this a good time?"
She was tiptoeing around eggshells; normally she'd have barreled right through to whatever she wanted to talk to me about by now. From where my laptop's webcam was situated at the dining table, she could probably see some of my living room landfill, where good gifts go to die.
"Ah, yeah, it's fine," I said, figuring I might as well start getting used to real life again. "And you don't have to be extra nice to me about the whole wedding-falling-apart thing. I'm totally over it."
"My darling, you're the worst liar I've ever seen."
"Yeah," I agreed.
"We don't have to talk about it, though, if you don't want to," Linn said. She made an effort to perk up, sweeping her black bangs out of her eyes, her face taking on a breezy, bracing look. "We could talk about your trip? Tell me things; I've never been there. Did you get offered sex?"
In a way.
I shook my head. "I did not contribute to the sex trade, no. I know you're disappointed; I'm sorry."
Linn huffed through a smile. "You totally did Thailand wrong. Go back."
"Kinda wish I could. It was nice."
"Yeah? Did you take any pictures?"
"Oh, yeah. Um, I was just going through them when you called." Behind the Skype screen I could still see the bottom edge of the photograph of me and Nate; the sides of our feet were touching. I remembered how easy it felt crowding in next to him, our hips mashed together, arms crossing along our backs, his palm curving at my side. Out of view of the webcam, I raised an unthinking finger toward the seam between our shoes.
Linn leaned forward. "Ooh, I wanna see."
My hand flexed back from the screen. "Right now?"
"Yeah. Upload them somewhere where I can see, and then you can give me the lowdown on everything. It'll be like doing vacation slides, only across the Internet."
"Really?" I made a suspicious face into the webcam. "Nobody likes those."
"Pictures, Em," she pleaded.
I capitulated, hands up. "Okay, okay. This'll probably take a few minutes, so tell me what's up with you while I do this."
As she updated me on her adventures in parenting and pregnancy, I navigated to one of my image hosting accounts and started uploading the photos in bulk. On a sudden impulse, I removed the one of Nate from the album; he'd be my secret to keep.
I sent Linn the link, and we went through the pictures together, my dry explanations doing nothing to deter her from oohing and aahing her way through the entire album.
For some reason, though, talking to her about all the people, places and things I'd photographed, however tediously, made them seem more real than before. I had been there, I had done these things, I'd had fun.
"Whoa," she laughed, at an incredibly blurry picture of me, the one where I'd countered Nate's accusation of not smiling properly by then smiling like an escapee of an insane asylum.
Linn clicked to the next photo.
"Oh," she breathed. Her eyes flicked up to the webcam. "Em, who took these?"
In my admitted haste to scroll through all the pictures to get to the one of Nate, I hadn't noticed this one, which appeared to either have been taken by accident or on the sly, just after my unleashing of my maniacal smile. The picture was simply one of me laughing, because, I remembered now, Nate had been laughing.
"You look so happy there," Linn added, a curious lilt in her voice.
"Yeah, um, it was this-- I kinda made a friend when I was down there," I said.
In an instant, Linn went from slightly awed to full-tilt saucy. "Ooh, what kind of friend? Would I approve?"
Would she? Maybe. We'd never find out.
"A friend friend," I said unhelpfully. "A pal. A chum, some might say."
She made a scoffing noise. "I said what kind of friend, not give me useless synonyms for friend."
I rolled my eyes at the webcam, though it was unlikely she'd see it, her attention on the picture album. Still, I did it for the principle of the thing. "It was just-- this guy. We started talking one day and then... we hung out a bit." And then I slept with him .
"Is he cute?" she