Marriage of Unconvenience

“Stop staring at me. I can feel you. It’s distracting.” I glued my eyes to the screen.

“I wasn’t staring.”

She bumped my shoulder.

“Yeah, you were. Do I have something on my face?”

I shoved a handful of popcorn in my mouth, and then ended up choking on it and needing Cara to smack me on the back and several gulps of soda to clear everything out.

“You okay?” Cara asked. I gave her a thumbs-up and gathered up all the popcorn bits I’d coughed out and rolled them up in a paper towel.

“Sorry to make you choke. But you were staring, Loren.” Yeah, I was, and I wish she would stop drawing my attention to it. Staring at Cara didn’t mean anything.

I refused to answer her, so we just went back to the movie and finished it in silence. I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed, but didn’t want to be the first one to throw in the towel.

“You want to just chill in your room for a while before we go to bed? I have a new book I really want to start,” Cara said and that was fine with me. I’d been slacking on my reading lately and I was way behind on my reading goal for this year, in spite of having more time to read. How did that happen?

We cleaned the living room, putting everything back, and then headed up the stairs to my room. There were two guest rooms, but Cara always preferred to stay with me in my old room, and that was how it had always been.

“Are you sure you’re okay with me staying in here?” she asked as I shut the door. I needed to change my clothes, but the idea of changing in front of Cara made my stomach do little flips of weirdness, so I grabbed the clothes from my bag and headed for my bathroom.

“Of course I’m okay with you staying here, what kind of question is that?” I left the door cracked a little so we could continue to talk as I was changing.

“I don’t know, I guess I thought maybe that now we were older you might want to have your own space. And we are living together all the time I don’t want you to get sick of me.” I stopped pulling my shirt over my head.

“What the hell are you talking about, Care? I couldn’t get sick of you if I tried. You’re my best friend and if I could surgically attach myself to your hip so we would never be apart, I would do that.” That made her giggle.

“It would be awfully hard to pee like that.”

“We’d have to get like, adjoining toilets,” I suggested and then finished getting dressed. She had changed too when I came back into the bedroom and I tossed my clothes back in my bag.

“That sounds really gross, no offense,” Cara said.

“You’re probably right. But the point is still made.” She took her turn in the bathroom and brushed her teeth while I sat on the edge of the bathtub.

She blushed as she spit out her toothpaste.

“Stop staring at me, it’s creepy,” she said before rinsing her mouth out and then putting her toothbrush back in her travel bag.

I looked down. I couldn’t stop making her uncomfortable tonight, I guess.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

Cara went back into the bedroom and pulled out a paperback from her bag. I followed her, not knowing what to say.

“It’s okay, I guess. Just... it’s a little intimidating sometimes.” I sat on the bed and gave her a puzzled look.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, let’s just drop it, okay?” She buried her face in her book and that was the end of that. I sighed and got out my own book. The only sound for the next hour was the swish of Cara turning pages and the racket that the frogs were making in the pond just past the backyard. When I was a kid I used to bring a net and scoop up hundreds of gelatinous eggs and wait for them to hatch and grow legs and arms. Before they became fully grown frogs and salamanders and newts, I’d release them back into the pond. If I’d had it my way, I would have put a pond in the house and had a menagerie of amphibians, but my parents had squashed that idea. Someday I wanted to have a house with a pond in the back so I could sort of live out that dream.

Cara snuggled down in the bed and I realized that her eyes were drooping closed.

“Hey,” I said, trying to take the book from her.

“Don’t take my book,” she said in a sleepy voice, blinking slowly.