by Julia Kent
But Laura wasn’t here. All Josie had right now was her own imagination, her own inner divining rod, and it was saying guys like Alex don’t want girls like her for the long haul—they want them for the quick and dirty. Josie could do quick and dirty. She could do quick and dirty real good. But spending enough time with Laura, Mike, and Dylan, and now baby Jill, had changed something deep inside her. It made her see a possibility that turned all the other options into pale imitations of life and love. What if that possibility were out there somewhere for her?
Laura’s voice popped into her mind. What if Alex is that possibility?
Josie took a sip of her coffee. It was hotter than she’d expected and burned a bit, shocking her. She drank some water to cool her mouth and then sat with the pain, knowing that she was sitting with a much more intense pain that no glass of water could alleviate.
Just open up to this, she thought. Just do it.
If she didn’t give this a chance, a true emotional chance, she’d be left with a big, heaping hole of regret inside of her.
But that’s better than rejection, another voice said.
She closed her eyes and listened to the cadence of that voice. Whose voice was it? Who was whispering these words that stopped her from acting on hope? It was the same voice that got her out of Peters.
The question was, who exactly was that?
If she were in a selfish frame of mind, which she was drifting into more and more lately, she would indulge in some deep self-pity over the fact that she and Laura had lost their morning coffee ritual. It was not that Josie was a cheapskate, but rather the free coffee from Laura had been more of a bonus, some sort of extra that came along with the companionship. And it wasn’t that she desperately needed the caffeine as much as she had pretended to when she and Laura had gotten together most mornings. The energy boost from the rich, brown liquid was, again, a bonus.
What she’d got out of her ritual was companionship—someone to bounce ideas off of, a good, deep friend to share the boring details of her boring life and her boring job. Laura had a corporate job that was just interesting enough to keep her there and just boring enough to make it a bit dull. Until Laura had met Dylan and Mike, in fact, they’d both been boring. There had been equity between what Josie would tell and what Laura would tell, a mutual bitching session that in the end balanced them out.
Josie, though, had spent years trying to get herself into a stable economic situation, and boring was an accomplishment. Her life had been more interesting than anyone would wish, growing up. In addition to losing her dad, and putting up with her mom, she didn’t have a smooth time of it at school, either.
“Smartmouth” had been the phrase that teachers had used the most with her. Watch that smart mouth. You’re a smartmouth. And occasionally, along with fingers clenching her bicep, cut it out, smartass, hissed in her ear. That one was the angry English teacher, the furious phys ed teacher—pretty much whichever teacher had a temper and couldn’t stand the fact that Josie did not defer to authority unless authority deferred back.
Socially, she did okay. Being a target for the teachers made her stand out, get notice. Plenty of boys wanted to date her. Though “dating” was a loose term where she grew up. A date meant that maybe the guy paid the car fee at the drive-in and managed to drive you home after he got what he wanted. Or, once you were old enough for bars, on cheap beer night you might get treated to enough drinks to get you drunk—and then, again, a ride home if the guy got what he wanted.
She’d tired quickly of that scene and had hidden in books, her nose in a tome at the local library and later the university branch campus’s meager stacks, hoping to read her way to a better life. It had worked. Nursing school had been her big ticket out of Nowheresville, Ohio. When she’d earned her associate’s degree she’d qualified for a full ride at the small college in Boston, which, for whatever reason and whatever deity knew why, had picked her out of a stack of Josies and made her a queen.
Once she’d transferred to the Boston area, she’d been able to breathe for the first time, a giant exhale of victory.
It was a big, giant fuck you to the rundown house she’d left, the trailer parks, the poverty, the misery of where she’d grown up. And most of all to all the people who had told her that her dreams had been foolish, that she had been overreaching or snobbish, or too full of herself. She’d had to struggle against it within herself—one part of her saying give up, another telling that part to fuck off. It shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. The true Josie had won, though. She had, indeed, said, fuck you to the other part, the part that was essentially the king crab pulling hard on the crabs that tried to escape the cooking pot. If she could have lifted a giant middle finger, tall enough to be seen the six hundred miles from Boston to northeast Ohio, she would have constructed it.
Instead, she faced a rather large structure of her own making that she needed to deal with—and that was nearly six figures in student loans. When you came from where Josie came from, people didn’t have college funds, or grandparents who helped out, or even well-established scholarships. A local credit union had thrown $500 a year her way for four years, and she’d managed to get the full Pell Grant three out of five years. She’d spent four years chipping away at her associate’s, and one of those years, her mom had never bothered to file her taxes. In the ensuing mess, Josie, still a dependent, had lost out on her Pell Grants. Community college and branch campus tuitions were low, but not that low.
It was so worth it, though. All worth it. Her graduation day—their graduation day, hers and Laura’s—had been such a triumph for her. In spite of her mom, Marlene, showing up looking and acting like an older, drunker, version of Daisy Duke. It hadn’t been pretty. A day of massive pride for Josie had turned into unrelenting embarrassment. Rather than striking a chord of fury, though, the embarrassment had actually given way to gratitude. A deep, intense, sense of gratitude that she had made it, that these past six years doing everything possible to change who she was, to defy the trajectory that everyone had assumed she would follow, had paid off. She was not her mom.
If Laura had been there, she could have talked about all of that.
But Laura wasn’t.
She’d moved on.
Inviting Alex over to her apartment for dinner was turning out to be a colossal mistake. First of all, she actually had to clean the place. Her apartment looked like early thrift shop, circa 1994, with a definite hippie tone to everything. She kept it neat, she just didn’t keep it clean. So she had spent most of the day dusting baseboards, pulling things off shelves and wiping under them, cleaning the crud out of the corners of the bathroom and making sure that everything that didn’t really have a place appeared to have some kind of a place. She opened the windows and aired the place out, and burned a little essential oil in an oil burner to fill the house with eucalyptus and lavender. It made her feel more alert, and calmer at the same time, excited to have a man over in her apartment for the first time in forever. Her cat, Dotty, was not a good helper, instead finding various sunny spots on the windowsills to curl up in.
She’d invited Alex for a 7:00 dinner. It was now 6:30. She’d bought all of the groceries earlier that day, but now panic set in. What if he didn’t like her cooking? What if this really was just about sex? What if she’d been too forward in making that joke about the movie? What if he didn’t like her apartment? What if he was a serial killer and he was going to empty her freezer and put little chopped-up bits of Josie in there to snack on over the next month, and no one except Laura would ever know that she went missing, and all Alex would have to do is say, “Oh, I’m enjoying Josie thoroughly, don’t worry,” and Laura would think that was a sexual innuendo? What if?
As charming as all those thoughts were, Josie shoved all of those insecurities aside, and was grateful that she hadn’t planned to cook any form of meat that looked like it might be human. Tonight, it was a simple pasta dish with an alfredo sauce, a rosemary focaccia, and a tossed salad
, with something chocolate from a bakery for dessert. It was great first-date food.
Was this a first date? Second date? Was the coffee shop the first date? Was the on-call room the first date? Boy, if you counted all of those she was somewhere around her seventh or eighth date and she should have been putting out anal by now. Technically, though, she supposed that the coffee shop was date one, and that therefore, this was date two.
Phew, no anal yet. Time to put away the butt plug. Her bedside table was well equipped for what she assumed would be the real dessert. She had condoms, and lube, and a few toys, in case he turned out to be that adventurous. She had hidden her giant black rabbit, though. No man needed to be intimidated by something that made her come like she was riding a Sybian while being licked by four tongues.
Everything was set up in the kitchen, the salad was tossed, the bread was ready and sliced, cooling on the counter, and she had the pasta and the water and the salt all ready to assemble and boil once Alex arrived. The sauce was done, and so she found herself rearranging candles on her mantle, making sure that the remote control was next to the television, and shooing the cat off the bed.
Why was she was so nervous when this was a sure thing? It drove her a bit batty. If she could fuck the guy against a brick wall under a canopy of ivy, while people kayaked nearby, what the hell was making her so nervous about making love to him in her own bed? This wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t a Dan Savage column, although…hmm…maybe it could be, that depended on Alex. It was just a guy, and her, and a basic “come over to my house and let me make you dinner” kind of date. The kind that Laura had gone on when Dylan had cooked for her and Mike, and the three of them had solidified a lot of goodness and hope in their relationship.
Bingo! That’s what made her so nervous. This was more than just a dinner date at her apartment, this was a trial for real life and real love. Alex wasn’t just coming over for dinner and sex, he was coming over to give her companionship and depth, and to trade in that little back and forth, where you give a little piece of your integrity to someone else and see if you can trust them with it. That she looked forward to this scared and thrilled her all at once. Maybe she really was ready for the kind of love that Dylan and Mike showered Laura with. Alex seemed capable of it. She had to let him in enough to give it a whirl, to watch him in his natural habitat. Innuendo, and looks, and touches, and caresses could tell her some things. But silence and tension and stress would tell her more than any of the fun stuff could.
The test of a person comes when they’re at their worst, that’s when the soft underbelly of people gets revealed. Josie had learned that the hard way when her dad had died when she was eleven. She’d watched her entire world fall apart. Her mother had spent six weeks in the hospital, all the way up in Cleveland, recovering from a brain injury. And she’d come back different. When people get hurt, they come back different, Josie had learned. And Josie had gotten hurt, not injured, but hurt by that tragedy, and she had never been the same, either. The doorbell rang, shaking her out of her reverie, and the cat ran to answer it, like a demented, furry butler.
Alex stood on Josie’s front porch and rang the bell. When she’d given him her address, he knew it sounded familiar, but he hadn’t realized that he could walk here from his own apartment two blocks around the corner. They’d both picked East Cambridge for whatever reason, probably the cheaper rent, and he smiled to himself, realizing that the right person may very well have just been right around the corner. The door opened and he found himself being evaluated by a very fat cat at his feet. It seemed to be unable to decide whether to rub up against him or to run away and hide, and as his eyes lifted to look at its owner, he realized that Josie had an expression on her face that said just about the same thing. They were both nervous. Was that how the whole night would be? The lazy casualness with which he carried himself most of the time seemed to disappear around her. The scent of something good hung over the air between them. He’d had a long day, getting off shift at 7 a.m. and sleeping through most of the daylight so he’d be well rested for this.
Breaking the silence, she smiled and opened her door all the way, stepping back with an arm outstretched toward the hallway. “Please, please Alex, come in.”
He’d walked through the door holding a bottle of wine. He hadn’t been sure, red or white, and had made a last-minute guess at the wine store, going for rosé just to be safe. He hoped she wasn’t a wine snob. Then again, if she were, maybe she could teach him something. The idea that there would be another time like this, and another, and another, and another, stretching on with her, wound his brain into a giant knotted string ball. He felt like a nervous schoolboy around her, and all he needed now was to have sweaty palms to complete the picture of a fully besotted, hopeless romantic.
He held up the bottle of wine, hand gripping it like an anchor. “I brought this, I hope it goes with dinner.”
She took it out of his hands and her face softened, shoulders lowering, her body relaxing. “It’s wine,” she said.
“Yeah, you do drink…?” He leaned forward, arm outstretched, his face a mask, as it occurred to him for the first time that maybe she didn’t consume wine. What if she were an alcoholic and in recovery, what if she abstained for other reasons? He should have called ahead, maybe bringing a tiramisu, or something chocolate would have been a better idea. Flowers weren’t even safe nowadays. He’d gone on one date where he’d brought a bouquet that had daisies in it and the poor woman had ended up sucking down Benadryl and leaving early, her flower allergy triggered by what he had thought was a romantic gesture.
She laughed. “Of course I drink, are you kidding me? Do you know anyone in the medical profession who doesn’t drink?”
He chuckled. “Fair enough.”
Her turn to laugh. “The wine’s lovely, thank you. I have no idea whether it matches this dinner, but I figure it’s wine, it matches everything.” She walked down a long, narrow hallway, leading to a kitchen. She didn’t seem to be in the middle of rushing around cooking, and yet he saw that a lovely meal seemed to have been prepared. A salad, some sort of bread, and pasta, about to be boiled. He liked it. Simple, to the point, no frills. Like Josie.
Just as she had on the day that they’d met at the hospital after the baby’s birth, she looked like she put some effort into her appearance. He liked that, but she didn’t need to. The way she’d looked when they’d met at the hospital during the birth had actually appealed to him more. Earthy, no makeup, no pretense, just very, very real. That didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate what she wore right now: a soft, heathered lilac v-neck top, coupled with some nicely tailored pants. He noticed she was barefoot, with a little toe ring wrapped around her second toe, a tiny opal set in silver. He couldn’t remember a tattoo from that brief interlude down by the river the other day. Tonight, he hoped, he’d be able to explore every inch of her body and find out what sort of imprints were on it.
She set the bottle of wine down on the counter and turned to him, reaching her arms up for his neck. The embrace was a bit awkward as she planted a kiss on his cheek. He was surprised that she’d made the first step, and he stumbled, then reached around her, hands flat against her back, and pressed against her. From the way her muscles melted, he could tell that she was letting herself sink away from the anxiety and the nervousness. She inhaled deeply against his neck, and he wondered if she liked the cologne he’d chosen, a scent he’d worn since high school, something spicy and citrusy that he didn’t think twice about putting on, on days he didn’t work.
Her kitchen was tiny, but so was everyone else’s in Cambridge. She didn’t seem to cook much, he thought randomly; his mind was trying to catalog the room. He shut it off and turned on the animal inside, instead. He wanted to sink with her into a different state of being, letting his desire run untamed now as he pulled her back and settled in for a kiss.
The walk over here had been filled with questions about what exactly was going on between them. But as he ben
t down to take her mouth fully, and her fingers played with the curly edges of his hair as she slid against him, her body submitting to his, letting him use his lips and tongue and hands to re-introduce himself, what was between them most urgently was his rock-hard—
“Hi!” she gasped, coming up for air, touching foreheads. Grinning, her lips stretched in a feline smile, the kind a woman gives you right after a toe-curling session in bed.
Not before.
The night just got way more interesting. His hands held her hips against his thighs, and he assumed she could feel him, he wanted her to feel him, bending his knees enough to lean down and go for more of that luscious mouth. Maybe an appetizer in bed before dinner. And then dinner in bed. Then bed after dinner.
With a nightcap of sex on the baseball field across the street.
Shivers ran through her body as he held her, as if she could read his mind.
And then she did.
Pulling him by the hand to the kitchen counter, she offered him the bottle of wine to hold, then reached into a drawer for a bottle opener.
“Dinner doesn’t have to be ready for a while. Let’s enjoy a glass or three of wine.” The sly smile tickled her lips and he found himself falling into her eyes, his body harder and needier than he’d been for any woman before. A light jazz sound tinkled through the air, his ears following the sound down the hallway. Her bedroom? What color was her bedspread? Her pillow? Her vibrator?
She had to have one. No one this sensual, this experimental, wouldn’t.
