by Lainey Davis
I sink into the papasan chair on my porch, just enjoying my house. I had an early night after hanging out with Emma. Her younger baby got really fussy and I could tell she wanted to be alone with him, so I just went home and got a normal night’s sleep for once.
Not before tossing and turning for a long while, thinking about my reluctant running coach and how he had scooped me into his arms when my lungs stubbornly refused to breathe properly on our training run. The experience really showed me how much I’m going to need to work to get ready for this thing.
Fucking Tim. He’s probably sitting at home smugly telling Alice how he’ll make an athlete out of me yet. Gag.
Rather than take a practice run this morning, I slid into my “workout” leggings and curled up in my sunroom, waiting for dawn to strike the barges slowly floating past on the river.
As the sun comes up, I squint into my back yard and notice a long line of mud that definitely was not there the day before. Staring, I stand and walk to the glass wall of my sun room. The line is too big to have been dug by some asshole’s dog in search of a bone. I notice that it extends into my neighbor’s yard. A ridge in the grass.
I frown at it. My neighbor, Valerie, is a crotchety old busybody who thinks I stole her hedge. We’ve been in a fight about it since I bought this place. It was planted on my fucking side of the property line, and it was ugly as fuck, so I had it removed and now I can enjoy my view of the river. She’s still not over it, though, and I imagine this new trench is her doing.
She’s probably planning some new landscaping nightmare, I decide, and make a mental note to call and fight with her later.
I finish my coffee, and get ready for work. We’re launching some major new strategic initiatives this year, partnering with other industry experts to help our athlete clients create charitable foundations. I spend the entire day pulling together comparison plans about competitor firms in other cities, ignoring everyone except Mark, and I only talk to him when he brings Pad Thai for lunch. I’m still pissed off about the coerced marathon gang.
I practically died this weekend training for that nonsense…is what I told Tim in a series of angry text messages. He knows I’m pouting. He probably also knows me well enough to understand that I hate doing things I’m not awesome at. I’d much prefer to be coerced into this next year when I’ve had time to get good at it first.
I get home from work and reach for my mail, where I notice a neon pink note card sticking out among my bills and Bust magazine. When I get inside, I drop my stuff on the little table I selected for just this purpose, and I read the note.
Scratched in hurried handwriting, it reads “we need to discuss your latest work in the backyard.” It’s from Valerie, which makes me frown, because I assumed that ridge was her doing.
Unless it still is and she wants to fill me in on whatever nonsense she’s scheming. I reach for my phone to pull up a copy of our property survey for her perusal, when she starts banging on my front door.
“Nicole, I know you’re there. Open up.”
“Um, hi, Valerie.” I step back a foot and she bursts into my house, stomping her feet on my mat and shivering like she just walked here from Ohio instead of next door. “What’s going on?”
Valerie pulls a packet of rolled up paper from her back pocket. “The yard is basically sliding into the river,” she says, gesturing toward the sun room. “That ridge of dirt is just unsightly today, but mark my words. In a week we’re going to have a crater back there.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. I have no idea what she did for a living before she retired, but I doubt it’s related to yard slides. “And how do you know this exactly?”
I gesture for the papers Valerie offers and begin reading skeptically. “Rotational landslide,” I say. “This looks like a page from a high school textbook.”
“Precisely,” Valerie says, tapping the pages. When I don’t respond, she says, “As you know, I retired after a long career teaching high school science.”
I glance at the diagrams. “I actually didn’t know that, Valerie. We only ever talk about landscaping.” We don’t chat about her career path, but I do sometimes hand her a glass of wine to drink while we bicker from our back patios.
As two single, female homeowners, we mostly communicate about the shared wall of our townhouses and the shared yards suffering from our opposite aesthetics.
Her papers all seem to relate more to giant hillsides than urban backyards. Valerie believes, because she’s been walking her cat back there apparently, that the yard has been slowly shifting and basically making its way into the river.
I walk away from Valerie and open a bottle of wine. She follows and, when I raise a brow at her, she sidles up to my counter. I guess she thinks we’re going to sit down and talk about this together.
I sigh.
“Look. I’ve had a really long day at work. My boss is making me run a marathon. I just don’t have the energy left for a landslide tonight.”
Valerie laughs maniacally, like I’m the one who’s being ridiculous here, and explains that this will all unfold over the course of the next few weeks. I maintain the right to stare at her like she’s an idiot and I start to tune her out, thinking instead of the new branding plan I want Tim to greenlight at work. Valerie coughs eventually, and I realize I’m supposed to respond.
“Can you say that again?” I ask. “This is all just a lot to digest.” Nice recovery, Nik. You’re such an asshole. Valerie suggests we each tap into our respective networks for advice and regroup in a few days to make a plan to save the yard.
By the time I shoo her out of my house, I have almost forgotten about the entire thing. I have filed the yard ridge away as a nuisance to deal with later. After work settles down.
I definitely push it into the back of my mind as I lie in my tub with a joint, searching the Internet for all the ways I could die training for a marathon relay. Seems like there are actually a lot of ways I could drop over dead, if I’m to trust all these horror stories online.
This is doing nothing to help me calm down. Taking another puff of my doobie, I decide there’s only one thing to be done if I’m going to salvage this day.
I need to get off.
I reach for my shelf of tub toys, selecting my most trustworthy vibrator, and close my eyes. But my clit doesn’t seem to be working. “What the hell?” I shout into the cavernous bathroom, my words echoing off the tile.
I try another toy, but I can’t even get so much as a tingle. I twist over the edge of my tub and grab my phone, pulling up some of my favorite tasteful porn. I crank the vibrator into high gear. Nothing.
Enraged, I decide this inability to orgasm is also related to being strong-armed into marathon participation. I throw the vibrator across the room and stare at my ceiling. Something is definitely off in my life.
In the morning, I wake up still angry, still convinced this marathon business is the root cause of my stress and my pussy problem. I decide that the only way through is through. And when Nicole Kennedy goes through something, she does it to kick ass and take names.
My to-do list today includes, apart from my work for work, hunting down a proper sports bra. This morning, I tried another little running attempt and my unrestrained knockers almost hit me in the teeth.
“Mark!” I lean over his office and then wince when I see his eyes widen in fear. I take my tone down a notch. “Do you work out?”
He nearly spits out his coffee. “Um, I’m gay and I’m single and I don’t have kids. Yes. The answer is yes.”
“Do you know where I can get a good sports bra?”
Mark looks at me, squints, turns his head to the side. “Did you hear the part where I said I’m gay? I mean, I can look it up for you on the internet…”
I scoff. “Forget it. Hold my calls. I’m going to find Alice.”
Alice Stag is puttering around the office kitchen space. She cooks from scratch and serves breakfast and a sit-down lunch here every day. It’s been a grea
t opportunity to get staff members talking to each other. We’ve seen a lot of really interesting collaborations grow out of these mealtime conversations.
Today, I’m hoping I can ask her about her rack without insulting her. “Hey, Alice,” I say, leaning in to get a muffin from the stainless steel counter.
She breaks into a smile. “Nicole! You never join us for breakfast. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
I feel a twinge of guilt at always sending Mark to fetch me a smoothie rather than come in here and say hello to her. She’s so perky, and she has hair with the same texture as mine, so she always has good advice about products. I sigh. “I, um, need your advice about bras.”
Alice’s face lights up. “Oh, I have a place for you! Yes. This is great.” She rattles on and on about how her boobs change size and shape so much since she started having babies. “They’re, like, a J cup one day and back down to a D the next. I swear! But this woman is a bra whisperer.”
Alice tells me about a fancy store north of the city, where all the big chested women go to find supportive bras that are actually pretty.
“I don’t need pretty. I need something that will strap down these boulders.”
Alice nods. “You’ll be in good hands.”
I’m skeptical. “There had better not be anything beige,” I tell her.
“Trust me! You’ll leave there with like ten bras. I mean, I don’t actually know what color the sports bras are…but probably not beige.”
I text Emma to see if she can go with me after work, and she immediately video chats me back. “Holy shit, Nik. Alice has been bugging me to go there since I got pregnant with Ricky! Yes.”
“I had no idea bras were such a big thing.”
She makes a face. “Um, yes you did. You’re always bitching about your back hurting.” She has a point. This all feels like more support for why I shouldn’t be a runner. Emma continues feeding me my dose of reality. “You keep avoiding dealing with this because of your mom,” she says, hitting me where it hurts. My mother finds everything about my body to be distasteful, and I swear she used to only buy me beige old-lady bras as an incentive to diet and slim down into a more acceptable size for her country club crowd.
“They sell the prettiest pink lace at the department store, Nicole,” she’d say with a fake smile. “Your sister has the loveliest B cups.”
I groan. “So anyway!” Emma’s face lights up. “I’m looking and they have wine night tonight. Let’s make it a whole thing. Can you give a ride to my friend Maddie, too?”
“Maddie from college?” Emma nods. “Yeah, sure. I haven’t seen her in ages.”
After work, I open my trunk and grab the carseat I bought to make things easier when I go places with Emma. She can’t drive because of her epilepsy, and I’m not going to just stand around while her husband wrestles with car seat straps each time Emma and I want to go out.
Tim personally taught me how to install the thing, and he’s as fastidious about safety as he is about, well, everything. I place one knee in the seat and tug on the belt, securing it, before I drive to grab my friend and her baby.
Once Emma and Maddie and baby Ricky pile in, we head to the boob store while I listen to the two of them talk shop about work. Emma eventually looks at me and tilts her head to the side. “You’re awfully quiet. It’s weird.”
I shrug. “Things are weird,” I say, nodding. Emma squints and Maddie leans forward, studying me. I hear the baby fart in the back seat. I sigh. “I couldn’t come last night. My pussy is broken,” I tell them, blurting it out in the open.
“Ok, this is important,” Emma says. “Tell us everything.”
I talk about the race I’m being coerced into, the feelings it dregs up about my mom, how it necessitates me buying this new bra “and now I’m hauling all your asses to some boob-tique. The timing is just a lot with our new foundation initiative. Oh, and there’s a trench forming in my back yard and my neighbor is being super annoying about it.”
Maddie whistles. “That’s a whole lot. I actually remember your mom visiting one time in college,” she says. “She was an ice cold snob about our dorm, remember?”
I nod. “Indeed. Can we not talk about her?”
Maddie moves to talking about her new fling, adjusting her bust and saying she hopes to find something lacy to wear for him. Emma actually pulls out her boob to show me how the clasp of a nursing bra works and I almost have to pull over.
“Why does your nipple look like that?” I hiss.
She shrugs. “It’s been in someone’s mouth nonstop for a few months. He stretched it out.” Emma laughs and I shake my head.
When we finally get to the shop, laid out elegantly in shades of purple with cushioned benches all over for people to sit and chat, Emma and Maddie shove me forward and explain to the store owner that I need sports bras and sexy bras.
Judy The Boob Whisperer beams and hustles me into a fitting room, where she somehow finds 13 things that are comfortable, beautiful, and hold my tits in place all at once. “Jesus, Emma, you weren’t kidding,” I shout over the curtain.
“Told you,” she sings, clinking her wine glass with Maddie while they wait their turn for the magic bra lady.
The whole experience reminds me how glad I am that I adopted Emma as my family. She and Maddie and Boobie-Judy all gush about how sexy I look in the bras, and they’re right, damn it. I’ve worked hard for decades to silence the voices inside telling me what my body is supposed to look like, and what it means that it does not meet that standard.
Sometimes, I guess, I just need this outside reinforcement. I buy a dozen different bras and drink a glass of wine while Emma takes her turn in the fitting room. I try not to gag when Judy hands her a sexy nursing bra, explaining that it comes with a risk. “You might wind up pregnant again if you get that one,” she says, grinning.
CHAPTER SIX
Nicole
THE NEXT MORNING, I’m fully decked out in my new boulder-holder and enough layers that I feel confident I can run two miles on my own before the public humiliation of the next group run this weekend. I remember that Isaac Brady will be there again—I refuse to call him Zack, because that’s just not the right nickname for Isaac and he’s a smug jerk who hasn’t earned a nickname from me yet.
This entire week at work, Tim hasn’t shut the hell up about the relay team. He’s “Tim Stag Excited,” which involves micromanagement and 100 texts per day about stretching and lactic acid. I will never, ever reveal to him that I did wind up doing some of his leg stretches and they did actually feel really good.
I only tried them because I was curious, damn it.
The only slightly redeeming factor is that the other guys from work are all also receiving these hyper-detailed info dumps. At least Tim’s not assuming I’m clueless because I’m female.
I lace up my new sneakers, pull on a knitted hat with a puff ball on top, and walk out back through my sun room door. I decide I’m going to stretch while the sun rises, because that feels poetic or something. Only as I make my way through the frosty grass out back, I notice the ridge isn’t so much a ridge as a trench.
“Mother fucker,” I screech as I walk closer. Valerie was absolutely right about this thing. The bottom half of our back yard is a foot lower than the part where I sit to drink beer in the summer evenings. So much for my test run. I consider banging on my neighbor’s door, but I remember it’s six in the morning.
“Emma,” I mutter. “Emma will be awake.” I dial my girl, who picks up almost as soon as it starts ringing.
“Nik! You’re up early. Well, you don’t sleep, do you?”
“I sleep and I’m up early. Ems--there’s a fucking trench in my back yard.”
“What do you mean?” I hear rustling on her end, like she’s sitting up in bed.
“I don’t know. My stupid neighbor says we’re having a landslide. What the fuck do I even do with a landslide?”
“Hmm.” I can hear Emma shifting around and something makes
a gurgling sound.
“Are you holding a baby right now?”
“I am! Ricky is going to keep on nursing while Mama does some phone research. Aren’t you? Aren’t you, precious? Yes!” I tune her out while I walk back inside and start making coffee. Emma used to be a reporter. I know she’s probably simultaneously searching her special databases while she coos all that nonsense to her kid.
I hear Thatcher start murmuring to her in the background and I nearly gag. He’s so freaking smitten with her. He even makes glass sculptures of her and the kids to display in his gallery along with his other glass art. I shouldn’t be so bitchy about that. Emma’s in a good place. But I also don’t need to hear her husband waking up in the morning. It feels too intimate, and reminds me that I’ll never have anything like that.
“You want me to give you a call in a bit?”
“No! Nik, stay on the phone. If we end the call I will get too deep in baby work and forget all this has ever happened. I’m pulling something up about urban landslides. You need to call a…geotechnical engineer.”
“A what now?” She repeats herself. “Huh. I had absolutely no idea there was a specific person you could call about this.”
“Well,” she says, chewing. Thatcher must have brought her some food. I approve of this. “I don’t think they just work with landslides. Like, they are the people to call about fracking and earthquakes and stuff.”
“Fracking?”
“I mean, and other stuff, too…”
I sigh. “Thanks, Emma. I appreciate your help.”
“I’m glad we connected! I miss your angry voice!”
“We just hung out.”
“Well, and I had to end it early because Ricky was a mess…”
“I love you and I’m hanging up now because I have to go to work and get Mark to make me an appointment with one of these fracking guys.”
