Marriage of Unconvenience

I went for another box and found another for the blue zone, but this one had sheets and pillows in it, so I was able to move that one myself.

Under Cara’s watchful eye, we got the everything out of boxes, and in their proper places in less than three hours.

“You have a lot of stuff,” I said, looking around the living room. True, it had been just about empty when Lisa had left, but I didn’t remember seeing all this stuff in Cara’s tiny apartment.

“I had to put a lot of this stuff in the basement because I couldn’t fit it in the apartment,” she said. Uh, I hadn’t known about that. No wonder she had so much stuff.

“You little sneak,” I said, poking her shoulder.

“Hey! You had the room, and my stuff is really nice.” She was right. Most of my decorating style was “Ikea Chic” or had come from yard sales and thrift stores. Cara had actually shopped at antique stores and the kinds of places that had home furnishings. I’d never even been into one of those places.

“We still need a couch,” I said, staring at the very empty space where a couch should be.

“And a coffee table, a few side tables, another chair, and some better curtains and we’ll be in business,” Cara said.

“Oh, is that all?” That wasn’t one or two things.

“I don’t think that’s a lot.” I made a sputtering noise.

“Aw, you two are the cutest couple. I’m so glad you’re married,” Cedar said. “I wish you had a show so I could just watch you together all the time.”

“Little creepy, Cedar,” Ansel said.

“Why is it creepy to be happy for my friends?” That sparked a long discussion about reality TV and whether real people were actors and then privacy in the internet age and then that somehow evolved into discussing whether we would want to know what thoughts animals were thinking if we could.

Ansel passed around the candy, and it was gone pretty quickly.

“Well, I feel like we owe you all food, so who wants pizza, and what kind?” Before anyone could say anything, Cara stood up from where we’d been lounging on the floor.

“Freeze. No one say anything until I write this down.” She whipped her phone out of her back pocket and then turned to me.

“What do you want, Lo?”

“Mozzarella sticks. And pepperoni.” Cara nodded and took that down, pivoting to face Cedar. She went around the room and figured out how to order pizzas with who wanted what, sometimes just on half, and enough appetizers to go around, and drinks. And then she split the bill so I could send her the exact amount, since we’d agreed to share the cost.

“You should just get beanbags,” Cedar said, leaning against the wall.

“Maybe,” Cara said in a way that meant we were definitely not even fucking considering beanbags as suitable for our living room.

“I didn’t know you were such a decorating dictator. I’m learning so many things about you now that we’re married,” I said as she sat down after putting in the pizza order and rested her head on my shoulder.

“And you’re going to learn so many more. Good and bad.” I knew she was going to figure out things about me that I might have hid from her, sometimes without even intending to. You could never really know someone fully until you’d lived with them and had seen what was under the veneer they showed the world. I’d seen what was under Lisa’s veneer and it was pretty rotten underneath. I was so glad to be rid of her, even if it meant that Cara had taken over the entire apartment. I still had my room to myself. She wouldn’t go in and decorate it when I wasn’t home. Would she? Surely not.

“You’re making me want to get married,” Cedar said with a dreamy sigh. “And I never thought I could get married.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She shrugged one shoulder.

“I don’t know. Just didn’t think it was for me.” Cedar didn’t talk a lot about her life before she moved to Boston to go to school for makeup. I’d known her for years, but still, she didn’t like to talk about her past, so I let it go. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t have to. Cara was the same way. When people asked about her parents, she shut right up and then ran away from the conversation as quickly as she could.