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Of course she’s still in love with him. That part’s not a mystery.
She got over it, she’d had to get over it, but no one falls in love with David Rose and falls back out again. Stevie’s pretty sure there’s only one other person who’s ever done it, and she knows he would agree.
Flighty as it seems, there’s a kind of permanence to David’s attention. Whatever it touches, really touches, tends to thrive on it forever. If he’d only landed in her life long enough to say “I think you’re funny” and disappear, it probably still would have left her a little bit always in love with him. But he’d stuck around, and taken a closer look, and she rearranged the entire trajectory of her life around what he found. He forced her to see value in herself, and now she can’t bear to waste it. There’s no getting over that.
There’s also the fact that he’d given her the best sex of her life. Not in aggregate, not on average (god, that first time was awful), but their third time in the love room sits right at the top of her individual rankings. She screamed his name so loudly that the couple in room five complained the next morning. She assured them the guests in room one had checked out the night before, and tried not to think about the thin, thin wall between rooms five and six.
She still relies on the memory sometimes, in bed, when she needs help getting there. She relies on it the night of the wedding, when she takes home one of the Brewer cousins from the “green light” list David gave her. The muscle memory of screaming his name hasn’t surprised her in years, but she bites her lip through her orgasm just in case because, well, wouldn’t that be awkward.
Anyway, that part’s not a mystery either. The mystery is how happy she is to see him with someone else. It’s a pure, unadulterated feeling, and that’s not something she’s used to. Adulterated feelings are kind of a point of pride for her. But she’d said “I like this for you” as soon as Patrick arrived on the scene, and never stopped meaning it. Not for a second.
The morning after their wedding, she means it the most. She’s headed to the café, hoping the Brewer cousin walk-of-shamed his way in a different direction, but too hungover to really worry about it, when she does a Pavlovian turn toward the ringing of the Rose Apothecary bell. It’s David and Patrick, coming out of their store, each carrying a bottle of the good rosé. Their car is parked out front, running and pointed toward their honeymoon.
They don’t see her—partially because she ducks into the alley next to the café, mostly because they’re only seeing each other. Patrick hands David his bottle, but before he can open the driver’s side door, David has him backed up against it. He paws at Patrick’s shoulders with his rosé double fists, then leans down and kisses him thoroughly, deeply, smiling all the way. On a cue only they can hear, the kiss breaks off into laughter. There’s a golden glow surrounding them that has everything and nothing to do with morning light glinting off wedding rings.
Stevie can’t imagine ever being more in love with anyone than she is with this version of David Rose, who’s so in love with his husband.
It should be a lonely feeling, she knows, but it’s not. She’s known all kinds of lonely feelings in her life, and this one isn’t even in the ballpark. Crouched there behind the freezer box-filled dumpster of Café Tropical, unable to keep the liquid joy inside her face, she starts to wonder if there might be something not entirely straight about this whole thing.
***
She tries to talk to David about it, once, a couple months later.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you, too,” he says back.
“I love you not in a straight way,” she clarifies.
“I love you not in a straight way, too,” he agrees.
She probably shouldn’t have started this conversation when they’re both high. Even once she’s sober, though, she can’t think of how to convince him they’re not saying the same thing.
***
The next name in her Rolodex of not-straight people is out for obvious reasons. (“Hey Patrick, I’m in love with your husband but I want you to have him. What do you think it means?”) That’s how she ends up on Ronnie’s stoop one chilly Sunday afternoon.
“Can I ask you some questions about queer stuff?” Stevie says when the door cracks just far enough to reveal Ronnie’s signature glare. Then she flashes the bottle of bourbon in her bag and the crack grows wide enough for her to step through. People might say she’s a vampire, but this is all the invitation Stevie needs.
She’s halfway lowered onto the couch when Ronnie’s voice pulls her up short.
“Uh-uh. Out here is where I take questions about business stuff.” She opens a door across the living room. “Questions about queer stuff I take in here.”
Stevie follows her into a small room made even smaller by the furniture squeezed into it—a pair of overstuffed easy chairs in the center and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all sides. The picture window punched through the back wall should make it feel bigger, but somehow it seems like a TV. Like the outside world isn’t even real. Stevie likes it in here immediately.
“Wow. Books,” she says, because she really hadn’t planned what to say after the bourbon got her in the door and this is as good as anything.
“Yeah, Karen’s in a lot of book clubs. The top shelves are mine.” The top shelves are all alcohol and glassware. “The cat kept knocking over my bar cart.”
The last two words come out slightly strained as Ronnie tries to grab down a pair of glasses. When she can’t quite reach, she plants one wool-socked foot on the bottom shelf for leverage, and it bears her weight sturdily. She probably built these shelves, Stevie realizes, and wonders why she didn’t fit them with one of those rolling ladders. She pictures Ronnie and her wife zooming across these walls together, a couple of Belles who never intend to give the Beast the time of day.
By the time the image fades, Ronnie has poured two fingers of the bourbon into each glass. She hands one to Stevie and they sit. The easy chairs are angled more toward the window than each other, which is a kindness.
“So who’s got you feeling things, Stevie? Alexis? Twyla?”
“Oh, um.” Stevie realizes she should have been more specific about queer stuff, but then remembers she can’t be more specific, that’s why she’s here. “It’s not– That’s not– Sorry, can we just... drink for a bit?”
“Fine by me,” Ronnie croaks.
So they sit in silence and they drink. Stevie stares at the cold day outside while the liquor warms her from the inside, thawing out her words.
By the time Ronnie refills their glasses, Stevie’s talking, and she’s started at the very beginning, for some reason, as if the way David hounded her for towels the day they met actually matters. As if that’s a part of this. She forces herself to speed up, to the games night and the love room and oh god, she’s telling Ronnie everything about the love room. Well not everything everything, not the screaming or the complaints from room five, but the phrase “best of my life” is definitely involved, oh god. There’s more bourbon in her glass and she speeds up again, to Jake and Aunt Maureen’s ashes, and then there’s Patrick and she slows down here because this is important, this is crucial. How much she loves Patrick, too. How much she loves him for David.
She ends where she knew she would end, at the golden moment she witnessed from behind a dumpster, which sounds so much more pathetic than it felt when she says it out loud.
“So I’m in love with my best friend, but I want him to stay my best friend, and what is that?” It’s like the question mark finally releases her from this long run-on sentence she got herself tangled up in. She hears her voice instantly go small. “Is that– Is that... anything?”
Ronnie’s silent and either she’s swaying or Stevie is. She’s lost track of how many fingers of bourbon she drank, but it was definitely more than a whole hand.
“Sounds like platonic love to me.” Ronnie’s eyes are narrowed, but it seems like a squint, not a glare.
“Yeah, platonic feelings aren’t this strong,” Stevie says, not exactly sure whose authority she’s speaking from.
There’s another silent, squinty moment.
“Have you ever felt something this strong for anyone else? Someone you did want to be with?” Before Stevie can even start to avoid answering this, Ronnie waves her hand and rephrases: “Have you ever been in romantic love?”
Something about this redundant phrasing—romantic love—drops into Stevie like a penny into a well; the echo of it illuminates some deep hollowness inside her, for just a moment, and then it’s gone. There’s a “Hmm” of recognition from the other easy chair, like Ronnie heard it, too.
No, is what Stevie wants to say, but she’s no longer sure she understands the question.
“I’m going to throw out a word, let me know how it hits you.” Ronnie swirls the liquid in her glass, a visual drumroll. “Aromantic.”
Stevie waits, but there’s no more. “A romantic what?”
“Just– Aromantic. As in, not romantically attracted to anyone.”
“Ever?”
Ronnie nods, then tilts her head, hedging her answer. “Or rarely. It’s a spectrum.”
Stevie snorts. “That’s not a thing.”
“It is,” Ronnie says firmly. “Maybe it’s not your thing, I can’t say, but it’s a thing. Think of it this way—most people feel a desire to connect to others through romance, to express their love that way. But some people don’t.”
Stevie swallows around a hard lump in her throat. There’s something so small and tragic about that “some people,” and the idea that she might be one of them. The extra behind the dumpster of everyone else’s rom-com.
“Aromantic people experience desire and connection in all kinds of ways—friendship, platonic love, sex, if they’re not also asexual.”
That one Stevie’s heard of, and yeah, that’s definitely not her thing.
“Romantic love might seem like the universal peak of human experience, but only because our culture and stories tend to tell it that way. It’s not a moral imperative.”
This rattles something loose in her memory of that golden moment, something she’d let recede into the background of the David of it all. She’d forgotten to notice how complete she felt to be on the outside of a scene like that, what a relief it was to step aside and leave it for other people. There, on the margins, she’d felt ready to seize everything she might do and have and be, if only she could stop waiting for a love like that to transform her. If only that were allowed.
The world outside the TV window has gone dark. The room is suddenly entirely too small to be sharing with Ronnie, especially when she’s saying things like “moral imperative.”
“Well, thanks so much, gotta be going.” This comes out in a single rush, and Stevie has her hand on the doorknob before she turns back, scanning a shelf on the side wall where half the titles contain the words queer theory. “Is there maybe a book I could borrow, or…?”
She’d rather die than let anyone see her reading one of these, but that’s what the Banshees on a Plane dust jacket is for. That’s how she caught up on A Song of Ice and Fire without having to listen to David gripe about the pace of George R. R. Martin’s writing every time he stopped by the office.
“No,” Ronnie says, tracking her gaze. “There’s nothing up there for you. I’m sorry.”
In all the years they’ve known each other, Stevie has never once, till now, heard Ronnie say those two little words and mean them.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Ronnie continues. “But the internet might be helpful. And oh, take this–”
She stands and plucks a book from one of the back shelves, just under the window. The spine has an eye-catching black and orange pattern, and Stevie had been staring at it off and on during her overshare. When Ronnie hands it over, she runs her fingertips around the raised metallic illustration of a woman’s face on the cover. Circe by Madeline Miller, it says below.
“It’s fiction,” Ronnie says. “But read the first line.”
Stevie finds the page and reads. “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.”
“Get ready to forge your own path, girlie.”
***
It’s a story about exile.
Stevie did check out the internet first. Google turned up some helpful information—that it’s possible to be romantically attracted to no one and sexually attracted to everyone; that platonic love is easy to misread as romantic; that the aromantic pride flag has major Slytherin energy. Stevie’s a Ravenclaw, of course, but with enough Slytherin undertones that she could make this work for her.
The more she kept clicking, though, the more everything became a jumble of labels and contradictions she couldn’t quite sort out—grey- and demiromantic people who feel romantically attracted in certain circumstances; aromantic people who pursue romantic relationships even without feeling the attraction; something called a queerplatonic partnership. So she picked up the novel instead, and now she can’t put it down.
Circe is a witch goddess (Stevie loves her already), who’s banished to live on an island after practicing magic in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. But the island isn’t the exile. The exile is her immortality, which keeps her removed from the world of mortals where she feels most at home. She’s drawn to mortal men and doomed to spend eternity watching as, one by one, their lives take shape and move forward in a way she can’t comprehend and will never get to have. She doesn’t have a past or a future to share with anyone.
Stevie plows straight through to the end in two days, then starts over at the beginning. Come Sunday afternoon, she’s back on Ronnie’s doorstep, this time with a bottle of rye clinking around her bag.
“We have to talk about this.” She waves the book under Ronnie’s nose as she breezes past into the small room with the shelves of words and liquor. It’s her turn to mount them like a ladder and collect the glasses. She has them both filled by the time Ronnie even closes the door.
Stevie starts with Glaucos, and is surprised to find she has so much to say about Glaucos. Circe never actually loved him, obviously. She just wanted to be chosen, for once, the way everyone else around her got to be chosen, so she did what she had to do to let herself be chosen. She used her magic to make the mortal Glaucos into a god so that he could choose her, and then he didn’t. He rejected her offer without even acknowledging how she’d weakened herself to make it, how she’d made herself vulnerable and fuck, this is about Emir isn’t it?
But Ronnie’s laughing too hard, too delightedly, for Stevie to feel bad about spilling her guts.
“Fucking men,” Ronnie gasps, clutching her sides like they ache.
“Fucking men!” Stevie agrees, then adds, sheepishly, “... is something I do sometimes.”
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”
Ronnie has her own thoughts about Glaucos, it turns out, and she shares them. They trade stories back and forth about the people in their lives they’d poured their energy into only to get nothing, worse than nothing in return. There’s pain in all of it, but it seems easy for Ronnie to talk about these people now, in this room, surrounded by the books her wife loves and the shelves she built for them to live in. Stevie notices that her own stories don’t feel as painful as she feared, even though she has none of those things. Even though she’s still alone.
The TV window is dark already, and they haven’t even made it past the first hundred pages. Stevie has so much left to say.
“Why don’t you come back next Sunday?” Ronnie suggests. “We can keep talking about the book. You don’t even have to bribe me with booze.”
“Okay,” Stevie says, getting to her feet. “I’d like that.”
***
“Who knew you were so into Greek mythology?” David taps the cover of the book where it sits next to her plate of hash browns.
Sunday brunch became their thing once they finally accepted, now that neither of them is living or working at the motel, that spontaneous run-ins were a thing of the past. They’d had to pull their socks up and schedule their togetherness time, like grown ups. Now if only one of them could get grown up enough to cook, then they could stop subjecting themselves to Café Tropical’s interpretation of brunch.
“What’s not to like? She turns men into pigs.” Stevie puts down her coffee and flips to the page number she has memorized by now. “Listen to this: ‘After I changed a crew, I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty, falling over each other, stupid with their horror… They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world.’ It’s aspirational.”
David gapes at her, a forkful of pancake suspended halfway to his open mouth. Stevie shrouds her face in irony and takes the opportunity to stare—at his hand, then his mouth, then his hand again.
She’s been staring a lot lately, when she can get away with it, trying to call forth the ghost of the desire she once felt for these parts of David. His hands and his mouth were what first drew her to him, back when he was just a bratty, presumably gay motel guest demanding towels. She can see, now, that the draw was entirely sexual, and is entirely gone.
She no longer feels anything for any part of David. Every desire she has is for the whole of him—for his company, his opinions, his happiness.
David eyes her eyeing his hands and puts his fork down, still full. He actually moves food away from his mouth, that’s how much he wants to emphasize whatever he’s about to say.
“I’m very afraid of you, suddenly.”
“You should be.” Stevie gives him her darkest grin. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
***
Three weeks into their accidental book club, Stevie and Ronnie talk about loneliness. They’ve been talking about loneliness all along, of course, only using different words, the code Circe gave them. Exile, island, witchcraft, power.
Stevie tells Ronnie about the loneliness that’s lived inside her for as long as she can remember, so deep that she once asked her high school biology teacher if it was possible for someone to have single-helix DNA. It was and wasn’t a joke. She had a reputation back then for being extremely undateable, which in retrospect never bothered her as much as she pretended it did. She was always more concerned about people knowing she was alone than about actually being alone.
She’s starting to think maybe her loneliness was never called loneliness at all. She’s starting to think she knows the word for it now.
They drank Manhattans tonight, after Ronnie pulled down the cocktail shaker and imported some ice from the kitchen, but that has nothing to do with the bounce in Stevie’s step as she leaves.
“Fuck Glaucos,” she says and salutes.
Ronnie returns their rallying cry. “Fuck Glaucos.”
***
Stevie wants to try saying her new word out loud to someone, so she invites Patrick to lunch on a day when she knows David is off visiting vendors. He texts that he’s running late, and she orders his tea and tuna melt. They arrive at the table just before he does.
“Thanks, friend,” he says, smiling that his food is waiting for him.
“Oh, this is all for me. Did you want to order something?”
They banter at a comfortable pace, and Patrick doesn’t rush as he’s eating, but she can tell he’s a bit harried. She’s not going to do it after all, she decides. This isn’t the right moment.
Patrick grabs the check as soon as Twyla drops it on their table, and stands up to pay at the counter. “I’m really sorry to run, but I have to get these new vendor contracts ready for David to take out tomorrow, and there was a bus load of–”
“I–” Stevie blurts and he pauses. She grits her teeth, not sure if it’s to keep the full sentence in or get it out, but either way: “I think I’m queer?”
Patrick sits back down so fast the chair screeches against the floor. “So I’d better stay, then, for a bit.”
Stevie realizes her mistake immediately. She wishes she realized it sooner than immediately, but what can you do. She chose Patrick over David for this conversation because Patrick is the one who doesn’t make everything into a big deal. She forgot that people coming out in their thirties is, by default, a big deal to Patrick.
“I, um. Yeah.” She made a plan for what she was going to say this time, she swears, but it’s gone whooshing away under Patrick’s intensely earnest gaze. How does David still manage to say so many words, living with these eyes on him full time? Practice, probably. “I started realizing it right after your wedding, I guess. I saw you and David so happy together and it just hit me. Like I knew, with certainty, there’s no one out there like that for me.”
She pauses to collect her thoughts, forgetting where she meant to go from here.
“Stevie,” Patrick says, his voice soft, “of course there’s someone out there for you.”
Oh no. Oh no, oh no. He thinks she’s after reassurance. She’s trying to tell him how she’s finally free, and all he can hear is that she feels trapped. As usual, she’s fucking this up.
“No, that’s not– I don’t want–” The word, this is what the word is for. “Do you know what aromantic means?”
Patrick stares at her helplessly. “I… I don’t. I’m sorry.”
Stevie’s face burns and the heat evaporates her last bit of courage for this conversation. She stands and hitches her bag over one shoulder. “Okay, well, this was stupid.”
“Wait, Stevie, I want to under–”
“It’s fine, I just did this all wrong. Forget I said anything.” She knows that’s not a rational request. She just wants a reset on this whole thing so she can try again later. “Please don’t tell David?”
“Of– Of course not. Stevie, I–”
But Stevie’s out the door before she can hear the rest.
***
She gets another text from Patrick that evening, asking if he can come by her apartment and show her something. When she opens the door to his knock, he holds out his phone and swipes through an impressive collection of browser tabs. Most of them have a familiar, Slytherin-adjacent color scheme.
“So. I spent the afternoon researching.”
“Of course you did.” Stevie rolls her eyes. It doesn’t come close to hiding her relief, and she doesn’t even care. “What about the vendor contracts?”
“To hell with the vendor contracts,” Patrick says forcefully. Then he shrugs. “I’m going to stay up late and do them tonight. But this was more important.”
“I’m flattered.” She doesn’t sound like she means it, but she does. That’s just how her voice is. She hands Patrick the beer she already opened for him.
“I’m sorry about before,” he says once they’re settled on her couch. “I didn’t know what you were trying to tell me.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I have to get used to that. People not knowing.”
“Don’t.” Patrick shifts to face her more fully. “I mean, tell or don’t tell whoever you want, that’s your choice. But don’t get used to people not knowing who you are. Please don’t make that mistake.”
Stevie feels herself blinking and refuses to question why. “Okay.”
“The info is right here,” he holds up his phone, “for whoever wants to look. It’s not hard.”
“Thanks.” More blinking.
“So now that I’ve educated myself, do you maybe want to try telling me again?”
She never actually said she wanted a reset, but of course he knows to offer it anyway. She nods.
“Okay, then. Take it from the top. Whenever you’re ready.”
Stevie laughs. She sees what he’s doing. They spent countless hours on this couch running lines for Cabaret together, speaking like other people and learning their own voices better. She sees what he’s doing, and it’s working.
“Hey Patrick?” she begins, injecting a script-reading stiffness into her voice.
He matches her. “Yes, Stevie?”
“I’m aromantic. I’m never going to fall disgustingly in love with someone like you and your husband. It’s gonna be wonderful.”
Patrick grips her shoulder and stares into her eyes. He’s trying to keep the bit going, for her, but she can tell he’s already breaking. That smile’s too genuine. “I’m really, really happy for you.”
Stevie will never admit which of them goes for it first, but they end up hugging. Patrick’s so good at it that she might have to amend her policy.
“And scene!” she shouts, and they break apart, laughing.
“How did you feel about that one?” he asks. “Should we run it again?”
“No, I think we nailed it that time.”
“Good, me too.” He lets that sit for a minute before asking, “You really haven’t told David yet?”
“I haven’t told anyone else yet,” she replies. Then she remembers the other reason why she chose Patrick to be the first. “But saying it feels so right. For the first time in my life, I feel right. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” Patrick looks like he can’t stop smiling. “Sounds like me when I first fell in love with David.”
This is just what Stevie was hoping to hear, that he can recognize this feeling in her. This rightness. It makes her rightness feel more real.
“Well, you have a person who makes you feel right, and I have a word. Since I can’t make out with a word in front of everyone, I guess I’m going to have to start saying it out loud more often.”
Stevie tries not to let it sound like a consolation prize, that Patrick gets a person and she gets a word. She tries not to let it feel like a consolation prize, but it’s hard to shake, even when she knows it’s a lie she’s been sold. Words are good, she reminds herself. Words were her friends long before any person was. Circe is sitting on her side table, so she reaches out to stroke its textured cover.
“Oh!” Patrick says, thumbing to one of the browser tabs on his phone. “I know you’ve been into Greek myths lately. Have you seen this?”
He hands his phone across and she reads the title at the top of the screen: “The Asexual and Aromantic Goddesses of Greek Mythology.” That’s how Stevie learns about Artemis.
***
Artemis, like Circe, spends her immortality alone. Unlike Circe, she does it on purpose. A daughter of Zeus, the first thing she ever tells her all-powerful father is that she’ll never marry. Then she kills or transforms any man who tries to change her mind. Ruthless.
“She’s the goddess of the hunt,” Stevie explains to Ronnie on their next Sunday. “A real badass with a bow and arrow. And she’s aro, like me.”
The TV world switched off to an opaque blackness a while ago, but they’ve just refilled their drinks. Stevie is sitting sideways in her easy chair, legs draped over one of the arms, feet swinging.
“Wait a second,” Ronnie says, scrolling through the link Stevie sent her and squinting with her voice, somehow. “Sure, she swears off marriage, but this also says she runs around with a whole pack of half-naked nymphs? Sounds like lesbian behavior to me.”
“Well, Ronnie, behavior is not identity, and besides,” Stevie straightens her posture for emphasis, “Artemis isn’t real, so she can be both. We can both have her.”
“To the power of fiction,” Ronnie says, and they raise their glasses.
They’ve circled back to the bourbon this week, and as her next sip slides down, Stevie realizes she just used a label in this room for the first time. Neither of them commented on it, and she likes that. She’s going to keep it that way.
Instead she starts talking about Odysseus, whom Circe lets hang around her island and her bed even though she knows they’ll never fall in love. It’s not even his mortality that’s the obstacle, this time, but his devotion to his wife. (Apparently, one of the bedrocks of Ancient Greek culture is that a man’s devotion to his wife remains untainted no matter how many island randoms he bones.) Circe acts like she wants to fall in love with him, if he could offer it, but Stevie’s not convinced. There’s a kind of safety to that, she argues, being with someone who’s impossible to love. It gives you an excuse not to try.
She’s thinking about Jake, of course, but that’s another thing she’s not going to comment on tonight, because fuck Glaucos.
Yes. Fuck Glaucos, indeed.
Stevie sighs into her drink. “I think I need to find someone to celebrate my body.”
***
Colin is the someone she finds. Technically, he finds her, but she put herself in that dress, on that barstool, so that someone like him would find her. He has curly brown hair, blue eyes, and a no-nonsense opening line:
“Mind if I buy you a drink and talk to you for five minutes?”
She accepts the drink and later, boozier, the invitation back to his place. Only once they’re outside, their hands ducking beneath each other’s clothes with increasing speed and boldness, she redirects to her place because it’s closer.
A couple of weeks go by, and they see each other a few more times. Not always for drinks, but never for dinner, and always for sex.
“Two nights in a row,” Colin comments on his third night at her apartment, coming back to her bed with two glasses of water and handing one to her. “Are we... dating?”
He waggles his eyebrows so she knows it’s not a serious question. She likes Colin. He laughs at her jokes and tries to make her laugh in return, with above average success. He brings her water in bed after he’s left her too wrecked to move, where again his record is above average. Colin’s not a Jake. He’s the kind of guy she would have tried with, back when she thought trying was something she had to do.
Stevie thinks of Artemis, and decides she can stand to be a little ruthless, too.
“I don’t do that,” she says.
“Do what?”
“Dating. Romance. Any of it.”
Colin gives her a look like he doesn’t believe her, but is willing to play along. “So what do you do?”
“Sex. Friendship.”
“Isn’t that what dating is?”
She tries to shake her head mid-gulp, and ends up spilling. “It’s not. Trust me.”
“So you want to be my friend?” His cheeky, sidelong grin is objectively adorable. She wants to kiss it off his face.
“Not especially.”
“This is just sex, then?”
Stevie shrugs. “By process of elimination.”
“Okay.” He takes the empty glass from her hand and places it on the nightstand. He slides back under the covers with her. “I can do just sex.”
***
Colin can do just sex for two more weeks, it turns out.
“You really won’t come out with me this weekend?”
He bought them tickets to some local Cranberries tribute band in Elmdale, which actually does sound like a great time, but she doesn’t want to give him the wrong idea. She maybe already gave him the wrong idea by letting him stay till morning this time.
“I’m trying to find a nice way to say this, but I’m not going to come out with you any weekend. I don’t do dates, remember?”
“Oh, you were serious about that?” Even Colin’s frowns are adorable and kissable. “I thought that was code for, like, ‘I’m feeling things but not ready to admit it yet,’ or something.”
“No code,” Stevie says.
“So you really don’t feel anything here?” He gestures back and forth between them.
She does and doesn’t know the type of feeling he means. She knows what it looks like, but not what it is. The truth is, if they went on this date, she’d know exactly what to do. She would tell him about how her vinyl copy of Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? is the one thing in her apartment she would save from a fire. She’d sing along to all of her favorite lyrics, leaning in close to his ear, letting him hear her voice. During the opening verse of “Dreams,” she’d reach for his hand. Then at the end of the night, she’d draw a line under all these gestures of trust and intimacy, sum them together, and they’d add up to… nothing. Another kind of math Stevie doesn’t do.
“No, I–” can’t, she doesn’t say. “I don’t feel anything here.”
Stevie feels a sudden rush of unwelcome sympathy for Emir as Colin gathers up his stuff. It really was asking too much, in hindsight, to want him to feel something more between them. It wasn’t fair to expect him to hear a language she can’t speak. Still, he needed to pick a better moment.
“Okay. I guess this is it, then?” Colin pauses by the door, giving her the opportunity to stop him.
Artemis isn’t just the goddess of the hunt. She’s the goddess of the wilderness, of forests and hills, of everywhere it’s possible to be alone, on purpose, and free. She knows when to take aim and when to let her target slip away into the distance.
“Yeah,” Stevie says. “I guess so.”
Colin leaves, shaking his head.
***
After Colin, it starts to feel a little ridiculous that she still hasn’t told David, so she decides to fix that. She even manages to do it when they’re not high, but only barely. David is sitting on her bed, fiddling the bong and lighter into position when she gets over herself and just says it.
“Hey, I’m aromantic.”
David’s head snaps up, and the first of his Möbius strip of expressions is trying to figure out whether she’s making a joke. Satisfied with the answer he finds, he slides down to join her on the floor. “Oh. Okay.”
“I wanted you to know.”
Stevie watches her best friend rearrange his image of her in real time. She knows exactly what he’s seeing—how quickly she got over the feelings she confessed to having for him, how long she stayed with Jake because it was going nowhere, how much the thing with Emir shook her confidence but didn’t break her heart. His eyes dance over her, picking up each of these mosaic shards and placing it exactly where it needs to be.
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” David says.
He chose her, she realizes, all that time ago. When he called off the thing between them, called her his only friend, that was him choosing her. This whole time, she’d already been chosen.
She was wrong to think she’d never be more in love with David Rose than that morning after his wedding. She was wrong to think she doesn’t get a person who makes her feel right.
Stevie clears her throat and scrambles for something non-mushy to say. “Patrick knows already. He was the first person I told.”
“I’m glad.” David doesn’t even pretend to be offended.
She wonders if she’ll ever tell either of them that Ronnie knew before anyone else. Probably not.
She takes the bong from his hands and lights it.
Some time later, when her internal clock has gone languid, feels like something painted by Dalí, they’re sitting side by side against the bed and she hears herself saying, “You’re the platonic love of my life.”
She takes another hit, and David interlaces their fingers while she holds it in.
“Stevie, you can just say love.” He makes this sound like a scold. “Love is love.”
Her breath hitches and she coughs up more smoke than she has since high school. She’s heard that phrase so many times. She never thought it had room for her.
“You’re the love of my life,” Stevie tries again, and feels the truth of it settle over her like a weighted blanket.
David drops his head onto her shoulder. “You’re one of mine, too.”
***
The day after his first wedding anniversary, David sits in a tattoo shop three hours from home, holding Stevie’s hand.
When she first mentioned wanting to get an arrow tattooed on her arm, she expected him to tease her for the pun. (“An arrow because you’re aro? Ted will love it.”) Instead, he grabbed his sketchbook and came back three days later with a delicate line drawing that made her cry on the spot. The tattoo artist transformed the drawing into a digital image, then a stencil, and now she’s working on making it a permanent part of Stevie.
“Any meaning behind this one?” the artist asks over the buzzing of the needle. “Are you an archer?”
“No, I’m–” For half a second, Stevie thinks she’s going to tell the truth. She tells part of it. “I’m really into Artemis.”
“Dope.” The artist smiles, David squeezes Stevie’s hand, and under the needle, her skin goes numb.
They go out for ice cream after, and Stevie keeps the sleeve of her flannel rolled up so she can stare through the plastic wrapping at her arrow. She’d planned to get it as small as her artist could manage, to make it easy to hide when she wanted. David convinced her to try out a larger stencil first, and once she saw it taking up half of her forearm, she couldn’t bear to go any smaller.
She texts a photo to Ronnie with an “FG” for “Fuck Glaucos,” and gets a response a few minutes later.
Single helix 👀 👀
Stevie grins. It’s her favorite detail, too, how the shaft twists itself into a spiral just before the arrowhead. It was the first part David pointed to in his sketchbook, explaining that he wanted to reference the story she’d told him about high school biology and thinking there was solitude in her DNA. Of course Ronnie noticed it.
Stevie drives all the way home, into the setting sun, while David dozes in the passenger seat. She keeps stealing glances at her tattoo, which is a bit of a driving hazard, but she can’t help it. Every time she sees that single helix, it transforms a little bit more of that feeling she once called loneliness into something else, something deeper than choice, weightier than circumstance. Something she can’t change about herself and doesn’t want to.
She’s done living a life with a hole in it. All she sees now is negative space, stretching across and around her past and future, letting it take shape. When she grips the top of the steering wheel, her arrow points out at the road ahead.
David stirs next to her. “What are you thinking about?”
Stevie takes a deep breath and smiles into the sunshine.
“Moving forward.”