Page 86 of Dear Ripley

There was nobody like Ripley, and there was never going to be. I’d take what she’d give me and relish it. Even if I was left aching for more, I’d catalog every look, touch, and comment. I’d work on being the best friend I could to her, and I’d keep the feelings she didn’t want hidden away, loving her in secret for the rest of my life. Just as I had been doing for the last eight years.

“Earth to Alicia,” Morgan called, amusement clear in her voice.

I whipped towards her, dragging myself away from Ripley’s mesmerizing gaze. “Sorry. What did you say?”

Ripley smirked and the power of it was almost more than I could bear. How could she not realize the hold she had over me? The smirk implied she might, but that couldn’t be possible. There was no way she’d be so amused if she suspected I was busy thinking about how she was the center of life and the universe.

“Morgan’s hungry,” Ripley said, finally looking away from me and back at Morgan.

Part of me noticed that she seemed to have an easy time pretending to be unbothered and unafraid of my presence when she was looking at someone else. At first, I’d assumed it came from the fact that she hated me and that being around me was physically uncomfortable. Now, I wasn’t so sure. After all her letters, the tiniest, most hopeful part of me wondered whether it might be a spark of something else between us.

I couldn’t control my hope any more than I could control any of my other feelings and emotions. What mattered was the way I reacted to them, and, if she wanted casual conversation, I could do that.

Or, I could try at least. I had to. We were finally trying. She’d told me conversation in person was hard, but we needed to find a way through it together. And I knew how much I wanted to try with her.

“And is Morgan incapable of cooking?” I asked with a forced grin. “I wonder how she survived this long without the three of us basically living here.”

“Hey!” Morgan protested immediately. “I’m a perfectly wonderful chef. My problem is that I don’twantto cook. You’re the ones who had problems with the food I had in, so you’re the ones going to fix it.”

My heart stumbled in its rhythm. Her tone made clear what she wanted—me and Ripley making dinner together. “Actually,” I said quickly, “I’m the one that had problems with it. Ripley just helped by getting pizza for us. And, since it was just me, I can make dinner for everyone.”

I stood up in some rushed attempt at fleeing from the room, as if, by making it to the kitchen, I’d win and be able to cook alone.

Perhaps this whole thing was Morgan’s ploy to get dinner out of us multiple times during our stay. Or, perhaps, it was a much bigger ploy and I was just willingly playing into everything she wanted without thinking things through.

“That’s nice of you,” Morgan called after me, her voice so smug I could practically hear the cogs whirling. “But Ripley likes to complain too, so she has to help you. Besides, I’m hungry and, if you work together, you’ll have it done in no time.”

I wasn’t sure that was true. I was confident that I’d work much better alone than dancing around the kitchen with the ex-wife I was now admitting I was still in love with. Everyone must be able to see that, surely?

“Go on, then,” Morgan said, poking Ripley in the direction of the kitchen. “Show us what you’ve got.”

“Oh, you think you can just goad me into making you dinner?” Ripley asked, her tone implying she knew exactly what Morgan was trying to do.

The sound momentarily soothed something in me. Ripley knew what was happening, she wasn’t going to just give in and do what Morgan wanted her to. She was going to push back and resist and, in the end, it would be easier to just leave me alone to do it myself. And Morgan wouldn’t win.

So, I was surprised when Ripley simply laughed and headed for the kitchen. And me.

I’d thought I was hungry too, but, with an oddly eager Ripley striding towards me, and the flood of memories of being in the kitchen together, I wasn’t sure I could eat anything. I also wasn’t sure I even remembered how to cook, and, despite everything, I really was trying not to embarrass myself in front of Ripley. If I suddenly forgot my way around a kitchen, that would definitely constitute an embarrassment.

On the bright side, though, perhaps if I didn’t know how to even peel carrots, Ripley would remember how much she wanted nothing to do with me, and then we’d both be free of this torturous tango we were doing. Even if I somehow couldn’t get enough of it.

Chapter 30

Ripley

Sleep didn’t come easy that night. Ellie was definitely a part of it, but the bigger part was Alicia. I’d known what Morgan was up to, pushing us to make dinner together. She was hardly subtle, and we’d been friends too long for it not to be painfully obvious. Even Alicia, who hadn’t been around her in years, must have been able to see through her pitifully thin deception. And still, I hadn’t resisted. It would have been easy to, but I couldn’t. I’d wanted to be weaving my way around Morgan’s kitchen with Alicia in tow. I’d wanted an excuse to be closer to her, with a task we were focused on that stopped the moment from being awkward and tense. It felt like a step on the new path we were walking together. In some ways, it had worked. In others, less so, but I still couldn’t get one second of it out of my head.

After debating for a moment what we were going to make, Alicia resolutely keeping her eyes on the available foodstuffs Morgan had ordered, we’d actually said very little to each other as we cooked. There was a situation in which that would have been disappointing. As it was, I found myself not very disappointed at all.

We moved like we knew and understood each other, like we still sensed each other with every movement, and like we could preempt each other with ease. I’d spent so much time lately convinced that we didn’t know each other anymore, that seeing the ways we did know each other, how smoothly we fit together in space again, felt like a gift. One I wasn’t going to be able to ignore or forget anytime soon.

It didn’t matter that we didn’t speak because we were still communicating, and, in many ways, that communication was much more intimate than words.

I shifted in my makeshift bed on Morgan’s living room floor. I shouldn’t have been feeling so electric thinking about Alicia. It was normal, probably, to remember how to move around someone in the kitchen when you’d lived together for years. Muscle memory didn’t really mean anything. Our whole problem had been communicating, and, in the face of that, being able to cook together meant nothing. We could make as many meals as we wanted, but without open and honest communication, we had no hope of moving forward as anything other than people who used to share a kitchen.

And that was the kicker, wasn’t it? The real reason sleep was evading me. Because, no matter how good cooking with Alicia felt, I’d laid out a lot of my feelings for her, and she hadn’t replied. Sure, it had only been a day, and there was a hell of a lot going on—much of it way more important than my letter—but I couldn’t pretend it didn’t sting a little that she hadn’t said anything. Not even a cursory signal to let me know she’d received it and was planning to reply in due course. I’d offered her the chance to ignore my letter, but I hadn’t expected her to seem exactly the same, as if she hadn’t even seen it.

Maybe it was better this way. If I wouldn’t like what she had to say in return, I think I’d rather she didn’t say anything at all, and we could go on with our lives pretending it never happened. Of course, it would haunt me deeply when I was alone, but, outwardly, I could pretend I’d never written it. Probably.

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