Groupie

By Lauren Weedman

By Lauren Weedman

My boyfriend, David, is organizing his sock drawer when I say to him, “You know, it just hit me, if we end up staying together, you will go down in history as the love of my life.”

I lean back and position myself on the bed—fan out my skirt and fluff my hair so that when he turns around and says it back to me I’ll look worthy. But he doesn’t follow the script.

Instead, he says, “Aww,” like he just saw a little baby with hearing aids.

We’ve been together four years. It shouldn’t feel like I just took a gigantic risk and told him that I had a crush on him. We are at the point in the relationship where we are supposed to say either, “You are the love of my life,” or, “You are not the love of my life but you have helped me figure out that I don’t like bossy women as much as I’d always thought.”

I sit up in the bed and smoosh down my hair. Lately David’s been bizarrely excited about how his senses are starting to fail. He likes to demonstrate this as if it’s a magic trick. “Do you see this lemon? Okay … I’m bringing it to my nose … and [sniff, sniff ] nothing! I SMELL NOTHING!”

I wonder if his ears are going as well and maybe didn’t hear me properly.

“That kind of blows my mind to think that you are the love of my life,” I try.

I’m fairly certain he hears me because his hands stop balling up his socks and he looks like he’s just staring at the wall. Oh my god. All I wanted was for him to simply cup my face in his hands and sob, “You are the love of my life.” I thought it would be a nice midday perk.

True, I’m probably fishing for a little reassurance since this evening we’re going to dinner with Jessica, an old friend of David’s who I find completely petrifying. Not only because she’s a yoga/healer person with whom David always makes time for long walks when we visit her hometown of Seattle, but because she did massage on Hannah, David’s wife, before Hannah died of cancer nine years ago.

I’ve never met Jessica before, but I did get a sense of the intimate nature of their relationship when I once overheard her on the phone telling David, “I miss her hair, don’t you?” For half a second I thought, “She’s never even seen my hair.” Then I realized what they were talking about and I knew I’d never be invited on one of their walks.

Jessica is in town for an acupuncture conference and we are going out for Indian food. Now that I’ve thrown the you’re-the-love-of-my-life ball to the kid with no arms and watched it bounce off his head, I’m not so hungry.

Photo by Michelle Pullman

This is an excerpt of an article originally published in Slake No. 2. To read the entire story, purchase or subscribe at shop.slake.la.