The Fix

by Kristin Rouse

  She giggles, and begins traces the outline of one of my tattoos with her fingertip. “That was. I know.”

  I sigh. How do I explain this to her without sounding completely insane? “That was… I don’t remember the last time I did that sober.”

  Her fingertips fall away. She leans up on an elbow and cups the side of my face with her hand. I press my lips against her palm, not ready to look at her after this confession until she forces me to.

  “How did it… um, compare?” she asks.

  “It doesn’t. Not at all.”

  Her eyes go wide with worry, and I realize she’s misunderstood my meaning. I click my tongue in my mouth, shake my head, and nudge her nose with mine until our lips brush together. I stroke my knuckles down her cheeks and along her jaw until our gazes lock again. “What we just did? That was incomparable. I can’t even explain to you how much better that felt than… well, than any time before.”

  She looks relieved and nuzzles her face under mine, pressing tiny kisses to the side of my neck and jaw.

  After a second, I continue. “I’m not sure if it’s because I’m sober, or because I’m with you.”

  “Can’t it be both?” she says.

  “Must be,” I agree.

  “Good.”

  “Excellent.”

  The smile we share is dippy and lust-filled. Our kisses after become lazy and sated as we stay, curled up in that chaise long after the restaurant has probably given up on our reservation. But really, who needs a fancy dinner out when you’re lucky enough to have a girl like this in your arms?

  ***

  Juliana is the type of person you’d want to get snowed in with. Her feet are never cold, she seems to have a steady supply of blankets and coffee beans and condoms, and she owns a copy of every Monty Python property known to man and can quote Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and most episodes of Flying Circus word for word.

  She’s the sort of person you want to make love to over and over again, even if you’re exhausted and your back is aching, because when she falls apart, she makes some of the strangest, most gorgeous sounds known to creation. This is my own opinion, of course—although I don’t think I’d like verification of this fact from other men she’s been with. I’m happy to just blanket-statement this.

  Even lazy, first-thing-in-the-morning sex makes her make noises that I swear to God I’ve never heard a woman utter. I really don’t think she’s faking, I think she’s just that vocal. She really, really likes what she likes—and I can’t get enough of figuring out what those things are.

  She’s the sort of person you can spend every night of the first three weeks she lives back in her hometown with and still not feel like you’ve gotten enough of her. You can spend quiet moments with her, each absorbed in different books or marathoning Friends on Netflix, and that’s just as exciting and interesting as fighting skiing traffic and wandering around a little mountain town, coffee in one hand and her hand in the other. She has fantastic, interesting opinions on art and politics and American versus Brazilian culture without being an utter snob. She’s funny without trying to be. She’s a gracious loser at cards and board games, but she loves to rub it in when she wins. She hums in the shower. She murmurs to herself when she’s sorting out something in her head when it’s keeping her awake at night.

  And if I thought for a second, for even the slightest of seconds, that I had any chance of not falling madly in love with her, I know for sure after three weeks that she’s everything I’ve been looking for. I know I’d be insane to let her go, because she’s the sort of woman I didn’t dare to hope I’d even get a chance to meet, let alone go to bed with. And she scares the living shit out of me.

  I know subconsciously that she’s not actually as perfect as she seems. But these days, I regard anyone who doesn’t have years and years of being a slobbering drunk as having their lives totally on track. It’s a low bar, but then again, I am that low bar. I’d ask, again and again, what the hell Jules is doing with someone like me if it weren’t for her asking me not to do so. I’ve done it so many times it’s begun to irritate her. And hey, that’s fair. It’s probably irritating having her—boyfriend? This is way more than just sex—whatever the hell I am to her and we are together be so goddamn insecure. But how can I not be when there’s still so much potential for me to fuck up so exponentially? I suppose in a situation like this, you either let the goddess-like qualities of the woman you’re with freak you out into a downward spiral, or you rise to the occasion.

  The problem is, I’ve never been particularly good at rising to the occasion.

  ***

  “Your mother is staring at me,” Jules says after she follows Anja and me out onto Mama A’s snowy porch. Anja laughs a puff of smoke out of her lungs and I wrap my arms around Jules to keep her warm.

  “I noticed. Sorry about that,” I say.

  It would have been any other dinner at Mama A’s if I hadn’t brought Constance with me. I’m not entirely sure what possessed me to do it, but I can’t really take it back now. She’s here, and since the moment she stepped through the door, there’s been a weird air of forced pleasantry and awkwardness between her and Mama A, her and Anja, her and Jules. Constance is not an intimidating woman to look at; she’s tiny, barely five feet tall and maybe 110 pounds dripping wet. She’s as fair as Mac was ruddy, hence where I got my pasty complexion, even though I did end up with Mac’s flaming red hair and dark eyes. But everyone, save for the unflappable Mattias and Lukas, who’ve been acting like they always do, seems to have no clue what to make of her.

  “It’s fine. It’s just not how I thought my first meeting with your mother would be. Hurry up and come back in, will you?”

  “We’ll be in in a second,” Anja says. She smirks at me when the porch door slides closed.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You two,” she says, a smile tugging at her mouth, “are pretty cute together.”

  “Shaddup.” I shove her hip with my own.

  “I mean it as a compliment, not to harass you. All the wedding pictures with the two of you showed it, too. You look good together. Complement one another. And she seems to be doing good for you. It’s been, what, three weeks since she’s been back? You haven’t texted me once in all that time saying you’re craving.”

  “I think she is. I really, really… really like her.”

  “Just… promise me you’ll be careful, okay?”

  “Are you trying to lecture me on condom use?” I snort. “We were in the same sex-ed class in high school, remember?”

  “I know that. I’m saying I’m still your sponsor first and foremost, so I have to do the sponsorly thing and remind you to be cautious, for the good of your recovery. I just want to be sure this be a good thing that keeps you on track, and not an intense thing that burns you out and derails you. Okay?”

  “Look, for whatever it’s worth, I think we’re both on the same page about… well, a lot. She keeps telling me we can slow down if I need it, but I feel like everything is going exactly at the pace it should be, you know?”

  “That’s good to hear,” she says with a smile. She stubs her cigarette out in a pile of snow on the porch railing and tosses it into the ashtray. “Do you suppose it would ever have occurred to us in high school that we’d end up with siblings who are basically clones of one another?”

  “It probably should have, since we’re sort of clones of one another. Although I’m not, you know, exactly with her. Yet, anyway.”

  She grins at me and chucks me playfully on the jaw. “You’re right about the clones thing. But you’re obviously together, Ez. Come on; let’s go inside. It’s fucking freezing.”

  I want to ask her how she knows, how she can tell so implicitly what Jules and I have become in the weeks she’s been back while I’m still over here, trying desperately to figure it out.

  It doesn’t take Mama A but the first helping of our meal to finally crack through my mother’s rough exterior. Mothers, it seems, love telli
ng embarrassing stories about their children to other mothers right in front of said children. After an especially funny story about ten- and thirteen-year-old Lukas and Mattias ruining an entire row of planted vegetables in the back garden with their bikes and rollerblades, Constance laughs with everyone else and looks at me with a soft smile.

  “Well, Ezra was never wild. He was the quiet one of the twins,” Constance says.

  There’s a familiar dull thudding in my chest at the mention of Dylan. If it weren’t for not wanting to be rude at Mama A’s table, I’d tell Constance to cram it, and fast. Coincidentally, that was a phrase she drunkenly shouted at me a lot while I was growing up, polite company or no.

  “Twins?” Jules asks, her eyebrows raised. “You didn’t tell me your brother is your twin brother.”

  “Uh, yeah. He is. Can I get another couple of bolinho, please?”

  Lukas passes me the platter of the little fried rice balls, but nothing seems to be able to deter Constance’s story.

  “Ezra was almost an hour behind. He was more than happy to ignore my contractions and stay right where he was—the doctor almost had to go in and get him by force,” Constance says. “But he was the most mellow baby. Didn’t cry a lot, didn’t fuss… So long as you didn’t take his spit pillow away from him, he barely made a sound.”

  My fork clatters to my plate. Oh God….

  “Spit pillow?” Lukas asks, looking at me like he just won the lottery of most embarrassing childhood story. “What on God’s green Earth is a spit pillow?”

  “Oh, it was this manky little crib pillow he wouldn’t part with. He hauled it around after he started teething, and we figured it wouldn’t hurt him since he couldn’t bite anything off it and swallow it. But even after he cut all his teeth, he took it everywhere—except preschool, thank God. We tried to break him of it for years, but he’d go bananas when we took it away from him. Every time I looked at him, there he was—one of the corners in his mouth, the rest of it tucked under his head. It was sort of precious if you could get over how gross it was.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I say, rubbing my eyes with the palms of my hands. Jules squeezes my thigh under the table, but she and Anja are still giggling.

  “He finally gave up on it when he was about six. But we couldn’t throw it away, just for posterity’s sake. Whatever happened to it, Ezra?” Constance asks.

  My palms sweat a little. “I, um, don’t know. We left it. Behind.”

  I give her a significant look, and she drops her gaze to her lap. I don’t mean to sound cruel—it’s true; it wasn’t one of the things we took in the move when Mac packed us up and left—but I emphasized the word ‘behind’ on purpose. And she falls quiet because she knows why.

  The table falls back into an awkward sort of quiet, and I feel like an asshole. I shouldn’t have said that, I realize. But words aren’t something you can snatch out of thin air.

  “I’m going to put the kettle on,” Anja says, getting up from the table. Mama A tries to object, and they end up squabbling all the way into the kitchen about it. Mattias and Lukas start to clear the dishes, and I watch my mother drum her fingernails on the table for a minute before she scoots back and gets to her feet.

  “It’s a long drive for me. I think I need to get going,” she says, prompting Mama A to come back in and try and talk her out of it. Constance manages to beg off and thank her profusely before heading to the front door.

  I whisper to Jules that I’m going to walk Constance out, and leave the lingering tension behind as we step out into the cold, February air. It’s begun snowing again since dinner started, and a light dusting covers everything. I help her brush off her windows, and we each light cigarettes as her engine warms up.

  Constance sighs. “I didn’t mean to bring up your brother to upset you,” she says between drags.

  I shake my head. “It probably wouldn’t kill us to actually talk about it. Him, everything before. But not in front of my friends.” I’m careful to use the word ‘friends,’ even though the Almeidas are more than my friends. They’re my family, my real family these days, and I’m pretty sure Constance realized it the minute she walked through the door. It’s the best reason I have for why she was so spiky with them at first, even after saying for months how much she wanted to meet them.

  “I know. I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Terms of endearment are strange coming from her mouth. “I’m… The whole mother thing has never been something I’ve been good at. Not like her in there.” Constance gestures back to the house and clearly Mama A.

  I opt not to try to deny it, because to do so would be needlessly condescending. And I’ve already been kind of a jerk to her once tonight.

  “We can talk this weekend, maybe? If you aren’t working?” she asks.

  “I work Saturday. And Jules and I have plans on Sunday.”

  “The weekend after, maybe?”

  “Maybe. Soon, I promise.”

  As she tosses her cigarette butt, she grins at me, a trace of a smile returning to her lips. “Jules seems like a sweet girl. I don’t know if I showed it, but I like her, Ezra. And she seems to love you a lot.”

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” I say, my eyebrows practically raised to my hairline at the pointed way she uses the word ‘love.’

  “Give me this little thing as Mother’s Intuition. She does. I can see it on her face when she looks at you, even if she hasn’t said so yet.”

  “I’ll take your word on that.”

  “I’m going for real now. Thank them again for me. And next time I’ll do better. I promise.”

  I give her a hug, something I’m still not used to doing. Even when I was a kid and she wasn’t messed up, she still didn’t show a lot of physical affection. “You did okay. And, for what it’s worth, bringing up my spit pillow? That did feel pretty motherly to me.”

  She smiles like she’s proud of herself. I suppose she should be.

  I wave her off, telling her to hug Gemma from me, and watch as she pulls away. As I turn to go back inside, my hip bumps the corner of Juliana’s car-share vehicle. I purse my lips and look towards the house to see if anyone is peering out at me. I poke my index finger into the snow settled on the windshield.

  Can’t you see that I love you? I write.

  She might see it later, or she might not. She usually stays at Mama A’s overnight Wednesdays and drives into the city in the morning. The falling snow is light, but will probably cover it up by the time I leave a little later to go home. Maybe I ought to brush it off when I leave. I like looking at it, even though I’m pretty sure that telling her I love her—even if it’s already starting to feel true—before we’ve even declared our relationship status is one of those things that scares people off. But then, it’s always felt true. It felt true the moment she made me dance with her at the wedding.

  Hours later, in my own bed in my own apartment, I realize I never checked the windshield when I left. Then I realize that I don’t regret it at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Few things can tear me away from Juliana’s mouth when we’re kissing and half our clothes are off, particularly when we’re on what we now think of as “our” chaise. But I figure that her stomach growling audibly is something we need to address since it keeps happening.

  “Why don’t we go get some food?” I say mid-kiss, eliciting a snarl from her in reply.

  “We’re busy,” she whines, and latches onto my earlobe. My eyes roll back into my head, but still I push her back.

  “We can get back to this when your stomach isn’t about to digest your other organs. C’mon, where do you want to go?”

  She pouts, but she doesn’t complain when I grab my car keys and lead her out the door. She’s no closer to a decision, though, even after I drive idly for several minutes while she debates with herself under her breath on whether or not Indian food will sully the mood later.

  “Jeez, Jules, I’m about to override you and just swing into the next grocery store we pass and we’ll co
ok a couple of plates of pasta.”

  “Pasta? Pasta sounds safe. And quick.”

  I decide not to say that we’d have already ordered and likely gotten appetizers at a restaurant if she’d been more decisive. I’ve learned over the last six weeks that when she’s hungry, Jules is about as petulant as an eight-year-old whose favorite toy has been taken away.

  It’s a quick right turn into the next market we pass. We start filling a small cart with everything we’ll need for a basic Bolognese, which is about the only thing I can cook with guaranteed success. I smile while she plucks other non-necessities off the shelves, because truly, I brought this on myself taking her into a grocery store hungry. We’re nearly done when we remember our need for tomato paste, and have to go back down the canned goods aisle.

  And that’s where I see him.

  He looks exactly the same as the last time I saw him, except his knuckles aren’t swollen and my nose isn’t broken and bloodied. He’s still a fair amount of roiling rage festering under a very cool, put-together facade—and I can likely only tell because he’s my twin brother. Estranged or not, I still can see that much about him. He’s dressed like he just got off work, with his dress shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his cell phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear. He’s wearing his glasses—we both have piss-poor vision, although I’ve always preferred contacts to frames—and at first, he doesn’t see me. When he does, I know he wishes he hadn’t.

  A sea of rotten memories crash over me in waves. Mac’s funeral, packing up his house, the explosive fight weeks later. It’s all muddled the way most of my memories from my drinking days are. Half the time I can’t tell which was worse—the shitty things I did, or the shittier excuses I had for doing them. Before I have time to dwell, I feel my hand raising in greeting of its own volition. I shouldn’t be surprised when he abandons his cart mid-aisle, throws his coat over his shoulders, and storms away.

  It’s like he’s clobbered me in the nose all over again. And I deserve it, of course—but it’s been almost a year. I’m kind of surprised. The Dylan Mackenzie I knew would have at least told me to fuck off and maybe given me a single finger wave as he did. It rattles me that I don’t even earn that much from him.