Amber

I narrow my eyes at Amber, daring her. "And another thing: You never support my dreams."

Amber gets a gleam in her eyes, devilish, bridging the distance between us. "I will delete We Shadows. No, I will print it out, burn it, and delete it because the only thing I hate more than your book is the environment."

We both laugh. Amber has spent months teaching and reteaching herself a program to format my series for republication. We Shadows looks beautiful now, far better than Double Dragon Publishing had made it. Amber is to the place in her revision where she is combing through it for any less than elegant phrase or plot point that does not quite gel with her. Soon, it will be the best version, and a large part of that credit is hers. Her effort on this work that has meant so much to me for nearly twenty years is one of the most extraordinary acts of love I have encountered.

The past twenty-four hours had involved one or the other of us harboring hurt feelings, neither of us having meant to hurt the other. We would have an argument -- or not even an argument and surely not a fight, but a wounded conversation -- assume that the topic had reached its conclusion and then watch it spring back to life hours later like those parched desert plants waiting for the passing rain.

Some of it was more fundamental personality differences and approaches to life, how when I met her, I was barely compensating for mental illnesses I was not acknowledging and how she was radically overcompensating for her presumptive autism that she was not acknowledging; we fell in love under different pretenses, as less comfortable gradations. The rest is that we hadn't slept well in days or a week. The night before this, Amber was awake for hours with a migraine and returned to bed sobbing, during which we revived the argument. It seemed callous to do otherwise and make her suffer from uncertainty. My job requires me awake before six every morning, which is unnatural to me. At my facility, windows are at a premium to prevent escape attempts, though there is nowhere much one can go once one is out of the building proper, running from comfort to a razor-wire cage. There are days where I see only a few hours of sunlight, if that, and feel their lack drag me down.

There may have been contributing factors; my flu shot days ago, stress from Amber's job, and dissatisfaction with mine. I told Amber that my relationship with her was one of the best things in my life, the part I most look forward to. When it hits a rocky patch, I find it particularly devastating, as though it will never find sure footing again. It always does, of course, and I know that. It is purely an emotional reaction, some moody, scared child reaching for comfort.

"Your writing is going well," she notes, hugging me when I make this point. I had not been ready to be touched before this point, though we had begun our sleep the night before cuddled together.

"Yes, in the way that I do a lot of it," I say, "but not in the way that people read it."

Before this conversation, I had taken a walk of more than an hour in the misty cold in the cold to clear my head, though I could not say for sure what in my head needed clearing even while I was walking. I knew only that I didn't want to talk and needed to soon if I were not to spend the remainder of our weekend miserable and unresolved.

After this conversation, a few milliliters of tears more on both our parts, the day returns to what it should be. We go out to brunch with her mother. We watch a gothic, middling horror movie, eating popcorn. We connect physically. I feel this low thrum of worry that we will trip back into the arguments, but we don't.

last watched: People of Earth
reading: The Orchid Thief