Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

I kiss him hard, and he kisses me back, then pushes me away. I can still taste the Cookie Crisp and the Molson on his tongue.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “Are we past the other stuff? I mean, is it in the past?”

Everything is in the past! Everything and nothing and god knows what else all at once! I want to scream.

“I am. We should be. It is,” I answer, though what I should really say is that I might be, we’ll try, who knows? But I am wearing my guts on my sleeve now, and I can’t stop the momentum of where Peter and I need to go. My mom was right. It’s only sex, dear! she’d said in her e-mail, to which I hadn’t replied.

He leans over and kisses me again slowly, softly, almost barely there, and I wonder if I’m kissing the way that I’ve always kissed, and if he’s doing the same.

“I can’t believe you initiated,” he murmurs. “You never used to.” He kisses me more forcefully now, and I try to keep up, but he’s almost frantic, bearing down too hard. My lips feel puffy, my face braised from his two-day-old stubble.

“Slow down,” I remind him. “Slow down or you’ll hurt me.”

He stops and checks himself, then smiles a smile both sad and joyful.

He starts to unbutton my top. “Never.”

Our doorman buzzes two hours later. “Sending up your sister,” he says, then clicks good-bye.

Peter is asleep in the bedroom and has been for the duration of our post-sex window. Afterward, he oohed and aahed over what we had managed to do to each other—despite my formerly fractured body, despite my formerly (and possibly still current) fractured trust in him, despite, well, everything. But afterward, I could tell it was a losing battle with his sinking eyelids, and soon enough, his breath grew patterned and his chest rose and fell, and I wobbled back to the couch and flipped on the TV. The sex itself was good, though again: no reference point. But it seemed good enough. I might not have remembered having slept with him before, but well, I seemed to remember how to sleep with him at least, and we laughed—both of us relieved—that I hadn’t forgotten everything .

“What’s with the bedhead?” Rory says as way of greeting when I swing open the door, and then lock it behind her. I shrug and look at the floor. “Oh no, you didn’t!” she says.

“He’s my husband. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with it!”

“I’m just…surprised. Knowing what you now know. I wouldn’t have pegged you for this type of reaction.” She stares at me for a bit, chewing on a thought she opts not to share. “You really are more like Mom than I realized.” She steps into the kitchen and emerges with a Diet Coke.

“I wouldn’t say that. Why would you say that? Ugh, god, please don’t say that.”

“Oh, she and Dad patched things up more times than I can remember. You got that gene, I guess, though I wouldn’t have pegged you for it before all of this. You know your nickname in high school was Ice Queen.”

“That’s original,” I say.

“Well, don’t blame me,” she answers. “I didn’t give it to you. It started when you slipped on a patch of ice your sophomore year and broke your wrist. You went to a party anyway, ignoring the pain, until your arm swelled up like an elephant limb, and Aaron Sacks, the senior who had invited you there, drove you to the ER. Mom was stuck at home with me, and Aaron stayed with you all night, through the X-rays, the cast, all of that, and then—the way you told it from the way he told it—you refused to kiss him good night. The Ice Queen was born.”

“I had standards.” The new me tries not to betray her disappointment in the old me, that I couldn’t have made out with him just a little. Just a fraction of a French kiss! Would that have killed the old me?

“Then explain this,” she says, gesturing toward the bedroom. She pales. “Shit, that was too mean. No, you did have standards…I just…well, like I said, you were different before. This isn’t what I was expecting, that’s all. I guess I just didn’t get the same gene.”

The soda hisses as she opens it, and then, out of nowhere, she drops onto a dining chair, emitting some sort of animal sob, her shoulders heaving and shaking. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s crying.

“Jesus, Rory, what? What’s wrong? Is it Peter and me?”

She looks up at me, batting her hands in front of her face, her mascara gruesome under her eyes, her nose already pink and running amok.

“It’s Hugh. We broke up.”

“What? Why?” I help her—we help each other really—to the couch. That goddamn unsightly disgusting gold couch. Despite my mess of a sister in front of me, I resolve to get to a furniture store like, this week. Like, yesterday. I cannot take another second of this monstrosity in my home. My former me’s home.

“Oh, I don’t know! No, I do know, but I don’t really know!” She moans. “We’ve been fighting…I wanted to get married, he wasn’t ready…I gave him…oh shit, Nell, I gave him an ultimatum. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting any goddamn younger here! It’s not like my ovaries are going to wait around forever!”

“You’re only twenty-seven, Rory,” I say kindly, trying to erase a mental image of my own ovaries, bruised, marred, expunged. I live in the moment and instead focus on the couch. Maybe I’ll get something in a burnished red or a surprising shade of sea blue.

“Well, it’s too late now!” She stands and starts pacing frantically, and I pull myself back to her, sensing her desperation. “It’s too fucking late now! I gave him a time frame, and he blew past it, and now it’s just too little, too late! I screamed at him, and he screamed at me, and we said things we shouldn’t have said—he actually called me a demanding bitch and I might have called him a noncommittal prick, and now it’s just all one giant effing mess!” She flings her hands in the air for extra drama and then flops back on the couch.

“People say things they shouldn’t all the time,” I say. “That’s the easy fix, that’s why we have apologies.”

“No, it’s more than that,” she says quietly, her voice cracking. “I see how precious life can be. I see you, and that you almost died, and I see what’s been taken away from you, and I just can’t settle for his noncommittalness for one more second.”

“Noncommittalness?”

“I probably just made that word up.” She snorts, half grief, half gallows humor. “But like I said, I think I just don’t have that gene…to settle.” She shakes her head. “Not that you’re settling. Jesus. I’m sorry. You know what I mean.”

I don’t, but it seems easier to ignore the comment than make something more of it than it needs to be. Rory doesn’t know crap about forgiveness and isolation and despair, so why even bother?

“Things seemed perfect with you two last weekend.”

“Don’t judge what you can’t see. Closed doors and all of that. If you could remember Mom and Dad, you’d know as much.” She hesitates. “Actually, on second thought, maybe you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, Ror, you’ll figure it out.” I pull her head onto my shoulder and let her rest there, until the phone rings, jolting us both.

The nerves snap in my hip from moving too quickly and my earlier romp with Peter, a quick reminder that I’m not what I used to be.

“Erg, hello?” I manage when I pick up the phone from the pass-through on the third ring.

“I’m a block away,” Anderson says. “I’m coming up.”

I glance at Rory, who has flopped back on the couch, her arms thrust over her face.

“Now’s not a good time.”

“For me either,” he says, and it’s only then that I detect his drunkenness, his ever-so-slight slurring of words. Formeeither.