Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“I was just telling you they were there,” I said.

“I can see they’re there. They are a huge bunch of yellow bananas in the middle of my counter, forty microns from where my hand is currently resting. If I couldn’t see the bananas there, I would have a major problem, given that I work in a field of visual arts.”

“Jesus, sorry, I was just being polite!”

“It’s not polite,” Will said, rounding on me. “It’s not polite to make people respond to inane comments in their own houses at seven in the morning. It’s intrusive. I need all my energy to deal with existing in a world filled with idiots and psychopaths. I can’t waste any on fucking bananas before I’ve even had coffee. Next thing I know you’ll say good morning or ask me how I am and I’ll have to kill myself.”

“How are you and good morning are not intrusive, asshole!”

“How are you is the root canal of small talk and good morning should be shot,” he said, and turned on his heel to go get dressed, taking his coffee with him.

Second, and not unrelated, was that Will mostly said whatever he wanted and considered honesty to be far more important than protecting people’s feelings.

When I suggested that sometimes a little white lie was more valuable than telling a truth for no reason other than to pat yourself on the back for being truthful, he said that he categorically refused to take other people’s feelings on as his responsibility. That if he’d let himself choose his words or his actions based on what might or might not hurt or uplift other people he’d never have made it past high school much less in New York.

It sucked when I was the one on the other end of one of his hard truths, but it was also incredibly reassuring to know where I stood. I knew that if Will paid me a compliment, then he meant it. I knew that if I asked his opinion, I’d get it. Will was aggressively, uncompromisingly himself, and it kind of made me feel like I could be that way with him too.

Third, if I wanted things to progress from the we-kiss-now phase into actual, like, sex stuff—which, uh, I really did—then I was definitely going to have to be the one to make it happen.

Despite the kissing, and the way that more and more often our television watching time turned into a cuddle-fest, Will had remained firm about me sleeping on the couch. He said he liked his privacy.

I was totally respectful of that, of course, but it was honestly torture, lying there and knowing that only about twenty feet and a thin door separated us.

So, since I couldn’t hope that maybe one night we’d just… I dunno, like, come together naturally in the middle of the night, I was taking matters into my own hands. I’d decided that tonight would be the night I made my move.

Apparently the universe had other plans, though, because things at Mug Shots went completely batshit. Gretchen, who was in town because she was doing a January term class, had come in to get a coffee and say hi, so I was distracted for a minute while it happened, but some lady drove her scooter into the window of the Starbucks across the street from us, and they had to shut down for the day to clean up the glass. This meant that all the people whose business Starbucks usually drew popped over to us when they found their usual route to caffeine cut off. It was the busiest day I’d ever worked, all of us running around at double-time just to barely keep up with the line. I fell asleep on the subway going back to Will’s and missed my stop.

Turned out Will’d had a day from hell too and was already in sweats when I got home, a sure sign he was wrung out.

“You want me to order food?” he asked. “I was thinking of sushi.”

I’d never tried sushi, but it seemed like a very New York thing to eat. Besides, if Will wanted it then I wanted to want it, so I nodded.

“Do you mind if I take a shower?”

He waved me into the bathroom absently, like he was totally used to having me here. The bone-deep contentment of being a thing that made sense in Will’s well-ordered world filled me, and I practically floated to the shower, my exhaustion evaporating in the steam.

“Oh my god,” Will said half an hour later as we sat with the sushi spread between us and I chewed. And chewed. And chewed. “You’ve never had sushi before have you?”

And, oh shit, I had to spit it out. I just had to. The texture. Oh man. I just couldn’t with the texture.