Chapter 58: Old and New

Saturday, January 26, 1985

I woke fairly abruptly, though not because anything was wrong. It was just one of those times where you’re asleep and then, suddenly, you’re not.

Paige was still asleep, so I did my best not to wake her. She woke perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later, shifting and stretching (which rubbed her tits against me — definitely not a bad thing!) and then blinking her way awake.

“Oh!” she said, giggling and planting a kiss on my chest. “I dreamed it was you, and ... it was you.”

“That’s a good thing, I think,” I said.

“Very!”

We kissed, softly, a few times. I wasn’t sure if we were going to start anything or not, and either way was fine. I definitely had no objection! Still, if people were in the living room, they might hear us. Maybe.

After a bit, Paige said, “Tell me we’ll always be together.”

“I can’t, but I can tell you I hope we’re always together and I think we will be. Things happen, but what I want, and what Angie and Jas want as far as I know now, is for us to be one big family, connected by two marriages, two adoptions, and maybe a bunch of half-siblings.”

She sighed, nuzzling against me a bit.

“That’s what I want, too,” she said. “Very, very much!”

“We’ll do everything we can to make it so,” I said. Jean-Luc Picard would likely excuse me for borrowing his catchphrase.

She looked up at me, hesitating, then said, “We dodged a bullet, you know.”

“Did we?”

She nodded a bit.

“I joke with Ang that she kept me for herself. Really, though, it’s ... I knew I wasn’t ready for you. And I knew you probably weren’t ready for me, though I pretended that was a ‘you’ thing and not a ‘me’ thing. No one was ‘ready for me,’ not really. But I kinda wanted you, even so. Ang knew I did, but she pointed you to Jas. I wasn’t really mad or anything, ‘cuz Jas had been, you know, in and out of relationships, plus she shared, so I’d get a turn anyway.”

I nodded, and said, “Makes sense so far.”

“It’s ... you and I, bluntly, we would have sucked back then. Like... ‘Brigadoon’ would have fucked me up. That was one amazing romantic gesture right there, and I was not ready. Jas, it turns out, was. But you and her make more sense all around, pretty clearly. The thing is, I feel like you might have broken me a bit and I might have broken you a bit and all of this...”

She waved her hand around.

“ ... might never have been. So ... we dodged a bullet, all of us. It’s not like it was close to being fired — Ang knew me and Jas enough to know which of us made sense — but still.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “It sounds like a mess best avoided.”

“I spent a lot of that year kinda fucking around. Not as much as freshman year, but ... it was pretty crazy. By the time we got to the cast party — I guess that’s only a few months later, but still — I’d burned out on ‘crazy’ for the most part. That’s why the party was so ... benign. It really was maybe the coming-out party for ‘new Paige,’ a bit. I kept thinking, ‘What would I do if I was me but older and wiser?’”

“I really enjoyed it,” I said. “It was fun, and fun in a way that some orgy, or even creeping from bedroom to bedroom, wouldn’t have been.”

“‘Old Paige’ would have disagreed. ‘New Paige’ got it. The thing is ... I wanted you more than ever after you’d made it that long with Jas, and ... a lot of me felt sure I’d blown it. That I was ... you know. Kinda ... damaged. Too much of a reputation, too much water under the bridge, too much ... whatever.”

“Never on my part.”

She nodded.

“I know that now. I mean, I knew that that night, after we talked. But I went into it kinda feeling like maybe I’d get a shot and, if I got a shot, I was going to take it. Then I did, and instead of taking it, we planned something much nicer. That ... that date helped end ‘old Paige’ for good. I left our date thinking, ‘This was way better than a one-night stand, even if it was a one-night stand, ‘cuz we meant something to each other.’ If it’d been the one and only, that would’ve been fine.”

“It probably makes more sense now, when you know things about me you couldn’t have known then.”

“It does, but it made plenty enough sense then. I’d gotten a feel for who you were, and who you were was someone who was going to do things right if you were going to do them at all.”

I gave her a squeeze and a kiss.

“Know what else makes much more sense now, even when it did at the time?” she said.

I shook my head and said, “Not sure.”

“It’s ... well ... stuff happened, and Ang and I got going, which you know. And ... we needed to be a couple. Just a couple. I know why, now, much better. I really thought it was about me for, like, a year. Meaning, you know, Ang figuring out if ‘new Paige’ was going to last, and me figuring out if ‘new Paige’ was going to last, and all that. And that was fine. It was better than fine, actually! It was great! She was taking the whole thing seriously, which no one ever did until you and then her. And I was ready for serious.”

I nodded along, letting her continue.

“The thing is ... once I knew, it hit me. Not all at once, not the first day, but ... that girl ... she’s had some losses! Her father dies — twice! Her mother lets her down — twice! Random guys fuck with her. Her boyfriends fuck with her. Her serious long-term relationship with a guy gets her thrown in fucking prison! Her serious long-term relationship with a girl ends in that girl getting out of prison and kinda vanishing after they’d planned a life together. I mean, maybe she didn’t vanish, but ... maybe she did. Ang hadn’t given up hope, but it was ... dwindling. Anyway, I mean ... of course, she wanted to make sure I was who we thought I was! And that she wasn’t totally fucked up and damaged and unable to cope, too! I feel like ... well, not like I almost blew it a few times, ‘cuz I didn’t, but there were times when I said the right thing for the right reasons for us right then, but it was also the right thing for reasons I knew nothing about, and I could have said something else which would’ve fit right then but would’ve been wrong for the real Angie.”

“I think we did some of that, those first months before we knew. Stuff ... some stuff just came out right because we read each other right, or because we cut each other a break. Some things ... we came damn close to saying things during the whole Max thing that would’ve been hard to unsay. We didn’t, thank God! We’d have managed, but it would’ve been a much bigger mess.”

She sighed, shifting, snuggling in.

“If it’s the way I think it might be, and you’re the only guy that’s ever ... on the list, or whatever ... that’ll be fine. I mean, if we find someone else, that’s also good, kinda by definition. But I’m happy where things are now. If the world was different, and I’d brought you home to Mom and Dad instead of Ang, they’d have loved you like they love her. Which, that second part still blows my mind a bit, but it’s so good!”

I chuckled.

“I think sometimes it still blows Angie’s mind that our Mom and Dad love you so much.”

“It does! She’s really clear about it! I love them, too. It’s weird, ‘cuz people say you’re supposed to hate your in-laws, but we have such great ones.”

“All is for the best...”

“ ... in the best of all possible worlds,” she giggled, finishing. “It feels that way, sometimes. In a totally not ironic way, unlike the original, but still. Except ... it’s still ... we’re doing all the stuff. We’re putting in the work. We’re earning our breaks, as much as we can anyway. Not saying you and Ang, ‘cuz your break is beyond anything, but still, from my point of view you’ve handled it as well as anyone might have. I still sometimes think I’d have just said ‘fuck it!’ and tried to get rich and go crazy. I like to hope I wouldn’t, but ... it’d be a big temptation, or it would have been until I’d seen you two handling it.”

“Rich is good, and we’ll get there, but people are what matters. I think that’s one of the lessons of our first lives — that we had good people around, but not the right ones, or not enough of them, or we didn’t open up enough, or whatever.”

“And now, we’re together.”

“Yes, we are.”

She scooted up and kissed me.

“Um ... maybe, before we get up ... I mean, just on the off chance that we don’t do this again for a while...”

I thought so, and — two times later — we agreed it’d been a great decision.

When we got up, Cammie and Mel were conspicuously absent. Jas and Angie, meanwhile, were having brunch.

We sat down with them, me across from Angie, which put Paige and Jas next to both the one they’d spent the night with and the one that was ‘theirs.’ It seemed perfectly fitting.

“Good night?” Angie said, a grin on her face.

“Very!” Paige said.

I nodded. “Definitely!”

Jas grinned. “You know I loved it!”

“Not too often, but ... yeah. We need to do this again,” Angie said.

“We do,” Jas said, nodding. “I love all of you!”

“I do, too!” Paige said.

“Me, three!” Angie said.

“Unanimous!” I said.

From somewhere out of sight, Cammie’s voice floated up, calling, “Get a room!”

“We did!” Paige shouted back. “It was glorious!”

That got us all laughing. I was pretty sure Mel and Cammie were laughing, too.

In the afternoon, I checked in with Carl, Hank, and Paul. I wasn’t taking any CS courses this semester, and might not for a while, but I didn’t want to lose their friendship. All of them seemed like cool people and I could use the friends.

The good news was that all of them had seen the Batt article and none of them felt like they had to drop me over my having gay friends. The even better news was that they’d all picked up on Angie and Paige being a couple and weren’t bothered, either. Hank joked about being in trouble under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) for associating with gay people, but it was indeed a joke. Soldiers couldn’t engage in gay sex, but they weren’t forbidden to have gay friends. Corps members weren’t subject to the UCMJ, either, but they were expected to live by its rules as if they were.

All of that made it reasonable to invite them over. Had I known it was fine, I’d have invited them to the Super Bowl party. Still, it was nice that we’d kept that one to ‘GSS insiders’ this year. Even if we opened it up to a wider range of friends next time, this one mattered for other reasons. I expected fireworks within GSS at some point, and the sooner (and stronger) Angie and Cammie (and Paige and Mel, of course) built whatever coalition they were building, the better.

I made a quick trip to Radio Shack and purchased a midrange speakerphone and an answering machine for the business line. The basement line would, for now, be answering-machine free, and we wouldn’t give that number out to anyone. It was there if we needed it.

While checking in with Mom and Dad, I let them know we’d be in Houston for U2. Unfortunately, it would be a quick trip and we wouldn’t get to drop by. As expected, they agreed this would probably happen occasionally and there was no reason for us to feel bad about missing them when we made a midweek trip.

Dad, perhaps sounding a trifle embarrassed, suggested we stop by (perhaps even after the concert) and pick up some mail we’d received. I suspected, from his tone, he guessed it might not be the most welcome mail. He said it seemed personal, though the names on the return addresses weren’t familiar to him. We’d pick it up and see, of course.

I wasn’t sure when we would get down to Houston again after this trip, and told them that, too. This spring was setting up to be far more of an ‘empty nest’ situation than last fall. I didn’t want things to get ‘bad’ for Mom and Dad. It would take some conscious planning and effort to add trips, though.