On Second Thought Page 10

  “You really have.” But there’s so much more I could say.

  “Then when will you make the time,” she says, “to meet Avery, Elizabeth? That’s family.” And she’s back on that again. But I’ll have Jordan.

  “We’ll see,” I say.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means that we’ll see. How you feel. After this.” And I bottom my drink.

  As I set it down. As she sinks in her seat. As I bend over mine.

  Glancing to the side, where I find her shadow of a kiss at my lips, its citrus and prosecco. Her voice tickling my ear, or maybe it’s a breeze, weak, when I hear, “I’m so in love with you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  My Worst Possible Timing

  Rae

  You know that hidden stretch of road out where nobody goes, and that feeling as some old song comes on and you sing along or just go there again, wishing you could dance or cry alone out in the middle of it all with those windows rolled down until the odometer slides into view and you’re, like, oh shit. But it’s not as if you can pull back or slow down or anything like that. I mean, it feels too good to just go there and stop watching your speed for once.

  It’s where Elizabeth would tell me to chill. And when that didn’t work, What the hell, Rae?

  So what if I did the whole I love you thing first? Haven’t we shared everything right down to my vast collection of rare seventies DVDs? Even those awkward shots of me in that jester suit they convinced me into wearing Halloweens ago.

  Because were it not for that song ending last night, me having to get up and go inside and start it up again, then her coming in to pour another glass, it shifted the mood. And if it wasn’t for the storm passing through, that downpour soaking my shirt as I ran back outside to grab my glass, we might’ve sat out there gazing at the haze of a moon all night, and maybe then she would’ve said it right back.

  At least that’s what I’m trying to convince myself as I kick it, weekend style, on her couch while she comes in carrying two mugs of coffee, hands me one, and takes a seat. Then she does that thing where you rest your chin on the heels of your hand before glancing up, as if I’ve caught her in some sort of lie. It’s a look too easily camouflaged behind that wide-rimmed mug.

  Still, haven’t I walked out with less of an incentive than this, too ready to wrap things up at that first hint of hesitation? When it starts to feel unpredictable, uncertain, like now.

  Because maybe this is it for her. Maybe I blew it, jumping the gun, and there she is over there thinking up ways to cut this long story short. What if we’re at that point of the show where it ends and we’re faced with empty seats after curtains fall, when we all file out, house-lights blind, and you look around to find that it was all just an illusion. Some kind of cruel masquerade. Theatrics. They’re not who you thought they were.

  Really. Maybe she isn’t. Maybe none of this is. Maybe I’m fooling myself.

  Still, why does it feel as if I’m riding a crescendo, deep and dull and reverberating? As I shift my gaze out the window.

  “Tell me what an awful host I am,” Madisen’s saying. But she’s indulging in this, reveling in it all. In my worst possible timing because, let’s face it, there are things you just don’t reveal this soon.

  “Please don’t host me,” I say, feeling as I speak that I should run, leave, something. But I can’t.

  “I’m sorry—I’ve just never been good at entertaining,” I hear as her posture softens, unlike mine.

  “Well, that’s fine,” I say, “because I’m not your guest.”

  Next she’s propping feet up on the couch, then nudging me. And every once in a while, she’ll raise a knee to run her palm up the length of her shin, that same way she fingers her lips when she uses that balm from a tin, the kind that tastes like watermelon and honeysuckle and rainbows full of infinite promises. Sweet and succulent and new. And she’s gazing at me over a lifted knee.

  While I drape an arm along the back of the couch, which she doesn’t catch, but the cat does, nudging my knuckle with her nose, then off behind the curtain to the window she goes.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about what you said last night.”

  “I said a lot,” I say, admittedly sulking.

  “I meant that part about family,” she says. “Because I’ve never really understood why their stamp of approval means so much. They’re all just flawed and damaged like the rest of us. Yet when they criticize, our world closes in. I wish I didn’t care so much.”

  “Then don’t,” I say.

  “I do,” she says. “But maybe I’m reevaluating, I guess.”

  “Look, you can spend your whole life waiting for someone to love and accept you,” I say. “Or you can live it instead.”

  But it’s as if being here seems endless and longer and extra everything. At the same time, it’s just a lot of nothing, like this. There are no someplaces to be, no anythings to do. We just laze around and talk about nothing at all until we run out of that and begin again. It’s that sense you get when you’re off on holiday, strolling through everything new. And even as they’re hurrying around and running about, serving, hosting, waiting on you, it doesn’t click, that everything goes on with or without you. Because life has paused for one brief, perfectly idyllic moment. Right here in this.

  “Then tell me why it’s so hard for me to reconcile?” she says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Why is it?”

  “To me, it feels so polarizing. How could someone give up on their own child?”

  “That’s because it is,” I say.

  “Well, I’m trying to put myself in their shoes,” Madisen says.

  “You can’t,” I say. “They live in an echo chamber. You don’t.”

  Next she’s giving me that look again. It’s the same look she gave me last night in that shared mirror in the bathroom, which feels unnerving, so much that my heart’s now pounding uncontrollably. Because I don’t know what she wants from me.

  Remembering the way she said: “You just act that way, as if nothing ever bothers you.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to get you home.”

  “You’ll say anything,” she said, towel-drying her hair. “You’re doing it to me now.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Saying everything I want to hear,” she said, “just to draw me in.”

  “Have I drawn you in?”

  “Of course you have.”

  Me: “But you don’t think I’m sincere?”

  Madisen: “I didn’t say that.”

  Me: “Then what are you saying?”

  Madisen: “Just that you don’t know me.”

  Me: “Don’t I?”

  Madisen: “Not completely.”

  Me: “You’re not at all what I expected.”

  Madisen: “What’d you expect?”

  Me: “Things.”

  Madisen: “When we met?”

  Me: “I thought you were hot. Still do.”

  Madisen: “And what else?”

  Me: “Either straight or taken. You came with somebody, and I don’t know…”

  Madisen: “If I had been taken, would that have stopped you?”

  Me: “Obviously it didn’t.”

  Madisen: “You were interesting.”

  Me: “That’s it? You found me interesting? I find you extremely hard to read.”

  Madisen: “And that goes both ways. Now I’m worried.”

  Me: “About?”

  Madisen: “I don’t know. That I could lose this. I could say the wrong thing, and that’s that. So I’m trying to be rational.”

  Me: “Which is why you’re agonizing.”

  Madisen: “The good kind of agony?”

  Me: “The only kind.”

  Madisen: “So what if this ends? Like, say there’s something about me that changes it all.”

  Me: “Nothing could.”

  Madisen: “Yes, it could.”

  Me: “And do you thin
k it would be a pretty end? Where we traipse off into the sunset, remaining friends forevermore as all lesbians do?”

  Madisen: “It won’t be pretty.”

  Me: “And why is that?”

  Madisen: “I think you know.”

  Me: “And I think you’re madly in love with me.”

  But that glimpse beneath her shirt was so distracting that I didn’t care what she said back. Much like now, with that sheen settling along the groove just above her lip as she tries to cool off, reclining against the couch, her skin so radiant and honeyed at ten a.m., haze shifting along her jaw, down her neck.

  Until I’m back to the curtain ballooning in the breeze, offering a peek of life outside before the screen sucks it flat again. As that roar of diesel pauses at the curb and I glance out and see UPS, and that uniform shifts me back into everything ordinary. To packages being tracked. To morning radio, to DJs, to banter. To news reports and social media. To road rage. And all the while, we’re here, partaking in none of that.

  “I’ve never in my life done that,” she says. “I don’t meet up with girls at bars and go back to their place.”

  “So how does it work?” I say.

  “They start as friends.”

  “Or clients,” I say.

  “As if I’ve had so many,” Madisen says. “I was married.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Everything about you is so wonderful. But that’s so overwhelming, like I can’t get out. Like I can’t stop. Like I can’t slow down enough to think, and it’s not as if you know me. And you should before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Before…you know,” she says.

  “Is this about last night?”

  “You don’t know enough about me yet,” she says. “So how could you love me?”

  “So that’s what this is about.”

  “No,” she says.

  “It’s about you and your slumber-party sweethearts braiding hair, waiting however long before ever actually doing it, and that’s knowing? How charming. It’s not about knowing, trivia, Twenty Questions. Who even cares about knowing? It’s how I feel. And I think you do, too.”

  “How would you know what I feel?”

  “Because you just told me,” I say.

  “Told you what?”

  “You told me everything I need to know,” I say.

  “But I’m just some girl you met by chance at the bar,” she says.

  “You’re not some girl,” I say. “Well, were—perhaps were. But had I thought that, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t call. I wouldn’t want you to call. And really, how do you think this is for me? You were married, you said, for how many years? Because when have I ever had anything real like that?” And shit, maybe I’m just done. Not with her but with me. “Listen.”

  “What?” she says.

  “This is going nowhere,” I say. “Plus I have messages, and everyone’s in a crisis right now, and I’ve just deserted them.”

  Which leads me to the second floor and down a hall to her room where everything seems more amusing, more inviting for some reason, now that I’m alone. This leather tray and a stack of coins. Wrapped candy. Some random key. This tube of hand cream crimped at the end. And another tube of lipstick, which I snap, then reseal, feeling more than slightly voyeuristic after I do. And there’s that balm in a tin that she carries around.

  But what am I trying to find? Some random simple object in her room that’ll answer every question I have?

  She has no television. No photographs. Nothing on top of her bureau. Just a half-melted scented candle under an open window, where you can see right down into the neighbor’s yard. They’re fueling up the grill now, their cloud of smoke, mesquite, deep voices, indiscernible from this height. It’s more like mumbling. A woman’s laughter. As I try to imagine our pianist among the crowd.

  Then I notice a baseball cap on a hook on her door and I try it on.

  And my phone rings. It’s buried under yesterday’s jeans. But I don’t pick it up.

  Instead I head down the hall to the bathroom at the end where, on a shelf near her sink, there are bottles and bottles of Aveda. More of this and that. As I twist a faucet to wash my hands and reach for the towel and find a hook, empty, until I’m walking along the hall past doors that are shut, and I’m opening one, then the next.

  Eventually reaching this closet with linens and a couple bars of soap, hand cut. And I dry my face, then hang the towel on that hook.

  Before bouncing down and spinning around the banister to the hall. My chin rests against her shoulder, and I glance at her screen.

  “All caught up?” I say.

  And she is. So I pull a chair as she twists waves of hair above her head. That scent of hickory breezing in, heavier now. As she hides her laugh behind a mug the color of this teapot, olive, like something you’d find in an import catalog.

  “What?” I say.

  “You’re wearing my hat.”

  “And your neighbors are having a party,” I say because, yeah, I forgot to take it off. “We should grill. Can I make you lunch?”

  “You don’t have to cook for me,” she says.

  “Of course I don’t have to,” I say, then follow along the ledge of her counter. “And by the way, how about that room you have up there?” As she closes the window to dull the noise. “You must have a niece?”

  But what’d I do?

  Because she’s leaving the room, and all I can see is that hand trailing down the back of her neck. Before she turns and settles on me, grave and, dare I say, apologetic? At least it seems so.

  “That room,” she begins to say, “is for my daughter.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cursed

  Madisen

  How there are two remaining doughnuts left on the counter from this morning’s meeting is beyond me. What’s more, I’m half tempted to grab one for dinner. Make that I do grab one for dinner. And as I do, as I crumble a piece over the sink, I wonder why it’s always the plain-Jane glazed they leave for last, when I happen to think they’re the be-all.

  Either that or apple fritter. Okay, chocolate glazed. Seriously, though, a good doughnut is just about as mind-altering as sex when you haven’t had one in a while.

  Or maybe I should start making something better tasting than lentil soup and crackers if I’m going to start comparing this plain-Jane doughnut to sex. And when I think about it, I might need to find something more satisfying than chocolate protein bars in the morning, add those Stouffer’s pizzas I’ve nuked for lunch every day this week.

  Still, as I finish the last of the glazed, I’m reading this note taped to the fridge in here warning of consequences should food not be cleared out by the end of day today.

  And I can see why, as I fish deep into tubs of plain and light cream cheese, coffee creamer, two liters of Diet Coke, one sad looking bottle of soy sauce, not to mention a few SlimFast shakes before finally uncovering my lunch bag, which is empty, less the few table grapes still on their vine, something I could’ve eaten instead of that doughnut.

  “Packing up?”

  “I didn’t realize you were still here,” I say, catching Kristen, our account manager, at the sink. And when have I ever blocked that out, her keyboard, the tapping, the smooth glide of that drawer on her desk. The file cabinet. Her occasional nonsmoker’s cough. And did she hear my call?

  As she washes another mug with those cared-for hands. And even her hair bounces fresh as if it was eight a.m. I’m not, more like strung together like taffy and lacking sleep, lacking everything aside from the strongest grind of coffee set to fine. Still she glances at me in that unsure, because this is my boss sort of way, then opens the cupboard to line the last few mugs mismatched on the bottom shelf.

  It’s late. And I want to say Go home already for another home-cooked meal—what I wouldn’t give. But the honest to God truth is I’m really glad she’s here—to the tune of her goings-on about her orbiting ex,
and that cabin, and its plumbing, and had she mentioned all of that work she’s put into it? Every weekend, she tells me, amid occasional jokes and remarks. Amid questions.

  Questions I don’t even know how to answer. As if weekends always consisted of car trips, of lake dips, of ordinary, when mine was anything but. After which you wander around in a fog not knowing, not rational.

  So I fall back on my generic response. “I decided to take the weekend off.”

  And she laughs before cleaning up, before setting the place up for tomorrow. The coffee filter. Twelve cups of water.

  But here’s the thing—I’m at work. Which means I talk about work. I only talk about work because nobody wants to hear about life, and besides, as much as they say they get the whole gay thing, they never really will. Which is why I steer this whole conversation back to where it belongs and say, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up.” Amid the lingering scent of lemon verbena counter spray. “Though,” I say, “it’s not the time or place.”

  “You need that budget.”

  “I do need that budget,” I say. “But I wanted to talk to you about marketing…that we’ve contracted that out to an agency. But really, I’ve been thinking about this, and we might be better off bringing that whole function back in-house, given the expansion, and maybe we could shift some of those responsibilities, all actually, to someone who knows our business.” Then I dry my hands. “Like you. Since you do have a marketing degree, and I don’t think it’s really being utilized. And, well, if we were to do that, it would mean a larger role…if that’s even something you’d be interested in?”

  “Interested,” she says.

  “Is that to say you are?” And her gaze, once blank, now softens. “Then let me see what I can do.”

  And it’s on that note that we leave, me ill-prepared for the wall of heat that greets me just outside the double doors as I rearrange keys on my ring, making my way down our sidewalk, which is lined on either side with beach-sized houses that show all of the elaborate trappings and features of being large. The kind with window fans facing inward—their stone walls, their cracked drives. Adding to that, the aroma of evening cuisine.