Tate shot Laura a look, rolling her eyes.
Krystal swiveled her head around so she could see Laura.
“And I read Tate’s horoscope,” Krystal added. “It said, ‘This month a fit of emotional eating will send you crawling back to the stale candy hearts you have left over from last Valentine’s Day. Pay attention. They will spell out a different message this time.’”
Laura raised her head from Tate’s shoulder.
“That was in the horoscope?”
“In Willamette Week. Yes. Probably,” Tate said.
“It means you and Tate would be perfect for each other,” Krystal said, staring across the dance floor at the darkened stained glass window on the other side of the room. “I knew the minute you walked into the coffee shop.”
Tate leaned over Krystal’s shoulder.
“Don’t talk to Maggie about it, okay?”
“Naw,” Krystal said. “I got your back. Mom won’t find out.”
Tate blushed, but it was only happiness making its way from her heart to her cheeks.
Then the man in the gold tutu called for a new dance partner, and Krystal stood up, saying, “Me. Me.”
“She is precocious,” Laura said once Krystal was clomping across the floor, her face set in an expression that was probably meant to be a seductive frown but looked something like a blowfish. “Is she really just like you?”
“She’s smarter than I was, but she’s more troubled,” Tate said.
“I like her,” Laura said, smiling her wry smile. “She’s got that stupid kind of hope that gets people killed.”
“Great,” Tate said.
Laura’s smile faded. “I never had that kind of hope.”
Tate leaned her cheek on the top of Laura’s head, trying to make sense of a world in which Frank Jackson could kill a girl with a wrench and his daughter could dance the tango in a room that looked like the inside of a golden candy wrapper. A world in which Laura could lean against her, stroking her ribs, her fingers just grazing the side of her breast. And a world in which Laura could leave. The next day. Forever.
Two more couples had joined Krystal and the man in the tutu, and they glided, stomped, and slid back and forth across the sanctuary, each pair making a dramatic turn a second before they crashed into the wall. Vita made a theatrical bow and asked Cairo to dance, and then there were eight bodies parting the crowd of guests.
“Vita is a character,” Laura said.
“She has a new girlfriend every week,” Tate said. “Every week it’s ‘the one.’”
“That’s the one for tonight?” Laura nodded toward Cairo.
“Yeah, although she’s been the one for a month. Maybe we can all change.”
“And what about the woman over there? What’s her story?” Laura pointed to a tiny woman with a puff of dark, gray hair.
“Barb. She shows dogs. She has a dozen Irish setters at home.”
“And over there…the man in the green dress?”
“Mica. He and his partner got together when they tied for the queen of the Rose Court. That’s the drag queen beauty pageant.”
Tate pointed out a few more local characters. Laura snuggled closer to her.
“And what do they say about you?” Laura asked, gesturing toward the crowd.
“Besides the fact that I grow the best heirloom tomatoes in east Portland?” Tate asked.
Laura laughed. “Besides that.”
“They probably say I’ve spent way too long working at Maggie’s coffee shop.”
“I didn’t mean what I said the other night,” Laura said.
Tate pulled her closer.
“They say I always fall hard for the wrong woman.” She pressed her lips to Laura’s temple to soften her words. Then, speaking into the sweet, citrus-blossom scent of Laura’s hair, she added, “They say, ‘This time she is much prettier.’ They say, ‘This time, she’s leaving even faster than the rest.’ They say, ‘Some people just have that kind of luck.’”
Tate closed her eyes. Laura said nothing. Tate heard the sound of music and boots clomping across the floor and girls laughing.
“Now turn,” the diva in the gold tutu called out.
“I’m going to get a drink,” Laura said.
Tate opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Tate said.
Laura smiled. “And then we’re going to learn to tango.”
More guests arrived and eventually the room got too crowded for dancing. Laura went in search of another drink, and Tate reclaimed her seat in the papasan chair. She was watching Laura from across the room when Abigail sidled up behind her chair and popped around its circumference like an orange sprite.
“Tate,” she said as though she had not expected to find Tate there.
Tate looked at her.
“Is she your girlfriend?” Abigail asked.
“That’s Laura.”
“I heard she was from Kentucky.”
“Alabama.”
On the other side of the room, Laura poured herself a sip of red wine in the bottom of a large wineglass. A moment later, Vita threw her arm around Laura.
“You call that a drink?” Vita grabbed a bottle of wine off the counter and dumped half the bottle into Laura’s glass. “Now, that’s a drink.”
Laura laughed, and the two of them toasted with overfull glasses. Tate thought how much fun it would be to have both of them in her life: her best friend and this strange, beautiful woman who was like a Pegasus that had alighted in Tate’s earthbound existence.
Abigail was still talking. Clearly it was important, at least to her, because she kept stepping in front of Tate and blocking her view. Finally, Tate had to tune in.
“You know they all said I was the backbone of the string section,” Abigail was saying. “It’s not so much about tone. It’s about strength of tonal unity. That’s what they missed, and I miss it too, but not in the same way.”
“What?”
“I quit the orchestra.”
“You got tired of Vivaldi?”
“I let it come between us. I can see that now. That’s why I broke up with Duke.”
“Duke.” Tate tried to piece together what Abigail had just said. She did not want to admit she had not been listening and risk the possibility of Abigail delivering the whole speech again. “Shouldn’t you have broken up with Duke because she’s crazy and she beats people up?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Abigail knelt down. “What matters is that I’m here for you, if you want me.”
“I’m with someone.”
“She won’t stay.” Abigail put a hand on Tate’s knee. “I’m not saying that to be mean. It’s just a fact. But I’m here.”
Across the room, Laura tossed her head and laughed. Her hair swam around her face like a golden storm. Behind her, someone opened a back door. Her dress rippled in the breeze. The breeze carried in the smell of charcoal fire, honeysuckle, a whiff of cigarette, and behind that the distant smell of the river. Tate thought, She’ll never stay. Then Laura was standing in front of her. Tate rose. She took the drink out of Laura’s hand and set it on a table. Then she cupped Laura’s slender neck in her hand and kissed her, because tomorrow’s sadness belonged to a woman who had not yet been born.
After the party, they returned to Tate’s apartment. Since she met Laura, Tate had spent many hours lying awake, imagining how skillfully she would make love to Laura, how she would wait—practically a stone butch—tending to Laura’s every need before her own. But it was Laura who took the lead, pushing Tate down on the futon and straddling her. Then slowly she worked her way down Tate’s body, kissing and licking and massaging Tate’s shoulders, her breasts, her nipples. When Tate tried to reciprocate, Laura chided her gently.
“I want to do this for you. I’ve been waiting too long already.”
“I know,” Tate said, thinking about the long, dry months at the end of her relationship with Abigail and afterward.
“No.” Laura’s kiss came to rest
on Tate’s stomach, just below her belly button. “You don’t know,” she whispered. “When was the last time you had sex with a woman?” Laura asked. “Besides me.”
“Nine months. Maybe a year. The last time I had good sex, besides you, was a lot longer than that.”
“You know you’re the only woman I’ve been with,” Laura said, laying her cheek on Tate’s belly and looking up at her.
“You said you came out in your twenties,” Tate said gently.
“I guessed when I was in my teens. I knew for sure I was gay by the time I was twenty, after I met my husband but before we got married.” Laura stroked one finger through Tate’s pubic hair, sending a shiver of pleasure down Tate’s legs and up her spine.
“And you married him anyway?” Tate tried to follow the conversation as Laura continued stroking her.
“I didn’t think he would cure me or anything,” Laura said. “I didn’t even think it was bad being gay, but it was my father’s first run at senate. The media was obsessed with my marriage. It was in the news more than his campaign. ‘A modern fairy tale,’ they called it. ‘The new Kennedys.’”
“And your father won.”
“Yes.”
“And you got divorced.”
“Yes. But it was my ex who asked for the divorce. I thought he was just in it for the press, like me, but he actually wanted a life together. He loved me.” Laura paused. “I didn’t understand that.”
“But you didn’t meet a girl you liked after that?”
“Not until now.” Laura slid her hand between Tate’s legs. Tate drew a quick breath. “Honestly, at first I didn’t care. I was busy. I had a career, and I was so good at it.”
Laura moved her finger in and out of Tate’s sex, gently, absentmindedly, as though she had forgotten what she was doing. Although Tate had not.
“I thought I could just turn off my sexuality. Priests do. Nuns do. That’s what I told myself. But the more I tried, the more I thought about sex. I wanted it. I thought about it all the time.”
Laura circled Tate’s clit with a slick finger.
“I don’t think that’s very strange.” Tate’s voice strained.
“Before I left my last project in Chicago, I decided I’d have a one-night stand in a city I knew I’d never come back to. I’d never had a one-night stand before in my life. I didn’t know how. But my boss called and said I was going to Portland. We don’t do business in Portland. Portland’s barely on the map. I thought, This is my chance.”
Tate rested her hand on Laura’s to stop the delicious circling of her fingers at least long enough for Tate to concentrate on Laura’s confession.
“I thought if I could do that once—if I could do this once, maybe twice a year—it would be enough. And I knew it was a mistake to pick you of all the women in Portland, but that ex of yours is so awful and you’re so beautiful.” Laura sighed. “And I didn’t expect you would come to the meeting. I thought if I could just…”
“Just…”
“I thought after I slept with you, I wouldn’t want it anymore.”
Tate relaxed back on her pillow and released the gentle hold she had on Laura’s hand.
“I don’t think that it works that way.”
“I know,” Laura said. “When I left that morning, I wanted you so much. I want to make you feel as good as you make me feel.” Her lips rested in the soft hair above Tate’s sex. “May I?”
Some vague inhibition in the back of Tate’s mind told her she should say no. She wanted it too much. Her body was too eager. She was supposed to be in control. But any rules or inhibitions she could remember slipped away as Laura kissed the inside of her thigh.
“Here,” Laura said. She kissed closer to Tate’s sex. “Or here?”
“Yes,” Tate breathed.
Laura’s first kiss was so light Tate could barely feel it, but it was at exactly the right spot, directly on her clit.
“Is that right?” Laura asked.
Tate’s hips rose to meet Laura’s lips.
“Or like this?”
Laura flicked the opening of Tate’s sex with the tip of her tongue.
“Or this?”
Tate felt Laura’s tongue moving around her clit in a slow, hot circle.
At that moment, there was nothing Laura could have done that would not have turned Tate on, but the blend of Laura’s ardor with her shy questioning—“Is this all right?” “Is that too hard?”—was excruciating. Tate had never been a vocal lover, but finally she begged Laura, “Right there,” she gasped. “Harder.”
Laura kissed her again, then plunged her tongue inside Tate’s body and then up along the side of her clit and over and around it. It was better than any sex Tate had ever had before, as though her body had suddenly opened itself to pleasure. She wanted to tell Laura how good it felt. Every muscle in her body was singing. And even as her hips lifted and her whole body strained against Laura’s kiss, she was not thinking about orgasm. She was just feeling the wild, incredible pleasure and, even better than Laura’s lips sucking her clit, pulling her toward orgasm, even better than that, she felt loved. When she did come the orgasm shook her whole body.
Laura cupped Tate’s sex with one hand, pressed her hand there as Tate rode out the last tremors of the orgasm. Then she held Tate.
“Are you okay?” Laura asked.
Since Tate could not put into words how she felt, she showed Laura with her lips and her tongue, and when Laura came Tate thought she heard in Laura’s cry the same pleasure she had felt. Then they slept through the night and late into the morning, deep in the sunshine of each other’s arms.
Tate woke to the realization that Laura was leaving Portland and the further realization that, if she were a truly good person, she would wake Laura. Laura seemed like the type to take early-morning flights, and it was already ten a.m. As it was, Tate lay motionless, barely breathing. Perhaps Laura would sleep through her flight. Perhaps there would not be another flight that day. Perhaps the next day, aliens would arrive on earth and destroy all flying vessels. Maybe Laura would be grounded forever, and they would grow their own food in the community garden, and weave baskets, and knit sweaters, and live in harmony with nature. And then die of strep throat, Tate thought. No. There was no fantasy world in which Laura stayed happily in Portland.
Tate glanced over at her sleeping lover. Laura looked like an angel, her hair fanned out across the pillow in a golden halo.
Don’t go, Tate thought helplessly, even as Laura’s cell phone chimed from the bedside table. Laura opened her eyes and consulted her phone, apparently able to go from dead sleep to smartphone calendar in one ring of her alarm.
“My flight is in two hours and twenty minutes.”
She stood in a quick, fluid motion, the sheets spilling off her. Tate admired the curve of her waist, the dimples above her tailbone. She was heavier than her tailored suits belied, plump even. Tate liked what she saw even more than she had admired the slim line of Laura’s clothes. But there was no way to tell her that. Not now. And if not now, not ever.
Laura dressed like someone in a locker room, turning away from Tate and curving in on herself as she donned her bra, her dress, and some contraption that looked like underwear but squeezed Laura to half her real size. Tate did not even remember removing that much clothing the night before. It was like Laura had carried a secret morning-after outfit. In a moment, she was fully clothed, complete with a perfectly crisp, white blazer she produced from some mysterious recess of her purse. The businesswoman reasserted, reaffirmed, and ready to go. From the same purse, she pulled out a comb and began smoothing the tangles from her hair.
“You aren’t coming back to Portland, are you?” Tate said. It wasn’t really a question.
Laura paused in her brushing and looked down at Tate, who had risen on one elbow, the sheets spilling off her body.
“On the 18th, a rep from my company will come out to close the sale. It will probably be my boss, Brenda. She’ll call another
meeting with Out Coffee. If you have the financials and the money, you’ll give it to her then. She’ll probably say yes if you have cash in hand, but if she hesitates show her the books, like I said. Show her you’re profitable.”
Tate felt suddenly self-conscious and pulled the sheet around her shoulder.
“If she says yes,” Laura continued, “you’ll sign the new lease. I’d like to be there for that, but I don’t know.”
“I don’t know if we’re going to be able to raise the money. I don’t know if Maggie will go along with any of it.”
Laura coiled her hair into a French twist and pinned it at the back of her head.
“I hope you can,” she said quietly.
Three nights, Tate thought. Is that all? There wasn’t even room in their brief relationship for Tate to cry, How could you do this to me?
“I don’t owe you anything,” Laura said. Not an accusation, just a statement of fact.
I am a fool, Tate thought.
“I have work,” Laura said.
“I know.”
Tate wanted to drop down on her knees and say, Please stay. Please stay. But what did she have to offer? A tiny apartment and barely enough money to keep her lights on? A few friends? A good party? And in that moment, everything that she had not done came reeling back to her: the degree she never finished, the scholarship she turned down, the life she could have had. She could have been a professor or an engineer living in a Victorian in the northwest hills, with her own garden, a nice car, and a purebred dog. Maybe then, Laura would have stayed. At least then Tate could have asked.
“I don’t have any other option.” Laura pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “I have to go.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to be late. I don’t even know where the airport is from here, and the TSA in Portland takes forever. No one reads the instructions. How hard is it to take your shoes off before you get to the scanner?”
There was nothing to do now, Tate realized. Laura was gone already.
“I can take you to the airport,” she said. “It’s fifteen minutes from here. You’ve got all the time in the world.”
Something True Page 16
