The next weekend she met several of my friends at Jake and Lina's apartment. I had worried about the gathering more than I admitted, because it was the first time Sarah would enter a circle of people who had known me long before we met. I kept thinking about group loyalty tests and who would be expected to impress whom. Sarah arrived carrying a dessert she'd chosen because she remembered Lina couldn't eat nuts, and within half an hour she was arguing playfully with my brother over a board game rule.
Nobody asked her to prove she belonged. She didn't have to adopt our jokes immediately, match our plans, or agree to attend every gathering. When the evening ended, she said she'd had fun and asked whether my friends always argued so intensely about games. I told her they were unusually well behaved that night, and she laughed the whole way down the stairs.
A few days later, she suggested a weekend trip for the following month. It wasn't an elaborate vacation, just two nights at a coastal town with a walking trail and a seafood place she wanted to try. We looked at our calendars, considered work commitments, and decided we'd book it once we knew neither of us needed to be elsewhere. Planning the trip felt exciting rather than fraught, and I realized I hadn't once wondered whether somebody would accuse us of abandoning the people we loved.
I wasn't entirely free of old habits. When Sarah told me she might need to move the dates because her museum had scheduled a major exhibition opening, I felt an instant stab of disappointment and said it was fine too quickly. She looked at me and asked whether I actually meant that or was trying to avoid seeming difficult. I admitted I'd been looking forward to the trip and was disappointed, but I also understood why the exhibition mattered.
"Okay," she said. "Then let's see whether the next weekend works. I don't want you swallowing a feeling just so I don't have to hear it."
I stared at her, then laughed. Not because what she said was funny, but because it was the sort of conversation I'd spent two years imagining might be possible if I found exactly the right words. We checked the next weekend, found it worked, and changed the reservation. The world didn't collapse because one person had a commitment and the other person had feelings about it.
I learned that feeling secure didn't mean never being disappointed. It meant being able to name disappointment without being treated as a problem, and being able to hear someone else's needs without interpreting them as a rejection. Sarah wasn't perfect, and I wasn't either. We sometimes misunderstood each other, but the misunderstandings didn't automatically become arguments about whether one of us was allowed to have a life.
Around that time, Jake mentioned that Khloe had finally moved to Portland. She was excited about her new job and had posted photographs of the apartment she'd rented near a park. Adrien and Emma had visited for a weekend, and Tasha and Finn had talked about going later in the year. Marissa apparently didn't come, though I didn't know whether she'd been invited, had declined, or simply couldn't make the dates work.