hey.”
“How's Alexis?”
“She's good. Cone on, we've got geometry to do today. You love geometry.”
We sit down in the living room and I spread the book over both our laps and show him the exercises we did in our class yesterday. He's improving at a faster rate than I am, which is annoying for both my self-esteem and my job security as his tutor. Luckily I don't think he's noticed.
“So you seem happier,” he says.
“What?”
“You've been looking really down the past few weeks and now you don't.”
It's funny that he noticed that, because I never ended up telling him about Josey breaking up with us. I'm not really sure why. I'm not really in the habit of talking about my personal life to anyone anymore.
It's also funny that he's right—that I am feeling a little better now than I have been for a few weeks, and I don't really know why. Nothing's really changed, besides the state of Josey's uterus. And I guess the degree to which I'm used to being without her.
I'm just settling in, I suppose.
“It's nice, that's all” he says. “Seeing you happy.”
“You're sweet.”
He keeps writing on his scratch paper for a while, and then all of a sudden puts his pencil down and reaches up and kisses me.
When I was seven, our apartment building was struck by lightning, and I've always thought that was the most startling thing that would ever happen to me.
The whole thing lasts for less than a second. I put a hand on his chest and push him away, gently, and he obeys.
“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”
“Um...”
“I guess I...misread,” he says.
“We're...” practically related, but it feels borderline cruel to point that out, when he stopped and apologized immediately. He's embarrassed enough. He doesn't need me beating him over the head with why that was so incredibly not okay. He already looks like he wants to crawl inside his shirt and die there.
So I say, “I have a boyfriend,” instead.
“I don't get it.”
That's not what I was expecting. “What?”
“I thought you guys were in some kind of open relationship thing.”
“It's not an open relationship.”
“So what, he's just allowed to sleep with as many people as he wants and you're not allowed to do anything?”
“Okay whoa. No one's talking about what I'm allowed to do.”
“You said it was because you had a boyfriend.”
“It's not like he tells me what to do. It's the rules of the relationship.”
“You don't have rules without someone setting rules.”
“That's so stupid,” I say. “Then how does monogamy work, it's always someone bossing the other one around?”
“How would you even know?”
I close the textbook. “God, Lucas.”
“Is it me or is it your situation? That's all I want to know.”
“It's...both.”
He kind of shrinks a little, slumps back against the cushions.
I have a feeling this is going to be very awkward for a very long time.
“I thought you liked me,” he says.
“I do like you. As a friend.”
“Well isn't that what it would kind of be?” he says. “Some friends with benefits thing? 'Cause you have a boyfriend already.”
“He had a girlfriend before me,” I say. “So what does that say about me, that he's just messing around with me?”
He looks at me and shrugs slowly, deliberately.
“Screw you,” I say. “You don't know anything about this.”
“I know you're in the weirdest relationship I've ever heard of. I know you're involved with the same guy as someone else and the two of you hang off of him like a little fan club and he can scope out more girls to join you whenever he wants.”
“That's not even sort of—”
“He's a slut,” Lucas says. “He's taking advantage of you.”
“He's not.”
“He's in love with someone else, Taylor! You're sleeping with a guy who's in love with someone else!”
“It's called polyamory, you asshole!”
And that's when I see that standing on the steps, watching us, listening to us, for
