Page 40 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Of course not,” she’d said. “He’s my friend. Plus come on, you’ve met him—it’ll be hilarious.”

“Ah, I see.” It was that easy; Marc had chuckled, shaking his head, not needing to question her further. “There she is. Queen of chaos.”

Chaos for chaos’ sake. Regan’s staple, and what made her such a fucking laugh.

“So you don’t mind?” she’d confirmed, and Marc had shrugged.

“We both know you’re happiest when you’re causing a scene,” he said, turning back to the French press and letting that be that. It wasn’t conflicted, and it certainly wasn’t dramatic; he’d already seen every shade of Regan’s highs and lows. Sometimes she was a marvel, brilliant, creative, witty; sometimes merely predictable, spoiled, manic, vain. It was never particularly cruel, but it was always honest. She loved Marc for his honesty. She was grateful, she reminded herself, for his candor.)

The cake arrived, a pile of whipped cream dousing the plate beside layers of cream cheese frosting. Regan lathered the fork in both, embracing the absurdity of excess (was anything more needlessly palatial than a diner?) and sliding it gluttonously into her mouth. It was rich, as velvety as its name suggested. The act of choosing it felt luxurious, needlessly extravagant in a reassuring way, and Regan slid down in the booth with satisfaction, her knee bumping into Aldo’s.

“Good?” he asked.

“Divine,” she said, leaning her head against the booth’s vinyl cushion as she slouched down in a state of limp-limbed ecstasy, both legs fully outstretched.

He smiled knowingly, then dropped his gaze to his plate.

(“How compulsive would you say you are?” her psychiatrist had asked her.

Enough to agree to six conversations with a stranger, Regan had thought.

“I don’t know,” she’d said, “maybe a little.”)

The outer bone of her ankle brushed the inner bone of Aldo’s, lingering there.

(“And how are your moods?” the doctor had asked.

The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking.

Every time a pill sat in Regan’s palm she suffered some new strangulation; a faint memory of some distant need to force her heart to race. She’d crave a senseless rage, a dried-up sob, a psychotic joy, but find only pulse after pulse of nothing.

Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?

“Managed,” she’d said.)

She blinked herself back to the moment at hand, taking another bite of cake and glancing up again at Aldo. His silence was less weighty than hers, or so she imagined. He seemed settled, or at least calm. He was considering something out of sight, gaze fixed on nothing.

His hair was falling into his eyes and it irked her, twitching between her scapulae.

“Do you live far?” Regan asked him, and Aldo looked up, dragging himself back to the present.

“No,” he said, “just a couple of streets over.”

Good. Perfect. Ideal.

“I’m going to cut your hair,” she informed him.

(“How compulsive would you say you are?” the doctor had asked.

“I can’t fucking remember!” Regan hadn’t screamed.)

Aldo’s gaze on hers intensified, a chatter somewhere in his mind rising visibly to the surface.

Then, abruptly, it went quiet. In his eyes, acquiescence was soft.

“Okay,” he said, returning his attention to his sandwich.

Letting Regan into his apartmentwas precisely the sort of conundrum Aldo had never cared for, because it was difficult to quantify the projections involved. For example, would she think differently of him once she’d seen the way he lived? Presupposing he had any idea what she thought of him now, which he didn’t. Still, would she find him dull? Dysfunctional? Would she ultimately wish to excise it from what she already knew of him, and would he be able to sleep there for any nights afterwards, having witnessed in such detail all the places she had been?

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