Reality Bytes

by Jane Frances

  “Sure, Emma.” Toni desperately hoped Kayisha’s wet nose hadn’t left a wet patch on the crotch of her carefully selected “I just threw these on” jeans. “I bet you spent months training her.”

  Toni’s reward was a chance to listen to Emma’s deliciously throaty chuckle.

  She held out the bottles of wine. “I wasn’t sure what we’re having so I thought I’d cover the bases.”

  “Thanks, Toni.” Emma accepted the bottles, smiling but apologetic in tone. “I’ve actually got someone here at the moment. We’re in the kitchen.” Emma ushered Toni down the hallway. “Having some tea.” Emma’s voice lowered to a whisper just before they reached the kitchen entrance. “Whatever you do, don’t have a muffin.”

  Thoroughly disappointed they were not alone, Toni’s smile was weak as she took a seat at the kitchen table opposite a woman Emma introduced as Justine.

  Emma pulled a cup and saucer from an overhead cupboard, placed it in front of Toni and sat at the head of the table. “Justine, this is Toni.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” The young, finely featured woman picked up a Tupperware box and offered the contents. “Blueberry muffin?”

  From the corner of her eye Toni saw Emma mouthing no and giving an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Despite the repeated warning, Toni dipped her hand into the box. Almost immediately she wished she hadn’t. For its size, it was mighty heavy. Against her better judgment she took a bite and chewed. Were these hard pellets really blueberries? And was that a glob of uncooked flour filling her mouth? Toni continued to chew, well aware that Justine was sizing her up from across the table. Her peripheral vision caught Emma’s expression. Her lips were pressed together as she desperately tried to keep a straight face.

  Justine eventually packed up her Tupperware box of terror with an announcement that she had to get home as Paul, her fiancé, was down from the mines and would be home from his golf game any minute. Toni smiled at the tenth reminder that Justine was engaged to be married. The woman must be a homophobe. Either that or she was a closeted lesbian trying to convince the rest of the world how straight she was.

  The two of them finally alone, Emma chortled as she pointed at the remains of Toni’s muffin. “Are you sure you don’t want this?” With Toni’s vigorous head-shake she called Kayisha to the table and held out the cannonball.

  Toni watched Kayisha wolf it down without chewing, wishing she’d thought of that method of consumption and wondering at the unlikely friendship between Emma and Justine. They were like chalk and cheese, not a pair she’d have guessed would hit it off. “How do you know Justine?”

  “She’s my neighbor. Lives just a few doors down.”

  “Oh.” Toni watched Emma gather empty cups and saucers and rise to take them to the sink. She knew she should have offered to help, but the sight of Emma’s behind wriggling in time with her cup-rinse was rather distracting.

  “And you remember the night I drank myself stupid at Lisa and Cathy’s?”

  Toni harrumphed loudly. “Vaguely.”

  Emma turned from the sink and gave a half-smile, acknowledging Toni’s dry humor. “She was the reason why.”

  The significance of Justine in Emma’s life assumed a swift upward trajectory. And her closeted lesbian theory thrust itself forward. Or maybe not so closeted. Toni’s mouth felt like it was still full of uncooked flour. “You went out with her?”

  “No. I was just suffering a very bad case of misguided lust.”

  Toni stared at a muffin crumb in the middle of the table, thinking of the world of difference between Justine’s looks and her own. “She’s very pretty.”

  Emma sat back at the table, not quite sure how she felt when Toni announced Justine pretty. Emma looked nothing like Justine. Maybe Toni preferred the waif look to…to Emma’s decidedly non-waif look. Then, when Toni’s words were combined with their light delivery and the hesitant raising of the eyes to meet her own, Emma realized the comment for what it was. Toni was trying to gauge where she ranked.

  Emma stopped herself from blurting a hackneyed, “She’s not as pretty as you.” Pretty was not an appropriate adjective for Toni. Pretty was reserved for woman such as Justine—petite and feminine. The word also held an implied simplicity. No, Toni wasn’t pretty. Short hair with an unruly fringe accentuated the boyish quality to her features, but the long, dark lashes, full mouth and wonderful swell of breast screamed she was all woman. As for simple, that description was totally inappropriate. Toni had layers—layers, Emma knew, once peeled away, would reveal new, more complex ones underneath.

  While still surprised she found features so different to Justine’s not only attractive, but downright sexy, Emma could not deny what she knew to be true. “Yes, she is very pretty.”

  “Shocking cook though.”

  There was no question about that one. “Terrible.” Toni stabbed at a muffin crumb with her finger. “I can cook,” she said offhandedly.

  Toni’s efforts to elevate herself above Justine were incredibly sweet, but totally unwarranted. “Would you like me to arrange a bake-off so you can prove it?”

  The repeated attempt to get the dry bit of crumb to stick to her finger came to a halt. Toni shot a glance across the table, color staining her cheeks in her obvious jealousy. “It’s my green eyes,” she smiled sheepishly. “It’s an inherited trait.”

  “Come on.” Emma scraped her chair from the table. “While we’re on the subject of color, I’ll introduce you to Malibu.”

  “Your black cat.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you’ll show me the blue room?”

  Emma was sure every drop of blood shot straight down to her groin. The “blue room” was the name Toni gave Emma’s bedroom when it was described in chat. “Maybe.”

  Toni concentrated on washing her hands with the pump-pack soap she found next to the basin.

  Ordinarily, this being her first visit to a new bathroom, Toni would have studied her surroundings a bit more carefully. Ordinarily, she would have noticed that Emma used the same deodorant as her, that the pump soap, while being her preferred brand, was of a different fragrance, and that all the towels not only matched the bathmat but were hung neatly on their railings. All this and more Toni would have noticed. Had she been feeling particularly inquisitive, she might even have had a peek in the bathroom cabinet.

  But right now, the aesthetics of Emma’s bathroom were insignificant. Instead, Toni’s attention was focused on analyzing how the evening had strayed so far from her expectations. Nothing had gone wrong exactly. The tour of the house, which did include a peek inside the “blue room,” ended back in the kitchen. Toni’s offer to assist with dinner was refused, so she sat at the table, watching Emma in her preparations. Emma was a calm cook. There was no hurry to her movements, no furious chopping or clanging of pots and pans, just a series of tasks efficiently performed. The result, chicken fillets accompanied by roasted Mediterranean vegetables tossed with rocket and olive oil, was delicious, and Toni gave it the praise it deserved. Their conversation throughout the meal flowed easily enough. There were a couple of periods of silence, but they weren’t extended to the point of being uncomfortable. Their talk continued through the stacking of plates next to the sink and the journey into the lounge room.

  They’d demolished the bottle of white over dinner, so the bottle of red was next targeted for consumption. Emma delved into her buffet unit for some fresh wineglasses while Toni pondered where to sit. She decided on the couch, a two-seater.

  Nice and cozy.

  “This is a good wine.” Emma studied the label before cutting the metal around the cork. She smiled in Toni’s direction as she twisted the corkscrew. “We did a tasting of it a couple of years ago at the wine club. It was good then, but they said at the time it would be fabulous if laid down for a few years. So this should be bloody fantastic.”

  Toni was surrounded by wine buffs; Cathy was a member of the same wine club as Emma. But Toni, while appreciating a goo
d wine, considered herself more a quaffer than a connoisseur. She mentally thanked the wine merchant for his recommendation, nodded in agreement they should leave it to breathe a while and waited in anticipation of Emma joining her on the couch.

  But she didn’t.

  Toni took a mental step back when Emma lifted herself from her kneeling position in front of the coffee table and hoisted herself onto the single easy chair immediately behind.

  And what was worse, she stayed there. They talked of wine, and they how Emma had met Cathy through the wine club. Then they talked of Toni and the gym and Emma and her running. Toni explained how she always went to the gym after work because she was so not a morning person, and Emma explained how she often got up even earlier than she had to for her early starts at the practice so she could take Kayisha for a run. Not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

  Toni was on the verge of saying, “So, apart from the morning thing we’re perfect for each other,” when Emma said, “Well, that’s it then. Night owls are from Mars, morning people are from Venus. And never the twain shall meet.”

  Toni thought she had Emma’s dry humor down pat, but this time, as she tried to read the intention behind the remark, she couldn’t. Maybe it was because she was so damn far away from the woman, she couldn’t see if that was a twinkle in her eye or just a reflection of the floor lamp that softly lit the room. Toni assumed the worst, and she assumed the worst because the woman was so damn far away and had made no moves to be otherwise throughout the whole evening. Throughout the whole evening Toni received nothing more than a brief hand-squeeze when she was pulled from her kitchen chair to go on a tour of the house.

  So Toni escaped to the bathroom and now, her hand-washing complete, stood staring at herself in the mirror, analyzing the evening.

  Green eyes stared back. Maybe it was the green-eyed monster that frightened Emma off. Jealousy was an ugly emotion and there she had been, sitting at the kitchen table going green over a neighbor. A neighbor who was not only outwardly straight, but engaged to be married.

  Toni grimaced as another thought occurred. Why had she made the comment about wanting to see the blue room? In online chat, her naming of the bedroom hadn’t been altogether due to the color of the walls. Dovetail that conversation into the admission she had spent three weeks having sex with a woman she had no emotional attachment to, and it was no wonder Emma was wary. She probably thought Toni some sort of predator, just waiting to pounce.

  Finally, Toni took attention from her eyes her skin. To her horror a dried blister, just near her left ear, was at the point of falling off. It hung like a leaf about to drop in autumn. Toni pulled at it, but it wasn’t ready to budge. She stared morosely at the blackish, protruding lump. No one in her right mind would be attracted to someone who looked like she escaped from the infectious disease control unit.

  Toni decided Emma had decided she was just not interested. Being too polite to tell Toni outright, Emma would see the evening out, but once Toni left she would shut the door, happy to see the back of her.

  Toni took a deep breath as she opened the bathroom door, readying herself for the return to the lounge room.

  “Thanks for a wonderful meal.” Toni stood at the lounge room entrance. She noticed that in her absence Emma had managed to peel herself from her single seat and now knelt in front of the stereo, flipping through a stack of CDs. She waited for Emma to turn around before stretching her arms into the air, forcing a yawn. “But I’m pretty tired. I think I should get going home.”

  “Oh.” Emma stood with little effort, brushing at the knees of her jeans. Her eyes darted to the nearly full bottle of wine on the coffee table and the almost untouched glasses. They also glanced quickly to the clock hanging to the right of the computer Emma used in the hours where she became Kayisha. Finally her nervous glance rested on Toni. “Okay.”

  Tell me you’d rather I stayed! Toni mentally screamed at Emma. Tell me you really don’t want me to go! Emma didn’t say either of those things. So Toni left. She sat in the car, hand on the indicator lever, watching the house. Finally, Toni flipped the indicator lever down and pulled into the traffic-free street.

  Emma stared at the empty couch as the throb of the BMW engine faded into the distance. She wasn’t quite sure what happened over the course of the evening, but she sure as hell knew it didn’t pan out the way she had hoped.

  FallenAngel and Rabbit and their disastrous meeting came to mind. “Lack of chemistry”—that’s what Toni had said about their failed rendezvous. Maybe that was it. Maybe the energy Emma felt in Toni’s company was all one-sided, maybe the meeting in the flesh was one big disappointment and Toni was just too polite to say so. After all, Toni was the one who suddenly went cold last night. At the time Emma assumed Toni was also so overwhelmed by the sheer pull of their attraction she needed to stand aside from it for a little while, to let the enormity of it sink in. It had not even crossed Emma’s mind Toni felt nothing, or worse, repelled. Emma’s insides shriveled in mortification. Toni had said no to a night out on the town. Maybe the invitation to dinner had been accepted purely out of manners.

  But Emma was certain she had read Toni’s reaction to Justine as one of jealousy. Why would she be jealous if she felt nothing? She’d as much as admitted it with her green-eye comment. Were Emma’s instincts so off the mark she totally misread the tenor of the entire evening?

  All evening she’d been in some almost indescribable half state. Half of her was at ease, finding the woman who sat at her kitchen table incredibly easy to talk to, articulate and entertaining. The other half was tightly wound, unnerved by her mere presence. Her hands were especially distracting. Toni used them as an extension of her voice, punctuating her words with expansive gestures. Emma couldn’t keep her eyes off them. At one point, when chopping up an eggplant, she nearly sliced her fingers because she was so busy imagining those hands expressing themselves all over her body. She avoided damage, but to be safe, slowed her slicing and dicing considerably. Controlled movements in the rest of her preparations enabled her to avoid personal injury or breakage of crockery, but to her mind it was a wonder she managed to get a meal served up at all.

  The consumption of dinner was unhurried and surprisingly relaxed. The downing of a bottle of wine between them no doubt helped lubricate the conversation. It also heightened Emma’s desire to reach out, take hold of those expressive hands and press them to her lips. She resisted the urge. If Toni wanted to take things slowly, she was not going to foist herself upon her.

  That’s why, although she desperately wanted to, she didn’t place herself next to Toni on the couch. Instead she sat in a chair opposite, every cell in her body calling Toni to make some sort of move. No move was made. Despite them both inching forward in their seats and pointing their bodies directly at each other, nothing happened. Instead, Toni begged a need for the bathroom, stayed there an awfully long time, then announced her desire to go home.

  Emma slumped into the couch and stared at the bottle of red and two glasses left abandoned on the coffee table. Maybe Toni sat forward in her seat because she wanted to make her escape. Maybe it was only Emma who moved forward because she wanted to leap straight onto Toni’s lap.

  “Hi, girl.” Emma scratched Kayisha’s ruff and bent to nuzzle her head into her companion’s. “You still love me, don’t you?”

  Kai’s fur smelled fresh and clean, evidence of her morning bath. Kayisha had complained at the treatment, it coming a full two days early, Emma wanting her at her best for meeting Toni.

  Kayisha grumbled quietly when the cuddle was halted. She followed Emma to the lounge room window, nosing her snout into Emma’s hand as Emma stared out into the night. The floor lamp was on so all Emma really stared at was a reflection of herself. When she met her own eyes her mantra of less than a week ago replayed in her head. I am in control of my own destiny.

  “Stop saying stupid things to yourself,” Emma reprimanded herself as sat heavily onto the seat Toni had
vacated. “You can’t control how someone feels about you.” From her vantage point, the computer Emma had spent so many hours in front of was in plain view. Were she and Toni really just more victims of its virtual reality? Were they just another FallenAngel and Rabbit?

  Emma really didn’t know. The signals she received over the last twenty-four hours were so mixed they were impossible to interpret.

  Destiny and who controlled it—the thought again ran through Emma’s mind as she headed for the kitchen. “Act in haste, repent at leisure” was her next thought and it almost stopped her from retrieving the car keys that sat on her kitchen bench.

  “She who hesitates is lost.” Emma actually spoke out loud as she grabbed for the keys and trotted to the front door, at the same time wondering if talking to oneself in a series of quotes was normal.

  She decided it probably wasn’t.

  Fifteen minutes later Emma knocked on Toni’s front door. When the door swung open, Emma didn’t even give Toni the chance to say hello before she took a deep breath and started talking, “I know I’m making a habit of landing on your doorstep late at night but you forgot something when you left so I came over to give it to you.”

  Toni looked down to Emma’s hands, empty except for her car keys. “What did I forget?”

  Emma smiled weakly. “Me.”

  There was no immediate response and Emma had a sudden image of a cursor blinking on an empty screen. Maybe her intellectual dissection of the night had been correct and Toni was not interested. Her gut told her to press on. After all, she’d come this far. If she was making a fool of herself, she may as well make a good job of it.

  “But if you left me there on purpose, I can always just take me back home again.”