Cassie
Iwoke to Mittens breathing in my face, waiting. I’d had the strangest dream. I was standing in my living room across from the futon in the late morning. The sun was shining warm through the windows that looked out on the front yard. My potted plants were gone, and instead, stalks and leaves had sprouted out of the cracks in the floorboards all around me, vines climbed up the walls, flowers drooped, resting on my bare feet. Somehow I had planted this greenery, and it was supposed to be here, warm and comforting around me.
I sat up in bed and heard music filtering in from the living room, and on top of it, a voice out of tune. The song was “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin. The voice was Luke’s.
I gave Mittens a pat on the head and slipped on shorts and a tank top.
Everything in the living room was like what I had imagined, except the plants were back in their places. Somehow they seemed fuller, though. I stood still. The sun shone. Luke was in the kitchen, limping back and forth from the stove. The air smelled like fried eggs.
“Good morning!” I called.
He couldn’t hear me over the music and a very exaggerated impression of Robert Plant. I tried to keep from laughing, and held up my hand for Mittens to stay. Luke had his back to me, poking at the skillet with a spatula.
“Good morning,” I called again.
He turned to me, shirtless, startled. “Oh! Good morning. Yeah. I was just...”
“Making eggs?”
Luke was still an anomaly in my close quarters, too big to fit, or at least he was now that he was upright, his six-foot-plus frame in my little kitchen. And especially after last night. The memory jolted me. Our bodies, together. I wondered why we didn’t stop ourselves before it got that far. Then I wondered why we stopped. I cleared my throat.
He gestured to the stove with the spatula. “Making eggs and working on some, you know. Vocal stylings.”
“Very good. You should consider starting a Led Zeppelin cover band.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Shed... Dead...”
“Nothing rhymes with Zeppelin,” I assured him, grabbing a glass for water. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”
I left him to the stove and caught a smile in my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I was thinking about the recent uptick of his interest in music. Today was not the first day he’d started by putting on one of my records. He was just as he said he was, a straight classic-rock fan, but I could put on something rock-y but obscure and get a curious glance out of him.
We emerged at the same time, me with my face washed, him from the kitchen with two plates.
He sat, I sat. Over-easy eggs, still steaming, and avocado on toast. The last time we were here, we were holding each other. He’d revived me. He’d cried into my hair. Now his elbow touched mine only on occasion, balancing the toast to his lips, trying to get the crumbs to fall on the table rather than all over his leg brace.
“What are you gon’ do t’day?” he asked, his mouth full.
I laughed. “Eat eggs and avocado.”
“Oh, yeah?” He took another bite. “That sounds pretty good.”
“What are you doing?”
He swallowed. “Eat avocado and eggs.”
“Huh, who knew?”
Mittens trotted in, tongue out. We moved our plates out of her reach. I stood, paused the Led Zeppelin, and put on Xenia Rubinos’s “Hair Receding.” A crease rose between his eyebrows, his mouth slightly turned up, listening.
“I knew it,” I said.
“What?”
“I call this look your new face.” I pretended to frame him with my fingers.
“My new face?”
“Your new face. It happens every time you’re exposed to something outside of your comfort zone. It’s the song, and I can tell because of this.” I reached across the coffee table to touch the crease between his brows. “You got it when I put on Dirty Projectors, too. And when you ate sweet potato fries.”
