by K L Hughes
“I know,” she said, her voice breaking again as fresh tears fell. “I know I shouldn’t be here.” J listened to her talk, the woman’s thick accent reminding him of when he first met his best friend. Leigh’s southern drawl had still been fairly prominent at that point, though now, it had become practically nonexistent, her life in the city slowly changing her manner of speech. J forced himself to dismiss the sympathy he suddenly felt for the woman as she cried. He refused to pity her.
“Stop crying!” J shouted, unable to contain it any longer. “You don’t get to cry. You don’t get to cry in front of her. She isn’t the one who destroyed you. She isn’t the one who took advantage of you and then broke you. That was what you did to her! So, no, you don’t get to cry in front of her, and you don’t get to beg for forgiveness, and you don’t get to just show up twelve years down the line and decide you want to pick up where you left off. You have no rights when it comes to her. You should ju—”
“J, please. It’s okay, baby. I’m okay,” Leigh said softly to her best friend, laying a shaky hand on his chest to calm him down. He’d been on a tear, tears bursting from his own eyes as he’d let loose on the woman from Leigh’s past. She wasn’t angry with him for it; frankly, Beth deserved it, and Leigh knew that, but she also loved the woman. As much as she hated herself for it, as much as she’d wished for so long that she didn’t, she still loved her, and she didn’t want to see the woman hurt anymore.
Leigh took a long, deep breath, psyching herself up for what she was about to do. She turned to look up into her best friend’s eyes. “Go inside and wait for me. I need to do this alone.” He stared into her eyes for a long time, before slowly, regretfully, nodding. He leaned in and planted a soft kiss on Leigh’s lips, before giving her a look that said, “You call me if you need me.” Leigh nodded her understanding, before letting her best friend leave her to head into the coffee shop and wait for her.
The instant J left her side, Leigh regretted her decision to send him away. She missed his warmth beside her, radiating strength into her, but this was something she knew she needed to do alone. She took another deep breath to steady herself before finally willing her body to move. She took a step forward, her brain putting up a heavy fight so that it felt like she was trudging through quickly drying cement, but she took another step, and then another, and another. Each step became faster and easier, until she was standing only a few feet in front of the woman. She took a breath and inhaled the scent of her past. It rippled through her, igniting her senses with everything and nothing all at once as she both tried to let herself feel it while also trying to force it away from herself.
The electricity between the two women sparked faster and brighter than ever before. Leigh could touch the woman if she reached out. She was close enough, and she couldn’t deny the fact that part of her wanted the physical contact. Part of her wanted to latch onto the blonde and cling to her past. Another part of her wanted to slap the woman. Yet another part of her wanted to run. She was so conflicted, and she wondered if the woman in front of her was feeling as conflicted as she was.
“You came over a thousand miles to find me? How did you even know where to look?” Leigh asked, the questions coming out breathless and forced, as if she was afraid she might throw up at any moment or otherwise completely fall apart. Leigh wasn’t sure yet which of the two she was closer to accomplishing.
“I didn’t, not at first,” the woman began timidly, suddenly shifting her eyes to the ground. “I lost track of you after you graduated college, but then I saw you on The View.” Leigh cast her mind back to her interview on The View, trying to think of the exact moment in which she gave away her location. There’s no way she would have said where she lived, and simply knowing what city she lived in wouldn’t have helped the woman much. The city is so massive that the chances of Beth showing up and finding her on a whim were next to impossible. “They asked if you were considering moving to Los Angeles after the film, and you said that you liked it here too much to move to L.A., so then I knew that I could find you here.”
“This city is massive. Are you telling me that it’s pure coincidence that you just happened to show up at my favorite coffee shop, six blocks from my studio apartment?” Leigh asked, mentally slapping herself for the bite in her voice. She didn’t want to be hateful. She knew she had every right to be, but she didn’t want to be. She didn’t want to show the woman how much she’d been hurt by her. She wanted to appear and act as the grown, successful, happy woman she’d become.
Beth shook her head, a slight hint of a smile brushing her lips, though she quickly let it fall, afraid that Leigh might interpret it as the woman mocking her or laughing at the situation, and she wasn’t about to let this moment slip away from her due to some stupid misunderstanding.
“No, after I came to the city, I had no idea where to even begin looking for you, but then I read an interview you did with the Times, and you mentioned that your guilty pleasure was a vanilla mocha latte with a shot of caramel from a little shop on East 16 street. So, the next day I came here, to 16 street, and luckily, this was the first coffee shop I found, and one of the baristas told me that you came here often. You weren’t here, though, so I came back every day, hoping to see you.”
“Bu—” Leigh started to interrupt, but Beth held up a hand to stop her.
“Please, let me get this out,” Beth pleaded, her voice a cracked whisper of a prayer. Leigh shut her mouth, and after a minute, she simply nodded and let the woman continue, curious to hear where this was going.
“I came in every day for a month, and I hadn’t seen you even once. I was starting to lose hope, but then one day I came in, and there you were. You were with that guy, and you two seemed intimate. At first, I thought maybe you were together, but I remembered that you said that you were definitely a lesbian on Ellen; so, I just assumed he was a friend, and even if he wasn’t just a friend, I had decided that I didn’t care. I had come all this way to tell you, to make you understand, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way this time.”
When she finished talking, Beth’s face was flushed red and streaked with tears, though her voice had become stronger and more confident as she spoke. Leigh listened to everything the woman said, letting it all sink in and mulling it over before replying.
“To tell me what? Make me understand what?” Leigh questioned her, their eyes locking onto each other fiercely, electricity firing up once more, so intensely that Leigh feared they both might short-circuit and catch fire at any minute.
“That I’m sorry. That I never meant to hurt you. That no words will ever be enough to tell you how sorry I am or how much I regret letting you go, abandoning you, breaking your heart. That no words will ever be enough to tell you how much I loved you, how much you changed me, changed my life, how much I still love you, how much I always will.”
Beth finished the confession in a rush of words and voice, trying her best to get it out as quickly as possible so as not to lose her nerve. She watched the love of her life take in her words, Leigh’s eyes narrowing as she considered the woman before her. Beth knew what Leigh was doing—she was tearing it all apart, overanalyzing every second, every word, trying to find the flaws so that she could latch onto them, expand them, and use them to hide, to run, to justify her choice to dismiss an argument or a truth or a person or a situation. She’d always been that way. Beth knew no amount of time would ever change that; she could see it in the younger woman’s face. God, she was beautiful. She’d grown up, flourishing as the years passed, and it showed beautifully. She was a breathtaking picture of perfection, and Beth wanted nothing more than to embrace her, breathe her in again. It had been so incredibly, achingly long. Too many years of haunting dreams, of vivid fantasies, of endless tears, and of unfaltering, unwavering hope.
Leigh couldn’t help her doubt. It was warranted, justified, when it came to this woman. At the same time, though, she could hear the sincerity in Beth’s voice, the wanton, earnest need
to make Leigh understand. She stood there, staring into the woman’s eyes with scrutiny, trying to find something to break apart and analyze, trying to find something that she could prove to herself was false or dangerous. She couldn’t find anything. So, she fell back on the only defense she had.
“You have a husband,” Leigh said, sheer disgust dripping from her voice as she said it, her mind flashing back to memories of the man and how he’d treated the woman in front of her. It made her shudder with anger.
“No, I don’t,” Beth said, easing the words into the air, knowing the effect that the confession of her divorce would have on the younger woman. She watched the flash of shock, and then suspicion, and finally acceptance wash across Leigh’s face as she waited for her to say something. When Leigh finally did speak, though, it was nothing that the woman had expected to hear.
“Do you have a pen?” Leigh asked, her voice a shaky, quivering mess.
“Uh, what?” Beth asked, caught off guard by the question.
“A pen, do you have a pen?” Leigh repeated herself. After another moment of Beth standing there silent, staring at Leigh as if she’d gone mad, she finally reached into her bag and pulled out a pen, handing it to the younger woman, taking care not to accidentally touch Leigh’s hand for fear that the physical contact would scare her away. She knew that she was timid, and didn’t want to push her limits. Leigh took the pen, and reached into her back pocket. Seriously? She thought, I confess my love, and she asks me for a pen?
Leigh pulled a tiny notepad from her back pocket that she always kept on her person for jotting down writing ideas and notes while she was out, but she often forgot to carry a pen, so she frequently had to ask for one from random people in public. She scribbled something on the paper, ripped the small sheet from the notepad, and folded it up. With one last molten glance into the face of her past, she let go of the note, pushing it into the woman’s hand, before turning and heading into the coffee shop where J would still be waiting.
Beth watched the younger woman walk away, heading off into the coffee shop, suddenly afraid that she’d said something she shouldn’t have. She scrambled to unfold the paper and see what Leigh had written. When she read the note, her stomach bottomed out, and a fluttering began in her chest that had her breathless in seconds. Tears sprang to her eyes as she read the note over and over again.
1223 E 22nd St.
Studio 8-A
Tomorrow
7 PM
Chapter 10
“What the hell happened out there?” J asked, concern worrying his handsome features as Leigh sat down beside him. He slid her latte over into her hand, which she thanked him for and kissed his cheek. She seemed oddly composed despite what had just occurred, and he knew that she was holding everything in and that at some point, probably sooner rather than later, she was going to explode because of it.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Leigh said, her voice a quiet, but desperate plea for him to drop it. He didn’t. He knew better. He knew that if she didn’t want to talk to him, of all people, about it, then that meant she was planning on doing something that she knew he would consider incredibly foolish.
“Shit,” J hissed at her under his breath. She winced, knowing that he was mentally lecturing her with that one word, and she knew he was right. She had no fucking clue what she was doing, but she was going to do it anyway. She had to. Something inside her was pushing her forward, begging her to leap. So, she leapt, and she prayed to whatever God might be listening that there would be water at the bottom, that she hadn’t just plunged to her own emotional demise. Either way, she’d find out tomorrow night. “You’re going to see her again, aren’t you?”
Leigh just sat there silently, letting her lack of voice answer the question for her, though she knew that J was already entirely aware of her intentions. No one had ever been able to read her as thoroughly or as quickly as J could. She could hide nothing. J sighed heavily, but instead of berating her for what he considered an extremely poor choice, he simply put an arm around her and pulled her tightly against him. She soaked in the comfort of his embrace and fresh tears began to leak from her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered to him. She knew it took a lot for her best friend to bite his tongue on this subject, to set aside his worry for her, and to let her make her own decisions about the situation she was facing.
“Just, be careful, please,” he whispered back.
****
Leigh’s nerves were on fire as she went to the buzzer by the door, and pressed to connect the intercom. She knew exactly whose voice she would hear on the other end, and the fact that this was all really happening and not just another one of her dreams, was overwhelming to the point that she thought she might get sick.
“Beth?” she asked softly, holding the button down to speak to the person on the other end. Beth stood in the cold of the city air, just outside Leigh’s building. She’d gotten here an hour early and just paced back and forth across the street for an hour, psyching herself up for whatever might happen that night, most likely a fight, but she wasn’t going to run away from it. She was never going to do that again. The sound of her name on Leigh’s tongue made her shudder and ache in ways she hadn’t in over a decade. That sensation was both alarming and wonderful at the same time.
“It’s me,” Beth answered her, her voice coming out in a low, shaking whisper. She waited for Leigh to respond, but the brunette never did. Instead, Beth heard the door buzz and click. She pulled it open and stepped inside. She stepped onto the elevator and jabbed the button with the black number 8 on it, and felt her heart shift when the elevator did. “Here we go,” she whispered to herself.
Leigh paced back and forth in the middle of the room. She knew the woman who’d haunted her dreams and her memories for over a decade would be knocking on her door at any minute and the suspense was killing her. Before she could freak out any worse than she already was, though, she brought up a cool hand and slapped herself across the face, the sting of it bringing her back down to reality. Get it together, Leigh. Get it the fuck together. She yelled at herself to get a grip, and that’s when a soft rapping echoed against the metal of her studio door. She checked her reflection in the large mirror on her wall to make sure there wasn’t a giant red hand print on her cheek before shakily stepping over to the door, unlatching it, and sliding it open.
“Hi,” Beth said, instantly making eye contact, which in turn, instantly started a fire deep in Leigh’s belly, the flames growing with each passing second spent tumbling into the older woman’s cerulean gaze.
“Hi,” she managed to get out in a choked whisper. After a few awkward moments of standing there in silence, Leigh suddenly realized that the woman was still standing in the hallway, waiting to be invited in. She mentally cursed herself before stepping aside and motioning for the blonde to enter. Beth stepped past her, the scent of her crashing into Leigh like a tidal wave. She tried to swallow, but her throat had become horribly dry, every bit of moisture in her body pooling between her legs. She nearly moaned with the ache that accompanied the realization. She hated that her body reacted so readily to the woman. For Christ’s sake, it’d been over ten years, and she still felt the same tortuous twinge and tingling in her lower back, that near-painful itch beginning at the base of her spine and growing, spreading down her thighs. Then again, she’d never actually had a physical relationship with the woman. It had all been inside her head. The thought only further tortured her, her curiosity becoming tangible, dancing around on her skin like water—spreading, sliding, slipping, capturing everything. She shifted uncomfortably on her feet, silently cursing her body’s reaction and choosing to distract herself, to squash down the feeling, by closing the door and stepping over to the fridge to offer the woman a drink.
“You want a beer or some wine or something?” Leigh asked, opening the fridge to grab herself a cold beer. She was definitely staying away from the wine. It made her far too uninhibited for her to drink it around this w
oman.
“Uhm, wine is fine, thank you.” It was obvious to Leigh just how uncomfortable the older woman was. She didn’t blame her. It was an uncomfortable situation all around; no matter how you looked at it or whichever role you happened to play in it, it was just uncomfortable. Leigh pulled a bottle of cabernet from her wine rack and a long-stemmed glass for her guest from the hanging rack attached to the bottom of her upper cabinets. She used an electronic cork remover in order to avoid making a fool of herself. She never could manually remove the cork from the bottle and any time she did ever manage to, a piece of the cork always broke off into the wine or she ended up smacking herself in the face with her own hand as the cork came flying out of the bottle. After pouring the glass, she held it out to the woman, trying to avoid too much eye contact.
“Thank you,” Beth said sweetly, taking the glass and sipping at the wine. She closed her eyes and moaned her love of the taste, which sent a fresh stream of ripples across Leigh’s flesh and up her spine. Leigh clenched her thighs together tightly before quickly turning away from the blonde, taking a deep breath, and pulling out a chair to sit down. Beth grabbed another chair of her own accord and settled it across from the younger woman, trying to figure out what she should say or do. There really was no proper etiquette for how to spend an evening with your ex who wasn’t really your ex, who you still loved, who you flew across the country to be with, who may or may not still have feelings for you. So, she just remained silent and let Leigh take the lead. She’d pushed her enough in her past, and she knew others had, too. Leigh should get to make her own decisions.
Leigh surveyed the woman in front of her. She looked different, yet oddly the same. Her thin, yet beautiful blonde hair fell in gentle waves around her softly lined face. Her petite frame was still very much in shape despite being in her early forties now, which told Leigh that the blonde took good care of herself. Her style hadn’t changed much. Ever the hippie in her earth tones and peace signs. She was unique; she always had been, and she was beautiful. She’d always been that, too.
