“Thank you,” she said. She still wasn’t looking at me, and she didn’t say good-bye as I left.
Teo was in the kitchen, carefully wrapping up leftovers in foil while Stevie scrubbed pots. As usual, Stevie glanced at me and said nothing. Teo didn’t see me at first, and I just leaned on the doorway, feeling a rush of tenderness for him that I knew would disappear the minute he opened his mouth.
I’d have to break the silence with something spectacularly lovable if I was going to survive the ensuing conversation, so I tried to quarantine my crazy away from the rest of me. Picturing my own little construct, I imagined stuffing my rage and lust and fear and self-loathing into it, leaving only the person I would have been if someone hadn’t put my brain in backward.
“I’m sorry, Teo,” I said, and bit down hard on my tongue before I could add all the explanations, the justifications, the mitigating circumstances that crowded into my throat at the sound of my own words.
“I don’t care,” said Teo, snapping the lid on a plastic container and taking it to the fridge.
“I’m still sorry,” I said, trying not to be devastated at how little I had reaped from that massive act of self-mastery.
“And I still don’t care,” he said. “Either words mean something or they don’t, and either way, you’re fucked. You and I are done.”
“Actually, we’re not done, which is what I came to tell you. Caryl needs my help to wrap up this situation with Rivenholt and the census anomaly.”
“I am not working with you again,” he said flatly.
“Teo, I lashed out at you, and there isn’t anything that will make that better. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hate you right then, but it’s also not everything there is to know about how I feel.”
“I really don’t care how you feel.” He turned around, leaning against the fridge. Stevie just kept right on washing pots. “I honestly was never into you,” he said. “I don’t find you attractive, and it’s not just your scars or whatever. You’re like, thirty, and your hair is too short, and you dress like crap.”
“I’m twenty-six. And you kind of flirted.”
“Who else am I supposed to flirt with? Caryl? That’s like talking to a brick wall. I swear on my father’s grave, you don’t do anything for me. At all.”
“I’m okay with that,” I said. And I was, which was kind of weird, since I had always hung a lot of my self-esteem on whether or not men found me worthy of insemination. I didn’t really have the time to look deeply into this breakthrough, because Teo still had more he wanted to unload on me.
“I don’t mind people being crazy,” he said. “I understand rage and depression and saying stuff you regret. But when I do it, I’m just a dumb dog snapping his teeth. What I don’t like about you is that even when you’re being nice, even when things are good, you’re checking out people’s weaknesses, storing things up to hurt them with later. You can’t be trusted. Not ever.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But for the same reason you can’t trust me to be your friend, you can trust me to work out the weaknesses in a problem and solve it. Caryl wants everyone upstairs for a meeting when you’re finished being mad at me.”
“Don’t talk about this like it’s a mood swing,” Teo said. “Sometimes things are just broken.” He was calm in a way I hadn’t seen before, and it gave me an uneasy feeling.
I opened and shut my mouth a couple of times, and then a little voice piped up behind me. An actual voice, not one of the many in my head.
“Shame on you, Teo!”
Oh, for God’s sake. “Gloria, I didn’t see you there,” I said. Yeah, this time I was being an asshole.
Gloria seemed too focused on scolding Teo to notice. “Forgiveness is our duty as Christians,” she told him.
“So is not stabbing people,” said Teo.
“I know how hard it is to forgive,” Gloria went on blithely. Apparently she’d recently armored over that weak spot. “But hon, the only way to be a better person than those who hurt you is to forgive them and show them kindness.”
“Teo doesn’t have to try that hard to be a better person than either of us.”
Gloria turned her sleepy-lidded blue eyes up to mine and smiled with beatific sweetness. “God forgives you for the things you said to me,” she said. “And so do I. And if Teo were half the man he thinks he is, he would be strong enough to forgive you too.”
Teo snorted. “Fuck you, Gloria.”
“Hey!” I snapped.
Gloria gave me a surprised smile, then turned back to Teo, looking ready to start into another lecture.
“Don’t waste your breath,” I said. “I forgive him for not forgiving me, okay? Now I think we’re all wanted upstairs.”