But when he was no longer breathing, when cancer had taken his life before I could take my life back from him, it wasn’t the same. It was cruel, and heartless, and it produced a type of guilt that sat low and unsettling in your stomach.

This was my entire existence, it seemed, for the past several months.

“While I appreciate the attempt to make me laugh, I’m not ready to make jokes about Carlo like that,” I said softly. “I probably won’t ever be.”

“I’m sorry,” Belle said on a sigh, squeezing my arm as we flowed with the crowd. “Really, I am. That was too far. You know me, I can’t help but make jokes, even when it’s wildly inappropriate. Remember when my cousin had a funeral for his cat?”

“And you made a cake that looked like a litter box with little pebbles of poop, and wrote Sorry your cat hit the shitter, at least you don’t have to change any more litter on it with hot pink frosting?”

Belle pointed at me. “Exactly. I’m awful at death, it makes me feel itchy and so I resort to humor. Apparently, very poorly placed humor. But,” she continued, taking that finger she had pointed at my face and re-directing it to point at my lady bits. “Let’s bring this back to the real subject at hand, which is that that region is about as dry as the Sahara Desert.”

I rolled my eyes, pulling my arm from where it was wrapped around hers to fish in my purse. I rummaged around for my lipstick as we made our way toward the South Loop bars.

Play the humor card, Gemma. You’re good. Everything’s okay.

“This region is just fine, thank you,” I told her, gesturing to my crotch as I finally found my lipstick. I rolled the burgundy tube up, pointing it directly at my best friend. “It gets plenty of action.”

Belle scoffed. “Oh, right. Forgive me for thinking a twenty-nine-year-old woman might want something more than a dildo with three vibration speeds.”

“Four,” I corrected, smoothing the deep burgundy cream over my top lip and blotting it together with the bottom. “And this twenty-nine year-old woman is perfectly content.”

Belle huffed, and for the rest of our walk to the strip of bars we frequented after games, she continued, on and on about the importance of my libido not going stale and my vagina getting action.

This was part of what infuriated me about Belle, and part of what I loved — she could argue a fish into buying an oxygen tank. In Belle’s mind, she always knew what was right and what was wrong, and she had all the right words to convince you, too.

It was one of the things that made her a successful entrepreneur.