“Yeah, well Justin isn’t good for you.”
But there’s no playfulness to Annie’s voice. We both sit there, listening to the wind echo across the line, until Annie breaks in.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” I know she’s talking about the “stalker” part more than the “not good for you” comment.
“I hate that word,” I tell her.
And even as I say it, I think to myself that it’s my turn to apologize now, but I don’t. Instead, Annie rushes back in, her explanation at the ready and, at least compared to the silence, familiar to us over these last few weeks.
“He’s not normal. The two of you together isn’t normal.”
This is what she keeps telling me. “What’s not normal, Annie? Huh? I don’t understand how having a boyfriend who wants to spend time with me and who makes me feel good isn’t normal.”
“That’s just it,” she says, and I know we are heading towards an all-out fight. I consider avoiding it altogether—launching instead into the scene from my classroom earlier today, telling her about the blip in my mental armor. She’d listen; she’d make me feel better, stronger, but apparently my subconscious has an itch that needs to be scratched, and so I lean into this fight that’s been brewing between us for weeks.
“What is?” I say, with sarcasm dripping.
“He’s not real,” Annie replies. “No boyfriend is like this in real life. No relationship is as perfect as you are making yours and Justin’s out to be.”
“Maybe you should date better people.”
Annie stays calm, and I feel childish trying to get a rise out of her. She’s had a string of lame relationships—boyfriends or girlfriends who always seem more interested in their work/video games/phones than her.
“I’m not talking about my dating life. I am talking about yours and about how you are around him. Eventually he’s going to slip up and do something that isn’t perfect, and how are you going to deal with that when you have him on such a pedestal? I mean, come on, Morgan—doesn’t this seem familiar?”
“You haven’t even met him yet,” I argue. And it’s true. Annie and Justin have never met, although I’ve tried to make it happen a few times over this last month. Justin doesn’t like to drive long distances—he says the highway makes him nervous, as driver and as passenger. And Annie has been getting her exhibition together and just can’t seem to get away. So I have to keep asking myself where all this is coming from for her.
“You’ve never even seen us together,” I add. “How do you know how I am when Justin is with me?”
Annie blows her breath out. She takes another sip of her drink. Her voice gets quiet; her tone much more serious than it’s been for this entire conversation so far. “Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh towards Justin. But come on, can you really blame me for being defensive for you? I don’t want it to happen again. You’ve been through this already. . .”
I don’t let her finish.
“That was different, and you know it. I’ve worked really hard to get better.” I don’t try to keep the snark out of my voice. I know Annie isn’t saying these things to be cruel to me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I feel attacked. “Can’t you see how happy he makes me?”
“No, I can’t,” Annie says. “I know when you’re happy, and this is different. You’re desperate. Weak. I don’t know—those words aren’t quite right.” The line goes silent for a second. The wind whips up again and hurls itself across my face. “You know what it is,” Annie finally continues. “Even when things were at their worst with Richard, you were still yourself. Messed up, sure, but yourself. Being with Justin is doing something different to you. Since you’ve been with him you seem like a version of yourself that’s been copied a couple of hundred times, and the ink is wearing off.”
Sometimes I forget that Annie is an artist—a real, legitimate creative person—and then she’ll say something like that and I remember again. But today, I’m too much of everything—angry, hurt and exhausted—to appreciate anything that she’s saying.
I just want to win the argument.
Annie goes on, “How much does he even know about you? And I don’t mean the stuff with Richard. I mean the accident, your appointments with Dr. Koftura, the way your brain works sometimes?”
I ignore her.
“What happens when you let him see who you are? What happens when everything’s not perfect?” There’s a pleading edge as she asks, but I don’t want to get into this. Not now.
“You know what it is, Annie?” I put extra emphasis on her name, and draw out the last vowel until it squeaks in the back of my throat. “You’re jealous. You can’t stand the fact that I have a man who loves me—”
Annie cuts in, “Has he said he loves you?” But I ignore it.
“—and who wants to spend all his time with me and take care of me, and you can’t stand that I have someone else in my life besides you.”
I don’t wait to hear her response. I hang up on her, too embarrassed to deal with the aftermath of what I’ve said. Instead, I listen to the pounding of blood in my ears until I reach Justin’s apartment. It’s only after stepping inside, after Justin peels my coat off me and brushes the snowflakes from my face, when I remember I never found out why she was calling.
4
I hold office hours at 8am twice a week. It’s a trick I happened upon early on in my career (I’m still early on, I suppose, so I guess I mean “earlier”) to schedule office hours at the undergraduate equivalent of the crack of dawn. It helps weed out ambivalent students from showing up just to fish for extra points in the last exam.
Typically, I spend the hour reading the news headlines and checking my Google alerts for updates to developmental topics—the world is obsessed with growing our children healthier, smarter, and prettier—but today I can’t help myself. I have to post something about last night.
I log into my Twitter account and scan the most recent trends before opening up a new tweet box.
Hah—that should be something, shouldn’t it? Tweet box.
Despite my fight with Annie, I’m in a good mood this morning.
Today, at 6:12am, as he was handing me a cup of tea in bed, Justin said he loved me.
I almost dropped my cup.
Sure I deflected the whole question of “Did he say he loves you?” when Annie asked me last night, but it burned me all the same. One thought kept skittering through my head. Why was I talking about love when he wasn’t? To be honest, it felt a little sickening.
Growing up a ward of the state, love can be a touchy subject.
But then I wake up today and Justin is standing there looking at me with this expression on his face, and before I’m even fully with it he says, “I love you.” Plain and simple. And then he kissed me, and so I found myself saying it back to him against his lips. And then, well—afterwards I had to rush into work this morning.
@NotThatKindofDoctor Good morning, Tweeties! Have a love, love, lovely day
It Was Always You Page 3
