“That was the last little bit of feelings for her,” he says. “That was it. I’m not sad about her anymore.”
I trust him so deeply that when he says it’s over, I know she’s gone and there’s only us.
“Bye, Casey,” I say, waving at some ghost of a memory of her.
“Bye, Casey,” he says, waving at the things he loved about her that have stopped mattering.
“I love you,” I say to him in the simplest, clearest voice I have.
“But seriously, Mon, does the dude have a ring collection, like, in his sock drawer?” Bernardo says. The words are thick, but I like the way his hand moves from my knee to my hip bone. It makes me feel a little like a cat, which isn’t the worst way to feel when the rest of the time you feel like a mouse.
I adjust his glasses and shiver at how close it makes me feel to him.
“I’m sure he returns them. Or sells them to some diamond expert. Or, like, puts them in a safe at the bank,” I say. I’m actually not sure about this at all, so I add it to the list of things I don’t know or don’t understand about my father.
“Your dad is not selling those rings. He’s classy and shit,” Bernardo says. I’ve noticed he never swears, so him saying shit is a mini-revelation, one more thing to fall in love with. It’s amazing how many things you can love about one person.
I almost understand my father in this moment. Almost. I get how sudden and drastic the feelings come on when you meet someone you like, and the pull to tie it all down and guarantee that it won’t ever go away. I have never felt more feelings than right this second. I’d like to tie Bernardo here. Both of us. I’d like to tie us to this moment, anchor us to each other and how it feels to be in love in the summer in New York City when you’re seventeen and pink-haired and braver than you were before.
We are fixing each other’s broken parts but not in the manic temporary way my dad and his wives and girlfriends do. I can finally un-hear Arizona’s voice in my head about too fast and too much like Dad and delusional and don’t know what love is.
“Is Karissa’s ring the craziest? Because that thing is crazy,” Bernardo says. “That’s what you should have. Something crazy.” He keeps drinking, even though we’re past the point of no return. So I keep drinking too. I don’t mind being dizzy when I’m with him. I’m already dizzy around him, even sober, so it almost evens out. Like a double negative or whatever.
I have the best thoughts when I’m drunk.
I smile and drink more wine and take the cigarette from between his fingers and put it between mine because I want our mouths to taste the same. I want to be in that cloud of smoke with him.
Plus, I am cool when I smoke. I’m a girl in a movie.
“Maybe he lets the ladies keep them.” I never know what to call my dad’s exes, so I’m always trying different phrases. The exes. The ladies. The Sean Varren Club. Fakes. “That would be classy, right?”
“Let’s look,” Bernardo says.
“Look in my father’s sock drawer?” I say. I cock my head and take another drag and put the cig back into Bernardo’s mouth, like a distraction.
“Worth a shot, right?”
I can’t stop laughing. Love and wine make me laugh. Bernardo, of course, doesn’t laugh, but he looks content watching me.
“You better not be plotting a heist of my father’s diamonds and socks,” I say. I lean back on the couch, which is too stiff and too leathery to be comfortable. It squeaks under my bare legs, and I can’t stop laughing.
Bernardo moves closer to me. He stubs out the cigarette in the crystal ashtray on the coffee table and looks at me like I’m beautiful, like even the parts of me that are not so great are actually amazing. He looks at each part of my face, feature by feature, and does these mini-sighs each time his gaze shifts.
He moves his hand from my thigh to my face, and the other behind my neck. “I want you to have one,” he says. “I think we should do it.”
“Do it?” I say, trying not to squint in confusion or drunkenness.
“We should get you a ring.”
“Like a ring ring?” I say. I laugh because seventeen-year-olds don’t get rings. I look very closely at his face to determine exactly how drunk he actually is. I can’t stop laughing. Bernardo is serious and I’m a mess of feelings, plus my head is heavy, heavy, heavy.
“You’re drunk,” I say. It’s a fact, and it’s the only explanation for what we are talking about.
“We’re drunk,” he says.
It’s nice, being a we.