Blood Sugar(32)

It came out slow and awkward but deliberate, like a baby bird pecking through its eggshell and crawling out for the first time. “Nothing,” I said. “Just. I love you.”

He smiled an easy smile. “That’s good news. Because I love you too.”

That was three years before I met Jason. I had been twenty-two at the time. And since being with Seth, I had slept with a couple others, putting my number dangerously close to my age. Twenty-four partners. That meant if I had sex with Jason and things didn’t work out, I would have to take a sabbatical from sex for a while to let my age overtake my sex number. A lot was riding on this Jason decision since I would under no circumstances break my sex rule. Since I didn’t always follow other people’s rules, the laws of man, and some might even say the laws of God, if I started breaking my own rules, life would seem dauntingly limitless in its possibilities. Without my own personal self-imposed syllabi and code, I would have crumbled under the weight of an existence without any meaning or structure.

But standing in that doorway, I believed in me and Jason. I thought maybe I was pushing it. Moving too fast. Maybe a different approach. So I said, “You know, we can just be friends.”

I saw a trace of hurt in his eyes. But I got too angry to care about his hurt. And said, “Actually, forget that. I take it back. I have plenty of friends. I don’t want to be your friend. I want to date you. I don’t quite understand you, but I like that. And I like you. A lot. And if you don’t feel the same, okay. But I won’t be your friend.”

Before I could shut the door on him forever, Jason strode over to me, grabbed me around the waist, pulled me in, and kissed me. And that night he became my number twenty-five. He was more defined than his blue T-shirts had led on. Each muscle in his shoulders and back twitched as he pulled his shirt off. When he reached for me, I could picture him paddling out through the water, on his surfboard, his arms and core well attuned to working together. As I pressed against him, I thought we could be that sixty-years-of-bliss couple. I was wrong.





CHAPTER 22


    FLOWERS



The morning after our third date, Jason admitted he was in fact giving me mixed messages. Not on purpose to play games, but because he really wasn’t sure about me. It wasn’t until I told him I didn’t want to be friends that he clicked in. As he sipped on his Diet Coke, he said there was a rare honesty and integrity to my outburst, so he was willing to let his guard down. What would scare most men away even more made the alien in him dive into the deep end with me.

When my supervised internship hours were complete, my classes were finished, and my thesis on sociopaths and narcissists being like first cousins once removed was turned in and getting rave reviews from my professors and advisers, I officially graduated with my doctorate degree.

Immediately after graduation—because why would I start procrastinating now?—I took the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology, EPPP for short. I studied for it using the old-school cue card method, and missed Roman so much at these times. The nostalgia came in waves, sometimes so strong I felt almost pushed overboard. But I hung on, breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, and remained focused.

Like the IQ tests I used to enjoy as a child, I reveled in the 225 multiple-choice-question test focusing on core areas of psychology, such as assessment and diagnosis, and social and biological bases of behavior. Fun! There was a right and wrong to every question. Nothing open-ended, nothing left to chance.

I passed and was officially a licensed psychologist. Ready to go into the world unsupervised, delve into the trauma and darkest places of others, and do my best to make their lives better. To use my strengths to help those weakened by life.

To celebrate this achievement, Jason arrived at my apartment with a bottle of my favorite Champagne and a beautiful bursting bouquet of several different types of purple flowers. He made sure that all the varietals were nontoxic to cats, since sometimes Mr. Cat would nibble on the petals and harmlessly puke up his own bouquet. Jason was always so conscientious like this. And wonderful and kind and supportive. He brought out the best in me. So why was I being questioned about his death?

Goose bumps crept up my legs because the metal chair I was sitting on had itself succumbed to the cold air and become a conduit for shivers. Detective Jackson now looked at me with kindness. His face was open and patient. He was playing both good cop and bad cop all on his own. As I held the flimsy photo of me and Jason at the lamp store, I asked myself a very important question. If I could think of no reason to kill him, why on earth would anyone else think I killed him? As I put the photo back down on the table, I thought about all the flowers he had given me over the years. How there is always an end to things. No matter how long the flowers stayed fresh, they always seemed to die too soon. I suppose the moment they were cut from their stems they were already dead and, like me in happier times, were just reveling in the beauty of their slow decay.





CHAPTER 23


    CAKE



Jason spoke to his mother on the phone at least three times a day. He filled her in on his minutiae, asked her for advice constantly, and rarely made a decision without her input. If he had a major flaw, it would be this. It seemed a tad codependent to me, but I murdered a little boy to protect my sister, so who was I to judge?

After we’d been dating for several months, Gertrude wanted to meet me. Jason’s twenty-ninth birthday was coming up, so it was the perfect opportunity. He said that way it would be a big group and not too much pressure, but I didn’t feel any pressure. Meeting parents had never caused me anxiety. Parents usually loved me. And because I was a psychologist, I was great at asking other people questions and either really listening to their answers or pretending very well to really listen. Most people like talking about themselves, so if you walk away from an interaction feeling you’ve been heard, you usually like the person who you believe was listening. I kept reassuring Jason that it would all be great, his mom and I would be fast friends, or at the very least cordial acquaintances. How could we not get along when we both clearly cared about him so much? But looking back, I now see he was trying to shield me from something. Something he wasn’t able to communicate at that time but subconsciously knew was a danger.