I can make a semi-educated guess about what he means by “stuff” based on the dirt I heard from Mama and Peggy. Chrissy got into the OxyContin again. Chrissy’s brother Cracker is protective of his baby sister, and he wants her in rehab. And what Cracker Parsons wants, he gets. They call him Cracker because he’s not afraid to breaks things. Laws. Windows. Legs.

Lucky for Willy, I’m not in the mood to press for details. All I want is pizza, wine, cake, and a birthday lay in the dark sketchy parking lot behind the old bank. Or, in the wheelchair-accessible bathroom of The Vault, which we occupy just long enough to make it look suspicious when we wander back to our table. As if the ear-to-ear grins weren’t enough to give us away. Happy World Toilet Day to me. Outside, it just keeps snowing.

Willy groans as he rolls over onto his back, stretching himself awake beneath the cool, clean whiteness of the king-sized ­hotel bedding. I languidly stroke the ginger-haired mermaid inked into the sea of his bare bicep, thinking about childhood summers at The Wharf. And the time Ricky Dicks called me a whale, even though I was clearly trying to swim like a mermaid.

“So how was that for a birthday?” Gimp nuzzles in closer to me.

I want to say wonderful, because it was. The part where we walked out of the restaurant and into a full-on blizzard, and realized we were stuck here for the night. The part where we took a cab to the nicest hotel in Town, Town and the cab driver tried not to gawk at us in the rear-view mirror while we made out, and then let us smoke a joint in his car. The part where they almost didn’t let us have this swanky hotel room because Gimp was so high and giddy that he kept giving them his Air Miles instead of his credit card. The part where Gimp and I slept together and then slept together, tossing and turning and drooling and dreaming like people who love each other do.

Instead of telling him it was wonderful though, I just mumble, “Not bad.” Because all of it made me feel so alive. Which reminds me that I’m dying. As Gimp wraps an arm around me and pulls me even closer, my gut clenches with a claustrophobic guilt over letting him think he can love a dying woman. Or that a dying woman can love him. I push away and make a mad dash to the spacious, pristine hotel suite bathroom and unleash a gush of undigested urgency into the spacious, pristine hotel suite toilet.

I’d like to make this morning after feel as non-awkward and un-weird as possible. But, no dice. Awkward and weird ooze from my ungraceful stagger as I emerge from the can. Awkward and weird cling to my surprisingly unruly buzz cut bed-head and garbage breath. Awkward and weird roll in and settle like a bank of fog on the Bras d’Or when I crawl back in bed with him, and stare up at the ceiling because I don’t want to see his face when I say, “So. What’s the deal here? What are we?”