A practical arrangement

The risotto was supposed to be for a client consultation on Thursday, but I had made too much stock and the arborio was sitting there on the shelf looking reproachful, so there I was at seven thirty on a Tuesday evening stirring a pan in my own kitchen for nobody, which is honestly where I do my best thinking. Cass, twenty-eight, caterer, professionally capable of feeding two hundred people without breaking a sweat, and I could not work up the nerve to have one conversation with the woman I lived with. There is a joke in there somewhere and I have chosen not to find it.

Here is how it started, or how I remember it starting, because Delores tells it differently and she was probably more sober than I was. Three years ago I was twenty-five and she was twenty-four and broke and we had known each other maybe four months, and the lease on her place was coming up and mine was coming up and rent in Portland being what it is, one of us, and I genuinely do not remember which, said something like why don't we just split a two bedroom and save ourselves the misery. Then we signed, and then somewhere in the first winter the two bedrooms became mostly decorative, and by the following spring I had unpacked my toothbrush into her bathroom and neither of us had ever actually said out loud that we were dating.

We had an agreement, and the agreement had quietly turned into a relationship, and the relationship had turned into three years, and the whole time I had been telling myself it was practical. Practical. I was in love with my roommate and I called it a practical arrangement, like I was doing her a favor on the electric bill.

The thing about being in love with someone you were never supposed to fall for is that you keep waiting for the arrangement to end, because arrangements end, that is what makes them arrangements. So every time someone from before showed up, some old friend of Delores's, some ex, I braced for the lease to come up for renewal, metaphorically speaking. And Tobias had started showing up.

I had met him exactly twice, once at a party and once at a wedding I was catering, both times he was pleasant in the way tall confident men are pleasant, and both times I had spent the drive home doing arithmetic I hated. He dated Delores for a year when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-five, before I was in the picture, and it ended, by all accounts, amicably, which is somehow worse than it ending badly, because there is nothing to point at. You cannot say well he was terrible, because he was not terrible, he was just a guy she used to love who is now standing too close at parties.

The risotto had reached the stage where it needed constant attention, so I gave it that and let my brain spin in the background like the exhaust fan. Delores had texted that she was running late, a client revision, the kind of thing that eats a graphic designer's evening alive, and she would probably walk in hungry and tired and gorgeous and I would say something normal and not once again try to have the actual conversation. Three years. You would think three years would build up enough courage to fill a teaspoon.

* * *

She came in at a little past eight, keys first, then the bag, then the shoes, in that order, always in that order, and I heard her sigh from the hallway the way you sigh when a day has been winning for eleven straight hours. She came around the corner into the kitchen with her coat still on and her hair pushed back and she looked at the stove and then at me and said, "Oh thank god, what is that, it smells like a restaurant in here."

"It is a restaurant in here, technically, I live in my workplace," I said, and she dropped her bag on the counter and kissed my cheek, quick, the way you kiss someone you are extremely comfortable with, which is a thing I usually love and tonight read as comfortable in the alarming sense, settled, taken for granted, part of the furniture. "Risotto. Test batch. There is plenty, sit down before you turn into a person made entirely of client feedback."

"I might already be that person," she said, pulling her coat off and hanging it on the back of her chair, which she never hangs on the hook, which is one of about six things about her I find endearing instead of annoying and I have stopped examining why. "Today was, ugh. Today was a day where the client discovered fonts. They discovered fonts like Columbus discovered America, there were people here the whole time."

I laughed and ladled her a bowl and sat across from her, and for a few minutes there was just the sound of eating and her telling me about the font situation in escalating detail, and it was nice, it is always nice, that is the whole problem, the niceness never stops long enough to make me brave. Then, because I am apparently a glutton for my own discomfort, I said it.

"Oh, Tobias stopped by the truck today."

She looked up from her bowl. "Tobias? At the truck?"

"Yeah, he was getting lunch for his office, apparently he works like six blocks from our commissary now, which, great, wonderful, he recognized me from the Henderson wedding and we did the whole how have you been thing." I kept my eyes on my risotto like it might have a message for me in the grains. "He asked about you."

"What did you tell him?"

"That you were good. That you were busy. That you had a catering roommate who feeds you too much risotto." I said it lightly. I would like to state that I aimed for light and I believe I mostly landed on light.

But Delores did a thing with her fork, a small pause, the kind of pause you only notice if you have spent three years learning someone's pauses, and then she said, "He's actually been texting me. A little. We've been catching up."

"Have you." Still neutral. I could have narrated a weather report in that voice.

"Cass, it's not a thing, it's just, he was a big part of my life for a year and I don't have a lot of, like, people who knew me before, you know? Everyone I'm friends with now either met me after, or they're your friends that I borrowed." She shrugged, and there was nothing wrong with the shrug, it was an innocent shrug, and it still sat on my chest like a cat that weighs forty pounds.

"That makes sense," I said, and it did make sense, and I ate another bite.

"He invited me to a gallery opening Friday," she said, in the same easy tone, the one that tells me she has already decided it is fine and is informing me rather than asking me. "His company sponsors the gallery or something, he gets plus ones. It sounds kind of fun, honestly, free wine, questionable art."

I put my spoon down, which was a mistake, because putting the spoon down was a tell, and she saw it, I watched her see it. "That sounds fun," I said, and my voice did the thing where it agrees while every other part of me files an objection, and I hated the sound of it, that flat pleasant nothing, like a customer service voice coming out of my face.

Delores set her fork down too, slowly, and looked at me with the particular expression of a person recalculating. "Okay," she said. "Say that again, but like a person."

"I said it sounds fun."

"Cass."

"It sounds fun, Delores." And then, because the risotto had clearly gotten into my bloodstream, I heard myself add, "Does it sound fun to you, or does it sound like Friday with Tobias," and the kitchen went very quiet, just the exhaust fan and the stockpot ticking as it cooled, and Delores looking at me like I had finally, after three years, said the thing.

"Friday with Tobias," she repeated, and she didn't sound angry yet, she sounded like someone reading back an order to make sure she got it right, which was worse in a way, because it meant she was taking me seriously. "That's what you think this is."

"I didn't say that's what I think it is, I asked if that's what it is, which is a different thing, grammatically and morally."

"It's really not."

"It's a little bit not."

She pushed her bowl away a couple of inches, not a slam, Delores doesn't slam things, she relocates them with meaning, and leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, and I realized I had done it, I had finally cracked the nice sealed tank of our Tuesday open on the rocks and now everything was coming out at once, and I still didn't know what I actually wanted to say, only that I wanted to say it loudly.

"Okay," she said. "Let's do this. What is it you think is happening, Cass? Because I told you about the texts at the beginning, I was like, hey, my ex surfaced and he's being friendly, and you said cool, and now you're doing customer service voice at me over risotto, so something has been going on in there for a while and I would love to hear about it before it kills us both."

And the honest answer, the one I did not want to give while sitting across from her in my own kitchen, was that I had spent the last couple of evenings on his Instagram, which is a sentence I never planned to say out loud, and that I had a knot in my stomach that I had been feeding deceptively normal dinners in an attempt to starve.

What I actually said was, "Nothing is going on in there."

"Cass."

"Fine. Something is going on in there."

She waited. She's good at waiting, it's one of the professional skills of being a trans woman who has had to explain transition timelines to coworkers, and I have never once benefited from it as much as I resented it in that moment, because the silence just sat there with its hand out.

"I looked him up," I said. "On Instagram. The other night, after you mentioned the texts. And then I looked him up the night after that, and then, this is the embarrassing part, I looked him up tonight, before you got home, while the risotto was doing its thing, and I have now seen every photo of a trip he took to Bend in the spring, including one of a trout that he caught and released and then, apparently, grieved about in a caption." I turned my spoon over on the table, a little gesture that accomplished nothing. "He looks great, Delores. He's thirty and he looks great, he has a company and a sponsor thing and plus ones, and he knew you when, and I'm the one who feeds you too much risotto, which I said as a joke and then heard come out of my mouth as a fact."

"That's not a fact."

"It's a fact-shaped feeling."

"So your whole case against Friday is that he has nice photos."

"My case against Friday is that I am twenty-eight years old and I am scared, and I've been scared for like three years, and I keep not saying anything because everything is nice, and you don't take a wrecking ball to a house this nice just because the person living in it is terrified of the foundation, but apparently tonight I did, so, congratulations, dinner is ruined, the risotto is actually fine, it's me that's ruined."

The fan hummed. She uncrossed her arms, slowly, and I watched her decide to be careful with me, which I hated almost as much as the alternative, being handled like a client complaint.

"Cass," she said, "you know we didn't start this thing as a real relationship. We moved in together because rent was stupid and we liked each other, and we were both broke, and the arrangement was, what was it you called it, a practical arrangement, and somewhere in the first winter it stopped being practical and started being us, and I have never once, not once in three years, thought of Tobias as a better version of that."

"You don't have to want him for me to lose you to him," I said. "That's the part nobody tells you about jealousy, it doesn't need his participation. I can lose you all by myself, through sheer