I was waiting to ambush Gould when he got home from work the next day.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted before he was even all the way through the door. “I’m so sorry for what I said. I don’t mean to try to control everything. I just love you guys so much. I really do. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. Not you or Miles or Kamen or Ricky or Kamen’s mom or even fucking Cinnamon. I’m never going to be okay with the fact that I wasn’t there when Hal needed me. Never.” I stood there in the entryway, my head buzzing. Gould just looked at me, so I kept going.
“Every time Miles does anything with knives, even though he knows what he’s doing, I’m always afraid someone’s gonna stab him. Either on accident or for using words like ‘ergo.’ And Kamen’s such a doofus, I’m worried he’s gonna be involved in some random disaster. And I’m always, always afraid that the people you play with will never love you like I do.”
For a second I thought he was going to tell me to go fuck myself.
Then he sighed. “No one loves me like you do,” he agreed softly. He hung his jacket up and turned to me. “But that’s okay. There are lots of ways I can be loved.”
“I worry about you. I think you miss Hal more than any of us.”
He went to the couch, and I went with him, and we both sat. “Hal and I had more baggage than he had with any of you.”
“But you’d tell me, right? If you were having trouble dealing with it? If you still wanted to murder Bill?”
“I never wanted to murder Bill. Just punch him in the face. And I did.”
I stared at the pine boughs on the mantel. I hadn’t even realized he’d started decorating for the holidays. The Pez-dispenser-and-birthday-candle menorah Kamen had made him last year was up too.
“D found out about the review blog,” I said quietly.
Gould looked at me.
“His name was on there for a few days. I don’t know who put it up. And someone told him about it. Told him I was one of the Subs Club founders.” I tried to smile. “He’s pretty pissed. And I definitely didn’t help things with what I said to him.”
Gould’s expression was genuinely sympathetic. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Me too.”
I didn’t know if I should tell him about talking to Cinnamon. I wasn’t sure I was ready to go there. So I stuck to talking about poor, poor me.
“Do you think I ruined everything with him?”
“Probably not.”
“How? I mean, I took his name off the blog, but isn’t that unfair to the other people who don’t want their names there either?”
“Maybe what we need to do is take the review portion down. Go back to what the blog was originally supposed to be—what you wanted it to be, before I messed things up with my dumb idea. We make it a forum where people talk about kink.”
“It wasn’t a dumb idea. It’s just . . . hard to please everyone.” I tucked my legs up under me. “It’s so hard to moderate all those comments and not know who’s being too aggressive or spiteful or . . . you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I talked to GK and Kel last night. They, um . . . asked me if I wanted to lead a roundtable discussion in a couple of weeks. To talk about the Subs Club and why we . . . what it was supposed to be.”
He nodded. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good idea. I said I’d do it.” I groaned and leaned back. “People are gonna be there, though. Like, people who got reviewed on the blog and hate us. What if they heckle me?”
“I don’t think GK and Kel will let you be heckled. And I’ll be there. And Kamen and Miles.”
“Promise?”
“Of course.”
“So now all I have to figure out is how to win back my man.” I stared at the ceiling. “I feel like such a romcom heroine. Like this is totally the part where a sad song plays over a montage of me doing stuff with D. Except my montage would be really weird. Like, he’d be putting Vicks up my ass and beating me with homemade paddles. And we’d be reading his monster-movie screenplay.”
“So. What would a romcom heroine do next?”
“Eat a whole tub of ice cream.”
“And then?”
“Watch a movie that makes her feel better.”
“Okay, but what about after that? After she’s spent two weeks crying and her eyes are all puffy and she decides she has to take action to make this situation right?”
“Adopt a shelter cat?”
Gould jostled me. “She’d go to the guy. And she’d tell him . . .” he prompted.
“Tell him,” I agreed, nodding.
“Come on, Dave, you’ve so got this. Tell him . . .” He motioned for me to take over. “She’s . . .”
“Pregnant?”
“Sorry.”
“What?”
“Tell him she’s sorry.”
“Noooo.” I picked up a throw cushion and hid my face in it. “D hates me. He’ll never forgive me.”
“You won’t know until you try.”
I refused to come out of the cushion.
Gould squeezed my thigh. “But we’ll do this in order, okay? Pick a movie.” He stood and headed for the kitchen.
I sat up. “Are we eating ice cream?”
“If we’ve got any.”
“We don’t. Kamen ate it all when the Seahawks lost.”
I heard Gould opening the cupboards. “We could go to Mel’s to get milkshakes.”
“I’m in sweatpants.”
“You’re entitled to a couple of public appearances in sweatpants. Come on.”
We walked to Mel’s. I fished in my wallet as we entered. “Do you have a penny?” I asked Gould.
He handed me one, and I placed my order. “That’ll be three twenty-nine,” said the girl at the register. I immediately handed her exact change.
She smiled. “Wow, you were ready with that!”
“This is not our first rodeo,” I informed her.
Once we had our milkshakes we headed back to the house, where I curled up on the couch and made my selection from the streaming menu.
“What’re we watching?” Gould settled beside me.
“21 Grams.”
“Seriously? That’s depressing as hell.”
“I love Sean Penn.”
So for the rest of the night I lay on the couch with my head in his lap, and we watched 21 Grams and drank our milkshakes. And I tried to think about what I’d say to D.