It's been so long since I’ve shared a space with someone. Three years since I moved out of the house I shared with Avery. My trailer is too small for Connor and me, but we want to be together all the time. It’s like a switch has been flipped. He’s different. I wanted to tell him I loved him right away. I was in love with him for two years but I was sitting on the words. And there’s this other part of me, the one that wants a guy to say it first for once, that is winning. I am tired of loving more. I’ve thrown my mother’s advice out the window and it’s always ended badly. I'm glad I waited. I'm glad I let him say it first. I think he loved me back then. When we were on that dance floor in the bar, years ago, before I ruined it all, I saw it in his eyes. And it can't compare to the way it felt to hear it from his lips.

I was not a good cook. I never learned. My mother worked hard when I was an adolescent. She still works hard. When she got off work, the last thing she wanted to do was cook for her kids. Now that I am adult, working hard at my job, coming home worn to the bone, I get it. I don’t want to slave over a stove either. And I saw this praise for the women who did. I heard what wonderful, beautiful women they were because even though they were tired, they cooked a meal for their family. It wouldn’t be the first time I lined myself up to an invisible measuring stick. It wouldn’t be the first time I measured my worth as a woman upon dated ideals.

Anxiety was a foreign word then. I didn’t know why I found it so hard to focus, why I rushed through things. Why the directions of a recipe made me anxious and sweaty.

I just wanted to eat a bowl of cereal for dinner. To heat up leftover pizza for breakfast. There were things I missed from the years I spent alone. I mourned them, but it was worth it to be with Connor. I reminded myself of that as I stared down at the hot grease in the frying pan on my stove.

One of Connor’s favorite foods was fried chicken. I told myself I would make it for him for his birthday dinner, despite the gnawing in my belly. I would rather bake something, set a timer, let something marinate. Anything but this. I looked at the directions twenty times as I lay in bed after work. I knew I was going to fuck it up. I always did when I was trying to make something on the stove. If the day ever came when my eggs over easy didn't have to be turned into scrambled because I fucked them up, I’d probably keel over and die.

I stared at the chicken thighs on the countertop, determined to pick one. I couldn’t stand over the hot grease forever.

When the hot oil hit my forearm, I let out an unearthly cry, inhuman. My skin went pale white, then red. I ran for my phone on the dining room table, the linoleum slick beneath my feet. More grease had fallen there.

“Hello?” Connor’s voice on the other end of the phone was a salve for most hurts these days, but not for the current one.

“Hey,” I grimaced, “I burned myself making the chicken. Can you pick up some bandages?”

“Are you okay?” I heard the music in his Range Rover muffle, the sound of his blinker.

I looked down at my arm. The skin was bubbled up. How many degrees was that? How bad would the scarring be? “No.” My voice broke. The numbness of my arm ricocheted into a blinding pain skittering over a dull ache.

“Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.” My forearm would forever wear a scar the size of my palm. Connor cleaned and bandaged me up. I apologized and cried. I only wanted to give him a gift for his birthday, one that couldn’t be bought with money, since I didn't have much.

Connor finished his own birthday dinner but I didn't have much of an appetite, and I didn't like fried chicken much anyway. I made it for him.

“I don’t care about the dinner,” he said in bed later, running his fingers over my collarbone. “I appreciate the thought, that you tried. That’s what I love about you.”

Years later, when I turned to stone and apathy, he would bring that night up. He would refer to it as one of the nights I still loved him. When I still tried, when I wanted to impress him.

Those first two years were a blur. Connor moved out of the house he shared with his friends and back in with his sister in Lafayette Square, but it was as if he moved in with me, and his room there was just a storage space. My trailer was too small for him to fit all of his belongings in anyway.

I still worked at my same, draining job. I worked hard and found myself at the end of promotion after promotion. Connor would be proud one minute, taciturn the next. He didn't like me working for Joe’s family, and with Joe. He didn't like me going on trips with Joe. But that relationship was now strictly professional. We weren't even friends and never had been. When the sex faded away, we were left with nothing.

Connor loved bringing home potted plants for me. I collected them, watered them, let them die. I was never good at nurturing. The only time in my life I had a knack for it was in those beginning years. I nurtured Connor, and he nurtured back. I still miss those moments.