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“Nance, I don’t think we’ll be making it tonight.” Robin lets go of the string, letting the blinds clatter against the windowpane. “Seriously, I think we might die if we try to drive.”
From her spot on the couch, Nancy doesn’t move a bit, staring intently at her newly delivered paper with the kind of intensity usually precipitated by Robin’s rambles or an egregiously misinvestigated crime–not that those two are even remotely the same. Robin isn’t a professional detective–an amateur, at most–and she isn’t a journalist–mostly a radio host, and that was years ago–but she does tend to spew a ton of information all at the same time, which obviously requires a lot of attention to follow–or, at least it did for the two months of their relationship before Nancy finally gained the skill of processing her logorrhea without having to stare directly at her mouth the entire time–which, now that she thinks about it, might not have had a lot to do with her being hard to follow–so this article must be really fascinating if she’s giving her best dead face to the shocking, saddening news that, true to Vaughn Monroe’s 1945 holiday classic, “the weather outside is frightful,” preventing them from getting to Tiffany’s party on time.
Robin really thought she’d be more upset about this. “Nance? Did you hear me? Tiffany’s going to have to wait until at least next December to see us.” She flops down next to Nancy, dragging a disturbingly clean knit blanket from the armrest onto her lap. Nancy looks up for a moment, eyes flickering with a smile in time to the snow hitting the window, then returns to her paper, completely uncaring that Tiffany will most definitely be pretending to notice or care about their absence in less than half an hour.
“What about the December after that?” she asks drily. “We should give her some more time to learn how to treat you like someone worth her time before we go over to her house again.” At this, her mouth twists just slightly, the creases of her lips catching the cold light from the window.
“Well, I mean, we could give her more time, but I really don’t think that’ll help her.”
“Then what will help her? Being upset about not being able to go to her bullshit party won’t do anything.”
She has a point. Tiffany’s parties are always lame anyways, like she planned them using a statue of a dog wearing a tuxedo as inspiration; she spends way too much money on catering but never from anywhere good, always insisting on getting the fanciest things on the menu even though they taste like burning car tires and existential crises to Robin, and despite the black tie casual dress code (which really just means that if you show up in anything but whatever she thinks is in fashion she’ll be snide), there’s always cheap beer collecting in puddles on the counters, floors, and the undersides of half-flattened solo cups. Nancy thinks that she truly has no idea about the spills. She says that Tiffany is too busy trying to clean out her ass so she can deem it fashionable enough to stick her head up even farther, and Robin’s honestly really tempted to agree with her. However, wholeheartedly agreeing with this would mean that she would be partially ignoring the other, arguably more disturbing problem.
See, Tiffany has this thing where she introduces them really weirdly to her friends. She calls them over, nearly spilling her probably insanely overpriced wine with the motion, and puts her free arm around Nancy’s shoulders. For the next five minutes–always five on the dot, Robin has timed it–she elegantly (drunkenly) explains every single one of Nancy’s achievements and degrees in detail, going back and forth between staring at her and batting her eyelashes at her friends, seemingly on Nancy’s behalf. Then she turns to Robin, and with the air of someone who just found out that the weird crash in the basement wasn’t faulty plumbing, but their roommate’s meth lab collapsing, and says, “This is Nancy’s roommate, Robin. I’m not sure what she does, but she talks a lot for whatever she does.”
Robin has told her at least three separate times that she is a psychologist. Three! She does this for the rest of the night, too, acting like Robin is Nancy’s less accomplished, less intelligent roommate, like she wouldn’t even have invited her if Nancy didn’t insist. It drives her absolutely nuts.
“OK, well, what do you want to do, then, if you’re cool with not going?” Robin nudges her toe into Nancy’s flannel-covered calf. “I could make popcorn? Mrs. Cass doesn’t really like the smell, but what’s she going to do, sue for emotional distress on behalf of two thirtysomethings deciding that they want to eat in the comfort of their own apartment? It does sound like the kind of thing she would pull–however, I think it’s also important to consider that she also can’t decide what to be angry at for more than five seconds, so we should be safe. I could also put on a movie! Doctor Zhivago or It’s A Wonderful Life sounds really good right now. Only one of the two is very Christmas-y, b-”
There’s a crinkling as Nancy unceremoniously crushes the newspaper in her lap, digging her elbows into the thin paper to get the correct angle to kiss Robin contentedly on the forehead. Robin freezes momentarily, hands midair and wavering from the momentum of her hastily halted gesticulating. She drops them and turns to stare–falsely offended–at the woman responsible for the interruption of her very important, very detailed plan for the rest of the evening.
“I thought you liked the sound of my voice, Nance,” she says, eyebrows raised.
“I do,” Nancy replies, tilting her face up to kiss Robin’s suddenly warming nose. “That’s why I’d rather be home with you, anyways.”
“That’s why you want to be home with me? The only reason?”
“Absolutely.” A final moment passes, soft and snow-lit. Then, Nancy presses her lips–lips still outlined in shades of silver–to Robin’s. Warmth blooms, familiar in the way that love only is when it feels truly everlasting, between them, tracing the tips of Nancy’s fingers onto Robin’s cheek, and Robin decides that Tiffany can have her party and her night without having to pretend to miss either of them–she would absolutely rather be exactly where she is.