face?” he asks, covering the lower half of his face with his napkin.
“Dope.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
I stare again. Does he really have to ask? I keep waiting for that thing I now realize he always does when I’m feeling stuck for words—taking the initiative in the conversation. Talking about Love and Rockets or Pulp Fiction or the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era. But this time, Travis doesn’t do any of that. He just stares back.
“Bon appletini.” Sonia plunks two plates down on our table. Travis digs into his omelet like he’s starving. Like he’s been living off of microwave popcorn for weeks. Like we didn’t just have the best sex of my short life last night.
“Travis,” I whisper, like I’m trying to get his attention in a movie theater. He glances up at me, shifts his eyes to the side to check for supervillains or anyone else I might be wary of hearing me.
“What?” he whispers back. Then he hands me the syrup.
“What happened last night . . .” I start to say, but I can’t continue because I am choking on the awkward.
“Was really awesome?” He finishes the sentence for me with a crooked smile and I die. Then he lowers his voice to a whisper again. “I thought so, too.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Really?” he asks in mock surprise. “Because last night you seemed to think it was pretty awesome. That is, if all the orgasms were any indicator.”
Now I’m choking on my coffee and ready to hide my own face in my napkin. He’s got a verifiable point, though.
“Wait, you weren’t faking it, were you? For my ego’s sake?”
I shake my head no. No, I wasn’t faking it, and no, you are not teasing me about this. No, you are not.
“Travis, I’m serious.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m serious, too. Last night really was awesome.”
“Look, this can’t change anything. We’ve worked too long and too hard to fuck everything up now by this one little moment of weakness, all right?”
Now he looks serious. Not the serious look he has when he’s trying to nail a difficult solo or when he’s negotiating with the door guy for our fair cut, though. This is more of a pissed-off kind of serious.
“Sure,” he finally says. Then he goes back to shoveling his omelet into his face. He hails Sonia and she comes and brings him a coffee refill and he asks for the check.
“You’re going?” I say. “You’ve got nothing else to say?”
“What else is there to say?” he asks.
“Don’t be mad, all right?” I plead. “I just don’t want it to be weird.”
He laughs but he’s not amused. I know that.
“Fine,” he says. “I understand completely. I really do.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” he says. “No big deal.”
“It’s not?”
“Do you want it to be?”
I pause because it feels like a trick question, and I suck at trick questions. But even as I pause I feel my mouth make the shape of the word “no,” and before I get it out he’s nodding and his mouth is a straight, pissy-looking line.
“Should we tell the beat brothers?” I say, and he rolls his eyes and now I can almost see the smoke billowing right behind them. “Look, if we aren’t honest about it, it will turn into this big thing that we have to keep secret.”
“And we wouldn’t want the fact that we had sex last night to, you know, mean anything.”
“Exactly,” I say, and I am waiting for him to look relieved that he doesn’t have to deal with any weirdness as far as I’m concerned. That I am not some needy girl who expects things from him other than the usual. Be on time for rehearsal. Play your Goddamned guitar like you mean it. Drive me home when I’m drunk and carry my amp for me and be an integral, essential part of me pursuing my dreams. Okay, that’s a bit much but the thing is, he does it. All the time. And I can’t lose this.
This is what I would assume he also wants, for everything to just be normal and not weird and for us to not be on the brink of fucking up this very great thing we have together. I expect him to acknowledge that while last night was, in fact, awesome, it was also a mistake that could potentially kill this band we’ve worked so hard to build.