Page 84 of It Couldn't Be You
“Order up.” He proudly poured me a cup.
I instantly puckered my lips at the overwhelming sour. He had a big smile saying, “Good lime, huh?”
I nodded and gave him a half-hearted thumbs up. I searched the kitchen for tortilla chips to help soften the sting.
“Did I tell you it’s my own recipe?” He beamed.
I drank it anyway. We all did.
We piled our plates with tacos, took pictures with the birthday girl and told Terrence all the funny stories we could think up. Later that night we put candles on a cheesecake and sang to Katie. It all felt right—Terrence fitting right into the group and Gabriel back with our little group. A perfect moment in time, all of us together.
As the night ended, we were gathering in the kitchen, some of us cleaning up, some of us picking at leftovers and talking.
“So, how’s all the back and forth going, Terrence?” Victor asked as he poured some of the last remnants of the margarita from the pitcher into his plastic cup.
“Ah, it’s a little exhausting to be honest. I was just in Seattle a week ago, and a few days prior I had flown out to Toronto for a day from here. It’s been a lot of time changes in a short span of time,” Terrence said, scraping food from plates into a garbage bag.
“You’re basically living in three different places right now?” Victor said.
“Basically,” Terrence sighed. “I’ve always traveled a lot, so I thought it’d be easy for me. But this being my daily life, my day-to-day, it’s a little tough.”
“How long do you think you’ll be tri-city?” Ricky asked, standing beside me, picking at the cheesecake.
I watched Terrence shoot a glance at Katie. “It’s unclear,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” Ricky laughed dryly.
“The stubborn girlfriend in Texas can make things pretty unclear, huh?” Victor teased. I shook my head to nobody in particular.
“Something like that.” Terrence shrugged, maybe unsure of how to field the jokes from the little brothers.
Katie’s shoulders tensed as she asked sharply, “It’s your stubborn girlfriend making things unclear? How’s that?”
Terrence dropped the plastic bag to the ground. “Babe, your brothers are just teasing me about my living situation.”
“I didn’t ask about them. I’m askingyousince you agreed. How am I making things unclear?” Katie said.
“God, Katie, why do you have to get so heated?” Ricky whined. “The man is jetlagged.”
“Yeah, Katie, I didn’t mean anything,” Terrence said, and in his defense, he did sound tired.
“It felt kind of like you did,” she murmured.
“I just said ‘something like that.’ That’s all I said,” Terrence said.
“That’s true,” Ricky added. I elbowed him.
“That’s not all you said, though. Before he even asked you if I was making it unclear, you were going on about how much you hate the situation,oursituation. Plus, you didn’t deny that it was the stubborn girlfriend’s fault you’re in this predicament,” Katie said. Katie and I rarely fought, but this was the second time I was privy to a Katie clash. It wasn’t lost on me that both fights were circling living situations.
“You realize that where you live, or how many places you live, is athousand percentup to you, right?” Katie crossed her arms.
“Katie, it iszero percentthat simple. My work, my love life,” he gestured to her, “which does involve a stubborn girl from Texas, my family, all of these things determine where I live.”
“You determine where you live,” she said flatly. “Those things can all work around your location. You are not at the mercy of everything.”
“Says the woman with a ten-minute commute,” he said quietly, barely.
She took in a deep, angry breath. “I choose that commute. You choose your commute, too.”
