Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

  Her gaze slid to the butch squad. They would learn the same lesson eventually. They’d find it easier and easier to talk a woman into bed. Then, having mastered the game of seduction, they would end up finding it unsatisfying. Not all of them, of course. But the smart ones, the ones not addicted to drama and conquest and ego, would get tired of it. Del dragged her attention back to her smiling quarry, wondering if she was blind her to own hubris.

  “True. And thank you.” Tracy was relaxed, enjoying the ever-bewitching combination of feeling both safe and attracted, charming and charmed. She took a long sip of her white wine, pushing the martini a few more inches away.

  “Tracy, can I ask what brings you here tonight?” Del widened her eyes in a none-too-subtle signal. Trust me, little bambi, I’m just the harmless hunter you’re looking for. “Or is that too personal a question?”

  Tracy blushed and laughed, leaning forward. Del caught a peripheral flash of impressively generous cleavage and pinned her eyes on Tracy’s face. She listened to a rambling explanation. She already knew the words to the familiar story—good girl marries good boy and realizes later it wasn’t a boy but a girl she wanted. She found it easy to respond effectively, making the right faces, the right noises, waiting the perfect amount of time to reach over and pat Tracy’s forearm. She nodded and laughed and shook her head and let Tracy lead herself along the path of seduction. How many times had she played this particular part in this little psychodrama? Twenty minutes of sympathetic attention and she’s yours for the taking.

  How many toaster ovens had she earned? Too many. Sometimes she worried she fell too easily into stereotyping people, particularly women. It seemed like they all wanted to be the princess in the fairy tale. Gay, straight, bi, trans—none of that mattered. It was the unmet needs of their early lives that dictated what women craved, and it was appallingly easy to figure out what those were. Del was getting bored.

  She almost called it off twenty minutes later when she found herself back at home with tipsy Tracy, whose real name would be Brenda or Camille or Elizabeth or whatever. Mrs. Somebody, doting mommy of two or three darling little kids and devoted wife of some clueless guy. He’d come home from his business trip and be delighted because his pretty wife was always particularly amorous after he’d been out of town for a few days.

  Del went through the rest of the seduction by rote: candles, more wine, soft music, let the girl make the first move, take your time, let her think this whole evening’s a fairy tale, that the pickup at the bar was true love’s first dance at the ball in the castle and she was wearing a glass slipper. It was almost painfully predictable. Del had known Tracy would sleep with her from the moment she’d leaned forward at the table in the bar. There was little satisfaction in such an easy victory, and Del was disappointed. It would have been nice to have to try.

  Tracy would have her fun, and she would think she felt something for Del, but she would be ashamed of her one-night stand. She’d go back to her husband with only the slightest twinge of guilt. Her infidelity wouldn’t count, because she’d only fooled around with a woman, and she’d figure that wasn’t really cheating. By noon tomorrow, Tracy would have convinced herself that the whole evening had never happened.

  Del had her own twinges of guilt. She was helping this woman cheat on her husband, hardly an ethical thing to do. Of course, Del told herself, Tracy would have cheated with someone else if Del hadn’t taken the hook. But wasn’t that the way drug dealers and pimps and other criminals justified their actions—if I didn’t do it, someone else would?

  Leading Tracy through the house toward the bedroom, Del felt a tug of resistance.

  “My gosh,” Tracy said, sounding nervous. “What’s all this?”

  Del looked at the dining room, where she still had all her data on Ernie White printed out in stacks and on a dozen poster-sized sticky notes on the walls. It looked like a stalker’s war room, and for the first time Del wondered if her ongoing study of White’s movements might border on obsession.

  She caught Tracy’s eye and faked a laugh.

  “My roommate’s writing a play.” Del hastened to add, “She’s not here tonight. Out of town.”

  The lie worked, and Tracy let herself be ushered up the stairs. In bed Tracy was sweet and shy and uncertain. A perfect pillow princess, thought Del, running her hands gently over Tracy’s sumptuous hips and breasts. She was responsive and suggestible. She was perfumed and lotioned and waxed and toned. She was perfectly prepared for infidelity. Del pushed aside this observation and instead played with Tracy, teased her, brought her to gasping, groaning, shuddering orgasm twice, and then watched her sleep. She’d done well; Tracy was exhausted and satisfied. But Del was still restless.

  She’d hoped sex would satisfy the longing she’d been feeling. She’d hoped to wear herself out and feel the tired contentment that a one-night stand would have given her just a few years ago. But she felt nothing. She rolled over, wishing Tracy would just disappear, wishing she hadn’t gone to the bar, and wishing it weren’t so damned easy. Her body ached. She felt like she would explode. After tossing and turning for hours, she finally gave up on sleep. She left a note for Tracy and pulled on her running clothes and shoes, desperate to burn some energy.

  The air was cold enough to chap her skin as she tried to keep a steady pace. She had to fight the urge to sprint. Her body was like a spring coiled too tightly, and she felt a frantic need for some kind of release. Her stomach hurt and that made running hard. She turned back. This was unbearable. She couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything but obsess about Lola. Every woman she met she compared to Lola. Every day she wondered what Lola was thinking, was feeling. Was she happy, safe, fulfilled? Was she lonely? Did Lola miss her? Did Lola still love her? Was her short story autobiographical? Or was it a warning—get it together or I’ll replace you?

  Del slowed to a walk as she neared her street. It was nearly five, and the sun would be up before too long. God only knew where Lola was, what she was doing, what time it might be where she was. They hadn’t spoken in weeks, but Del couldn’t stand it. She pulled her cell out of her sock and dialed.

  “Hello?” Lola’s voice sounded sleepy. Del rounded the corner and saw the light go on in Lola’s bedroom.

  She’s home? She’s home! Del’s heart leapt. She stammered a hello and fought to catch her breath. Lola was right there, less than a hundred yards away! What now?

  “Del?”

  “Uh, hi.” She didn’t know what to say. She stood in front of Lola’s house, thinking of Romeo and Juliet, knowing how ridiculous that was but still wanting to declare her love like some stupid, heartsick kid.

  “Are you okay?” Lola sounded more worried than sleepy now.

  “I’m just outside.”

  “Oh.” A curtain opened, and Del saw Lola standing at the window. Lola’s white hockey jersey, ridiculously oversized, glowed in the moonlight.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Now?” Lola hesitated. “Okay. I’ll be right down.”

  Del bounded up the stairs, fidgeting until Lola opened the door.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Please.” Del tried to smile, but Lola was already on her way to the kitchen.

  “I’d offer you toast, but there’s no food. I just got back.”

  “Yeah, no. Of course.”

  Now, steaming coffee in front of her, Lola three feet away across the table, her eyes ringed with tiredness. Del looked at her and was mute. She’d followed an impulse, calling Lola. She’d been so surprised to see her light on, she’d followed another impulse and asked to come in. Now she didn’t know what to say. Lola didn’t seem all that excited to see her.

  What did I expect? She sipped at the coffee to buy time.

  “Uh, sorry for the early hour.”

  “No problem.” Lola’s face was impassive.

  “When did you get back?” It felt strange, making polite conversation. Like they were strangers.

  �
�Last night. Late.” Lola sweetened her coffee and seemed to hesitate. “You know, I was thinking of trying to sell the house.”

  “I saw that.”

  “But the housing market has gone down a lot.” She cleared her throat. “I overbought, and now I’m sort of tied to the house until it regains its value. I can’t afford to sell it at a loss.”

  “No,” Del responded, too quickly. “Of course not.”

  “So I guess I’m staying for now.” Lola rubbed the rim of her coffee cup as if to clean an invisible smudge. “I hope that won’t be a problem for you.”

  “No,” Del repeated. “Of course not.” Why couldn’t she just talk to the woman? Why couldn’t she just say she loved Lola and that she was sorry for her behavior? Instead, she took another sip of coffee and offered a bland smile. She thought about Lola’s story of the man who couldn’t really talk to his son.

  “Well, okay, then.” Lola examined her coffee, bit her lip, nodded.

  “How was your trip?”

  “Fine, thank you.” Lola looked away. She got up and started rearranging things on the counter. Finally, she faced Del. “What are you doing here?”

  “What?” Del felt helpless. “I don’t know.”

  “You left me, remember? I don’t understand!” She flicked at an imaginary crumb on her jersey. “How can you just show up here like nothing’s happened? What do you want?”

  “What do I want?” Del felt the tumble of words and tried to stop it but couldn’t. “I love you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I blew it. I want you back. I want to be with you again. I can’t be without you. I can’t take it. I won’t ever fuck up again, I swear it. I—”

  Lola was shaking her head.

  “Look, I know I messed up. Okay? But I love you.”

  Lola snorted, and Del almost laughed at the unexpected sound.

  “Yeah, okay, maybe for today,” Lola said bitterly. “Until you decide I’ve done something wrong, or Janet needs you, or some case takes up every single minute of your life, and then you’ll leave me again and not even say anything.”

  Del sat back.

  “I deserve better than that,” Lola told her. “I deserve to be loved by somebody who would never, ever walk away or cheat or come up with excuses to ignore me. I trusted you!” Her voice broke, and Del watched her fight for control. “I love you but I don’t trust you anymore.”

  “I love you too. You can, I swear, you can trust me.”

  “No.” Lola whirled and stalked to the front door. Del followed. “I thought going to see Janet would clean it all out of you, you’d come back ready to put the past behind you and really focus on our relationship. But you copped out. You didn’t deal with any of it, not your parents and definitely not Janet. She’s still here in your head, and I’m just the woman who’s not her.”

  “What?” Del gaped.

  “Really?” Lola shook her head, scattering tears. “I hope you find someone. I hope you figure out why you keep sabotaging your relationships. I want you to be happy. But I need a grownup. I need someone who won’t leave me if I gain five pounds, or get mad if I can’t read her mind, or flip out if I get the wrong kind of shower curtain. I need someone who knows what she wants, and it doesn’t change with her mood. Someone who can talk to me. Who’s the same person every day. Please leave. Please.”

  Del shook her head again.

  What was that about, gaining five pounds? The wrong kind of curtains? What was she even talking about? Del wanted to defend herself, to convince Lola that she could be what Lola wanted, but she didn’t know how to do that. She stood by the door, wanting to find a way to explain things, and couldn’t do it.

  “Is Meeker real?”

  Lola reeled backward. “You read my emails? Why didn’t you—?”

  “Is she?”

  “Yes.” Lola crossed her arms. “I—”

  “Why would you send me that? How could you?” Del sputtered with outrage. Suddenly she remembered the woman she’d taken home. Tracy, was that her name? And she looked away.

  “Did you just remember the woman in your bed?”

  Del gaped at the acid in Lola’s tone.

  “Come on, you smell like sex and somebody else’s perfume, it’s all over you. You come into my house reeking of another woman and have the audacity to play victim because I told you about Jude Meeker? Who, in case you missed it, I didn’t sleep with because of you.”

  Del backed away and slunk out of the door. She felt her face with both her hands, and it was wet and cold with tears. A sob caught in her throat, and she struggled to contain it. She walked slowly home in the pale dawn, fighting the urge to turn back. Her stomach hurt.

  Go home, make coffee, shower and dress, get whatever-her-real-name-is back to her car. It’s probably parked at the bar. Or get her a cab if that’s how she got to the bar last night. Whatever. Get rid of her. Take a damn shower. Go to work.

  She did all of those things, starting with a long, hot shower that left her skin tender from scrubbing. Tracy was dressing when Del came out of the bathroom. She didn’t meet Del’s eyes and refused the offer of coffee but not the offer of a ride, and thanked her for the ride back to the bar, sliding out of the truck and trotting over to a beige station wagon festooned with a parking ticket. She snagged the ticket and ducked into her Volvo without a backward glance. Shame had overcome passion, just like Del had known it would. She made sure Tracy’s wagon started before heading to the nearly empty station.

  The place looked more like a weekend than a Thursday morning. Phan was out, was taking his daughter to the orthodontist. Bradley was at a meeting downtown. Everybody seemed to have scheduled something somewhere else. The weeks without progress, the lack of recent incident, meant people had started living their lives again. As much, Del thought, as we ever actually do. No one on the job seemed to successfully manage a personal life.

  She flipped through the case files and tried to concentrate on work, but she couldn’t stop seeing Lola’s face, hearing Lola’s words. If only she could have said something to turn it all around. Lola still loves me, she thought. She said so. I just wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t figured out what to say to get her back. She pulled out one of her notebooks, writing down all the things she needed to say—and do—to win back the love of her life. After nearly an hour she examined the scribbled list and blinked.

  “Time to get to work.”

  Chapter Nine

  After outlining her plan for wooing Lola, she focused on her job, leaving messages for people who’d ignored her previous messages and reinterviewing those who’d already responded to her previous calls. She combed through Mikey’s case file, hoping she’d find something, anything new. She spent a couple of hours traversing her handwritten notes on miles of data on Ernie White, whose activities were littered with red flags but who seemed smart enough to leave only hints of impropriety and not clear evidence of lawbreaking. If he was, as Del suspected, a dangerous predator, he was really clever at getting away with it. As was, Del noted, the kidnapper. But she couldn’t connect White or Teager to the kidnappings. There just wasn’t any evidence. Phan called to say he was taking the day off.

  She felt like she and the bad guy were stuck on parallel tracks, barreling along some Sisyphean cycle—she chased him, he chased his victims and the victims ran away over and over. She’d gone to Disneyland once, back when she still dated women with kids, and seen a fake pirate chase a fake wench, the animatronic figures stuck on a track that pulled them in an endless circle of uselessness. That’s what she was doing.

  She gave up and drove home, pointedly not letting herself look at Lola’s house. She’d never been the world’s best girlfriend to anyone. But she’d never cheated before. She’d never imagined herself a cheater, not like that. Sure, she’d slept with married women before, but only if she was not committed to anyone herself and if she was sure they were committed to cheating with someone anyway. Somehow she’d decided, twenty years earlier, this was okay. Still s
he didn’t feel guilty about sleeping with Tracy—not after Lola’s absconding and sending her that stupid story about not-quite-sleeping with that cop in New York.

  But until Janet had come storming back into her life, Del had never deliberately made love to one woman while in a committed relationship with another. She wasn’t sure how to live with that. She and Lola hadn’t even really talked about it. Was it even possible to have that conversation at this point, or was it just too late to retrieve their relationship? She felt reluctance warring with impatience as she carefully picked her way upstairs and to the computer. Was she punishing herself for cheating? Maybe so. Maybe she deserved some punishment. Lola had been pretty angry. But would she be so angry if she didn’t still care about Del?

  “Time to read the next one,” she commanded herself. It was another untitled story:

  Lola and Del were walking on a beach, sun-warmed and smiling. A soft breeze lifted Del’s curls and made them dance around her head. Lola’s hair was long and it tickled her bare arms. They were barefoot, but the sand wasn’t rough on their toes.

  Lola smelled flowers and saw that there were baskets of them nearby. She could smell the clean scent of the sea and something else, perfume? She could hear the surf, the distant call of a bird. There was music, soft music, not far away. There were other people there, too, but she didn’t look at them. She looked only at Del, whose eyes sparkled and shone. She looked so happy! Lola felt tears cool her sun-pinked cheeks and knew that they were tears of happiness. She heard the call of the bird again, closer this time, and flicked her gaze up to catch movement overhead. She let her gaze return to Del’s face.

  Del reached out her hand and Lola took it. She could feel Del’s warm fingers wrapped in hers. She could feel that Del was shaking, and that she was too. They looked at each other and Lola felt her breath catch in her throat. The bird circled over them, calling loudly, but she ignored it. I love you, Del, she thought. I love you more than anything or anyone. I will spend the rest of my life loving you and wanting you and making a life with you. I will never leave you. I will never stop loving you. Del’s smile grew even broader. Had she heard Lola’s thoughts? Or had Lola spoken aloud? Del whispered something, and Lola had to lean close to hear.