Page 73 of Falling Backwards
So I press on; this brief silence would be awkward if I hadn’t come prepared.“Rules?”
She nods.“Rules.What are the ones you’ve already come up with?”
“First up is that I think I should be the first person you reach out to when there’s somewhere you’d ordinarily go by yourself.”
“That makes sense.”After a beat: “We agreed that couples spend lots of time together, and being alone isn’t gonna help me feel safer about Kyle.”
“Exactly.”
“What if you aren’t available?”She quickly goes on again.“I think in that case, I should take one of my friends instead.As an absolute last resort, I can go alone but find someone to stick with me so I’m notreallyalone, like the cart attendant at the store.Right?”
I don’t know anything about the cart attendant part of her trip, but the gist of it is smart.“Right.”
Now it’s time to pose what just might be the rule we’ll have the most trouble with—and it’s got nothing to do with touching.
“The second rule I thought of is like what we were saying earlier about couples arguing.Even though it won’t be possible for us to get along the entire time, we have to make honest attempts at it.We gotta do our best not to get into arguments that might…uh….”
She looks away for a moment, rubbing her hands over her hips.
“Arguments that might damage what we’re trying to do here?”she supplies.
When she looks at me again, I nod.
As it is, we never talk about our past, but the more time we spend together, the more chances we’ll get to be aggravated with each other, and the more we might be tempted to fire shots.It would get in our way big time.
“No hitting below the belt on purpose,” she adds.“Try to…tryto be kind instead.”
I nod again.
I find that I can’t quite help mirroring the slight wariness about her, though, because the fact is we still are who we are.
“Okay,” she says.She drifts a look over me.“Anything else?Or should we move on to physical stuff?”
The mere mention puts a certain kind of buzz in the air, but I try to stay casual.“Nope, that’s the last rule, I think.”
I definitely catch one of her hands twitching now.She crosses her arms, then uncrosses them, then knots her fingers together.
I say, “Well, before we figure out what’s okay, let’s agree that if either of us ever feels uncomfortable, we’ll say so and be respected.”
That almost, almost gets a smile out of her.
She says, “Absolutely.Thank you.”
“Thankyou.”
“Mmhmm.”She pauses.“I think regular touches will be okay.Like, natural ones or whatever.”
She doesn’t elaborate, so I make guesses based off of what I can picture doing.“Natural ones like…getting an eyelash off your face if I see one?Putting my arm around you when we’re sitting close together?”
“Yeah.Holding hands.Me fixing your work tie for you when it’s crooked and lazy-looking.”
Any build-up of the buzz dips away as I scowl at her.“My tie looked like thatonetime, and I told you why when you brought it up.”
“It looked like that because you rushed through putting it on.”
“Well, the blender went stupid and got bright-ass strawberry daiquiri on me, so yes, I had to hurry to put on a random tie from Mr.Polk’s office.”
“You could’ve looked into the bathroom mirror for five seconds and—”
