Falling Gracefully: A Lesbian Romance

by Cara Malone

  When dinner was over, Steve graciously paid for Jessie’s meal despite the fact that he’d been dragged on this date just like her, and then Blaire suggested they all go back to her house. Her parents were out of town and she had a fire pit in the back yard. She said they’d sit around the fire and have a few beers from her dad’s fridge in the garage. That sounded casual and Jessie figured there would be less pressure to act romantic when they were just sitting around talking.

  She was wrong about that.

  No sooner had Josh gotten the fire started than Blaire was taking him by the hand and leading him into the house. Jessie felt anxious – she didn’t want to be alone out there with Steve, struggling to come up with conversation topics. She caught Blaire’s eye and tried to convey her panic. This whole thing was supposed to be a double date, and she was beginning to doubt Blaire knew the meaning of that phrase.

  Blaire raised her eyebrows at Jessie, nodding at Steve in an expression that clearly meant go for it. Just before Blaire and Josh disappeared into the house, she mouthed the words ‘spare bedroom’ to Jessie.

  Then it was just the two of them, Jessie and Steve sitting uncomfortably next to each other and staring at the fire. She tried to count the seconds that they were alone, wondering how long it would be until Blaire and Josh returned. Were they even planning on it, or was Jessie on her own out here? Eventually, Jessie gave up waiting and decided that if she just acted like a normal teenage girl, she might start to feel like one, too. It was impossible to tell how much time lapsed between the moment Blaire disappeared and the one in which Jessie turned to Steve and said, “Do you want to go inside with me?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Steve slept on the couch the night of Ellie’s recital and the next morning he and Jessie sat down at the kitchen table again to figure out how to move forward. It felt surreal – they didn’t argue any more, and there were no more tears. They calmly discussed the terms of their divorce, and after a few minutes Jessie got up and made Steve a plate of eggs and sausage just like she always did on mornings when they were both at home.

  The only difference was that this morning, Jessie woke up with the feeling of a great weight being lifted off her chest. She never noticed it when they were married, but she’d spent the last five years carrying a huge burden like a boulder depressing her lungs and keeping her from taking a full breath. It was gone now, chased away while she slept, and she wanted to fling open every window in the house and take big, gulping breaths of fresh air.

  By the time breakfast was over, Jessie and Steve had decided on a few things – first and foremost that Ellie would always be their number one priority.

  “It breaks my heart to think about her not seeing you every day,” Jessie said.

  “I know,” Steve said. “But it’s not like I got to see her much during the week anyway thanks to my work schedule. She’s already used to seeing me only on the weekends. That’s how most people do split custody, right?”

  “I think so,” Jessie said. There hadn’t been much to mourn about the end of a passionless marriage, but she couldn’t get over the idea of tearing Ellie away from her father. That had been the whole point of staying with Steve. She stared out the window for a minute, pondering as her eye caught the ‘For Rent’ sign that never seemed to leave the yard. Then she said, “What if we don’t do it like that, though?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Move in next door,” Jessie said, pointing to the wall they shared with the other half of the duplex. “It’s for rent. Ellie could go back and forth whenever she wants. It would be exactly like how we are now, except with an extra wall between us. We can have our separate lives and Ellie still gets both of her parents.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Steve said. “But…”

  “What?”

  “How the hell could we afford it?” He asked. “We’re barely making ends meet as it is, and you want to add a second rent payment?”

  “We’d have two rent checks no matter what if one of us moved out,” Jessie said. “You know there have been a million different tenants in that apartment since we moved here. I bet the landlord would be thrilled to rent it to trustworthy people he already knows, and maybe he’d even give us a little discount for renting out both halves. Come on, Steve. You know this is a good idea.”

  ***

  It took the two of them a couple of months to save up the money for a deposit on the other half of the duplex, during which time Steve continued to sleep on the couch. They explained the situation to Ellie as best they could, and after they reassured her that daddy was only going next door and he’d still tuck her in at night, she warmed to the idea.

  It helped soften the blow when they told her she’d be getting a second bedroom in the new apartment. It turned out to be a blessing that Mary Beth’s was closed for the summer because Jessie could put her whole paycheck toward furnishing the second apartment, and when she realized she had an extra hundred dollars, she decided to surprise Ellie by turning her new bedroom into a dance studio. Jessie bought a dozen full-length mirrors and hung them on one wall, then Steve made a ballet barre out of a handrail he picked up at the hardware store. It wasn’t the most glamorous ballet studio in the world, but Ellie flipped when she saw it and Jessie knew that they’d made the right choice renting the other half of the duplex.

  The strangest part of splitting up with Steve was being alone in the bed every night. Jessie had gotten used to the rhythmic, slightly nasal inhale and exhale of Steve’s breath as she fell asleep beside him. Now the bed felt huge and empty and she found herself staring at the ceiling for a lot longer than it used to take to fall asleep.

  Usually, she spent that time thinking about Melody, and that was strange too – strange in a wonderful way - because it was the first time in Jessie’s life when she could think about another girl without an undercurrent of guilt.

  Jessie quickly found herself actively trying to fend off sleep just to spend more time with the Melody that resided in her mind. She went back again and again to the way it felt to slide her hand into Melody’s, and the way her hips felt against Jessie’s palms the last time she saw her. She imagined those stunning chestnut eyes and she craved the chance to act on that desire. The summer seemed to stretch on forever and Jessie thought again and again about the next moment she’d see Melody when dance lessons resumed in the fall.

  CHAPTER 26

  Melody spent her first summer back in Lisbon hiding from the world in Andy’s smoke-filled basement. She thought she’d be doing the same this summer, but a lot changed during the year and she was finding life underground to be less and less appealing. For the first time in almost two years, she wasn’t in the mood to hide anymore.

  When she came home on the night of the recital, Melody felt a new sense of pride swelling in her chest. She’d stood in the wings and watched Ellie’s solo performance, miming the choreography and watching in awe as Ellie nailed the whole thing. When it was over, Ellie ran off stage and threw her arms around Melody, pleased as punch with herself, and Melody cheered her on as she dashed out of the wings to get accolades from her parents.

  That was the moment Melody understood what Mary Beth had been trying to do when she forced Melody into the studio against her will. Watching Ellie take the lessons she’d given her and turn them into something beautiful, Melody suddenly felt like she’d found a new way to do ballet – one that didn’t involve panic attacks and bleeding toes and inferiority complexes and massive amounts of debt.

  The morning after the recital, Melody got out her laptop and started researching colleges in the area. She had enough of performing arts degrees, but she thought she could manage one in dance education.

  “I think that’s a really good fit for you,” Dr. Riley said when Melody brought up the idea.

  “I figured I could start in the fall and ask Mary Beth to give me some more classes as a substitute when her regular teachers call off,” Melody said.

  “Sounds like you�
��ve thought a lot about this,” Dr. Riley said.

  “I guess so,” Melody said. “I have a few other things I’m trying not to think about.”

  “Such as?”

  “Jessie.” She said it merely as a statement, not intending to discuss the matter, but Dr. Riley let the room fall silent so long that Melody started squirming in her seat and felt obligated to explain. “The last time I saw her was at the recital. We had a really intense moment followed by a really awful one. Her husband was there and I think they got in a fight because of me. I keep thinking the worst case scenario is that she doesn’t even enroll Ellie for the fall – maybe they go to some other dance studio next year and I never see either of them again.”

  “Why do you think that possibility bothers you so much?” Dr. Riley asked.

  “Ellie was my first student,” Melody said, willfully ignoring the thought of never seeing Jessie again. That idea was just too painful to acknowledge, particularly if it turned out to be Melody’s fault for giving her husband the wrong idea. “She was my first student and I kinda want to see that through.”

  “Do you think there’s anything to be done about that situation over the summer?” Dr. Riley asked.

  “No,” Melody said. “Not really.”

  Even if she had a way to contact Jessie and apologize, doing so would only make things worse.

  “Let’s put a pin in that one until the fall, then, and see how it goes,” Dr. Riley said. This was incredibly unhelpful, but she was right – there was nothing to do until classes resumed. Dr. Riley asked, “So have you told your parents about your idea of going back to school?”

  “Hell no,” Melody said with a laugh. “Do you know how much they’d badger me about it? I won’t tell them until I get an acceptance letter and a financial aid package.”

  “So you’ve definitely decided to apply.”

  “Yeah,” Melody said, considering. “I suppose I have.”

  ***

  On her way home from her therapy session, Melody paused on the sidewalk in front of Andy’s lawn. It had been mowed recently – a rare sight – and she suddenly realized it had been a while since the last time she saw him. Her trips down to the basement had been a daily occurrence through most of last year, and as she got busy at Mary Beth’s, they started to become less frequent without either of them noticing. Melody cut carefully across the grass and knocked on the door to the basement.

  “Who is it?” Andy shouted from the couch.

  “It’s the golden child,” she called back and he yelled for her to come in.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asked as she came down the stairs. “You never knock.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a while. Thought maybe you died and your parents hired a landscaper.”

  “Har har har,” Andy said with a roll of his eyes.

  “Seriously, have you seen the lawn?” Melody quipped. “It doesn’t look like crop circles, but I’m not ruling out alien interference.”

  “I did it, jerk,” he said as she sat down in the recliner. “I started doing some lawn mowing, you know, for a little extra weed money.”

  He added this caveat in the same way Melody had tempered her parents’ excitement when she told them she landed the receptionist job last year, lest they be too proud of her. She grinned at Andy.

  “What?”

  “You got a job,” she cooed. “Look at you, all grown up and responsible.”

  “Shut up,” he said, nodding at the bong in its customary place on the coffee table. “Wanna smoke?”

  “Nah,” she said, and then because she couldn’t help pestering him, she said, “You know lawn mowing is a gateway job. Next thing you know you’re going to be sitting at a desk and wearing a tie.”

  “Never,” he said. “They’re not even paying me above the table.”

  “Well, baby steps,” Melody said with a laugh. “You want to hear something even crazier? I think I’m going back to school.”

  “Back to New York?”

  “Hell no,” she said. “Granville State maybe, or Westbrook. I’m thinking about getting a dance education degree.”

  Andy took this news without much reaction, saying flatly, “That is crazy. It’s cool, though.”

  It meant that their friendship had just about run its course. They’d both known, at least on a subconscious level, that it had an expiration date and now that they didn’t have apathy and weed in common anymore, they didn’t need each other. Melody barely missed this basement, with its persistent old sock smell and dank air, but she was happy to see that Andy was moving on as well, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think it will be. Well, I just dropped by to make sure you didn’t sink so far into that couch that you got trapped or something. Talk to you later?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Andy said. Melody climbed back up the creaking stairs and when she got to the door he called, “Nice knowing you, golden child.”

  Then he reached for the bong and she walked carefully across his neatly manicured lawn to her parents’ house.

  ***

  Melody’s first day back at Mary Beth’s in late August just so happened to be a Tuesday morning private lesson. She’d been surprised when Mary Beth called to tell her Jessie and Ellie wanted to continue them, but she had no idea what to expect from Jessie.

  Ellie was six now, old enough and dedicated enough to memorize her own routines, so maybe Jessie wouldn’t even come inside. Or maybe she’d pull Melody aside to yell at her for putting her in such a compromising position with her husband. Or worse, maybe she’d come in and find a spot along the wall where the parents sat and not even acknowledge Melody.

  When the morning came, Melody got up and put on a black leotard with a pleated bust that used to be her favorite back in her Pavlova days. She didn’t have much to show off – she’d always been built like a bean pole – but it accentuated what little curves she had and she couldn’t help reaching for it when she thought about the possibility of seeing Jessie. She wouldn’t mind teasing her just a little bit - in case Jessie planned to ignore Melody through the whole lesson, she would at least make it difficult.

  She pulled on the fuzzy pink sweater that she wore during Ellie’s private lessons last year, not worried so much as she had been in the past about the possibility of the sleeves riding up. She had a gnarly scar on her forearm, but eventually it would fade and in the meantime, she could finally look at it and see a battle wound instead of an admission of failure. She didn’t fail – she survived.

  Melody arrived at Mary Beth’s a few minutes early, unlocking the door and heading into the studio. She went to the center of the room to do a few warm-up stretches and work through the routine she had already begun to choreograph for Ellie’s recital dance this year. She turned on some music and for a few minutes it was just her and the mirrors, enjoying the ballet like she always used to before New York.

  Then she heard a familiar shriek behind her. “Miss Melody!”

  Ellie dashed into the room, wearing a brand new pink leotard and looking about half a foot taller than the last time Melody had seen her. She held a new pair of ballet slippers in her hands, dangling them by the elastics, and Melody guessed she had probably grown out of her shoes from last year, or else worn them out practicing. Melody used to wear through a pair every six months or so because she danced so much and it was clear that, schedule or not, Ellie was going to be the same way.

  “Hey, Ellie,” she answered cheerily. “How was your summer?”

  She was watching the studio door out of the corner of her eye, waiting to find out if Jessie was here, too, and trying not to get her hopes up too high. Fortunately, Ellie didn’t seem to notice her distraction.

  “It was good,” she said. “I have my own ballet studio now!”

  “Oh wow,” Melody said. “How’d you get so lucky?”

  “My dad moved to-”

  “That’s enough,” a familiar velvety
voice scolded. “Remember what we talked about, Ellie.”

  Melody turned to see Jessie coming through the studio door and tried not to grin like an idiot. She missed the hell out of Jessie, and relief washed over her knowing that their interaction at the recital hadn’t been the end of them.

  “Sorry,” Ellie answered, chastised, and she went to the opposite end of the room to use a chair as she put on her ballet slippers.

  Jessie walked further into the room, and Melody’s heart almost stopped as she realized Jessie was making a bee line for her.

  “Hi,” she said breathily as Jessie stopped right in front of her. They were standing far closer than was polite and Melody felt an electric tingle running through her body as she looked into Jessie’s moss-green eyes.

  “Did you have a good summer?” Jessie asked, and it was such a mundane question it drove Melody crazy.

  She didn’t want to talk about her summer, and in this moment she didn’t want to teach ballet, either. She wanted to push Jessie up against the nearest wall and finally take what she’d been waiting for – that kiss that had been interrupted so many times before. She thought she’d go insane if she had to wait any longer, but she looked over to where Ellie was busy tightening the strings on her slippers, oblivious to the tension building between them. Of course she’d have to wait.

  “It was alright. Nothing much to report,” she said. She would have liked to come up with something witty to say, but staring into those green eyes so close to her own, she found herself tongue-tied. Eventually, because she couldn’t bear not to ask, she managed, “Is everything okay? After the recital-”

  “Everything’s… good,” Jessie said. “Steve and I separated.”