A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

arms, a sleepy, hopeful smile came over his face. “Hey,” he said, his voice froggy. He cleared his throat. “So.”

“So,” I said, and an awkward silence hung in the air for a moment.

“I need coffee. You want some?”

I made a noncommittal noise, and he rolled off the bed and disappeared out the door. As the sounds of him clattering around and grinding beans rose in the kitchen, I searched for the shorts he’d given me last night. There they were, balled up under the covers at the foot of the bed. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and looked away quickly, both because of the shame and because, with my purplish under-eye circles and lightning-struck hair, I looked like a troll doll.

God, everyone had seen me naked, dancing around tits-out like I’d gotten too drunk at a college party. And now I was supposed to go back to Nevertheless and act like everything was normal. How did the other women do it, slip into these ecstatic states, do and say things that daylight would render ridiculous, and then slip back into reality to go about their lives? It was like they were pulling on a costume, transforming themselves in the firelight. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe everything they did in the daytime, every casual conversation they had in line at Sweetgreen, every meeting they led at the office, was the costume they wore, and when they danced in the firelight, mad and wild, that was the reality that mattered.

I slunk into the kitchen right as the pot of coffee finished brewing. Raf poured me a cup and handed it to me with a nervous energy, then scratched at the stubble on his cheek. I took a sip.

“Um,” he said. “We should talk.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m really sorry about just . . . throwing myself at you.”

“You don’t need to apologize for that.”

“We can forget it ever happened. A weird one-off night. Probably most friends do it at one point, right?”

“I don’t know if they do.”

“And I’m sorry that this fake-dating thing has dragged on so long. We should end it. I’ve been depriving you of your ability to hook up with all these hot ladies, and it’s not fair to you—”

“Jillian, stop it.” His face flushed. “I don’t want to hook up with all the hot ladies.”

“Right,” I said. “I know. Because it’s overwhelming.”

“No,” he said, his thick dark eyebrows knitting together, a little curl of chest hair sticking out the top of his undershirt. “Because I love you.”

I froze. An image flashed before my eyes, that of Margot throwing the cow tongue into the fire last night as all the women chanted for Raf to tell me his feelings.

“Did you talk to Margot?” I asked. “Did she tell you to say this?”

“What? Why would she— No. No one told me. But I just . . . do.” He looked down at the floor, then took a deep breath and looked straight at me, and he was both the shy little boy down the block and a man who it turned out that I didn’t know at all. “I love you.”

Bear with me on a tangent here: researchers once conducted a study where they showed a roomful of subjects a line segment and then asked them to identify a matching line from three others of varying lengths. Visually, it should have been the easiest task in the world. Only most of the subjects weren’t subjects at all. They were confederates hired by the experimenters. Their job was to point at a line of a clearly different length and say, with conviction, that that was the matching one.

And so, for the real subjects in the room, it screwed with their heads. They knew which line matched, but, as more and more people pointed to another line, they began to doubt themselves. Were the other subjects seeing something they weren’t? Some of them braved potential ridicule and stuck to their guns. Others picked the same line as everyone else just to save face. But others, I think, truly didn’t know what reality was anymore.

I was not going to be like them. I was not going to start doubting what I knew to be true. The women hadn’t made this happen, with their cow tongue and their chanting. This was a coincidence. An extremely inconvenient one.

“Well, sure,” I sputtered. “Like, you love me as a cousin. Who you had sex with. Which isn’t illegal, so it’s fine the one time but probably shouldn’t happen again.”

“Not as a cousin, Jilly,” he said softly, and the hair on my arms lifted into the air. “I want to be with you, for real.”

“Stop it,” I said, and collapsed onto the couch. “You’re confused. I confused everything by making us do this fake-dating thing. I thought it was symbiotic, you know? An excuse to help you figure out this new life of yours. And you went along with it, because you’re so nice—”

“I’m nice, but I’m not that nice.” He sat down next to me. “I think I’ve probably always loved you.”

Inside, a part of me thrilled to this news, and it was like I was seeing our childhoods together in color instead of black-and-white—Raf watching me recite my terrible poetry, hanging on my every word. Raf playing the Romeo to my Juliet and not picturing me as lasagna at all. “It’s not like I was pining away all of this time,” he was saying. “Sometimes it was stronger than others, but it was always there on some level. But now, I don’t know, I just feel like shit’s getting real, and I had to tell you.”

I turned to him and took his hand. My palm was sweating, and so was his. “You’re one of the most important people in my life.”

“Yeah, and you are for me too.”

“No, but listen, it’s different. You still have your family, and you have all the people at your restaurant and so many others who love you. But for me,