Page 94 of The Way I Am Now
“What do you want to do tonight?” I ask her. “Are you hungry at all, or do you want to go back to bed . . . watch a movie? It’s whatever you want.”
“Could we lie back down?”
As we get undressed, she starts taking her pants off and looks up at me with this small, mischievous grin. “I promise I’m not trying to have sex with you again; I’m just getting into pajamas.”
“Stop,” I groan, folding my jeans over the back of her chair. “You know why I said that.”
“I’m just messing with you.” She takes her sweater off again and hangs it on the doorknob of her closet, walks over to her dresser in a mismatched bra and underwear, looking so beautiful I almost wish she would try to have sex with me because I need to feel human again now too. She pulls out one of my T-shirts I hadn’t even realized I’d left here. “Can I wear this?” she asks.
“Sure,” I answer, trying not to sound too enthusiastic about seeing her in my clothes. But as I watch her take her bra off and slide on my old beat-up gray T-shirt with a hole in the collar, my feet won’t let me not go to her. “By the way, I pretty much want to have sex with you constantly.”
“Oh,constantly?” she repeats, laughing as she gently pushes me away.
“I’m not kidding. I think about it way more than I should.” I follow her to the bed. “Truly, you’d be offended if you knew.”
She’s smiling as she pulls back the covers and climbs in first, but then she looks up at me with her eyes narrowed, like she’s confused about why I’m saying this.
“So, I would never reject you,” I tell her as I climb in beside her.
“Oh,” she murmurs.
I kiss her the way she was kissing me earlier—deep, serious. “Never,” I repeat. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispers.
As we lie here, she curls up around me, her head on my chest, her arm and leg draped across me. I start to feel more like myself than I have all week. We breathe in and out together, and I can feel her drifting to sleep when her phone vibrates from somewhere in the room, muffled. I look around and notice that she’s cleaned, rearranged things.
The phone keeps going off. She sighs loudly.
“Do you need to check that?” I ask her.
“I don’t want to,” she whines.
“It might be important.”
“I know it’s important, that’s why I don’t want to get it.” She rolls off me and says quietly, “It’s under the dresser.”
I don’t ask why it’s under there; I just get out of bed and tell her, “I’ll get it.” But as I walk up to her dresser, my eyes go directly to the pills lined up on top of it. I glance back at her. She sees me seeing them.
“My full pharmacy,” she explains. “Insomnia, depression, anxiety.”
I nod. “Okay,” I say because I don’t know if there’s anything else I should say. I’m happy she’s not hiding them anymore, but I can’t say that without letting her know that I knew about them already. I kneel down and press my face to the floor, see the phone all the way against the wall, glowing. I reach for it and pull it out, trying not to look at the screen.
I walk back over to her and hand her the phone, but she’s just staring at me. “Does that bother you?”
“What?”
“Those,” she says, gesturing to the dresser, the pills.
“No, they don’t bother me. Why would they bother me?”
“Because of your dad.”
“You need them, Eden. It’s totally different.”
“Yeah,” she whispers sadly, holding her phone facedown against her chest. “I do.”
She curls up to me again and breathes deeply, finally raises the phone.
