Page 44 of Here for a Good Time
“Before we came here, Zwe was in this on-off relationship with his ex,” I say. “But now they’re very muchoff,which was the ‘good point’ I was referring to.”
“What happened?” Leila asks.
Zwe does not like talking about his personal life. Even his parents never got the full story about him and Julia. In fact, I don’t think anyone in his life—apart from me, and that’s only because we live together—would know if he was in a serious relationship until the day he announced his engagement.
“We made sense until—” Zwe shrugs. “—we just… didn’t. We had… different perspectives on things.”
Leila starts digging the pit, but I notice that she’s not showing us her face, and I would bet my last granola bar that it’s deliberate. After all, who among us hasn’t busied ourselves with a fire pit in order to hold back our unbridled interest in our new crush’s last relationship?
“Like what?” I ask, partly to ease Leila’s itching curiosity, andpartly because this is news to me. As far as I was aware, Julia and Zwe had the same views on all the big things in life. They both liked having a stable nine-to-five, disliked traveling, wanted to live in the same city as their parents, and—to my utter shock—kept spreadsheets of their monthly expenses.
Zwe doesn’t answer, instead buying himself time by going over to help Antonio and Leila dump all the leaves and twigs they gathered into the pit. If he’s hoping we’ll take his silence as a hint, though, we’re absolutely not. In fact, after a few more seconds, Antonio urges, “Oh, come on, Mr. Zwe. We might be the last people you ever talk to.” He presses down on a pile of leaves. “What’s the point of secrets?”
“Look, I need something to keep me entertained out here,” Leila says. “Consider this piece of gossip your contribution for the night. Or at least a thank-you to me for building us this fire pit.”
“You accept compensation in gossip?” he asks.
She waves a twig around. “Desperate times.”
“She wanted to move in together, buy a house, settle down. I said we were moving too fast, and she left because she felt like we were moving too slowly.”
He says it all in one breath, so quickly that it takes my brain, which wasn’t ready for this specific stream of words, several moments to process it. I try to catch his eye to make sure he’s telling the truth, but he’s deliberately avoiding me, focusing down at the pit as his hands fall into a repetitive motion. Collect, dump, pack, repeat.
Leila is the first to speak. “Not wanting to live together does sound like a solid deal breaker,” she says, awkwardness straining her voice.
“I didn’t know you guys were looking at houses,” I blurt out,hurt distorting my own. Why wouldn’t Zwe tell me about such a big move?
“We weren’t,” he says. “Shewas. That was kinda the point.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
Finally,finally,he meets my gaze. “You were busy with work,” he says. It’s the shrug that makes me feel sick. “And it wasn’t a massive deal. There wasn’t anything more to that conversation.”
Why didn’t you want to move into a house with her?I want to ask, because I know for a fact that he’s always wanted the backyard life, one big enough so that the shelter dog he eventually adopts can run around in it.
The other, more pressing “why” that’s balancing right at the tip of my tongue, though, is,Why didn’t you tell me?
If we were alone back at ours, I would press and pry until he spilled. But we’re not alone and we’re not back at ours, and right now I can see how tired he is, even if he’s done a good job of masquerading it. Sweat sticks his shirt to his skin, his hair is greasy and ruffled by both the wind and his own hand raking through it throughout the day, and as he helps build this fire pit, he’s not moving as quickly as he typically would.
So I let it go, deciding that, actually,notmaking him talk about the worst heartache I’ve seen him go through in front of strangers while we try to survive a night in the wilderness, is an easy grace I can and should give him.
“Just in time,” Leila exhales once they’ve packed it all tightly within the pit. “Zwe, glasses?”
He complies, passing along his navy-rimmed pair.
“Hopefully we havejustenough sunlight left to—” Holding up a medium-sized stick in one hand, she angles the sun through Zwe’s glasses, shifting the latter a few degrees down and then tothe right. The rest of us stay silent while she works. Biting her bottom lip, she continues to adjust the angles and mutter, “Come on, please, please, work, please.”
There’s a quiet sizzling sound before orange embers start dancing atop the kindling.
“There we go,” Leila breathes out as she carefully places the tinder at the top of the pit. We exhale a collective breath when the fire spreads, its delightful shadows already dancing across our faces.
She wipes the concentration-induced sweat off her forehead and returns Zwe’s glasses.
“You are amazing,” Zwe laughs out. He looks like the personification of the heart-eyes emoji. “You just built a fucking fire in the ground. Using a stick and a pair of glasses!”
“Like I said,” she says with a playful toss of her hair. “Not just a pretty face.”
We get started on dinner soon after, and surprisingly, it’s nottheworst meal I’ve ever had. He hadn’t found any vegetables that could be eaten raw, but Zwe ended up gathering a variety of berries, guava, water apples, star fruit, and three large ripe mangoes.
