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CHAPTER SIX
MINA WAS PUTTING the butternut squash and leeks into the oven to roast when she heard a knock at the front door, followed by a squeak of the hinges.
“Hello?” Levi called, his footsteps quiet and uncertain on her wood floors.
“I’m in the kitchen,” she called. “Head to the back. It’s a small house—you can’t miss me,” she said, shutting the oven door and grabbing a towel for her hands. Levi’s head stuck around the corner just as she was tucking the towel back on the oven handle.
He’d shaved. She was, momentarily, speechless. The sharp contours of his face and squareness of his chin were worth a moment of silence, but that wasn’t what stopped her tongue. Not only had he taken the time and effort to shave, but he was wearing nice jeans and a neat dark blue button-down that showed off a trim, muscular figure, especially with the sleeves rolled up and his forearms on display.
Levi had gone to some effort. Like this was a date.
“I feel underdressed,” she said, recovering her speech and looking down at her worn gray yoga pants and white tank top. Since she wanted to get the vegetables in to roast as quickly as possible, she’d just rinsed the sweat off her body. Barrettes and sweat were keeping her hair off her face, and shaving... Well, the state of her leg hair was better not considered. Probably for the best. Looking at him now, she needed to put brakes on her libido.
He shrugged. “You look fine to me” was all he said, but there was warmth in his eyes, so she brushed away her feelings about looking sloppy. “What’s for dinner?”
“Butternut-squash lasagna and a salad. It’s not a quick meal, but it’s one of my favorites, and I had all the stuff on hand. Plus, it’s filling after a long day of working outside.”
“No meat?” he asked with the disappointed face of a child who’s been denied candy.
“No.” She shook her head with a laugh. “I have sausages in the freezer, but they would have taken too long to defrost. The lasagna will be good, I promise, and if you miss the meat, I’ll make sure the sausages come out for the next time I cook you dinner.”
“Next time,” he said, his voice caressed with approval. “I like that idea. Where did you learn to cook?”
With that simple question, Mina eased into conversation, talking about cooking with her mom when she was a kid and some of the terrible food experiments and impossible diets she’d tried in both college and graduate school. “I don’t know how I found the time or energy to eat a raw food diet, but I managed it for six months.”
She didn’t mention that she’d tried many of these diets in an attempt to keep her flagging energy or stave off upset stomachs or to control all the other side effects of either HIV or the meds that kept her virus count low. Desperation over a chronic illness had been her motivation to prepare raw carrot crackers every week. Then there had been the macrobiotic diet. And the gluten-free one. And hopping back and forth between several other less popular options before she’d settled back into moderation and mostly vegetables.
“I don’t like the sound of a raw food diet. There’s no way that could include enough meat for someone born and raised in Montana,” he said, one side of his mouth kicked up in a half smile.
Good—she wasn’t boring him. Mina was a talker. She talked when she was nervous; she talked when she was relaxed; she talked when she was tired... She just talked. She even talked to herself as she wandered her house. The near never-ending stream of chatter had driven more than one boyfriend crazy—at least that was what they said. But there had been a few that had been amused. She could hope Levi was the latter.
She sneaked a peek over her shoulder at him as she stirred the béchamel sauce. If she was reading his shave and nice shirt correctly, well...the more she talked, the more his eyes seemed to shine and his lips stayed in the amused position.
This could lead somewhere. If she was thoughtful and deliberate and purposeful, she could turn one dinner into two.
Mina, if you’re thinking about anything past dinner, then you’re already rushing into something. Get through dinner first, then worry about what comes next. Good advice, but not nearly so much fun.
“The lack of meat wasn’t the problem I had with eating raw foods,” she said, steering her mind back to the conversation.
“Not born and raised in Montana.”
“No. And far too interested in trying new fads to stick with the tried-and-true method of eating meat and three square meals. Though that’s how I grew up.” She turned her attention away from the handsome man standing in her kitchen and back to the food. The béchamel had thickened, and it was time to layer the lasagna and get it in the oven.
“Do you need help?”
“No. Grab another beer and we’ll go sit in the living room while this bakes. It’s more comfortable in there.”
Mina joined Levi in the living room as soon as the lasagna was in the oven. He was on the couch, not in one of the two armchairs, and he’d sat near the middle of it. Unless she chose one of the armchairs, she’d have to sit near him.
She joined him on the couch and put her beer on the coffee table in front of them, turning her body toward him. He’d turned toward her, too. They weren’t touching, but she was close enough to smell the brisk notes of his aftershave and to see some stubble along his jawline that he’d missed. His intense gaze sent good shivers down her spine, shivers that reinforced that she hadn’t been wrong about his more intimate intentions.
After her diagnosis, Mina had become more thoughtful about her interactions with men. She hadn’t yet managed to make accurate predictions about their intentions from her careful study of their movements, but she kept trying. Trial and error would surely pay off eventually, and she’d be right about a man one day.
If nothing else, the careful study of men slowed her down a little.
“I’m glad you came over and introduced yourself,” he said, his rich voice coating her skin in warmth.
She smiled. “Me, too.”
“I checked out your website. That was the first time I’d heard about graphic novels. The drawings were neat and, uh, darker than I would have guessed.”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “I’m so bubbly and short that everyone expects me to have light, fluffy drawings. Something cute, with bunnies. When I do talks and festivals, the most common comment I get after ‘I love your work’ is ‘I thought you’d be taller.’ It used to bother me, but I’ve stopped worrying about it. Honestly, my art used to be lighter.”
Levi took a drink from his beer bottle, and his Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. How had she not noticed what a sexy part of the male anatomy the neck was until now? “What changed?”
She shrugged. “My drawings were always macabre and obsessed with the strange, but in college my lines got darker and thicker and I started having fewer curves in my art and more sharp corners. It’s better, actually. One of the things I tell my students is that they don’t have to be an amazing artist to write comics or graphic novels, but their art has to match their subjects. Like Kate Beaton, who draws these hilarious comics with random historical and pop-culture references. Her drawings appear to be rough sketches and, if you ignore the adult content, almost something a kid would draw. But it makes the punch of her jokes that much stronger. Or Tom Gauld, who wrote this beautiful book on Goliath, where Goliath was an innocent victim. The bare landscapes mean the reader focuses on Goliath’s simplicity and how he is used by both his friends and his enemies. Scott McCloud has this great book where he talks about comics with a focus on form versus comics with a focus on idea or purpose, and I was really so focused on form that I forgot my ideas.”
When she took a deep breath, all the words she had to say about comics clouded up her lungs, and she had to exhale slowly before she could say another word. Just to be safe, she waved all the excess words out from between them. “Anyway. Before, well, before my art and my subject matter were a mismatch. Not completely wrong for each other, but wrong enough that the stories lost their power.”
“Do you have more of your books?” he asked, his brows raised in genuine curiosity.
“Sure,” she said, pleased. “You want to see?”
“Of course. I’ve never known anyone who made money drawing pictures.”
“Oh, I don’t make much money. It’s certainly not a living.” She doubted that she’d ever make a living doing it. Russian stories were interesting to people, and people liked her art, but it wasn’t commercial, really.
She pushed herself off the couch and headed over to her bookshelf, feeling his gaze on her the entire way. When she got back, he set his beer on the table and accepted the two volumes from her.
While he examined her books, she examined him. The ridges of his spine starting at his hairline and disappearing into the neckline of his shirt. The curves of his ear and softness of his earlobe. A faint scar across his cheek that she hadn’t noticed under his previous scruff.
Her scrutiny didn’t seem to make him uneasy. He didn’t seem to notice it at all. He was a steady man, she realized, and someone could easily mistake his composure for shallowness, but his stillness suggested the lastingness of a mountain lake, not the transience of a rain puddle.
Better, he was taking the time to really study her art and the words, not just flip through and look at the pictures.
The timer beeped. Mina got up and went to the kitchen to take the lasagna out of the oven. While it rested, she set the table as Levi continued to study her books. When she called him over for dinner, he asked a few questions about her art, then sat back and let her talk. Still flattered by his interest, Mina monopolized the entire dinner talking about herself, her theories about comics and all the plans she had for books to come. And it felt right, because when she stopped chattering to take a breath, Levi asked her a question and then looked interested when she jumped back in.
She felt, well, she felt comfortable being herself with him, which was the best thing you could want in a man.
After they finished eating, Mina directed Levi around the kitchen as she washed dishes, and he dried and put them away. Then she offered him the choice of five different kinds of Sweet Peaks Ice Cream from her freezer. As he looked at the row of cartons on the countertop, he had the faintest possible smile, and she felt silly in the best, warmest possible way.
This casual, no-expectations dinner was quickly turning into something else. At least for her, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t misreading him.
Which meant it was time to relax. Be funny. Friendly. Open. Charming.
With their bowls of ice cream in hand, they returned to the living room couch, almost in the same spots that they had been sitting before. Almost, because now they sat closer to one another, their knees not quite touching as they faced each other.
There on the couch, their knees a hope and a prayer from being intertwined, Mina couldn’t hear the question Levi asked her over the beating of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears. She asked him to repeat himself. She tried to smile and tried to make it look natural. The world must be smiling down on her, because suddenly she thought of a question to ask him, something to take the pressure off her and give her time to take a deep breath.
Time to stop the panic welling up inside her.
More important, time to stop herself from acting on the panic.
“Are you okay?” Levi asked, his brows crossed in confusion over her sudden change of behavior.
“I’m fine.” Her voice sounded breathy and dismantled to her ears, but he only nodded.
“Let me take your bowl,” he said, and she released her grip on her ice cream. She wasn’t finished with it, but she had stopped tasting it several minutes ago.
Levi’s eyes had grown hot during the time they’d been sitting on the couch. Intent had softened his jaw and, she saw as he set both their bowls on the coffee table, his shoulders. As he sat back up, the coming kiss dulled the world around them. Mina stopped being able to hear the tick of the clock on her wall, and the outlines of the furniture got fuzzy.
He leaned into her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure,” she reassured him, trying to lie to them both and failing miserably.
But Levi didn’t seem to notice her failure. Or, if he did, he didn’t care. Every skin cell burned as he trailed his finger along her jawline. The panic beating inside her couldn’t hide the intensity with which she wanted his lips pressed against hers. The fear didn’t stop her from leaning into him, from meeting him halfway.
Just as his lips were a whisper away from hers, the panic that had risen inside her surged out, shoving charming and flirty and casual out of the way. “I have HIV,” she said, then sat back against the cushions before he could reject the kiss. Reject her.
“What?” he asked. His entire face had folded in on itself in confusion.
“I’m HIV positive. I thought you should know, before we, well...” That last part was a lie. She didn’t think he should know before they kissed. He didn’t need to know before they kissed. HIV wasn’t spread through saliva. They could make out all night, and he wouldn’t be any more at risk than if he’d sat in a church praying.
But Mina had never mastered the timing of the tell, if there was a way to master it. She’d read books and articles on living and dating with HIV. She’d read everything she could find in an attempt to find the balance between telling someone about the skeletons in your closet early enough in the relationship, so you could judge if they were a person who could handle your particular set of baggage, and not telling them so soon that you were pushing them away.
She always told too soon. Or too casually. Or didn’t prepare them for big news coming. Like everything else, she rushed into it.
“Okay. Um, thanks for telling me, I guess.” Levi leaned away from her, looking her over for a long minute. Then he nodded once with a finality that might as well have been a slap across the face and stood. Mina watched as he gathered the ice-cream bowls and walked into the kitchen. When he returned, she hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’m going to head home. If you need help building another raised bed—”
She braced herself for the final rejection.
“—give me a call.”
“Okay.” Her voice was barely audible to her own ears, even though she had no heartbeat to drown it out.
He nodded again. He shut the front door behind him, and the possibility of their relationship clicked closed, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LEVI’S BLINDS WERE still open when he got home. The lights were on in Mina’s house, and he could see right through from his kitchen into hers. The ice-cream bowls were on the counter where he’d put them.
Mina only had good ice cream in her freezer. Dinner had been delicious, even if there hadn’t been any meat. Levi pulled everything out of his pockets and plopped his keys and his phone on the table, before dropping into a chair facing her house. He’d enjoyed himself at Mina’s. She’d been funny and interesting, and her face moved when she talked, and he hadn’t wanted her to stop talking, because he hadn’t wanted to stop watching her face move.
But then he’d been leaning in to kiss her, and she’d told him about her HIV, and the animation in her face had turned into pill bottles on the bathroom counter and blinds that were always closed and doctor’s visits and the heavy weight of watching someone slowly withdraw until the day you came home, and they weren’t there at all.
Levi rested his forehead in his hand, feeling the weight of his head and the way it pressed his elbow into the table. He’d caught his skin on the table in a weird way and he should move his elbow, but the pinching kept him from disappearing into the past. Into what he should have done better, the times he should have reminded Kimmie to take her pills and the times he’d reminded her too much. Into the last day when she’d said, “Don’t go to work today. I feel like something bad is going to happen,” and he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t find his keys, and he’d said, “You always feel like something bad is going to happen.”
Only this time, Kimmie had been right.
He dropped his palm to the wood with a slap, his head bouncing once before he righted it and stared again at Mina’s house.
Knowing what he knew now, knowing how everything ended, he still wouldn’t go back and change anything about the day he’d walked up to Kimmie and asked for her phone number. He’d loved her more than he thought was possible—still did. Every minute they’d been together had been the best minute of his life.
A love like that was possible, and he believed lightning could strike twice.
But he didn’t know if he could go through the pain of loving someone who was slowly dying again. He had doubted he was strong enough for more heartbreak. Was he strong enough for worse?
The screen on his phone flashed on with his sister’s face, then vibrated on the table.
“Hey, sis,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to call you all day. Where have you been?”
“Yeah, sorry.” He’d felt the phone vibrate in his pocket but hadn’t wanted to interrupt Mina to even check who it was. “I was over at my neighbor’s, helping her build a raised garden bed. She made me dinner.”
“Oh? The neighbor Dennis mentioned?”
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he warned, hearing ideas she already had in the oh. If she got ideas, she’d call and text him nonstop to ask how the relationship was going. Eventually he’d turn off his phone just to get a break.
At some point when they were kids and she’d been stuck being Mom, she’d apparently gotten the idea that Moms smothered, and she hadn’t let go.
“Nothing is going to happen,” he said, before she could start planning his future wedding. “Mina is HIV positive.”
“Oh.” This oh was flat, not yet judgmental but edging that way. Brook was no longer getting any ideas. “I guess it’s best, then, that you’re not yet over Kimmie’s death.”
“What?” He regretted answering the phone, regretted saying anything. He especially regretted saying anything about Mina. Her disease was not his sister’s business, and it had not been his information to share, even if he’d thought Brook would understand his hesitation.
Which she clearly didn’t. “Maybe it’s not so bad if she’s one of those poor souls who’s had it since birth or got it from a blood transfusion or something. But what do you know about your neighbor? Maybe she got it from sharing a needle or she slept around in college or... I don’t know. How else do people get AIDS?”
“I think there’s a difference between HIV and AIDS,” he said slowly, realizing he didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know the answer to any of his sister’s questions. And the question of how Mina got HIV didn’t matter.
Did it?
“Well, you’re not going to be seeing her again to find out, are you?”
“Brook, less than a minute ago you were hopeful I was over Kimmie, would fall in love with Mina, get married and produce nieces and nephews for you to spoil.”
“All I said was ‘Oh.’”
“Yeah, but we both know where that oh was going.”
“Well,” she huffed, “you had always wanted to get married and have kids. Maybe you could marry someone with HIV, but you couldn’t have kids with them. It would be wrong to knowingly bring kids with AIDS into the world.”
I think HIV and AIDS are different. He didn’t bother repeating himself. She hadn’t listened the first time, and she wouldn’t listen a second. “I think someone with HIV can have children who don’t have the disease. Isn’t that part of what they talk about on the news when they talk about AIDS in Africa?”
“Honestly, Levi, you think a lot of things, but what do you know? About the disease or your neighbor?”
He bristled at her tone. She was his older sister, and her tone had likely been condescending since the day he was born.
At least, that was how he remembered it.
Most of the time he was able to remind himself that she was his sister, and she cared about him, and she fussed and bossed over everyone she cared about, from Dennis to her children to their aging father.
But tonight, he wasn’t in the mood. “Look, Brook, I get that you want me to get married again—”
“You liked being married,” she interrupted. “Even if...”
“Yes. Even if Kimmie had entire weeks where she didn’t leave the house, I did like being married. But I’m thirty-seven years old, and I get to pick the women I date.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he felt like her baby brother.
“And if you want to hear about any of them, you have to reserve judgment. At least until you meet them. And you have to pretend that I’m an adult and might pick out someone good. After all, I picked Kimmie.”
Silence reigned through the phone as Levi waited for Brook to point out that Kimmie’s clinical depression had eventually killed her. He could feel his phone shudder at the effort his sister was putting forth to keeping her mouth shut.
“Kimmie was great,” she said finally, her voice soft with affection. Because Kimmie had been great. She had been unable to be a light in her own life, but she’d been the sun, moon and stars for many others.
“Good night, Brook. Go remind Dennis to take his high blood pressure medicine or something.”
“I worry.”
Whether it was about him, or Dennis’s health, or any number of things, Brook didn’t say, and it didn’t matter. “I know.”
“Someone has to.”
“But it doesn’t always have to be you.”
On that note they finished their goodbyes, and Levi ended the call. Then he slouched in his chair to catch his breath. Talking to his sister for ten minutes was more exhausting than an entire day spent building a raised bed with Mina. For all Mina’s chatter and energy, Levi had felt better after building the raised bed than he had before.
This was why he didn’t call his family and only occasionally answered the phone when they called him.
His breathing back to normal, Levi glanced up at his windows. Mina’s blinds had all been closed, and her house was dark.
It was too late to go over and apologize, but he could at least prove his sister wrong about the baby thing. He sighed. He knew the growing list of items he needed to apologize to Mina for, though he didn’t know what he wanted out of it. To be back on her couch kissing? To be friends and neighbors? To make the barest effort at not being a total ass?
Or did he need to apologize simply because he was wrong and sorry about it?
Levi rolled his eyes at himself. No matter what he was sorry for and why, he could at least be less ignorant when he apologized. Gathering his phone, he went in search of his laptop.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL Friday that Mina was finally able to be outside after work, hands shoved in the new dirt in her new raised garden bed. Even though the nights were getting cooler, the sun had shone on the dark dirt all day, and it pressed warmth and possibility against her skin. She didn’t even care if the greens she was planting grew into anything edible, so long as she had the excuse to be out here, away from her thoughts and her work and her problems.
The past week had been rough. Classes were starting, increasing the amount of work she needed to do and the amount of time she had to spend on campus. Departmental meetings, syllabi, double-checking on the assigned readings and that the bookstore and library both carried what the students would need, etc. The meetings were the worst. She could work on the syllabi from home, but the department wasn’t yet willing to hold meetings through Skype. She’d always suspected that her emotions played a big role in the side effects of all her meds, and this week had done nothing to disprove her theory.