“This woman I’m dating is… she’s beautiful, she’s smart, not—not educated, but she’s had to learn about a lot of things, and she picked it up fast. She’s passionate and stylish, she’s interesting, and… it’s like those television dramas.”

“Numb, you said,” Jessica interjected.

“It’s enjoyable, it has its moments, don’t get me wrong. But those moments pass, and… it feels like there’s a bit less of everything to everything. We started it off as an experiment, I was upfront about things, and maybe we’ll taper it off, I don’t know. I think we could remain friends.”

“I don’t think anyone could know the context of what happened and fault you for taking some time, finding your way back to a comfortable place.”

“I don’t want to take time,” Amy said, a little bit emotional now. “I don’t want—I don’t want to work from nine until nine every day, and I don’t want to work from nine to five or nine until noon either, with half my day or my evening spent on dates. I’m not really interested in the… dating part of it. I want to skip forward.”

“Wanting to skip forward to the part where you’re situated and comfortable is very common, I think. I’ve heard similar sentiments from people I know, especially introverts.”

“I want to skip forward to the point where I’ve known her for ten years. Where we’ve been there for each other’s trigger events, where we went to high school, middle school, and most of elementary school together. And I had that. I almost had that.”

“I don’t think that’s possible, short of using time travel. I don’t think you could one hundred percent rule that out, but I think even if you did travel back in time and rewrite history to contrive those scenarios with your new girlfriend in mind… I don’t think you’d have what you really want.”

“No.”

“Can you broaden your hopes and expectations?”

“I tried. I tried seeing this one girl in the Birdcage. Ex-mechanic, smaller than me but strong, short black hair, funny, tender. I didn’t really believe her story about what she did that got her into the Birdcage, but I didn’t really care. I asked my dad if it was safe to try seeing her and he said yes and…”

Amy trailed off, aware she was rambling.

“…she was my first kiss,” Amy said. “And it was pretty wow.”

Jessica’s expression changed, and Amy caught it. She’d had to catch a lot of those little expressions to navigate the household of Carol and Mark.

“What?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t remark, but… I find that surprising.”

“You mean Victoria.”

“I shouldn’t have commented. I apologize.”