Chapter 8

This weekend, Maria received her diploma. The aforementioned trepidation returned to me one Thursday as I contemplated the prospect of the weekend that was beginning to reluctantly unfold itself before me. Or perhaps it was a different sort of trepidation: the true nature of emotional states eludes me. Are emotions like Hindu gods, lurking at some mysterious height to cloak themselves anew to fit the circumstances, or do they arise from those circumstances, relate only to a particular occasion, so that their only continuity is that which we bestow upon them?
This new anxiety was not a sudden apparition, like divine revelation meting out judgment, but whispered innocently the full gravity of a certain segment of circumstances. Nor did it run through me, but it fell like a succession of pellucid curtains that increasingly shrouded the little dots of paint, those little actions that I had not considered before, or rather that required reexamination under different lighting.
It was a sort of blinder, forcing me to examine in minute detail an exiguous piece of life.
This new anxiety seeped into me, a thin dread that condensed slowly and inexorably into a final form, an elongated wire that ran through a part of me like some flaw in an iron beam, like a dog worrying away at a bone while a feast lay spread on the table above it. An oligarchic anxiety, its interest lay only in the few, but it gnawed torturously at that paucity. This devious dread possessed an exquisite malice, because it stemmed from something that had not yet happened and was utterly beyond my control.
My only consolation was that my dread had a sister avatar like a cold leaden weight that squatted in the bellies of Maria’s parents. The first meeting between parents and boyfriends gains all of its fearfulness through potential. The reasonable part of my mind told itself that we were of an age and Maria possessed the sort of character that would make this meeting a simple enough thing. If her parents were truly worried that I would deflower their beautiful daughter, they had been captured by a powerful delusion, as the time for that first occasion had come and gone long ago. It was not as though I were a seducing hominid indifferent to her interests and brusque in my treatment of her, either. Maria discerned characters very finely: her judgment was seldom incorrect, and most of her fallacies had been made by a younger version of herself, who had fallen prey to all of the sweet nothings that lustful boys use to seduce girls. Her naivety had lessened. And it was not as though I were some shiftless malingerer. After all, and I had nothing but the best intentions for Maria.
In all likelihood, the weekend would progress smoothly, with a certain degree of awkwardness and examination at the beginning, that slowly tapered away into simple company.
But there was still a looming specter: perhaps they would be violently opposed to any boyfriend, or they would find some flaw of mine utterly revolting, or I would blunder stupidly into causing some offense. I suppose that on their end, there was a fear that I would be a jobless drug addict who was indifferent to Maria’s sensitivities and who engaged in promiscuity and shared needles and had given the AIDS virus to their darling daughter. The first meeting between the superpowers of a girl’s affection has swollen to titanic status in our common cultural consciousness, so that any consideration of the subject must be considered on all sides to bear the mark of innumerable televised hyperboles, comic exaggerations that gain potency when we give to them the potential for reality.
I often wonder if we ever make authentic judgments and decisions and actions, or if we simply plagiarize entertainments that are profound like shoal waters. We recount movies and television shows like they are our own experiences.
We met them at the airport, and there was that interminable wait that airports possess so abundantly, in which they were held captive by the cramped seating and recycled air and the whisper of an artificial draft, the canned joy of flight attendants who were bone-tired and wanted nothing so much as to be left alone and to be freed from the demands of travelers. A mutual captivity resented equally on all sides.
I stood awkwardly, and it was as though all of the discomfort inherent to travel had seeped into the marrow of my bones to be disseminated, building upon my anxiety, escalating the sentiment to mythic proportions entirely separate from the laws of probability. Cataclysm rode hypothetically upon tangled, catenated, and narrow margins, and it seemed likely to drive its chariot erratically until the entire world was one great conflagration. The reason on which we put such high stock rules only the slightest portion of our lives: the rest is just a torrent and reflex.
Finally, they came. Her mother, Cynthia, was slim in a rawboned sort of way, and seemed as though she dangled from some point between her shoulders, as if her legs did not need a floor upon which to walk, but rather were entirely capable of exerting their will regardless of the circumstances. She looked to possess an incredible endurance, not quite a physical sort of stamina, but there was some unexpressed facet to her demeanor that suggested that she could outlast even erosion. Her father, Mark, was the sort of vigorous man who embodied the progress of time: to look at him was to see him simultaneously in the fresh-faced outpouring of youth, with a handsome jawline and strong, lean frame and innocence and determination; and also to see him as he was now, having gained a paunch and the vaguest of stoops, with his hair graying and slowly disappearing. Moreover, to see him was to see him as he was along all of the moments in between. He was the sort of person that suggested the playfulness between our conception of our self and the gravity demanded of our age.
Maria ran over to greet them, a stutter of steps that grew progressively longer, a parody of a triple jumper running down the ramp, while I walked in her wake.
“Oh my God!” said Maria, in a higher pitch than was normal. “It is so you good to see you!” She wrapped her arms around her mother’s shoulders in a hug, and then pulled back to kiss her on the forehead. She repeated the process with her father, but upon leaning back said, “Dad, you’ve sure gotten wrinkly.”
“It’s because he lost all that weight,” said Cynthia in a congenial tone, “it’s given him a neck like a turkey.”
“Sure, sure, accost my dignity,” said Mark, in a voice gruff with feigned affront. “And who is this young man?” He nodded in my direction.
“Daddy, this is my boyfriend, Sidney.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet both of you,” I said, shaking their hands. I felt for a moment as though I were golfing with important clients and attempting to woo them with artificial folksiness and an overcharged sense of the saccharine.
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” said Maria’s mother, her tone full of hospitality for hospitality’s sake, the sort of friendliness to which Southerners subscribe, a sort of lowering of the entrance standards for their friendship accompanied concurrently by consequences for violating that friendship that were made all the more stringent. Behind her eyes, however, something glimmered that was not so much doubt, but simply the reservation of certainty. “We’ve heard so much about you.”
“It’s true,” said her father, “Maria’s been singing your praises for months now.”
They were the sort of couple in which both parts were so comfortable with their mate that they worked together with a thoughtless coordination that was nevertheless perfect. No seams could be seen when they passed the conversation between themselves.
“Well, it’s certainly nice to meet you. Do you want to go get your luggage?”
“I guess that we probably ought to, huh? Otherwise we won’t have anything to wear.”
“That would be a shame.”
After another delay, we shuffled together under the burden of luggage, Mark rolling his luggage behind him with a protective air, as if he was holding a small child’s hand while they crossed the street, myself I carrying his wife’s luggage in an act of gallantry. We put the luggage in the trunk and then drove away.
“So do ya’ll want to check into your hotel first, or would you rather go to lunch?”
“We probably should go to the hotel first. I’d like to get settled for a bit. It always takes a little while for me to recover from a long flight,” said Maria’s mother, rubbing her temples wearily.
“Did you have a good flight, though?”
“As good as a long flight can be, I guess. We had a three hour layover in Denver, which is always a pain, but that kind of thing is unavoidable.”
“So it is.”
I drove to the hotel, and stood awkwardly to one side like an afterthought while Maria and her parents fell into that unconscious comfort between loved ones who have long been separated, but who nevertheless have never lost the habit of familiarity.
Her parents performed the slight rituals of every traveler, the token effort to shape a hotel room around oneself, although it can never be made into a home. They placed an alarm clock and their luggage with precision, as if properly arranged personal effects could ward off the impersonal miasma of bed sheets like an unfaithful mistress and the wayward affections of the furniture, which played host to the throng of humanity.
I could play little part in their actions, because I had no place in their concept of home, and so I was incidentally shunted aside.
The bulk of the conversation eluded me: it pertained to people whom I had not met and places that I had not been, and though I tried to listen closely, it was like the jargon of a theoretical physicist, and I had no ground upon which to stand. Maria developed a stalwart expression as the conversation progressed, overwhelmed by the progress in the lives of so many people that she had left behind, and about whom she had thought very little.
It was one of those moments that inevitably occurs between a child geographically distant from their parents. The child has made their own life in a new place, fostered new friendships, found family-run restaurants to frequent and picked up the vernacular of the new location, and their old life has fallen by the wayside, transforming from a vital dynamo with which they must contend constantly into a fond memory, a ghost of the past that has lost its pertinence. The parents, however, still occupy this hinterland, and their child’s new life is only a malformed sketch that grows unwillingly, for no parent wants to truly accept that they no longer occupy a dominant role in the day to day existence of their child.
It was a conversation that tried to overcome distance by detailing all of the minutia of the personal triumphs achieved by all of the family’s acquaintances, as though the effort would transplant Maria back home rather than reveal the mediocrity of their acquaintances, their immersion in tepid lives.
There are only so many stories to be told about human beings, and very few people have the opportunity to live an exciting story. The common lot in life is a series of occasions only important when we are engrossed in the present: new boyfriends, new girlfriends, a marriage, children, a new car, a new job, a new friend, a party, a divorce, an injury, an illness, or death. These are the options from which most of us choose. There are very few demigods or actors or politicians or war heroes or rock stars to be found.
The strange thing is that we are content with these few choices, and that anyone can sigh their last breath with cheerful eyes and the satisfaction of a life well lived. Perhaps the shades of these demigods would share Achilles’ lamentations. Perhaps these simpler lives are turned golden by the alchemy within love’s Midas’ touch, and the overbearing titans of the world are spangled with gilded paillettes with cores of plastic.
Maria’s answers became briefer and briefer, although she admirably maintained a mask of exuberance out of courtesy for her parents feelings, an attempt to hide her independence which stood swollen between them like a teen pregnancy. Her father gave me sidelong glances as he fiddled with their things, as he stood largely mute in this recounting of things of little importance.
Finally, the interval ended, and we went to lunch.

We went to a Thai restaurant of excellent economy and quality, with glass panes overlaying its tablecloths and blue porcelain wheels of peppers and anonymous sauces to intensify the gastrointestinal impact of the meal. It was decoration with only a token reminiscence of Thailand, in the form of a large and intricately carved wooden screen in which peasants and kings and elephants and temples went about their frozen existence, and also in the ethnicity of the staff, and the language in which they primarily spoke. Besides these obligatory gestures, it bore the hallmarks of the sort of restaurant in which cinematized Midwestern boys romance cheerleader girlfriends, draped in an abundance of polyester and unabashedly ersatz teals and blues.
Our water glasses were never empty.
“So Sidney,” said Cynthia, “Maria tells us that you’re a writer?”
“Yeah, I’ve written a bunch of books, actually.”
“Anything that I would have read?” asked Mark, squeezing the pulp of his lemon into a water glass.
“Well, I don’t know where your literary taste lies, exactly. I write under the pen name Sam Beckett.”
“Oh, I’ve seen your books at the grocery store. I’m kind of a history buff, myself, but I’ve certainly heard of you.”
“Honestly, you should probably stick to the history books. My books aren’t very good, they just sell well.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re not that bad.”
This last was from Cynthia, who had engaged in the maternal reflex to eradicate any self-deprecation, so that her child, or anyone’s child for that matter, would grow into a confident and successful person. She demonstrated the chic tendency to replace accurate criticism with unwarranted clemency as goiter on the side of her personality.
Maria, however, had loving mockery in her eyes, the sort of mockery that is truth by another name, and which includes within it an implicit acceptance of whomever is being mocked.
“No, they’re really pretty terrible, Mom. I tried to read one and I burned it after the first chapter. His grammar is atrocious.”
“Oh, Maria. Be nice.”
“No, it’s all right. She really did burn it. Which is fine, because I got to stand on my moral high horse for a little bit. I told her she shouldn’t waste her money. So what sort of history do you like, Mark?”
“Pretty much everything. I’m read a lot of books about the civil war, and also a lot about ancient Rome and Greece.”
“You know that Sidney reads Greek and Latin, Daddy. He’s pretty scholarly.”
“Do you really? That’s pretty impressive.”
“She’s exaggerating. I’m passable with Latin, but my Greek still needs work.”
“Don’t believe him, Dad. He’s being modest.”
“Modesty isn’t a bad thing, pumpkin.”
Our conversation was interrupted momentarily by the waitress, who came to collect our drink orders.
“So what do you do, Mark?” I asked, by way of keeping the conversation going.
“I’m an engineer.”
“Oh? What type of engineer?”
“Civil. I spend a lot of time stress-testing concrete and building highways and parking lots. That sort of thing. It’s not really glamorous, but it pays the bills.”
“Yeah, my dad wanted me to become an engineer when I was in high school. I think he was trying to live vicariously through me, though, because he really dislikes his job.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s about to retire now, but for the last twenty years or so he’s been working a mail order gift company. As far as I can tell, he decides what needs to be shipped where in a certain amount of time, and tries to streamline the whole shipping process so that it’s as cost-effective as humanly possible.”
“I don’t know if engineering is necessarily any more exciting than that sort of work, especially civil.”
“Honestly, I don’t think that there are that many jobs out there that are a thrill a minute. I always kind of took my dad’s advice with a grain of salt, anyway, just because he’s the sort of person who’s discontent regardless of his circumstances.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, it is. But I guess it’s his life, there’s not much I can do about it. What about you, Cynthia? What do you do?”
“I teach the fourth grade.”
“Oh, wow. That sounds really rough to me.”
“It’s really not so bad.”
“I think that you’re a far more patient person than I. The thought of dealing with twenty nine-year old kids on a daily basis sounds really stressful to me.”
“I wish that I was only teaching twenty kids. No, the kids aren’t actually that bad; it’s the parents who are the worst. Every child is somebody’s little darling, and it’s a lot easier to blame the teacher for the kid’s problems than it is to blame their child, or, God forbid, themselves for not putting in the work at home.”
“Yeah, my dad was actually a high school math teacher for a while, and he quit because he just couldn’t handle the parents. I think part of his problem was that he isn’t a very diplomatic sort of person, so when a parent would complain about their kid getting an ‘F,’ he would just look them in the eye and say, ‘Well, they didn’t do any homework and they failed most of the tests. What sort of grade did you expect them to get?’”
“Sometimes that the best way to handle it, though. A lot of times, if you give the parents an inch, they’ll just walk all over you.”
“That’s probably true. In any case, I have a lot of admiration for what you do.”
“Thank you.”

We visited a building that was not the tallest building in the city, but rather the building with the most expensive elevator ride. The tallest building can be ascended for free, but it lacks the iconic and unique and much-lauded architecture of its more famous counterpart. Standing windblown at the top, we admired a truncated view, and her parents were content with the experience.

Maria graduated the next day. The day opened in a chaotic ballet of frustration and tardiness. Maria spent hours standing in front of the mirror, making minor adjustments to herself while she was tortured by her own image, which had apparently become some baleful doppelganger that channeled the spirit of Tantalus’ punishment and put it into effect using the inaccuracy of feminine self-evaluation, that irresolvable antagonism with thigh and buttocks and the size of pores and the mannerisms of hair follicles and the entire motley spectacle of the female ego, which periodically takes the center of court and shakes its weird spangled heterogeny and its thick ropes of doubt with tiny bells tinkling with every motion. The feminine ego is like eroded washes waiting to receive a desert downpour, parched channels etched by Cambrian floods and ignorant of the newfangled, dehydrated climate. The scars have been made: no further erosion will occur, but still it tense, apprehending further injury.
She stood before the mirror as if before a judge and while muttering hostility adjusted endlessly in a futile effort to salve her discontent. She looked lovely throughout the entire process.
A beautiful woman is always beautiful regardless of circumstance.
She sat through the car ride to the hotel as though she thought the final product was some spun-sugar confection that would crumble at the slightest touch.
When we arrived at the hotel, we were confronted with the simple fact that human beings can not transfer motivational inertia, and her parents moved slowly as if through molasses, a retarded bustle that slowly wound itself faster and faster, as they assembled the last few odds and ends necessary to watch the interminable event that lay ahead.
The ceremony itself was such that it made clear that a momentous occasion, if planned ahead of time, is not truly a moment, but rather a ponderous juggernaut creeping forward as though sloth were a laudable characteristic that lent dignity to the event, or as if the occasion would only happen this once, and the powers that be had seen fit to drag it on for as long as possible, in hopes that no one would feel as though the receipt of their degree had been a casual affair. The end result was discomfort, as well as an analgesic effect that nevertheless failed to numb the pain of boredom and uncomfortable seating.
We were all proud of Maria.
Afterwards, with Maria basking in the glow of accomplishment as validated through a piece of paper that would be mailed to her at some later date, we decided to take a look at the progress that had been made on my house. Or rather, Maria decided somewhat peremptorily, and because it was a day for celebrating her achievements, we went along with her, although I somehow doubted that her parents would be particularly interested in the dusty and cluttered embryo of the place in which I would eventually live. She is an adorable dictator.
I parked on the sidewalk, and we walked in. Her parents looked skeptically at the industrial surroundings and the drunken pampalan spilling from the neighboring bar, the sounds of intoxication in all of its narcotic glory. The street was still disheveled and indifferent to aesthetic trivia. The inside of the building seemed to sooth their discomfort, however.
What had once been a hollow shell was fleshing itself out, a leviathan rising from primordial depths, draping dripping streamers of alien vegetation, blossoming into an unhewn beauty, like the knobby, coltish movements of adolescents sniffing around the future like beasts in rut. It was a yawning cavern that promised some oracle at its end, or an entrance to a world free from phantasms and lush with sunlight and beauty. At the very least it promised that shouts issued within would echo with insight into the shape of the future in a temporally confused form of echolocation.
The beams and pillars were all in place, and the sub-flooring had been attached to the frame of the second and third floors. The plumbing was nearly finished being installed, although the toilets and sinks and other such things had not yet been brought in, and the wiring was just beginning to be strung. It was a geometric tangle with the musk of craftsmanship, a countenance like rough-callused hands, a cluttered thing as though a chrysalis had been vivisected to reveal the primordial sludge of some pixilated, polygonic caterpillar, with aquiline surfaces bearing all the rigor of fascist ideology. A caterpillar midway through its transformation into an akimbo, Euclidean butterfly. There had even been some work done to smooth out the acne scars on the slab concrete floor of the first level.
Brushed into the corners and pressed into little piles and strewn about the entire structure lay loose nails and sawdust and the inevitable detritus of construction.
Looking at it I saw myself, an odd sensation, for I was seeing myself in accoutrements. It was like watching myself being formed out of mud before the life was breathed into me. I felt as though I were some self-made golem. There was an ontological dissociation, in that what I had thought to be the self-enclosed fortress of myself was picking itself up and spreading into my surroundings, a metaphysical manifest destiny, a sense of self that possessed my surroundings and sent them spinning in orbit around me.
“So this is going to be your house?” said Mark.
“Yup. They’re getting everything done really quickly, too. They only started a month ago.”
“I’m sure it will be lovely,” said Cynthia. “It’s such an unusual design. It’s really interesting.”
This was not a tepid sidestepping of an insult, but rather genuine appreciation.
“Yeah, it really is great. Maria was telling us that you came up with the idea for the architecture yourself?”
“Well, I had a general idea of what I wanted, but the architect really helped refine the idea. He really deserves all the credit.”
“So, are we going to get a tour?”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely. What you’re looking at right now is the living room. Over there is going to be the kitchen.”
“What were you thinking as far as appliances go?”
“I was thinking all stainless steel, with wood or limestone countertops. I think that granite would be a little too glossy.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right. Would it be a gas range or an electric?”
“Gas, but mostly out of personal preference. I sort of have a thing for older technology, I guess. I’m going to put a wood stove in the living room, too.”
“Oh, wood stoves make a house so cozy.”
“Yeah, you really can’t beat them. That little room over there is going to be a half-bath, which really isn’t that interesting, and there’s going to be a guest bedroom over there, with its own bathroom.”
“What about the upstairs?”
“The second floor is just four spare bedrooms, arranged into little suites, I guess you could say. Every two rooms shares a bathroom.” We walked to the third floor. “This is going to be the library. There are going to be bookshelves built into all three walls, eventually.”
“That’s a lot of shelving.”
“Yeah, but I have a lot of books.”
“I guess so.”
“And this is the master bedroom in here?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this place looks like it will be fantastic when it’s finished,” said Mark. “I guess the writing business pays well.”
“Yes it does. I honestly feel a little bit guilty about the whole thing, just because I‘m fortunate enough to not only own a home so young, but the home of my dreams, when so many people work so hard just to make ends meet.”

There were more meals and tourism and conversation, and I left Maria and her family the afternoon to themselves, claiming errands that I could not escape, and returned for dinner. The meal was small talk and concentration on shoveling foods into our mouths. After dinner, Maria caught a cab and went to a party thrown by her classmates, while I drove her parents home. The next day, her parents flew home.

Maria and I sat together in my car, driving home from the airport, alone together for the first time since her parents had arrived, or at least since she had been alone with her parents. We sat in silence, enjoying the ability to sit without the need to make small talk, the need to make her parents feel at home though they were a thousand miles distant from their house. Maria looked over at me, and she spoke.
“My parents really liked you.”
“Oh, yeah? That’s good. I was kind of worried about meeting them, actually.”
“My dad called you articulate, and he said that you had a good head on your shoulders. That’s by far the most complimentary thing that he’s said about any of my boyfriends.”
“Really? What did he say about the other ones?”
“Well, he thought that my first boyfriend was selling drugs, which was actually true, and he said that my last boyfriend seemed nice enough, but that he had shifty eyes.”
“Did he have shifty eyes?”
“Shifty enough that he cheated on me, I guess.”
“Oh, it was that piece of shit? You still haven’t told me where to find him. You know I’ll whoop his ass for you.”
“That’s probably why I haven’t told you where to find him.”
“Fair enough. What did your mother think about me?”
“She said that you were very handsome.”
“I feel so objectified.”
“I’m sure. She also said that she could tell that you really loved me by the way you looked at me.”
“Well, I do love you, darlin.’ You know that.”
“I know. It’s just nice to hear you say it.”
“I love you.”
“Thank you, honey. Your house looks like it’s coming along really well.”
“Yeah, I was surprised. I hadn’t really been to see it for a couple weeks, and they’ve gotten a lot done. They were just putting up pillars last time I went.”
“When did they say it would be done, again?”
“It should be done two or three weeks before Smitty’s wedding, I think. I wrote it down somewhere; I don’t really know exactly.”
“I think it’ll look really good when it’s done. My dad was actually really impressed by it. He took me by the shoulders and he said, ‘Maria, you should stick with this one. Not only does he own a house, but it’s a really fancy house, too. The way you are together, I think he’ll treat you like a princess.’”
“Darlin,’ if I tried to treat you like a princess, I think you’d kick my ass.”
“Maybe. I don‘t know that I would mind having adoring subjects, though.”
“Did seeing the place make you rethink moving in with me?”
“A little bit. What my dad said made me think about it a lot.”
“Really? I wasn’t actually being that serious.”
“So you’re taking the offer back?”
“Of course not. To tell you the truth, having met your parents, I could kind of see myself spending the rest of my life with you.”
She gave me a sidelong glance that said it was unfair to slip the first hint of marriage into a conversation so casually.
“What if I hate your parents, honey?”
“Then we won’t visit them. It’s not like I go see them very often, anyway. We get along better on the phone.”
“Well, I guess that’s solved. I’m not so convinced that I’m ready to start popping out babies and being domestic, though.”
“Who said anything about that? I don’t know if the world is ready for a bunch of my little hellions running around, causing trouble. It’s just that I really like your parents, and I love you very much, honey. It’s not like I’m proposing or anything. I’m just saying that I could see us spending the rest of our lives together. I don’t want to freak you out or anything. It’s just the first time that the thought had crossed my mind. I felt like it was noteworthy.”
“It is, Sidney. It is. Listen, I’ve been thinking a lot about us and I actually do want to move in with you. I was just freaking out before.”
“Really? I thought that you were worried that you would lose yourself in our relationship and domesticity and all that shit?”
“I am, but I was thinking about it, and I don’t think that moving in with you is really the problem. It’s just finally facing the real world. I’m worried that I’ll just become another office worker, or even worse, that I’ll just mooch off of you to avoid becoming another office worker.”
“Well, I’ll just have to punch you in the face if you do either of those things, darlin.’”
“I know. Spousal abuse aside, one of the things that I realized was that if anyone was going to encourage me to reach for the sky, it would be you. Just being around you and your friends is motivating. I would end up feeling really out of place hanging out with an author and a couple of famous photographers and a music producer and an artist if I were a cubicle rat.”
“Only Andrew would rub it in.”
“I know, but I’d still feel like a failure.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that, darlin.’ You’re worrying too much about life. At the very least, you’re a beautiful and intelligent woman. You’re already way ahead of the curve.”
“Sure, butter me up now that I’m going to live with you. I’m still going to expect you to clean up after yourself.”
“That’s why I’m going to hire a maid. That, and it’ll let you skip on domesticity completely.” She kissed me on the cheek and then settled back into her seat. “You’re sure that you want to move in together? I don’t want you to feel like I’m pressuring you into it.”
“I know, Sid. You’re not pressuring me. I just changed my mind is all.”
She kept her thoughts to herself for the rest of the drive.