He hadn’t been convinced. She could tell. But there were some things that took mulling before they settled in. And that was all right. Other matters engaged them before long, and then out came the Ben & Jerry’s, a deep and rich double chocolate delight. Conner had brought home a video and Sherry sat beside Katt on the couch, paying no heed to the mayhem on the tube, but holding Katt’s hand and gazing over at Conner getting off on the movie, but mostly at the simple sadness of her friend’s profile. She felt warm and good, wrapped in comfort there beside her.
When Conner announced he was going to bed, kissed his mom, gave Sherry a hug, and dashed upstairs, the two women blended together on the couch. “Come here,” Sherry said, fighting a resistance in Katt, a knotted muscle softening under her touch. “I’ve missed you,” she told her as they embraced.
“I’ve missed you too.” Soft lamentation.
She kissed the warm smooth stretch of Katt’s neck as her right hand curved along Katt’s jawline, fingertips at and under shortfalls of brown hair. “How are you holding out?”
“Fine,” her friend said.
“Liar,” Sherry teased, and there was a litde laugh. Still, they shared the gravity of things. No hurry. She would coax it out of her in time. Felt good here. Solid and comfordng. Her condo served its function, but there was a starkness, a linearity there that had insulated her from the world. Here, Katt’s warmth, even cloaked in her grief and sadness, enveloped them both, opened Sherry up, made her vulnerable. It felt as if her whole past became visible and available, the deep shaft of things buried or forgotten now open to come forth and tease or torment her again. Deep down, there was fear and hurt and anger; but closer to the surface now, and overwhelming in its warmth and goodness, was love. Sherry loved this woman. It was a simple natural fact, nothing forced, nothing delusional about it. “Come upstairs?” she suggested.
Katt’s voice held injury. “Isn’t it a litde—”
“No, it’s time.” And it was. Time for whatever was in store for them, a night spent in the same bed, embrace or beyond, the accretive healing of two souls sharing the same night-space, breath to breath, skin to skin.
As one, they rose.
Ordinarily, when Conner went to bed, Katt would light a candle and sit in the living room, blinds shut, going in deep to her guilt. Sometimes she tried to kill the flurry of scripting that went on in her head,
but more often than not she let the regret take hold, replaying these last few months, making different choices that veered her away from being a killer and an abusive mother and a liar. How, she wondered (but found no answer), could she feel such depths of love for her son and yet have done what she did? Chalk it up to stress, residues of Marcus. An easy answer, even in many ways the right answer. But it didn’t wash. There was no justification for it. It had happened, and she had chosen to do it, and all that existed at her center was an unshaped consciousness surrounded by snippets of musts and oughts and shoulds, scripts and stories that vied with one another and left her foundering in confusion.
Tonight, though, buoyed up into light sorrow by having Sherry in the house—and the prospect of lying next to her all night brought even more comfort—Katt felt the fretful round of recrimination lift, content with simply being and not peppering herself with the buckshot of morality.
They walked easily in tandem up the stairs, Sherry an angel of warmth and aroma. In the bedroom, its door being drawn soundlessly closed, almost as if she didn’t want her son to know they were there, she felt Sherry’s hand at her waist, suggesting her about and into an embrace. Too much haste. Too tight and clingy. She accepted the kiss, felt herself melt below. Not yet. She broke off. “Hey, hey,” she said softly. “Let’s just hold one another. Under the covers, okay? I’d like that.”
Sherry nodded. “All right.” She kissed Katt’s hands and Katt broke away. Sherry’s disappointment, small as it was, edged her kindness. But Katt felt that sex was still far off, that cuddling was as intimate as she wanted to be tonight. She undressed at her closet, tossing her clothes into the brown laundry basket. Beside Katt’s more prosaic dress suits, Sherry’s silken green robe hung like a daring notion. Katt watched her remove her dress, her bra, the red lace bikini briefs hugging her hips. Sherry smiled, sauntered over in an easy flow, cocked her head in sympathy with the sorrow she rightly read in Katt’s eyes, took her hands, brushed their knuckles against her nipples, then wrapped her arms around Katt as she moved in for a full body embrace. She felt as comforting as a blanket of sun, breasts touching, softening inward as Katt returned her hug.
They lay down then, cool sheets quickly warming about them. It felt as if their bodies had blended to the full, a comfort akin to a mother’s hug. But Sherry somehow came closer, kissed her gently, then more ardently, sliding her left leg up over Katt’s right. Her private hair teased at Katt’s, barely there, brilliant red curls twining into her brown ones. “I love you,” she whispered at Katt’s ear and it made her weep. “It’s all right,” she said, kissing her earlobe, the soft skin at the hinge of her jaw.
“You’re so good to me,” Katt protested, feeling as if she deserved condemnation, not love.
“Everything’s all right,” Sherry said. She comforted her, unhurriedly, even as she pressed and rhythmed herself against Katt’s clitoral hood. It felt good and Katt could feel the heat rising and sense the dampness and the breath changing in her bed-mate—so that when Sherry seized up and came, it
was no surprise at all, but a giving and a taking all in one. What surprised her was the sudden love-clutch below, the orgasm that crept up inside her when she hadn’t been paying heed. It flared at her clitoris, fiery, quick as a flicked match head, then spread deep and down and out through her entire body, shaking her, shaking tears out of her, her cheeks damp, kissing Sherry, making herface damp too. Her lover, all turned on, was gasping endearments in her ear. But she couldn’t process them, couldn’t focus to hear them, and that was all right. It was only the soothe that mattered, the clear loving intent, the rhythms of her words, the low ragged harshness of her voice.
Katt wiped her tears on the pillowcase, then laughed, hugging Sherry anew. She touched her toasty thigh, softer than babyskin. Sherry lay back, easing open. Katt’s hand moved in to touch the moistness, to further moisten it—an index finger, then the next finger, together a penile heft sliding deep, probing, caressing. She remembered what she had found, what her jealousy had tempted her to set loose. Incredibly, that temptation still existed— but attenuated, deflated, a faint echo of what it had been.
She uncurved her hand between Sherry’s thighs so that her fingers sank in another inch, touched the os, entrance to the cervix. Her lover mmm’ed in pleasure, squirming on the bed. Katt placed her left palm on Sherry’s tummy, her fingertips easing into the thick soft forest of pubic hair and deepening downward, the flesh-botde of the uterus now clarifying in her mind’s eye. She gave it light, she gave it love. Static interfered. Thoughts of her husband came between her will and the cure, his penis once tracking the same lovepath she now fingered. Jealousy, territoriality, a remaining twinge of revenge— these welled up to blur her focus.
Katt closed her eyes, raising her level of intent and trying for a bead on the tiny growth she’d found. But her Marcus-thoughts amplified, her guilt over Conner coming in to join them. She’d hurt her son. No measure of kindness toward him in the years ahead, no amount of motherly love, would ever counterbalance the enormity of what she’d done. Fine, fine, she told herself. Get past it, go through it, it’s a tired drone. Conner vanished and there popped into her head again good old Marcus. She sent out love through her fingertips, moving the right ones through Sherry’s wet warmth, palpating with the left. Marcus stood impassively beside the bed in a room that was and was not this room, a recrimination that this time failed. It was right to have sent him over. That stunned her. Now before her, despite her current bout of suffering, lay an opening out to fresh air and sunlight; with Marcus there had been only a sealed coffin,
lightless, airless, confining, eternal.
Did he deserve to die? No. But she deserved to live, and if that was selfish, then so be it. As parallel as one contrived to align one’s life with a spouse, that illusion merely covered the essential fact of aloneness. Our birth brought separation—and in that separation, ever after, we lived and we died. How convenient, she thought. How nice a justification. She gave it credence and she didn’t. He was dead—and that was right and it was wrong, right wrong right wrong, like a punchdrunk fighter being drubbed in an unending loop of pain and punishment.
Outside her window, the geese fluttered up and honked by. Sherry’s moans grew more intense as her fumbling hand found Katt’s left breast, thumbing the nipple hard, making more difficult the concentration Katt needed. Too dark in here.. She ought to have lit a candle. Babble babble, her mind, her body. She loved her lover’s cervix, but it fell short of being sufficient, the healing somehow elusive.
Another time she’d be stronger, she’d get the growth and rein in its stampede, tame the renegade cells or sheer them away. How she might do that occurred to her later at the lip of sleep, not to return to remembrance until fresh coffee steamed Sherry’s love-aroma from her upper lip into her nostrils the next afternoon. For now, she gave up the attempt and merged into complete sensuality, slick fingers finding and come-hithering Sherry’s G-spot, her other hand snaking down through the thick red thatch, furrowing labia apart, rhythming the moist nub she found there, bending at last to taste its elemental goodness. Love was good. She hadn’t known such love in a long time: healing, delivered from the heart, its ebb and flow moon-whole. The sadness, though it hung about, softened in the blessing of Sherry’s unconditional acceptance of Katt, just as she was, even if Katt’s just-as-she-was remained in essence unknown. Guilt eased back into her when she wasn’t looking, taking up its steady vigil over her; but it remained in abeyance, a deep yet mild ache that granted her some respite from its goad.
Katt fingered and kissed scar tissue, tracing letters across her lover’s back.
Mine, she thought. All mine.
Bleeding Under Moonlight
Tuesday, August thirty-first. A full moon tonight at Lyra’s cabin. Katt caught Sherry at her office, two rings and she answered, her voice softening as soon as Katt said hello. “I’m taking you somewhere special tonight.”
“Where?” asked Sherry.
“You’ll find out.”
“Oh, c’mon, c’mon, I want to know.”
“Nope,” Katt said. “My lips are sealed.”
And they went on in that vein like schoolgirls for an-amused few minutes. Katt told Sherry to meet her for soup and salad at Alfalfa’s, six o’clock sharp, and hung up. A call to Healing Pathways (Lyra overjoyed to hear happiness in Katt’s voice) had confirmed that the cabin was free and that they would not be disturbed. Although Katt was still bothered by the secrets she held inside, the communion she and her lover had shared all night—sleeping, waking, half awake and then nicely roused into a new tussle—had turned a corner on sorrow, had left guilt foundering in the dust. Five took forever to arrive. But when it did, Katt logged out of her workstation, gathered her papers, and bounded down the stairs to the parking lot.
She had no idea how such an unlikely phenomenon as an energy vortex could grant her such powers—could, with the help of the full moon’s rays, redouble them. Thank God no faith, naive or otherwise, had been required. It had gone on its subtle way inside her in the face of manifest doubt and skepticism. And soon, with her new love naked beneath the skylight, a fire raging in the fireplace, she would be able at last to confront the cancerous threat, reverse it, undo it, restore the body’s true harmony—giving Sherry no clue as to what she was about, but couching it in intimacy and eventually turning it into that. Indeed, it was that. Her power as she delivered it was—had always been—a gift of love; reversing it had run counter to love.
By five twenty she was home. Conner had made himself a bowl of popcorn, looking a little guilty at being caught snacking so near dinnertime. “Hi,” Katt said, leaning to kiss her son’s cheek. “How’s every little thing?”
Conner’s eyes widened. His munching slowed. “Fine,” he said, putting a spin on it that asked, And
what sort of yuckiness is this bizarre behavior the prelude to?
“Sherry and I are going out for dinner and then up to Lyra’s cabin for a few hours. I’ll fix you a Le Menu, the chopped sirloin, mushroom, and green bean kind.”
He cocked his head in a Marcus gesture, and Katt felt' a surge of anxiety which she managed to hide.
“No problem,” Conner said. “I’ll do it.”
Katt haggled, but she was pleased to see him take the initiative, and she quickly gave in. The house felt large again and brighter, as she showered and dried and dressed, a simple jeans and blouse combo. Tennis shoes over socks. Three small beaded necklaces, colorful, casual, that broke at the third button completed the picture. They’d look so nice and sexy, they’d feel that way, when she wore nothing else and bent to massage her friend, beaded stones lightly clicking at her breasts.
Downstairs she grabbed her son from behind, snatching him out of his hypnotic reverie. “Mo-om!” he protested, a hand tugging at her arm.
“Have a good ’un,” she said, releasing him. Although she feigned closeness, there was distance, a barrier. She wondered if it might always exist between them. She hoped with all her heart it would eventually disappear.
“When’ll you be back?” he asked.
“Late’s my guess. Elevenish. Don’t wait up.”
“Will Sherry be staying over?”
“Dunno,” said Katt. “My guess is she’ll sleep at her own place tonight.” God knew they could use (he rest.
“’Kay. Have fun.” The tube claimed his eyes, sucked up the whole of his attendon.
Six on the dot, Katt arrived at Alfalfa’s, a down-to-earth health-food supermarket located just off College on Horsetooth. Wasn’t as large as the one in Boulder—which, along with Pearl Street Mall, she’d made a point of visiting soon after her arrival in Colorado—but the people who worked there were wonderful and it invariably buoyed her spirits to stop in, even if a browse was all she had in mind.
She scoped the aisles, the tables in front, the juice bar. Took all of two minutes. No Sherry.
Somebody came up to her, her mouth wide around Katt’s name in a small screech of recognition. Skeleton eyes big in a radiant face. Judy Ger-rard, her first massage client in Fort Collins, though she’d discontinued after the third session. A young man over by the chips, handsome, vaguely familiar, looked up at Judy’s exclamation. Katt nodded at Judy’s words, exchanged pleasantries. Then she could feel the woman drawing away from the babble she’d created. She promised to call, set up another massage session. One day next week. They both knew she was lying. Judy clamped an affectionate squeeze on Katt’s arm, then held her hand and moved past her with a wave and a blessed-be.
The aisle was empty.
More scoping. A cluster of people had carts and kids over by the dried fruits and grain bins, bagging what they found, marking weight and price per pound on white tags.
Still no Sherry.
Katt checked her watch. Five minutes past. What 222
the heck. Let Sherry find her. She snaked over to the island of salad bar items, snagged a wide black bowl, started her scavenge of the exotica—a spoonful of spud salad, seaweed something, trail mix, sunflower seeds, a perfect eggplant-tomato-squash casserole.
“Starting without me, I see.” Sherry, wearing a low-cut blouse with eyeholes and laced leather thongs at the U of her bodice, smiled broadly.
“That’s right,” Katt replied. “You’re gonna stand me up, you’re on your own.”
“So what looks good?”
“Everything.”
“And where are we headed?”
Katt looked at her. Deadpanned: “I thought we’d sit at the tables in front.”
“Tease.”
Ka
tt was pleased with herself. She asked if Sher-ry’d go for a salad too.
“I think I’ll have them make a smoked turkey on whole wheat. Grab us a table. I’ll join you in a sec.” Funny how good hearing Sherry’s voice, seeing the control in her lovely face as her lips moved, made Katt feel. Here was a woman who’d gone through her personal hell and come out on the other side— whole, content, complete.
“Okay,” Katt said, heading for the front of the store and catching a glimpse of the handsome guy studying canned soup near the salad bar. His hands were empty and no cart stood beside him.
She drew a cappuccino, paid for it and her salad, sat at a table near the dusky window. The small din-ing area’s dozen or more tables were sparsely oc-
cupied, a few student types reading textbooks, friends and couples in quiet talk over tea. Maneuvering among the closely packed tables was hard but not impossible.
When Sherry arrived, hips swaying to avoid bumping an empty chair, she commented, “Crowded tonight.”
“It’s just a small space is all,” said Katt.
The trio behind Sherry rose from their table, cleared it, and left. Sherry settled in, her eyes boring into her friend’s, coming at her again with the question. Refusing to let her gaze be caught that way, Katt equivocated, fork at her salad, teasing, eyes roaming the room. The guy was skirting tables over yonder, coffee cup in hand. He fixed on the next table over and slid in behind Sherry, the back of his chair nearly touching hers.
Maddening, being unable to place him.
Sherry snapped her fingers face-high. “Hey Galloway, I’m talking to you.”
“And I’m listening. Barely.” A sly smile.
“I’m gonna ask one more time. Then if I don’t get an answer, I just may withhold my affections.” Sherry teased like a pro. “Where—other than to bed of course—were you planning to take me?” She bit on her pickle spear, daring Katt with a glare to put her off one more time.
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