Compare Notes

Priya was waiting on the couch when Wren got home, two glasses of wine already poured, which was Priya’s universal signal for sit down, we are talking about your life whether you want to or not.

“You’ve been weird for two weeks,” Priya said, handing over a glass before Wren had even taken her shoes off. “Weird good, I think, but weird. Sit.”

“I’ve had a lot going on with the commission.”

“Uh huh. And is the commission six foot two with forearms, or is that a different, entirely unrelated development?”

Wren sat, because there was no version of this evening where she didn’t, and took a long sip of wine before answering. “There are two commissions. Two brothers. It’s complicated.”

Priya’s eyebrows went up slowly, the particular expression she reserved for information she’d clearly been waiting weeks to hear. “Two brothers. As in plural. As in more than one.”

“Twins. Identical twins. It’s a whole thing.”

“Oh, this is so much better than I was expecting.” Priya tucked her legs underneath herself, fully settling in. “Start from the beginning. Don’t skip anything.”

So Wren told her. The sideboard delivery, the two faces that turned out to be the same face wearing entirely different expressions, the farmers market and the kettle corn and Declan’s hand resting near hers on the picnic table. The quiet hour in the workshop with Rory, the way he’d said I don’t want that like it was the simplest sentence in the world, and how it had landed somewhere she still hadn’t fully processed.

Priya listened to all of it without interrupting, which was, for Priya, a genuinely remarkable feat of self control.

“Okay,” she said, once Wren had finished. “So which one do you like?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t know how to answer that.”

“It’s not a hard question. You met two men. Presumably one of them made your stomach do the thing more than the other.”

“They both made my stomach do the thing,” Wren admitted, and saying it out loud made it feel more real and more ridiculous at the same time. “Different things. Declan’s easy. He’s warm, he’s funny, he makes me feel like the only person in the room. And Rory notices things nobody else does. He remembered a joke I made a week later. He said something true to me and I said something true back and it felt like more happened in that hour than in the entire day I spent with Declan.”

“So you like both of them.”

“I like being around both of them. I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”

Priya was quiet for a moment, turning her wine glass slowly, the way she did when she was actually thinking rather than just waiting for her turn to talk. “For what it’s worth, that doesn’t sound like confusion to me. Confusion is not knowing what you feel. You know exactly what you feel. You just don’t like that it’s two different things at once.”

“That’s an uncomfortably accurate way to put it.”

“I’m a nurse. I’ve watched a lot of people lie to themselves in waiting rooms. You get good at spotting it.” Priya reached over and squeezed her knee, gentler than her usual teasing. “You don’t have to solve this tonight. But you should probably stop pretending it’s simpler than it is, even to yourself.”

Wren thought about that conversation for the rest of the week, in the specific way a comment from Priya tended to lodge itself somewhere and refuse to leave. She thought about it Tuesday, sketching alternate proportions for the judge’s dining table. She thought about it Wednesday, when Declan texted her a photo of a particularly ugly lamp at an estate sale with the caption tell me this isn’t the worst thing you’ve ever seen, and she laughed out loud at her desk before she’d even considered why the text had made her feel warm all afternoon.

She thought about it Thursday, when she stopped by the workshop unannounced, technically to drop off a revised sketch, and found Rory in the back with sawdust in his hair, entirely absorbed in something, and stood in the doorway for a full minute just watching him work before he noticed she was there.

“You do that a lot,” he said, when he finally looked up. “Watch before you say anything.”

“You’re interesting to watch. Sorry if that’s strange.”

“Didn’t say it was strange.” He set down what he was holding, wiped his hands on his jeans, and looked at her with the particular directness that still, weeks in, caught her a little off guard every time. “You look like you’re thinking about something.”

“I talked to my friend about you. And Declan. About both of you, I mean.”

Something crossed his face, quick and unreadable. “What did you tell her?”

“That I don’t know how to explain what’s happening. That I like being around both of you, in completely different ways, and I don’t know what to do with that.”

He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Wren started to worry she’d said too much, and then he nodded slowly, like he was working through something in real time.

“I could tell you it’s not complicated,” he said finally. “That you should just pick whoever makes you feel more. But that’s not true, and I don’t think you’d believe me if I said it.”

“Would it bother you? If I said I liked him too?”

“It already bothers me,” he admitted, and the plainness of it landed harder than any hedge would have. “But that’s not really your problem to fix. That’s mine.”

Wren didn’t have an answer for that, and for a moment they just stood there in the quiet workshop, the specific charged silence that seemed to follow them whenever they were alone together, neither of them quite ready to name what was happening but both of them clearly aware it was happening anyway.

“For what it’s worth,” she said eventually, “I’m not trying to make this hard for you. Or for him.”

“I know.” He picked his tools back up, though he didn’t start working again right away. “Doesn’t make it less hard.”

She drove home that evening replaying both conversations, Priya’s on the couch and Rory’s in the workshop, and found herself circling the same uncomfortable center of both. She wasn’t confused about what she felt. She was confused about what she was supposed to do with feeling two real things at once, about two men who happened to share a face and nothing else.

Priya had been right about that much. It wasn’t confusion. It was something harder than confusion, because confusion at least came with the promise of eventually being solved.

This felt like something she was going to have to sit inside of for a while, uncomfortable and unresolved, before she had any idea what came next.

She texted Priya from her driveway before going inside. You were right. It’s not confusion. I just don’t know what it is yet.

Priya’s response came back within a minute. That’s called falling for two people at once, babe. It has a name. You’re just scared of it.

Wren sat with her phone in her lap for a long moment, the porch light buzzing faintly overhead, and didn’t type anything back, because she didn’t have anything true enough to say.