Broken in Soft Places

by Fiona Zedde

In her face, Sara could see everything. The night had yielded all Rille had both hoped for and feared. In the brightly lit bedrooms and corridors of Marjani’s immense house, people had come together like animals. Eager and unselfconscious. Clothes fell away and hands reached out. Pleasure taken and given in a way Rille had experienced in college and now missed. Naked flesh gleamed under lights, sweat-soaked and ecstatic. Bodies moving over each other in a spectacle of raw fucking that begged the voyeur’s participation, made envy tug at the flesh, and tossed inhibitions out the nearest window.

  It was nothing like her encounters with the naïve students she’d occasionally indulged in before. In those situations, she could control herself; she could control her partners. When she took them, it was as if to prove she could still catch someone young, desirable, and healthy. What Rille really wanted—and what Marjani’s group sessions offered—was a complete abandonment to sensation and pleasure. Multiple hands, tongues, penises, and pussies that could take her completely away from herself.

  But Rille’s blood kept her away, led her slinking to a dark corner where she touched herself in furtive and quick strokes, caught herself crying quiet tears even as one orgasm after another ripped through her over-stimulated body.

  Staying to watch had been worse than leaving. With the misery squeezing at Rille’s mouth, Sara almost felt sorry for her.

  “I thought I could just watch them, just once, and remember what it was like to be free.”

  “You’re hardly imprisoned now,” Sara murmured.

  “I am. Don’t you see?” Rille slammed her wineglass down on the coffee table. Miraculously, it didn’t break. “I’m trapped by this body and this damn disease.” Her chin jutted forward, stubborn and belligerent. Loosened hair trembled around her face. “I’m tired of living like a victim of HIV. I’m sick of being sick. For once, I want to live my life like a woman, not as a woman with HIV.”

  Sara tamped down on the surge of worry that shot through her belly. During the past few weeks, Rille appeared to be teetering on the edge of discontent. Nothing pleased her. She sulked more, ate less, and was often gone from home. Sara had tried to find out what was wrong but only got snarled responses and a demand to be left alone. So she left Rille alone. She forced herself to dismiss Rille’s new behavior as normal mood swings. And as the recklessness and cruelty of Rille’s actions increased, so had Sara’s apathy.

  After one shallow breath, then another, Sara finally spoke. “In most situations, you do live that life, and it’s a great one. Most people would kill to have what you do. But there’s also the reality of your disease.” She lowered her voice. “You are sick and you can’t pretend that you’re not.”

  “Why the fuck can’t I pretend? Why can’t I be like you? Or Stephen?” Rille abruptly fell back into the sofa, her anger gone. “I just want to do what I want,” she said.

  “If what you want is to have unprotected and indiscriminate sex, not even the most free of us can do that anymore.” Sara paused. “It wouldn’t be the wisest thing.”

  “Fuck being wise.”

  But there was no heat in Rille’s words. It was as if she’d had this conversation with Sara in her head long before this moment. As if she knew the outcome to her desire to be free.

  “I think you’ve managed to fuck that already.” Sara picked up the remote and turned it over in her hands, resisting the urge to turn up the television’s volume and drown out the familiar sounds of Rille’s self-absorption. She felt like she’d just wasted her breath talking with Rille.

  “Who’s fucking who?”

  Stephen’s sleep-roughened voice sounded from just beyond the doorway before he appeared in the threshold, scratching his bare chest. His rough hair, plaited for sleep, hung down his ears and curled away from his neck, giving him a slightly thuggish look. A jaw-splitting yawn ruined the effect. His loose drawstring pants drooped from his narrow hipbones and fluttered around his thighs as he moved. He dropped into the loveseat and blinked sleepily at them.

  “Not Rille. That’s the problem.”

  The words spilled from Sara’s lips into Stephen’s ears. She saw him perk up, shake his head as if his senses misled him.

  “You’re not getting enough attention at home?” Stephen asked.

  But he knew better than to ask that. A full day rarely went by without one or both of them making love with Rille. Sometimes twice or three times. Once, when conversation had been scarce, Stephen and Sara shared how neither had ever had such an insatiable lover as Rille.

  “Then you must want someone else.” There was surprise, puzzlement, in his voice. “Why?”

  “Familiar fruit is not always the sweetest,” Rille said, her words poetic garbage.

  Sara put the remote control down and cupped her palms together in her lap. “You’re just being greedy. As usual.” She turned to Stephen. “What we should do is find other lovers of our own. Then she’d want us again. Rille only wants something because someone else does.” Her mouth tightened scornfully. “We apparently need to raise our worth.”

  Stephen said nothing.

  He’d never seen this side of Rille before, Sara realized. Stephen had told her how he managed to capture Rille, that bright and seemingly unattainable butterfly fluttering past the windows of his shop with a different and younger companion each weekend. When he told her that story, Sara had never stopped to ask herself if Rille had slept with any of those people, undoubtedly all students. She knew Rille. Had accepted most of what was good and bad about her. Most. She’d stepped back into Rille’s world knowing fully what she was. What Rille could offer, and what she could only mimic.

  “Would you have cheated on us or…” His eyes caught Sara’s in the darkness then released them in pursuit of Rille.

  Or offer the two of them the same deal she had offered Sara two years before. I need another lover to be happy. Take it or leave it.

  Looking at him now, Sara realized he must have known how much Rille’s inclusion of him in their relationship had hurt. He realized all those years ago and did not care. Sara glanced down at her lap, wondering how much of a revelation this was. Hadn’t she always known? Wasn’t that what she held against him all this time?

  “I don’t cheat,” Rille said, tipsy and self-righteous.

  Not anymore, Sara thought.

  Rille looked at each of them. “I would have told you.”

  “But afterward.” Stephen leaned forward in the sofa.

  “You knew where I was going. You know what happens at those parties.”

  “So it would be our fault, my fault, for expecting you to control yourself like you’ve done over the years?” Sara tilted her head in question.

  “Shut up.” Rille’s voice snapped cold and hard. The generous drunk abruptly gone. “You are not my mother. Don’t speak to me like you are.”

  Sara clenched her teeth. “I’m treating you like my partner, not my child.”

  At her silence, Stephen looked at her more intently. “You are my partner, aren’t you? You are our partner.”

  “I am myself.” Rille’s tone was final.

  She picked up the remote again. “So your sickness was the only thing that stopped you from enjoying yourself at that party, right? Not any notions of partnership or honesty?”

  “Yes.” Rille dismissed Stephen from her gaze.

  Sara released a sigh, silently grateful for the truth. Although she knew Stephen was not. “Thank you,” she said.

  The television’s sound came back on with a press of her finger. A commercial flickered on. The sound of African drums and musical wailing. An advertisement for group vacations to the unspoiled heart of Kenya. Sara wondered if that even existed anymore. She didn’t look up when Rille got up from the sofa, pausing for a half a dozen heartbeats’ worth of silence, before padding barefoot, silently, from the living room.

  Stephen’s breath was slow and measured. He said nothing. Sara said nothing. When the golden barrenness of the Sahara desert reappeared on the television sc
reen, they both sat in the dark and watched.

  Reunion

  Sara/2002

  Sara dropped her father’s letter in her attaché and snapped the black alligator case shut. A flick of her wrist to confirm the time, and she was out of her condo, slamming the self locking door behind her before sailing down the stairs and to her car in the underground parking lot. Although she’d only given her father’s latest missive a quick glance, she gathered that things were still the same with him.

  Retired from the seafood factory with a middling pension spent on the necessities like envelopes, stamps, and a subscription to National Geographic, her father lived a peaceful life. In cheerful rebellion against Sara’s frequent though brief e-mails that he received on the computer she’d bought for his house in Tampa, Daniel Chambers diligently wrote his daughter once a month. In lengthy letters, he detailed the minutiae of his days and shared feelings on everything from the tedium of Florida retirement to his heartache behind the reason Sara didn’t visit him more often.

  His vivid and emotion-laden words strongly evoked the Tampa house Sara hadn’t set foot in since her mother chased her out with words that pelted and stung her tender skin. Eight years. Sara pressed harder on the gas, pushing the silver Volvo faster up the highway.

  In her eleventh floor Buckhead office building, she stepped through the heavy steel double doors of Winthrop, Baines, and Associates.

  “Good morning, Anthea.” She greeted the receptionist with her customary smile and Anthea nodded and smiled, apparently occupied with the voice chirping from the headset sitting neatly on her dark, upswept hair.

  In her office, Sara put her briefcase beside the desk and booted up her computer. A knock sounded abruptly at her door before her boss’s graying dark head peeked in. Today, like most days, he looked ready for the cover of GQ. Three piece pinstriped navy suit. Purple paisley tie. Iron gray eyes.

  “Sara, can I see you in my office for a moment?” Lloyd Baines looked at Sara as if there was only one possible answer to that question.

  She checked her watch to make sure she had enough time to spare before her first morning appointment.

  “Sure.”

  She plucked her BlackBerry from her purse and followed him out the door and into his brightly lit corner office. As he shut them into the large room, she noted with surprise the other figure sitting in one of the two large leather chairs in front of his desk.

  “Have a seat,” Lloyd said.

  She sat.

  Lloyd moved behind his desk, glancing once at the other man sitting across from him before giving his full attention to Sara.

  “This is a little short notice,” he said, “but Derrick here is in need of a pinch hitter.”

  Sara crossed her legs. Lloyd’s habit of talking in sports metaphors had always annoyed her. When she’d first started at the firm, she tried to learn every metaphor, analogy, and term that could possibly trip off her boss’s lips. But by the second year, she’d grown fed up with his “good old boys’ club”-speak and merely asked him to clarify if she didn’t understand something.

  She pursed her lips. “What’s the situation?”

  In the seat next to her, Derrick Wainwright gave her an apologetic glance. Newly clean-shaven after a recent divorce, his face held a smooth, boyish quality that was taking Sara some time to get used to. The mountain-man lawyer of the office was no more.

  Derrick smoothed his houndstooth pant leg. “My client is a professor at Emory University being sued by a student for sexual harassment and breach of promise. The student has no proof so we’re going for a dismissal of all charges.”

  “Did he harass the girl?”

  “Not he. She.” Derrick glanced at a spot just to the left of Sara’s ear before looking her again in the face. “And it’s a matter of perspective.”

  Meaning the two of them did have an affair, but after being dropped, the student got angry. And vengeful. Not Sara’s kind of thing. “Ah…I’m not sure about this one. There isn’t anyone else in the office who can take the case?”

  “I think you’d be better suited for this, Sara,” Lloyd got up from behind his desk and cracked his knuckles. “I’m going to take an early lunch and leave you two to work this one out, but I’d really like for you to take the case. This Thompson woman isn’t just some sour-faced academic who can’t stop putting her puck where it doesn’t belong.” He paused as if to let that metaphor sink in. “Her people are well-connected in Atlanta. If the firm makes this thing go away, the family will be very grateful. They’re shopping around for a firm to keep on retainer.”

  Lloyd gave Sara one last meaningful look before closing her inside his office with Derrick.

  She unclenched her back teeth before facing Derrick again. “I guess that’s that then.”

  “Sorry about this, Sara. But she—I just can’t continue to represent her.”

  Realization slowly began to dawn. “Is she that bad, or that good?”

  A blush worked its way up Derrick’s handsome face. Before, his neatly clipped beard would have hid most of that color, given him some privacy instead of baring his emotions for Sara to see. She felt embarrassed for him.

  “Ms. Thompson is very attractive,” he said.

  “And you’re very divorced.” Which meant that once off the case, he’d be free to pursue the woman. God save her from men and their hormones. Because this one couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, she’d have to take on another client when her current caseload was more than enough to keep her in the office past six every night. “No problem,” she murmured, her tone conveying just the opposite. “Do you have her file with you?”

  Without saying a word, he pulled a thick manila folder from the briefcase at his feet and handed it over. Sara’s mouth tightened. Derrick and Lloyd had both been so sure that she would take the case. Trying not to show her annoyance, she flipped the file open and skimmed the first page. The client’s full name caught her eyes. And held them.

  Sara looked up at Derrick. Was the world really this small?

  “What? Did I forget to include something?” He frowned and leaned close to look at the papers in her lap.

  “No,” she said, her voice echoing dully in her ears. “There’s more than enough here.” Sara cleared her throat and closed the folder. “If I need anything else, I’ll get it from her.” She stood, holding the file and her life’s newest earthquake, loosely in her hand. “Tell me, why did you ask me to take on this case? The woman is bisexual. Aren’t you and Lloyd worried that she’ll seduce me too?”

  Derrick’s mouth twitched. “No.” As if it were the most ridiculous thing in the world that she would be ruled by emotions. “You’re actually the only one in the office who I think would be immune to her seduction.”

  She didn’t have to ask why. Sara knew that the others in the office thought of her as cold and remote. Although what Lloyd would refer to as a “team player,” she didn’t play with her coworkers outside of the office. At the Christmas parties, she drank and chatted, obligingly bought a secret Santa gift, sometimes even showed up with a pretty woman on her arm. But that was all. They didn’t know any more about her life than they had to, and she preferred it that way.

  “I’m disappointed that it wasn’t my brilliant legal mind that had you and Lloyd knocking at my door.” Sara made her tone deliberately neutral.

  “If the boss didn’t think you could win this, hard-ass or not, he wouldn’t have suggested you for the case. He wants her family’s business.” Derrick gestured for her to precede him.

  Sara nodded then stepped through the door that he held open for her. “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all we can ask for. Thank you.” He gave another one of his naked smiles before walking in the opposite direction toward his office.

  Sara watched him stride away, a hand in his pocket, the tailored black suit shifting over his lean but broad-shouldered frame as he moved. Did the Merille Thompson of the thick legal file and pending lawsuit return any
of his affection? And if so, what did that mean when Sara finally saw her again?

  *

  Sara walked briskly down the Emory University hallway, high heels rapping against the newly installed marble floor, her attaché gripped firmly in her hand. This should be just like any other case. The thought swirled in her head as she walked past closed doors, the lingering smell of dry erase markers and teenage hormones. With each step, her loosened dreadlocs bounced against her shoulders.

  Near the end of the hall, she stopped before a frosted glass door. The words “Conference Room” etched across the glass assured her she was in the right place. Sara put her hand on the knob, turned it. Startled clear eyes leapt to her face, but she only raised an eyebrow before taking a chair at the head of the small rectangular table.

  At twenty-eight, Rille looked…healthy. Thick blond and dark curls pulled up in a twist left a few wisps of hair framing a brown face still unlined around its aggressive bones. A pale green sweater and camisole twin-set brought out the color in her eyes, skimmed her slender yet softly rounded body. Rille was just as Sara remembered. She didn’t look sick.

  “Good morning,” she said to her ex-lover, as if it had been only a few hours instead of eight years since they’d last seen each other.

  After Rille’s breakdown on the stairs in front of Sara’s room, they’d never spoken again. For the first couple of weeks, it was as if Rille disappeared from the campus altogether. All attempts that Sara made to contact her were met with silence. Rille’s roommate had nothing for her but a blank stare, a gentle closing of the dormitory room door in her face. No one knew where Rille had disappeared to. No one wanted to talk. Then a month later, Sara saw her, a ghostly presence near the student affairs office who did not turn when Sara called her name. But that bright hair and dark skin were unmistakable.

  Then much later, Sara found out through Devi that Rille had finished up the semester at Vreeland in near-seclusion and had successfully defended her thesis. She then enrolled in a PhD program in her hometown instead of at MIT with Devi as she’d originally planned. The news had left Sara reeling. Her first lust. Gone, just like that. No explanation. No closure. Although Rille had been the one to cheat on her, to lie to her, to endanger her health, Sara felt she was the one being punished.