Mina Murray’s Journal

Talking about how Lucy and I got together sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to find my old journal from that month to see what I wrote and…wow. I can almost feel my happiness coming off the page. I’m gonna send a copy to Lucy because I don’t think I ever actually showed it to her.

Oh my god. Oh my fucking god, I told her. I can’t believe I did it. I…I feel like my heart has gotten so big it’s bursting out of my skin and I keep almost screaming, but silently, like my body can’t believe it is host to such satisfaction, FINALLY, after all these years. Lemme back up. I don’t want to forget one moment of it.

Lucy called me in the best mood. She was happy and carefree and wanted to meet for lunch and quarter martinis at Commander’s Palace. She’s one of the only locals I know who ever goes there, but she loves it. Her grandparents would take her and Harker when they were kids so she’s sentimental about it. I told her we’d probably need reservations and she laughed and I could practically see her rolling her eyes at me.

“Just wear something fabulous and meet me there at noon,” she said, and hung up.

I honestly did not know I was going to do it. I was just happy at the idea of a fancy lunch with Lucy, happy she’d thought of me first. And okay, fine, I don’t hate Commander’s Palace. The teal, and the cheerful striped awnings, and the garden dining room. Besides, it feels so special to get classily drunk at lunch, duh. I found a red dress in my closet that my mom had bought me and I’d never worn because it really wasn’t my style, but for some reason it just seemed like the thing to wear. There was something in the air. I put my hair up in a ponytail and put on mascara, too, hoping to live up to the dress.

When Lucy crossed the street, I swear my fucking breath caught. She was so stunning. She always is, but she was wearing this long, sleeveless white dress that hugged her curves and curled around her ankles as she walked. The white dress and the sunlight through the mossy branches of the oaks made her brown skin glow like a supermodel. She smiled when she saw me and grabbed my hands in excitement at the sheer pleasure of our outing.

Christ I’ve loved her forever, haven’t I.

We ordered turtle soup, barbequed shrimp, and crawfish bread, and settled in with our drinks. Lucy brought a spoonful of soup to her lips, then grinned hugely at the taste, like in the whole world she couldn’t imagine a place she’d rather be. “Yay,” she said, and winked at me.

I swear I don’t know what happened. One second Lucy was eating soup and the next I was telling her everything.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you too, Min,” she said, and squeezed my hand quickly.

I caught her hand so she couldn’t pull away and shook my head.

“No, I— I need to tell you this and I need you to hear it. And I…uh, I really hope you don’t want to leave because we just ordered an expensive lunch.” I swallowed hard. “I love you, Luce. Being your friend all these years has been the best thing in my life, but I haven’t been honest with you. I haven’t thought of you as just a friend in…I don’t know…I just know that you’re the best thing in my life and I care about you so much, and you’re the person I am always happy to see no matter how tired I am. So if there was ever a chance that you might feel that way about me, then—”

And then the motherfucking waiter showed up with our entrées. And inside I screamed forever. I could feel my face turning red and I dropped Lucy’s hand.

“Ladies,” he said. “The shrimp for you, and the crawfish bread. What else can I get for you?”

A smile of wonder and delight crept across Lucy’s face and she grinned up at him.

“Nothing,” she said. He nodded politely. “I don’t need anything else. My best friend is in love with me!”

And because it is a human impossibility to be grinned at by Lucy and not feel like the universe is awash in the warm glow of perfection, he grinned back.

“How wonderful for you, miss,” he said sincerely, and backed away with a longtime waiter’s grace.

“Are you really?” Lucy asked, eyes burning into mine. “Like, really for real actually in love with me, not just wanna fuck me, not just feel comfortable with me since we’re so close so it seems easy to date me instead of getting close to strangers, actually fucking in love with me, Mina Murray?” Her grin had turned to a glare. “Because if this is just you trying to avoid dating again, I swear to god, I’ll—”

“Lucy, Lucy, no! I mean yes! I mean, oh my god are you seriously yelling at me right now? That’s some harsh shit!”

Lucy cringed and looked down, then took a deep breath and smiled at me. “You really love me.”

“I really fucking do, Luce. Sorry to spring it on you. I just uh… Do you…maybe…um.”

“Dude, no way would she have gotten that mad if she didn’t love you too,” hissed a teenage girl at the next table, having lunch with a very old woman who nodded primly in agreement.

“These tables are very close together,” I muttered nervously, and downed my martini, then stared at the table.

Lucy nudged my foot under the table and I looked up.

“I had a dream about you last night,” she said. “You made me go on a vacation with you to Ohio, and then you made me take tours of the most boring, non-historic houses I’d ever seen.”

My stomach clenched. Lucy had the power to make anything interesting and fun, but I did sometimes fear that she found me boring.

“And I was like, ‘yeah, great, let’s go to Ohio and look at this random lady’s 1970s kitchen, great.’ Because doing anything with you seemed great. And I woke up smiling and told you to meet me for lunch.”

Her smile was soft now, and she reached for my hand.

“Plus I wanna kiss the hell out of you right now, so.” But she just lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed my knuckles. “Guess it must be love.”

Tears blurred my eyes so I looked down, but I could feel myself smiling.

“Eat your food,” she said gently.

I’m sure it was good, but I didn’t taste a single bite. We each had three twenty-five cent martinis, per the restaurant’s limit, and when we got the bill, the waiter placed a takeout box on the table.

“I thought the occasion called for something sweet,” he said, and smiled.

When we walked outside, the sun was still shining and the air still smelled of magnolia and jasmine, but I felt different. Lucy took my hand and tugged me across the street to the Lafayette Cemetery. I memorized the feeling of her fingers in mine, even though I’d felt it a hundred times before. Because this was the first time that she was mine. The cemetery gates wouldn’t close for another half hour and Lucy pulled me down the central aisle and off to the left, to the spot we’d sat at since we were kids. She was giggling and I tripped over tree roots, and we agreed we were a bit tipsy from lunch. Under the shade of a huge tree that grew over the gate, we sank down to the marble plinth and Lucy opened the takeout box, revealing a piece of chocolate cake.

She ran her finger through the frosting and licked it clean. My stomach flipped. I was too full for cake yet, so Lucy took a bottle of gin from her purse instead, and smirked at me.

“Where’d you get that?”

“The bartender.” She winked and took a sip, then handed it to me. “Drink some of that and then tell me everything you love about me!”

She threw her head back and laughed, and I took her by the shoulders and kissed the laugh from her lips. I felt her surprise as she froze for a moment, then moaned and kissed me back. Lucy. Lucy Westenra was kissing me back. My best friend. The woman I had loved for so long. She kissed like she had all the time in the world. Like there was no one else in the graveyard, or the block, or the whole city of New Orleans, except us, mouths pressing together, breath shared between us.

It was the greatest kiss of my life. Then she pushed me back against the grave and kissed me again. And that was the greatest kiss of my life. Kiss after kiss, each one outdoing the one before it, until keeping score was pointless and all I could taste was Lucy.

“God damn you’re a good kisser,” Lucy said. Then she held up her hand for a high five and I knew I hadn’t lost a friend. I’d just added another layer to our relationship. Relief washed over me so suddenly I felt lightheaded.

Or maybe that was the gin.

Either way, I grabbed her and held her and she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. We were both grinning when we pulled apart. We sat in the shade and drank most of the gin and told each other what we loved about each other. And when a tour guide’s voice boomed out, leading her group to a nearby gravestone, we didn’t bother moving. Lucy gave the group a drunken salute and I hid my face in her shoulder, and when they moved on we snorted with laughter at their averted eyes.

“What, haven’t you ever seen two best friends making out and drinking gin on a grave after confessing their love, tourists?!” Lucy yelled. Then she lay back and stared at the clouds, and I couldn’t be sure what happened next because one moment the gin bottle was dropping to the pavement next to me and the next I was asleep.

Although the crypts themselves are privately owned, the Lafayette Cemetery is maintained by the city and closes at 3pm daily. But everyone who’s spent a lot of time there knows that the vigilance of those who close the gates varies wildly, and that some, when faced with two passed-out drunk women, would rather look the other way than wake them. Which must be what happened, because I woke up as the sun was setting, and could only stare at the grave in front of me and make small sounds to try and wake Lucy without moving a muscle. I heard the sound of violent heaving and noted she was awake.

I had a brief, warm moment in which I thought, Oh yeah, Lucy loves me! before I joined her in my own disgorging.

It wasn’t the way I thought we would first wake up together after becoming a couple. But I wouldn’t change a moment of it.