85: domestic
In the morning he's still there, even scarier-looking with sobriety on his side, milling around my tiny house and making strange bored noises with his lips, alternately quacking and buzzing them like a raspberry, and nearly silently naming every author, I assume, he hasn't heard of, which is all of them. He takes one down off the shelf with a happy sound of recognition and, before he can either attempt to borrow it or attempt to discuss it with me, I realize we have reached a deliriously critical moment.
"Jaime," I say from the bed, slowly rising. "Are you a Republican or a Democrat?" It's fucking nine AM on a Sunday morning, cut me a break. I have to work fast.
He looks at me like I've just turned my skin inside-out and put it back on like everything's fine, and then narrows his eyes: "What are you?"
"Oh, I'm a libertarian," I say, and remember too late the dawning confusion on his face: "Basically a Republican, but like... Meaner."
"So you're a Christian?"
Not even at my bleakest. Not even in service of the highest goals imaginable.
"No, but I do believe in... Voodoo."
"Yeah, I saw your books. My grandma did Santeria."
"...Awesome?"
Without being asked, or encouraged, Jaime starts making breakfast. I return to bed, not to sleep but to stare at my ceiling and count my troubles, one by one.
As he's serving it up on my donated ice-cream table, in the area near the door of my $200/mo. garage studio that I think of as my dining room, kitchen, and receiving area, there's a knock at the door.
"Who the eff," I whisper weakly, unable to deal, and terrified it's going to be some kind of bad-idea police showing up to slap some sense into me.
Which essentially it is, because: Why hello, Rocky and his girlfriend. What an appropriate time to visit my home. But no, even better, because although the girlfriend can't stay, and is just dropping Rocky off to spend the day with me as a birthday present, she gets a look at Jaime's dancing, bobbing rear in the kitchen, pouring out mimosas, and shoots me a look of supreme fucking triumph.
Which is how I find myself standing awkwardly in my pajamas in a room two small for three people, head nearly bumping the ceiling, with Rocky watching my last night's conquest bump and grind in his boxers. Good God, I think. If his dick gets loose and I have to be in the same room with Rocky and Jaime's dick at the same time, I will literally expire.
When I come out of the bathroom, having brushed the hell out of my teeth, Rocky's reading a newspaper or a comic book or something at the table, gnawing sloppily on the breakfast that Jaime proudly presents me now, his face a mask of total desperation. Eggs, naturally, which I choke down and exclaim over, making exaggerated and delighted noises as I chew. I wonder if it would be better to throw up now, or wait until Jaime leaves and then puke all over Rocky, or what the protocol is, or whether Jaime is ever going to leave, or if we just live together now and Rocky is visiting our tiny home, and whether that's maybe how all people end up together, tricked by fate, and I'm just the latest person to twig to this fact moments after it's all been sealed, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life explaining basic shit to Jaime, who for all his years seems to be an unremitting source of energy and enthusiasm, so excited by life generally that he can't even sit down long enough to eat his fucking eggs, and must dance wildly around the room to some horrible song he's found on my radio, counting the steps aloud like Debbie Reynolds and snapping his fingers for no goddamned reason at all.
I look blankly across the chaos and Rocky smiles sweetly, before turning back to the comics. I am in love with, have always been moving toward, this very scenario: Springtime sun coming in through my open windows, the curtains stirring, a mug of tea on the table between us. Quiet smiles and private time, together, on a Sunday. I just never pictured Jaime voguing his happy ass through the middle of it.
Finally taking in my jaw-dropped inability to comprehend Jaime or what he's doing in my house, Rocky mistakes it for something like wonder, or delight, and I see in the corner of my eye his lips go firm. It's a disappointed line I've seen before; it vanishes before I can see it properly. He folds the newspaper and decides to join my team, grinning snarkily behind Jaime's back, as though this isn't all his fault. As though it's not about him.
"So Jaime, we were planning on doing stuff today..." he says, and I'm pleased. Maybe Jaime's not so bad. If it bothers Rocky this much, maybe I'll date him awhile. Demonstrate my ability to hold down a stable relationship, open up the possibility of sex again since he's clearly learned to look at me the other way. It could work. It would work masterfully. I can call off our dates at the last moment and giggle privately to myself about having "other plans," and he can roll his eyes exasperatedly, and sooner or later it will break him. This will work, I know it.
But today, I'm not in the mood for that. Certainly not for Jaime in his current state of simple-minded joy, and anyway: I was promised the day with Rocky. That's what I can handle today, tender as a kitten, and it's all I ever want. I'm content to let him do the heavy lifting.
"Like what," Jaime says distractedly, knocking the silverware drawer closed with one hip and starting on the pots and pans.
"Like, um, the comic book store... And the music store. Maybe a punk band later. I was thinking about going out to the batting cages..."
Like hell, but I like his style; I like even more the bad-smell wrinkle of Jaime's nose. It's a noble nose, that one. Strong, like my mother's grandparents had. He bats his eyelashes at me from the sink, looking ten years younger for a moment, and grins.
"I'll be out of your hair shortly. But I demand that you come dancing with me next weekend, okay?"
I nod, grinning flirtatiously, and Rocky's hands fly to his hair. His arms begin to move impatiently, picking at his jeans and at nothing, and feeling brave -- and, yes, probably still drunk -- I move to Jaime and kiss him quickly on the lips, leaning into a strong hug before letting go. "Promise."
Rocky's impatience is so vibrant you can feel it thrumming, like a convoy going past. It is awesome, it worth all of it. I gaze out the window -- a useless if theatrical gesture, considering the window opens on nothing but the terrifying shed of my front-house neighbor, who drives rented cars on the nights he dates and whom we've decided is a killer of children -- while Rocky vibrates in the kitchen behind me. I indulge in my favorite activity of late, the construction of scenarios in which some overdramatic conversation we can have in a few moments, where he calls me to task for some imagined slight and I can yell, "Don't pretend you care!" and he melts into a pile of rumpled slacker gear and destroyed feelings, but when he clears his throat it's to yell something weird into the other room: "Hey, you should sign your book before you go!"
Jaime sticks his head out of the tiny bedroom with a look of equal parts horror and guilt, shaking his head at Rocky in a way that speaks volumes of their own intimacy; I am no longer able to locate the precise coordinates of my jealousy and just decide to be pissed off generally, spitting, "What are you talking about, what book?"
Rocky rolls his eyes. "He's so bashful, it's retarded. It's why I wanted you to meet. He knows that," he growls at the bedroom door. Through which Jaime's guilty hand, only, reaches out holding his book: Ernesto X. Puente's The Declension Of Pleasure Through Time.