she was angry at it, too. "Happy the way things are, Anita. Why does he have to go and change everything?"
"You spend more nights at each other's places together than alone, right?"
She just nodded.
"He said he offered to move in together first, why not try it?"
"Because I want my stuff. I love Louie, but I hate how he's taken over my closet, my medicine cabinet. He's taken two of the dresser drawers over for his clothes."
"The bastard," I said.
"It's not funny," she said.
"No, I know. Did you tell him you didn't like him moving his stuff in?"
"I tried."
"Do you want him gone, poof, out of your life?"
She shook her head. "No, but I want my apartment back, the way it was. I don't like coming home and finding that he's rearranged everything in my cabinets so it's easier to find. If I want to dig through every cabinet to find tomato paste, then it was my choice. He didn't even ask, I just came home one night, and he'd organized everything in the kitchen. I couldn't find anything." She must have sounded pouty even to herself, because she jerked off the glasses and gave the full force of those pain-filled gray eyes. "You think I'm being silly, don't you?"
"No, he should have probably asked you before rearranging everything." The fact that Nathaniel had not only rearranged everything in my kitchen, but also thrown out the non-matching stuff was probably best kept to myself.
"I love dating Louie, but I don't want to marry anybody."
"Okay."
"Just okay, you're not going to try talking me into it?"
"Hey, I'm not headed for wedded bliss either, who am I to force you into it?"
She looked at me, as if searching my face for a lie. She was pale and hollow-eyed, as if she hadn't gotten much more sleep than Micah. "But you've let Micah move in with you."
I nodded and drank coffee. "Yes."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you want him to move in with you? I thought you liked your independence as much as I do."
"I'm still independent, Ronnie. Micah moving in didn't change that."
"He doesn't try to order you around?"
I just looked at her.
"I'm sorry, Anita, but my dad was such a bastard to my mother. I've seen pictures of her on stage in college. She wanted so much, but he wouldn't have a wife that worked. She had to be the perfect little homemaker. She hated it, and she hated him."
"You aren't your mother," I said, "and Louie isn't your father." Sometimes in these heart-to-heart talks you have to state the obvious.
"You weren't there, Anita, you didn't see it. She fell into a bottle, and he never noticed, because on the outside she was perfect. She never got roaring drunk, or falling down drunk. It was just like she needed this constant buzz to see her through the day, and the night. A functioning alcoholic is what they call it."
I didn't know what to say to that. We'd both told each other our sad stories years ago. She knew all about my mother's death, my father marrying the ice princess stepmother, and my perfect stepsister. We'd shared our bitterness toward our families long ago. I knew all this, so why tell it again? Because something about the proposal had brought it up.
"You told me months ago that Louie is nothing like your dad."
"Yeah, but he still wants to own me."
"Own you," I said, "what does that mean, own you?"
"We date, we have great sex, we enjoy each other's company, why does he have to move in, or make me marry him?" There was something like real fear in her face.
I touched her hand where it lay clenched on the tabletop. "Ronnie, he can't make you marry him."
"But if I don't agree to something, he'll leave. We either move forward, or he's gone. That's him trying to force me to marry him."
I felt like I wasn't qualified for this talk, because her logic wasn't bad, but it wasn't like that. I knew Louie, and he'd have been horrified that she saw his proposal and his need to finalize things as ownership. I was almost a hundred-percent certain he didn't mean it that way. I squeezed her hand and tried to think of what to say that would help things instead of hurt. Nothing came to mind.
"I don't know what to say, Ronnie, except that I don't believe Louie meant to hurt you like this. He loves you, and thought you loved him, and when people love each