Coda (Songs of Submission #9)(16)

“The line in this place is nuts. So this five minutes counts.” I wagged my finger at him as if I meant it, which I didn’t. Not even a little. I couldn’t have cared less if he was late.

“Did you finish the EP?” Darren asked.

“Yesterday. It was great. I mean, all of it. Every track I feel good about.”

“How many?”

“Six.”

“Nice.” He looked at the menu. Organic fair trade lunch, gourmet cakes and pies, vegan, free-range, grass-fed, gluten-free, cruelty-free, flavor-challenged, and the descriptions of what wasn’t added, wasn’t done, or wasn’t offered took up half the board.

“You look different,” Adam said, looking me up and down. He’d really grown on me with his sharp mouth and cutting sense of humor. If you could take a joke, he was the guy to hang around, and if you beat him to the punch, even better. Thin-skinned weeping willows need not apply.

“I’m the same.”

“Just richer,” Adam snapped. Darren elbowed him, and Adam laughed.

I shrugged. “There’s that. But you’re still buying your own lunch.”

“But no,” Adam continued, “seriously, something’s changed since the last time I saw you.”

Darren cut in. “The last time you saw her, she was in a hospital cafeteria. She hadn’t eaten in weeks. It was a f*cking nightmare.”

They’d come to visit a few days after Jonathan had his transplant. I barely remembered it. No, I did remember it. It was Christmas. Darren had brought me a piece of holiday cake, and I’d eaten it down to the last scrapings of frosting. The cake I remembered, the conversation, which probably centered around physical damage and medical procedures, was lost.

We sat at a cramped spot by the window and put our number on the table. I’d seen Darren a lot since the hospital. He was the only one I’d told about the horrors of Sequoia. The recurrent dreams. The heart-gripping fear whenever I heard a machine beep or saw an innocuous color combination. I told him about how I went miles out of my way to avoid the hospital compound and turned off any TV show with scenes in a medical facility. I even refused to use white sheets in the house because the sheets in the hospital were white.

He’d been there for me in the middle of the night when the door alarm beeped and I freaked out because it sounded like a heart monitor. He gave me directions when I got lost in West Hollywood because I couldn’t find a way to get where I was going without passing Sequoia. He’d heard about all the dreams of endless hospital hallways while Jonathan died in a room I couldn’t find.

“When is Jonathan going back to work?” Adam asked. He traded real estate insurance products, so anything that happened in real estate was hugely interesting to him. I always had to make sure to only tell him things that had been announced publicly.

“He’s selling most everything,” I said.

“Really?” He considered his iced green tea latte. “He need more money?”

“Shut up.” I flicked a few drops of condensation from my cup at him.

“Sorry.”

“I mean, who wants to run an empire on borrowed time?” I said. “At this point, it’s either sell it all or go back to working like a dog. And that’s all you’re getting out of me, Mister Corporate Raider.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “You going to tell her?” he asked Darren, biting the straw of his emerald-color latte.

“Tell me what?”

Darren pressed his fingers into his eyes as if he still had sleep in them.

“You are an unbelievable chickenshit,” Adam mumbled.

“Fuck off.”

“Okay.” I held up my hands. “Listen, this is cute, but if you guys haven’t talked about this already, I’d be happy to step outside while you—”

“Easy, it’s not a big deal,” Darren said.

“Really?” Adam seemed put off.

“I’m moving out of Echo Park.”

“You’re moving in together!” I squealed joyfully. “That’s awesome!”

“Yes, but that’s not it. We did something impulsive, and we’re just sticking with it before some * makes it illegal again,” Darren said.

I heard something about *s at the end, but not really, because I’d scraped my chair back to run around the table. I plopped right in Darren’s lap and hugged him. Adam got in on the action until we were a pile of happy limbs.

“Just say it so I know I’m not hugging you for buying a pot farm,” I said.

“We got married!” Adam said.

Three tables of people twisted around to look at us then broke into applause. I stood and clapped too, and Adam pushed his lips onto Darren’s cheek. My ex-boyfriend blushed. I sat when the applause died and our food arrived.

“So,” I said, “why now? Or then? Or when?”

“Yesterday,” Darren answered. “The deal was, when I had a foothold as a musician—”

Adam interrupted between taps on his phone. “And I was not holding my breath—”

“Oh, f*ck you.”

“It’s got nothing to do with your talent, and you know that, honey.”

“Whatever. That was the deal. I’ve been working at Redlight Studios pretty regularly, and Harry and I have been working on some really broad, commercial stuff.”