Finders Keepers

by Karin Kallmaker

  Go slow, she told herself. Slow.

  She finished the dishes and then took her time surveying Marissa’s apartment. It was clear that the large number of boxes, labeled with dates going back six years, were the early years of the company. She hadn’t had a reason to take them to the office, prob-224

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  ably. The apartment had only the one small bedroom, so the living room was further crowded with a computer workstation which was reached only after a stack of boxes was moved. It was the room of someone who had not given much time to more than its functionality of providing warmth, light and shelter. She wondered if Marissa could like the wide open spaces of Montana. Would she really enjoy trekking through mud and heat to see a flower that bloomed for a day once a decade?

  “I’m not a slob, really. I’m just short on space.”

  Turning, Linda tried not to show that breathing was suddenly very difficult. Marissa’s robe was not belted as tightly as before, and with her hair damp around her shoulders she looked much like the water nymph of Tahiti. “I understand.”

  “I really am going to buy a condo—it’s a good investment and I’ll have more space. Those boxes will finally get out of my life.”

  She limped in the direction of the bedroom, leaving wet patches where her bandage touched the carpet.

  “Do you need that retied?”

  “I was hoping to preserve the fun ribbons, but now that it’s wet I’m not sure it was a good idea.” Marissa continued into the bedroom and Linda followed, not sure what Marissa expected.

  Marissa was seated on the unmade bed, tugging at the outer-most ribbon.

  “Let me,” Linda said, and without thinking she slid to her knees at Marissa’s feet.

  Marissa drew in a sharp breath and Linda looked up. Such an expressive face, Linda marveled. She’s scared. She wants me to touch her. She doesn’t want to want me. She’s remembering that night, the next morning.

  “Please,” Marissa whispered.

  Her hesitation was momentary then Linda carefully acknowledged what was happening. She was not afraid. She did not want to control the moment, she wanted to live in it. Marissa was everything Linda remembered of her—and more.

  She leaned forward to softly kiss the inside of Marissa’s knee.

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  Marissa was breathing hard. “Linda . . .”

  “What is it? What do you want me to do? I’ll do it.” Linda inhaled the wonderful scent that meant Marissa and closed her eyes with a sense of awe.

  “Hold me,” Marissa whispered. “I’m frightened.”

  Kicking off her shoes, Linda pulled Marissa to her on the bed, nestling Marissa’s head into her shoulder. “I’m here.”

  “I keep telling myself I shouldn’t feel like this. That I was a fool to let you inside me the first time and I shouldn’t let you close again.”

  “I understand.” She’s going to send me away, Linda thought with a spasm of pain. So far, every minute with Marissa had been more than she thought she deserved. To be holding her, wrapped in the complex smells of her sheets and her freshly washed hair—

  it was heaven.

  This moment, this woman, they weren’t the reasons for her striv-ing to put her life together. She wasn’t using the circle of Marissa’s arms as an escape from anywhere. Happiness pulsed from the inside of her and the thought blazed behind her closed eyelids, “I didn’t run away to be with her but she is still where I want to go.”

  “Linda,” Marissa whispered, and she lifted her mouth to be kissed.

  Her body responded before her brain could even decide if this was a good idea. The flash of Marissa’s bare shoulder was enough to knock the breath out of her and she kissed the upturned mouth with hunger and heat.

  Marissa’s hands were in her hair, a feeling Linda hadn’t forgotten and hadn’t dared to hope she would have again, fingers sifting, then brushing over her temples as their kiss deepened. They explored each other with slow intent and Linda was aware of the heat of Marissa’s body.

  The hips were smaller, more muscled and compact, but their motion was a limitless rocking that Linda had dreamed about ever since. The robe parted to reveal glorious, full breasts that were as plush and soft as her memory of them. Taut nipples beckoned and with a moan, Linda brushed the nearest with her fingers.

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  Marissa gasped, her legs parting. Linda felt dizzy. This couldn’t be happening—it was like a fantasy, a dream, something she’d wanted so badly she was making it all up. Her hand swept the length of Marissa’s curving hip, then around to cup the firm roundness and soft skin of Marissa’s backside.

  “Oh,” Marissa groaned, low in her throat. “No. No, no.”

  Linda’s hand froze but she was powerless to stop her own panting. “I’m . . . sorry.”

  “No, this is my fault. It’s all happening so fast.” Marissa pulled Linda’s hand to her waist, even as her breast seemed to swell and demand further caresses. “I need some time.”

  “Shall I go away for a while?”

  “No. Yes. How long?”

  “A week or two? To give you some air?”

  Marissa sat up. She looked down at Linda, her shoulders framed by the open robe, her hair tousled and a glow in her eyes that nearly broke Linda’s restraint. “I don’t think I could bear it that long. Dinner, Tuesday night, okay? I just need to breathe, Linda. I need to think.”

  “I understand,” Linda said again. She got off the bed and wasn’t embarrassed by her groan of loss—it matched the one she heard Marissa make as well. “Should I go?”

  “I think . . . you should.”

  Lightheaded, part of her dancing on air and the rest incredibly frustrated, Linda managed to get her shoes on again and find her keys. “Shall I meet you at your office?”

  “No,” Marissa said quickly. “At the Opera Café. Do you know where that is?”

  Linda nodded. Her motel was across the street. “Seven?”

  “Yes, please.” Marissa’s voice was husky but Linda didn’t dare look back. She could picture the yielding legs, the robe falling open, the pink flush on Marissa’s neck and face.

  It seemed miles to the car. Part of her mind was still in Marissa’s bedroom and they had never stopped rocking together on the bed.

  She had waited a year to reclaim the wonder of being with Marissa, to see herself again in Marissa’s eyes. This time she knew 227

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  she was the woman Marissa thought she was. If she had to wait another year for Marissa to trust her again, then so be it.

  Her mind made up, but her body in a major pout, she drove toward her motel. Job or not, she needed to find a place to live.

  She wasn’t budging from the area unless Marissa told her to go.

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  Chapter 15

  “This is our manifesto: there is someone perfect for you out there.” Marissa tried to look as if her ankle wasn’t aching as she turned on the overhead projector. It was a good thing she’d gone ahead and dressed as if there would be no one to take this presentation for her, because there hadn’t been.

  Spending the rest of her Sunday following WebMD’s sprained ankle advice while her thoughts went around and around in circles had at least helped her ankle. Her mind was still a mess.

  “Your perfect someone is there. Like anything in life, your perfect someone is worth looking for. Why not look smart? Why not let technology help?”

  After all, she mused, it found me three and possibly even more compatible women I could have been happy with, most likely.

  Eventually we’d have went zing in every room in the house, I’ll bet. It’s possible the world was full of 97s and 98s. It was all Linda’s fault that 98 wasn’t enough.

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  “At Finders Keepers we are constantly updating our questionnaire to capture not just who you are today but the changes likely in your life, and match your personality and character with someone who can adapt and grow with you as you adapt and grow with them.”

  What had all the zing and passion gotten her, anyway? Okay, there were those moments when having a body with nerves in certain places had finally made sense, moments when skin and electricity seemed like the same thing. And okay, those moments were worth months of not feeling that, and okay, zing and passion weren’t things she was going to live without.

  Dang it all, no sooner did she think she believed one thing for certain than she argued herself into the exact opposite thinking.

  She could live without zing, without sex, without all the drama but then why bother even dating? A perfectly dispassionate electrical appliance could provide plenty of hum to break up the ho.

  “At Finders Keepers, we believe in love. We believe in romance. We believe in first meetings, second dates, third anniversaries and relationships that can last a lifetime.”

  Sure, a corporation could believe in all those things, Marissa darling, but do you?

  The audience, made up of mostly women in the middle years, seemed rapt. Why were they here, Marissa wondered. The questionnaire didn’t seem to take into account all that she herself wanted. None of the three women she had called were anything like Linda, and dangitall, she thought with undeniable clarity, she wanted Linda.

  Dear Self:

  Blithering is unattractive.

  Love, Marissa

  P.S. Pay attention to what you’re doing!

  Startled to find herself mouth half-open and not sure what 230

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  she’d been saying, she glanced at the screen and tried to play back the last few seconds.

  “No computer can really capture the complexity of a human being,” she extemporized, silently thanking Helena Boxer. “We are as diverse and complicated as the planet we live on. The universe is in a blade of glass—and in all of us.”

  Oh hell, where was she going with this flashback to English 1A?

  “Your lives are full to the brim already, however. My business partner would kill me for putting it this way but we meet a thousand new people a year and I think we’re all too busy to sort the dreck from the gold. So why not let a computer help? After submitting your questionnaire, you would get a profile report like this.

  Compatibility scores of ninety-five and above, well, they’re not dreck. And among those people there is a high probability you will find twenty-four karat gold. All the mystery and magic and frustration of dating and getting to know someone will still have to happen, though. The computer does the analysis—you do the living.”

  So she had just violated one of Ocky’s rules of marketing: she’d focused potential clients on what Finders Keepers couldn’t do for them. She clicked to the next slide and tried to get back on track.

  Her mouth, it seemed, had other plans.

  “You could walk out the door right now and bump into someone who is a ninety-seven. You could meet the Perfect Someone stranded on a desert island, even. But if you don’t like those odds, then Finders Keepers will help. Three out of four of our clients are still with someone they met through our service as long as three years ago. Many five years ago or more.”

  That, she told herself, hadn’t come out quite right.

  She wasn’t sure how she got through the rest of the presentation. She gave away a number of business cards but wasn’t ready when a woman asked, “Have you filled out your own questionnaire? How did it turn out for you?”

  Thinking fast, Marissa said, “I have and I met three really nice people. If anything, it was more choice than I could handle.”

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  The echo of her words—not untrue but far from representing the whole story—stayed with her as she limped to the car and drove back to the office. She tried to drown out her thoughts with Fatboy Slim but she couldn’t get the woman’s reaction out of her head—that excited, hopeful grin. For a moment she felt like the Take It Off saleswoman, saying whatever the potential client wanted to hear.

  Great, just great. She had been ready to move on. Ready to date and find someone and get her life out of aging student mentality into that of a woman ready to grow up and get real.

  Then Linda showed up.

  Marissa snapped the radio off. “She hauls your heart back into the open air and you feel more alive than you’ve felt in a year and yet you doubt everything you see and do and ever thought could be true.”

  “You weren’t in love with her,” she told her reflection as she brushed her hair that night. “You were in love with how she made you feel. You’re in love with the endorphins and the sex and that ridiculous giddy feeling. She hurt you and you can’t go back to her like some addict.”

  She scrubbed regenerating daily serum with UV repair into every last pore on her face. “She’s not in love with you. She’s just feeling the same thing. You make her feel good, that’s all it is.”

  The sleeplessness and emotional turmoil of the previous nights seemed to catch up all at once and her ankle wasn’t the only reason she stumbled into bed.

  During the night she woke once, heard the sound of the gentle tide hissing over warm sand. A new thought occurred to her. She smiled into her pillow and went back to sleep.

  Her ankle was nearly normal-sized in the morning and she made time for a trip to the gym just to do something aerobic that didn’t involve her legs. Though the scale wasn’t exactly zooming in the right direction after the last weekend, she also wasn’t unduly 232

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  worried she’d suddenly gain ten pounds during a few days where she focused elsewhere.

  “How can I hate sweating and enjoy it at the same time?”

  The woman at the next station, her tight dreads shining with perspiration, grinned knowingly. “Maybe you have two brains?”

  “Yeah, one into cookies and sleeping until noon. The other into pain and thinking sunrise is the coolest time of day.” The other woman chuckled while Marissa was chortling inside. Having two brains was making a lot of sense at the moment. Love her, love her not. And it was still not the least bit fair that after her workout she felt more calm and more focused.

  “Glad to see you moving a little faster today.” Heather handed over the mail.

  Marissa leaned on the reception desk. “It’s better but it still aches a bit. You look tired.”

  “I’m nervous about the therapist. Maybe I don’t want to know certain things.”

  “You’re still going to go, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I had this nightmare.” Heather’s appearance was as perfect as always, but her eyes were shadowed. “The kind where you wake up and it’s like the most obvious meaning in the world and you think why the heck you had to be asleep to even think it?”

  “Okay.” Marissa wasn’t sure what Heather meant but she was listening.

  “I dreamed that I was sitting in the therapist’s waiting area and there was a huge tray of Twinkies. I had one, then another and then I couldn’t stop eating them. I felt very embarrassed and people were staring—that feeling you get at Mickey D’s when you think everyone heard you order supersized fries and they’re all thinking ‘no wonder she’s fat,’ you know, even if you haven’t had fries in four months?”

  Again, Marissa nodded. She wondered how much weight she had to lose before she stopped thinking that waiters were judging her choices.

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  “Anyway, I couldn’t stop eating them and my mouth got all full and so when my turn came I couldn’t talk.”

  Marissa blinked. “Okay, that doesn’t take much analysis, you’re right.”

  “I woke up at like four a.m. and I reall
y thought I was going to throw up but I didn’t. So. I don’t want to know some things. But I can’t live like this either.” Heather swallowed noisily and looked away.

  “You’re going to be okay, you know. Whatever happened, it’s already done and you’re here.”

  “Keep telling me that, okay?” Heather blinked rapidly, but the tears never slipped over the rims of her eyes. “Thank you for listening to me. I promise not to do this at work.”

  Marissa reached over the desk to pat Heather’s hand. “Yeah, like I can compartmentalize, sure. It’s okay—but we can also talk at the gym while we whack weights.”

  “On the bright, I’ve had a dozen requests for access to the online registration system this morning. Seems like more than usual.”

  “Well, it wasn’t because I was a ball of fire yesterday.” Marissa could hear work calling all the way from her office, but she added,

  “An old girlfriend showed up last week. I’m all over the place about how I feel.”

  “Did she treat you badly?”

  “Went away for a year. Said she’d get in touch and didn’t.”

  With sympathetic outrage, Heather said, “I hope she was in a foreign prison or something equally unpleasant.”

  Marissa laughed at Heather’s expression. “Some day you are going to have kids and scare off their potential beaus with that look.” She sighed. “Not a foreign prison but definitely something equally unpleasant.”

  “So how do you feel about it all?”

  “I understand why she dropped out of the world for a while.

  But if I trust her again I’m worried I’m a doormat, you know?”

  “Well, you always say every situation is different. I wouldn’t 234

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  want you to get hurt again but it’s not like she beats you and you think she’ll change.”

  “No, she just tromped all over my heart but had a decent enough reason for her behavior, a reason having nothing to do with me.”

  Heather made the scary face again. “She gets out of line, I’ll have a talk with her.”

  “Okay.” Marissa found herself grinning. “Everyone from Oprah to my mother would tell me not to let her hurt me again.”