Chapter 27: Slippery when wet.
Lisa’s right. The dock leading into the rippling black expanse that is the lake is covered in a combination of condensation and patches of feather-patterned frost. It’s slick enough that the intrepid Amy Ellis nearly wipes out the moment she steps onto the wooden platform, but I have long arms and fast reflexes and catch her before she dumps into the frigid lake.
For a moment afterward, neither one of us moves. She stands there, off-balance, gripping my forearms, letting me hold her weight and keep her on her feet. Then she shifts at last, glances over her shoulder.
“You saved me,” she says.
I let her go. “I think that’s a little dramatic, Amy. They were only talking about potty-training. It’s a natural fucking process, you know.”
She gives a giggle at my joke, but it transforms into an irritable groan at the end.
Reaching backward, one of her hands slides down my arm until she finds my wrist. She tugs me forward, and I’m more careful than she was when I follow her down the slippery dock towards the lawn chairs sitting at the far end.
“I don’t know why they have to do that,” Amy complains. The lawn chairs are as damp as the rest of the dock; she brushes beads of water away from them with her palm before finally giving up and sitting down in one of them anyway.
“You don’t know why who has to do what?”
“Come to a bachelorette party and then spend all their time talking about their children’s number twos. Can’t they think of anything else to talk about?”
I sit down in the lawn chair next to hers. The leather jacket I’m wearing protects my torso from the damp, but my jeans immediately get clammy. “That’s what mothers do. They talk about their kids.”
“Yeah, but…” She sighs and pushes dark hair behind one ear. Silver studs glint in the moonlight. “Not all mothers do that — show up to a party and talk potty-training. But there’s this certain breed of women who can only talk about their children. It’s like, their kids come along, and boom, they completely forget about anything else they ever were before motherhood. They start subscribing to parenting magazines, and every sentence out of their mouth begins with, ‘little Johnny did the cutest thing yesterday.’”
I lean back, turn my head to the side so I can look at her. It’s the first time I’ve seen her so worked up in our short acquaintanceship.
“Bitter much?” I ask.
“I’m not bitter,” she says quickly. “I never wanted kids. Not even when I thought I was straight. I just…” She sighs again, pushes dark hair back. I’m beginning to realize the gesture is one of her tells, revealing some level of pent-up emotion. “I just hate seeing amazing women do that to themselves. Become so single-mindedly determined to erase every bit of their personality and replace it with some kind of archetypal Uber Mother. It kills me.”
I chuckle, stare out at the undulating surface of the dark lake. Then something occurs to me all at once, hits me like a shotgun blast to the gut. I turn my head again before I speak, so I can watch her reaction.
“Were you with somebody who ended up having a baby?”
She shrugs, says casually, “A lot of women I’ve dated over the years have children now. Some with men, some with other women, some on their own.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
She turns, looks at me. Studies my face with lake-dark eyes that undulate with something lurking beneath the surface. “Then what did you mean?”
I shift forward; the plastic seat of the chair crackles beneath me. “Were you with someone who — I don’t know exactly — someone who left you because they wanted kids?”
I pause, realizing this is potentially too personal and too heavy and could endanger the fun I’m hoping to have tonight with Amy. But I press it anyway, putting forth a theory that, if I’m right, will give Amy and me more in common than I ever would’ve thought.
“Amy. Look, I’m just guessing here, but… Did somebody cheat on you and get herself pregnant in the process?”
She looks like she’s about to say something, but doesn’t. She shakes her head. “No. Not exactly.” Sighs. Pushes dark hair behind an ear. “She didn’t get pregnant when she cheated on me. Just thought she did. But she wound up pregnant a couple months later, anyway.”
I reach across the short gap between our chairs and take her hand. “I’m sorry.”
Amy won’t look at me. “Don’t be. It was a long time ago.”
“What was her name?”
“Wendy. We met when I was in business school and she was doing an MFA.”
“MFA?”
“Masters in Fine Arts. She was a painter. Did some sculpture, too, but mostly painting.” She pauses, seems to think for a moment. “I never would’ve thought we’d end up together because she wasn’t really my type — flighty and girly and filled with way more energy than me. But, I don’t know, we clicked somehow. We were together most of our twenties.”
Amy traces a vein on the back of my hand with her thumb. It tickles, sends a shiver through me.
“What about you?” she asks me. “Did you ever want a family?”
I think about Jenny and her kids — the solemn-looking Andrew, bouncy little Jake, the baby girl who shares my name. I think about Jenny showing me pictures of them on her phone, scrolling through with her thumb, smiling, telling stories about each of them, and I wonder if Amy would accuse Jenny of erasing her personality to become an archetypal Uber Mother.
And I think of lying in bed this morning, listening to the rhythm of my parents’ interwoven voices above me, missing a family with Jenny I never had.
The memories elicit a dull throb inside my chest. Somewhere in my brain, the janitor tests a lock on a door.
“I thought I wanted kids,” I say after a minute. “A lot of years ago. But at this point, I think I’m happy playing auntie to my sister’s kids and godmother for Alex’s two kids. Not that I get to see them that much. But that’s part of what I like about it — I show up for Christmases and birthdays, give ’em a ton of presents, play with ’em, leave. All the benefit of having kids, none of the responsibility.”
“Alex and Graham — they have a boy and a girl, right?”
I nod. “Danny just turned four. Aria’s two and a half — and she’s a total terror. I get the feeling she’s going to be all Graham.”
Amy laughs lightly. “So what’s Graham like? Coach Woods doesn’t talk about her much in the book. She only gets a few cameo appearances.”
A memory surfaces from last Christmas Eve, which was the last time I saw my best friends: an exhausted Graham, asleep on the couch, face illuminated in reds and blues and yellows by the Christmas tree lights, baby Aria sleeping on her chest. Alex carefully wrapping them both up in a throw blanket, while Danny asks in a dramatic stage whisper about what’s going to happen if they’re still asleep like that when Santa comes in.
“What’s Graham like,” I muse. “She’s completely fucking perfect for Alex, for starters. She’s sassy, doesn’t put up with Alex’s shit even for a minute, stubborn as a motherfucker, and she’s the glue that holds them all together. And Alex is so ridiculously in love with her that it’s fucking nauseating to be around. I hate them both.”
The thumb goes back to tracing the veins on my hand. “In other words, Graham’s as amazing as Coach Woods says she is.”
I sigh. “Basically. Yes.”
“And when you say you hate them, what you really mean is…”
“That I love them and their kids so much I would sell my soul to the devil to help them if I needed to? Yes.”
Amy laughs and leans over, kisses my cheek.
She settles back down in her seat, and we fall into a comfortable silence, the pad of her thumb still rubbing absentminded patterns on the back of my hand as we both stare out across the lake.
A couple of long, quiet minutes go by this way.
“Should we really be doing this?” Amy asks. The words are so soft that they nearly get lost in the blackness.
“Doing what? Skipping out on the male exotic dancer portion of the evening? Because if you want my honest opinion, I was kind of looking forward to that. Nothing says ‘fun’ to me like a room full of drunken straight girls and a male stripper.”
She doesn’t laugh. “Be serious for a minute. Should we really be doing this — spending all this time together, acting like this is going somewhere when I’m leaving in a few days and you… you don’t really even know what you’re doing?”
“What’s wrong with having fun for a little while? Even if it’s only for a few days?” I shrug. “Why make it complicated? Just let it be what it’s going to be — something to do in Marcine for a week besides entertaining Grace Adler. You entertain Grace; I entertain you. Nothing wrong with that.”
The thumb on my hand stops. “But Anika… I like you.”
“Well, I should fucking hope so. After all the time I spent trying to ply you with nachos and liquor at Dillan’s — ”
“Stop using humor to deflect. I’m trying to say something here.” She turns in her seat. “When I say I like you, I mean I really like you. I mean that I haven’t felt so… so right about someone I’ve met in a really, really long time.” Her eyes break away across the lake for a moment, then come back to mine. “But I’m getting too old for bullshit, Anika. I don’t have the patience for it anymore. So tell me the truth — do you see this going anywhere? Or is this a week-long fling and then we say our goodbyes? And I’m good either way, but I want to know. Because if this is just a week-long thing, I need to brace myself for that.”
It takes me a few seconds to react, and the delay must convince Amy she’s fucked everything all up, because she shakes her head like she’s angry at me or herself or me or the world, sighs, pushes dark hair behind one silver-studded ear.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said… It’s fine if you don’t feel the same way,” she starts, but I silence her by reaching over, pulling her hand away from her ear.
“Come here,” I say, tugging gently at her hand. At first, she doesn’t seem to understand, but I guide her out of her wilting old lawn chair, pull her towards me and onto my lap. She seems hesitant at first, uncomfortable, resting on the edge of my thigh like she’s going to sprint away at any second. But I take both her hands and pull her close, wrap my arms around her until she relaxes and finally lets the side of her face settle into the space between my shoulder and my neck. I kiss her forehead.
“I don’t know if this is going to go anywhere, Amy. But the way you’re feeling… it’s the same for me. It’s just… it’s so easy to be around you, and you make me feel like — like me again, and I haven’t felt like me in a really long fucking time. Does that make any sense?”
Her eyelashes tickle my throat, and I feel her grin against my neck. “Honestly? No. It doesn’t make sense.”
I let out a half-laugh. “It means I like you, too. A lot. Like a dumb-ass kid in high school ‘a lot.’ And if you want to try to… I don’t know, if you want to try to see if this can go somewhere, even if you’re in fucking Basel and I’m still stuck in Ohio, well, I’m up for at least trying.”
There’s another butterfly kiss of eyelashes against my throat, and the next thing I know, there’s a Tinkerbell-sized hand tugging at the collar of my jacket, pushing it down, exposing bare skin to the cold night air. Amy shifts against me, and the exposed skin doesn’t stay exposed for long; a mouth covers the goosebumps forming there, teeth graze against my collarbone, following the line to my clavicle and sucking the skin there into a kiss.
“Amy? Please don’t tell me you’re giving me a hickey.”
Instead of answering, her lips smile against the tender skin at the base of my throat, and the hand not holding back my collar fiddles with the jacket zipper, tugging it down. A cold hand invades the warm interior of my jacket, running down the contours of my chest and pulling up on my shirttail. Cold fingers land on my abdomen, and immediately I’m sucking in a breath.
“Holy Jesus, your hands are cold,” I accuse.
“Not for long,” she says against my collarbone. She pushes my jacket open further, and a second hand follows the first, joining in on the task of pulling my shirttail from my jeans and turning my bare stomach into goosebump patches of ice.
I reach down, shift her so that she’s straddling my lap, gently push her away from the vampire job she’s doing to my neck.
She looks up, studies my face, and in the silver moonlight, I can see there’s something in her eyes I haven’t seen before — something soft and open, something I guess that’s more like the real Amy than the hard-ass business woman she’s always presenting to the world.
Then her eyes dart down to my neck and back up, and she smirks, the secret soft expression disappearing. She touches a fingertip to the place her mouth had been earlier.
“Maybe a little bit of a hickey,” she says.
I grab both her hands and pull her roughly forward. “You’re so paying for that,” I say over her laughter, and she tries to squirm away from me, but I’m holding her tightly and of course I’m only five-fucking-thousand times stronger than my little Jane Lane-style Tinkerbell, so she can’t get away from the big-ass mouth that lands like a suction cup on the side of her neck.
“Bridesmaid!” she manages to say between bouts of giggling. “Don’t forget I have to be a bridesmaid in less than forty-eight hours!”
I draw a light line with the tip of my tongue up the side of her neck, suck lightly at her jaw. “That’s what you sorority girls learn all those fancy makeup tricks for, isn’t it?”
She puts her cold hands on either side of my face and pushes me back. “Seriously. No hickeys.”
“After the wedding?”
“I have that interview with Ohio State on Tuesday.”
“You don’t play fair,” I say, touching a finger to the spot where I think she left a mark.
Her eyes dance down to where my finger messes with my throat. The smirk comes back. “I said I liked you. I never said anything about playing fair.” She moves her hands from my cheeks to the back of my neck, lacing her fingers there, watching me.
I lean down, let my mouth find hers, pull her into a deep kiss. She obliges this time, rocks forward so that we’re chest-to-chest, doesn’t object when my fingers fumble with the buttons of her heavy pea coat, slide beneath her cashmere sweater.