Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2)

by Eliza Andrews

  Soulmates, I repeat silently to myself.

  Still just guessing, still not really knowing what I’m doing, I send my index finger up the same rabbit hole where my middle finger disappeared to, finding a new rhythm as I thrust inside her. She lets go of my wrist and claws her nails down my forearm, and it’s so sexy that my insides go hot and numb and gelatin, all at the same time. I want to form words, I want to say “I love you,” but I seem to have lost my capacity to speak.

  She comes a couple minutes later, in a rocking series of spasms and hushed moans. When she finally stills, I bring my hand back out, wiping Jenny off of me onto the rough wooden slats of the bench.

  I stay perched above her, searching her closed eyes and frozen face for signs of life.

  “Jenny?” I ask when she still doesn’t open her eyes a few seconds later. Worry starts to overtake arousal as I wonder if this was all just too much at once, despite what she asked for. I run a damp finger down her cheek. “Are you alright?”

  Finally, heavy eyelids break open and she blinks up at me a few times. She lets out a long, contented sigh.

  “I’m more than alright. I’m… If I’d known I could feel that way, I would’ve made you do that a long time ago.”

  I grin, more pleased with myself than I have been in a while. Then I shrug. “Beginner’s luck,” I suggest.

  She uses my arm to lever herself up. She zips up, buttons her shorts.

  “We should probably get out of here and head home, right?”

  The stupid grin on my face falters, spell broken. “Yeah. We probably should.”

  Chapter 11: A tutorial on how NOT to come out.

  That night before our senior year in high school at the Ohio State Fair that started out so magical ended up totally FUBAR.

  We stop for milkshakes at a highway diner not long after we leave the park, giggling and swapping bites of our shakes and playing footsies under the table until we lose track of time, the way sappy teenagers in love do. I drop her off at her house close to one in the morning, an hour past her curfew. We think we’re being sneaky and quiet and there are no lights on in the house, but unbeknownst to us, Jenny’s mother’s waiting for her in the living room, peering at us through curtains we think are closed.

  Which is how we get caught a minute later, making out inside a soft yellow cone of porch light.

  Jenny’s hands are halfway up my shirt, and she’s literally sending fucking moans down my throat when the front door flings open. And all the sudden, there’s Mrs. Pearson in the doorway, standing there in a blue nighty, eyebrows nearly meeting her hairline, mouth hanging open as wild eyes dart from Jenny, to me, to Jenny again.

  “Jennifer Anne Pearson!” she bellows as a startled Jenny breaks away from me. “Inside! Now!” And she yanks her daughter roughly away from me by the arm and slams the door in my face.

  I freeze, panicked. Total fucking deer in headlights. I want to help Jenny, but I know bursting in isn’t the right thing to do, and I don’t have any other ideas, so I just stand there stupidly on the front porch for a while, listening to the shouting match that’s unfolding inside. After a couple minute, I realize there’s nothing I can do, so I tuck my tail between my legs and go home, hoping but not really expecting that my own parents will have long since gone to bed.

  They haven’t, of course; they don’t usually even get home from closing the restaurant until close to midnight, which means they’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, watching television on the couch when I try to tiptoe past them through the kitchen and down the stairs.

  Like my mother would ever be fooled by that.

  “You’re late,” she says just as the door to the basement squeaks open.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Bad traffic on the way home.”

  She turns around to face me, clicks the tongue against the roof of her mouth with unadulterated disdain. “I know you’re not late and lying about it to me, too,” she says.

  I drop my eyes, rubbing my thumb over the same fingertips that had reached inside my girlfriend a few hours earlier. I know it’s only my paranoid imagination, and shit, it’s not like I didn’t wash my hands when we stopped for milkshakes, but I feel like my mom can fucking smell Jenny on my fingers all the way from where she sits.

  “Sorry, Momma. We just left Columbus too late. Lost track of time.”

  “Wrong answer.” She gets up from her place on the couch, walks towards me with arms crossed against her chest. My father follows her, and his face is stony.

  That’s when I know I’m really in trouble.

  “Mrs. Pearson called a few minutes ago.”

  Aww, shit.

  Then my mother, who I’ve known for eighteen fucking years and yet I’ve only seen her cry once, when her own mother died, starts to get tears in her eyes. “She told us what you and the Pearson girl were doing.”

  “Momma, I — ”

  “How could you, Ani?” she asks me through tears. My father’s lips press tightly together, and he puts a comforting arm around my mother’s shoulders. “We raised you to be Christian,” she says. “Christian! Your relations with that girl are not acceptable to us.”

  “But Momma, she’s my girlfriend! She’s been my girlfriend for — ”

  “Do not say that again under my roof again, young lady.”

  “I love her,” I say quietly.

  “You do not love her. That is disgusting, and unnatural, and you will — ”

  “But she’s my soulmate! She’s my girlfriend and I’m in love with her and she — ”

  “Anika Regina Singh!” she shouts, and she’s crying in earnest now. “I did not bring you up to raise your voice to your mother!”

  I try lowering my voice, and it’s trembling with tears of my own. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I want you to understand — ”

  “You are not to see her,” she says, talking over me. “You are not to call her. You are not to text her. You are not to talk to her in school. Mrs. Pearson, your father, and I already discussed this and — ”

  “You can’t stop me from seeing her!”

  “I can and I will!” Her hand snakes out, and at first, I think she’s going to slap me. I flinch instinctively, but she simply opens her hand before me. “Give me the keys to the car.”

  “But I — ”

  “Give me the keys!”

  I drop the keys to the Explorer in her open palm.

  “You are grounded until school starts. And once school starts, you’ll go straight to Soul Mountain every day after school and stay there until Dutch, your father, or I can take you home.”

  “This isn’t fair,” I say, and I’m crying as hard as she is.

  “You’re acting against God. All I’m trying to do — ” Her voice catches in her throat as she stifles a sob. “All I’m trying to do is protect your soul.”

  #

  I follow my mother’s orders. I move through life as a ghost. I don’t see Jenny, don’t call her, don’t text her. My mom’s checking my phone log every day, and I’m sure Jenny’s mom is doing the same, so there’s nothing for me to do but play basketball incessantly at the court near her neighborhood and hope for her to come by. She doesn’t.

  School starts, and I find that Jenny has transferred to another trigonometry class. That first day after school at Soul Mountain, I take continuous breaks to go into the bathroom and cry.

  Dutch is working that day, too, and she volunteers to drive me home when our parents let us go home early after the dinner rush.

  I’m not in the mood to talk on the way home, and I try to make it as obvious as fucking possible, but Dutch has never been one to take a hint.

  “So,” she says, “you finally opened your closet door. Hallelujah.”

  I glance over at her, confused, and look back down at my lap.

  “I’ve known you were gay since you were about twelve,” she continues. “Came into our room to find you reading one of my magazines, and the way you tried to hide what you were looking at…” She chuc
kles, shaking her head at the memory.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Dutch.”

  “At first I thought, ‘Is she actually interested in makeup now and she’s just afraid to tell me?’ But that didn’t seem right, so I — ”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Will you shut up and let me finish? I’m on your side here and I’m trying to tell a story.”

  Her pronouncement — that she’s on my side — shocks me into silence. Because when in our entire lives has Dutch ever claimed to be on my side?

  “Anywho, I saw the actress who was on the cover — that girl in all those weird-ass science fiction movies you liked so much — and it just sorta clicked.” She glances over at me, then back to the road. “Why you were reading the magazine. Why you looked so embarrassed when I came in. Why you tried to hide it.” She shrugs. “So yeah, I’ve known for a long time. Maybe you’ll stop being so afraid to be who you are now.”

  I look at my sister in sheer wonder. Did I actually just get encouragement from Dutch?

  She reaches into the center console, fishes around until she pulls out her phone. Tosses it to me. “Here. We’ll swap phones. You use mine to call your little girlfriend, I’ll use yours. We can swap back afternoons at Soul Mountain.”

  “You… you’re giving me your phone? So I can call Jenny?” I say, still dumbfounded.

  “The words you’re looking for here are ‘Thank you, Dutch.’”

  “Thank you, but… why are you being so nice to me? What do you want?”

  She laughs out loud. “Is it so hard to believe I’d want to see you happy, Ani? Really?”

  “A little, yeah.”

  She holds out her palm, and it reminds me of Mom demanding the car keys. “Then give me my phone back, if you’re going to be a little shit about it.”

  I put a phone in her hand, but it’s mine, not hers. Then I grin. “You can have this one.”

  Chapter 12: You know what? Screw “Amazing Grace.” I’ll just stay lost.

  Tuesday

  I trudge upstairs and into the kitchen, hungry and still half-asleep. I’m pretty sure that staying in my old room put me into some kind of wacky time loop, and I’m pretty sure I dreamed about high school — and Jenny — the night before.

  My mother’s sitting at the kitchen table, gazing down with a glassy stare at the front page of the newspaper.

  I give her a hug from behind and kiss her on the cheek. “Hey, Momma.”

  “Hey, baby,” she sighs without looking up. “Glad you got home safe last night.”

  The pre-surgery chemotherapy has left her worn and thin, like an old rug. Her skin is almost grey; a do-rag covers her head to hide the hair loss. It’s not the way I’m used to seeing my mother. I frown.

  “You alright?” I ask.

  “Yes, baby, I’m fine.” She stops. Looks up at me. Then she shakes her head. “No, I’m not alright. Not really.”

  I get an empty plate down from the cabinet and load it with bacon and eggs from pans that are still warm on top of the stove. I sit down next to her. She glances from the eggs to me and shakes her head, smiling.

  “Still the hungriest of all my children,” she says.

  “Still the biggest of all your children,” I retort.

  “True.”

  I pour a glass of orange juice and take a sip before I say, “So what’s wrong? You feeling bad from the chemo? Or are you nervous about the surgery?”

  She looks up, studies me a moment before answering. “No. I’m sure the surgery’ll be fine.” She rubs her hip absentmindedly, the one with the tumor hidden inside it.

  “You sure? It’s okay to be nervous.”

  “No, I’m… ” She heaves another sigh, eyes moving past me and staring at nothing in particular. “’Course I’m nervous ’bout the surgery. Why you gotta ask a silly question like that in the first place?”

  I smile at the sharp edges in her words because that sounds more like my momma. As long as she can snap at me like that, there’s still hope.

  “Heard you jumped in, helped your baba and your brother last night at the restaurant,” she says, changing the subject.

  I decide to go with it, not press the issue of her surgery, because when has my family ever been particularly good at talking about our feelings? We either don’t talk about them at all, or we yell. And I’m too tired to yell. So I shrug, tear off a chunk of bacon with my teeth.

  “That’s what I’m here for, right? Help out with things til you’re all recovered?”

  She nods and goes back to rubbing her hip. “Didn’t figure you’d start last night, though. Not after flying all day.”

  “They were in the weeds. It was the right thing to do. But anyway, what’s going on today?” I ask. “You want me to go with you to that chemo treatment?”

  “Actually… I was hoping that your baba could go with me. And you and Gerry could watch the restaurant?”

  My eyes narrow, not over being asked to babysit Soul Mountain, but at the million-and-one questions I still have about my brother. I decide to brave the topic.

  “So about that. About Gerry, I mean. He said he’s been clean for over a year and he’s living here and working at the restaurant? Are you really sure you should let him do that?”

  “Your brother has turned a corner.” She says it in her non-negotiable fact voice. “He’s different now. I believe the Good Lord gave him a bona fide revelation. And you need to give him a chance to prove that to you.” She jabs a finger at me when she makes this last statement, which makes me feel a little like, fuck, between me and the heroin addict, how did I suddenly become the bad guy?

  But then Gerry’s words from the night before come back to me. If he’s the black sheep, then I’m dark grey. Except maybe he’s not the black sheep at all anymore.

  (“For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.” — The parable of the prodigal son, fucking gospel of Luke, 15:24. Look it up. And yes I know the word “gospel” is supposed to be capitalized, but I don’t fucking feel like it, okay?)

  Maybe Gerry’s the prodigal son. The “Amazing Grace” once was lost, now he’s found ex-junkie. Always the favorite, underneath it all.

  But me? Yeah. Still the fucking dyke.

  I hold up my hands defensively. “Okay, alright. Don’t bite my fucking head off.”

  “Watch your mouth, Anika.”

  “Sorry. I was only asking. ’Cause last I heard, he was officially not an official member of the family anymore. That’s all. I just wondered what had changed.”

  “You want to know what’s changed?” she asks. “Everything’s changed.”

  Not quite everything, I think bitterly. I rip into the bacon again like a savage.

  #

  It’s Gerry and Becker and the Hispanic guy (who’s name is Emir, I learn) and me who open up Soul Mountain at eleven that morning. We’re more of a dinner place, and almost all of our lunch business is take-out from people who swing by on their lunch hour, so it’s blissfully quiet and restful, and I mainly spend my time running people’s credit cards in between playing games on my phone.

  Jodie and Ben come in right on time at noon for their weekly game of Scrabble. Jodie’s a hairdresser who owns a salon down the street; Ben owns the failing record shop on the corner. They used to date, years and years ago, but they’re still friends and get together once per week at Soul Mountain so that Jodie can beat Ben senseless in Scrabble. I haven’t seen them since the last time I was in Ohio, which was almost five years ago, and now Ben’s pony tail is streaked with silver and white and Jodie’s hair color looks like it definitely came out of a box.

  Jodie gives a high-pitched squeal of delight when she sees me behind the podium, shoving the Scrabble box at Ben and then prancing up to me with outstretched arms, wrapping me in a tight hug before I really have time to object.

  “Oh my God! Anika! Nobody told me you were coming home!” she exclaims agai
nst my shoulder. She pushes me back, still gripping my forearms. “Let me get a good look at you. Your hair’s still a disaster, but I like the shorter cut.” She pulls on the curly ends so that they come down just past my chin. “It frames your face nicely.”

  “Thanks… I think.”

  Her eyes scan up and down. “And you look like you haven’t aged a day. Like you’re going to walk in here in your high school uniform.”

  I give her a half-smile, but I’m thinking to myself, You have no idea how much I’ve aged, lady.

  Instead of saying that, I say, “You guys look good, too.”

  She finally lets go of me, but she’s still inspecting me like like she’s a fucking CSI lady-detective.

  “So what are you doing home? I thought you were playing basketball in Switzerland. That’s what your dad told me.”

  “I still am,” I say, although I wonder if it’s still true. Technically, I broke my contract by coming home. I don’t know how much the town of Marcine knows about my mother’s cancer, so I tell her, “My mom’s taking a break. So I came home to help out for a while.”

  I see Ben nod knowingly behind Jodie, so I’m thinking that maybe they know she’s sick, but then Jodie’s brow furrows in confusion.

  “You guys still get the same thing?” I ask, redirecting before she can ask more. I point to Ben. “Dal bhat tarkari for you, collards and chicken masu for Jodie?”

  Jodie beams up at me, already forgetting my mom’s mysterious absence. “I can’t believe you still remember, after all this time. Yes. You know, you always were my favorite Singh.”

  I ignore the last comment, because I’ve got a headache and because I already had to play fucking sibling rivalry games in the kitchen this morning with Mom.