by Fiona Zedde
Walking up from the parking garage, she collected the mail, unlocked the door to her building, and stepped into the air conditioning. The cool air bathed her hot cheeks. It was like Mayson had literally vanished, leaving an immeasurable hole in Renee’s life.
At the kitchen table, she listlessly sorted through the mail, putting aside the bills to be paid, throwing the junk mail into the recycle basket. A small envelope slid from the pile in her hands. It had a familiar Los Angeles return address scribbled on the back. When she opened the envelope, a key clattered to the table. What’s this? She frowned and unfolded the piece of paper.
Renee,
She’s at my house. Sorry I didn’t tell you before when you asked where she was.
She needs you.
—Iyla
The chair jerked against the tile floor when she stood up. Thank God. Oh, thank God. She grabbed her keys and hurried out the door. In the car, she programmed the address into her GPS with nervous fingers and headed north. Past La Jolla, through Oceanside, and into Los Angeles. Her thoughts spun like scattered marbles, slippery and without direction. Why was Mayson in LA? Was there another lover? Doesn’t she love me anymore?
Halfway into the drive, she shut down her thoughts and cranked up the volume on the ′80s station. She sang along to every power ballad, every love song, until the car pulled into Iyla’s quiet West Hollywood neighborhood. As she drove past, two men held hands walking their dog down a flower-edged sidewalk. A woman in a white convertible, her black Afro blowing in the breeze, raced ahead of her when the light changed to green. Renee turned in to Iyla’s empty driveway and parked in front of the two-car garage.
The key opened the door. There was no alarm.
“Iyla?”
Only silence greeted her. She walked deeper into the house, into the Mexican tiled foyer with its twin ceiling fans, to the living room and the open French doors leading out to the pool. The sound of laughter floated in.
She followed the sound back out into the sun and to the turquoise glitter of the pool. A woman sat on a deck chair, topless, eyes shaded with sunglasses. She laughed again into the cell phone, stretching under the sun. In the pool, another woman swam laps, crawling steadily back and forth in the water. Renee caught her breath.
“Renee.” Camille, the woman in the chair, smiled at her in surprise, shoving her shades up into her thick dreadlocks. “I didn’t know you were coming up.” She moved the phone away from her face.
Renee ignored her. In the pool, Mayson was still swimming toward the deep end, her face moving in and out of the water. Trembling legs took Renee to the water’s edge, where she waited until Mayson noticed her. The sleek body spun in the water to do another lap, then, when Mayson noticed her, floundered like a hooked fish. Her head came out of the water and her fingers latched onto the edge of the pool near Renee’s sneakered feet.
In the sun, she was as slick as a seal, her hair a black wave over bare shoulders and trailing behind her in the water. Under the shimmering blue, she was naked.
“What are you doing here?” Mayson asked, blinking water from her eyes.
Renee slapped her. She felt the sting in her palm, the shocking vibration of the impact, before she even realized what she’d done. They both gasped.
And then Renee was in the water, sputtering and treading water in her sweats that threatened to drag her down. She splashed against a snap-eyed Mayson.
“Careful. We’re not kids anymore.” The words came through Mayson’s gritted teeth.
“Fuck you!” Renee gasped. She shoved at the slippery shoulders and arms, but Mayson held her firmly. “After you disappear for a month, that’s all you have to say?”
“What the hell else should I say to you?”
Renee was vaguely aware of bare feet slapping against the ground near them.
“Is everything all right?” Camille’s voice came from above them.
“We’re fine,” Mayson said without turning. “We just need a minute alone.”
The footsteps retreated. Doors clicked closed.
“Is that who you’ve been doing since you left me?” Renee gestured blindly to the now absent Camille, splashing water into both their faces.
Mayson looked surprised. “I haven’t been doing anybody.”
“Then why are you naked? Why is she?” She struggled in the water, treading against the weight of the sweatpants and shirt on her body.
“Because it’s a nice day.” Mayson shrugged, looking annoyed. “Because we want to be. Why do you even care? Why are you here?” Her eyes narrowed. “Is Grant with you?”
Renee panted. Her arms and legs moved heavily in the water. “You didn’t come back.”
Mayson abruptly let her go, splashing backward as if Renee’s skin burned. “You didn’t want me to come back.”
“That’s not true.” The words burst out of her, breathlessly, vehemently. “I waited for you.”
“For what? To tell me how much I fucked everything up?” Mayson flinched, sunlight on the water reflecting off her pain. “I already know that. I think about that every day.”
Renee felt like she was cracking at the center. No, she had already cracked at the center and now was falling away from herself. Incomplete.
“Can we—can we just get out of the water, please?”
After a slight pause, Mayson nodded briskly. She disappeared under the water, gliding under the surface to appear a few feet away at the ladder. Water sluiced down her bare body, clinging lovingly to brown flesh, muscled back, tight backside, the long thighs and legs.
“I thought you wanted to get out of the water.” She stood, toweling herself dry.
Heat blossomed in Renee’s face. She splashed clumsily to the ladder, feeling graceless and awkward in her clothes as she clambered up, grunting. Then gasped when Mayson pulled her up out of the water in a heaving splash. She tumbled against her, undoing all the work the towel had done for Mayson’s skin. Her hands clutched at Mayson’s arms. Bare breasts against her own, and despite the wet clothes hanging from her, she felt every inch of her skin as if they both stood naked under the sun.
Her hands tightened on Mayson’s arms. She felt the quickly drawn breath. Then felt it against her lips. Mayson tasted of chlorine and surprise.
“Renee.” Mayson groaned her name and pushed space between them. “What are you doing?”
But before she even finished asking the question, Mayson pulled her close, pressing their mouths together. Gladness tripped through Renee. Yes. Yes.
This time they shared the kiss. Renee seeking toward the familiar, the softness she’d always wondered at, testing the texture of that longed-for mouth. Her tongue flicked out and Mayson groaned against her, mouth opening, tasting in return.
Oh God. This is it. This is what I’ve been searching for. Renee poured her joy into the kiss, her relief that Mayson wasn’t pushing her away.
Mayson’s body trembled against hers. “We—we have to talk,” her best friend said. “And get you out of those wet clothes.”
It was Renee’s turn to tremble.
Upstairs in the attic room where Mayson had been staying for the past month, she offered Renee some dry clothes, then turned away after an intense look at Renee’s body, only vaguely outlined under the sweats. A blush warmed her face again and she wondered, briefly, if she was doing the right thing, if this was what she wanted.
Yes and oh, yes.
In the bathroom, she peeled off the wet clothes and hung them over the shower rod. She hesitated at her bra and panties, but they were wet too. They joined the rest of her clothes on the rod. The oversize shirt Mayson had given her smelled of laundry detergent and not of flesh-warmed eucalyptus mint. Renee sniffed at it in disappointment but drew it over her head anyway, smoothing the hem over her knees. She left the bathroom.
When the door opened, Mayson jumped up from the couch. But once on her feet, she seemed at a loss for what to do.
“Sit, please,” she said. Dried at her hair with a w
hite towel. Tossed the towel aside.
Renee looked around the room. It was a suite, really, filled with light from two large windows. A couch sat near the low wall leading to the stairs. Across from it and under the window was a neatly made bed. Renee climbed into the bed and sat with her back against the wall. She pulled her knees up to her chest.
When she sat, Mayson sat, stretching out her long legs on the couch. The T-shirt she wore was painted wet at the shoulders from her hair. Cutoff jeans sagged beguilingly at her hips.
She’d always loved Mayson’s body, its strength, its softness, the way it could bend and move so effortlessly. But in the past few years, her appreciation had become more than just aesthetics. She’d wanted to touch. Miraculously, she’d hidden this want from Mayson, who noticed everything.
From the couch, her friend fidgeted, plucking at the frayed ends of her shorts. “I’m sorry about pulling you into the water. You’ve been sick—”
“I’m okay. There’s nothing wrong with me now.” Renee smiled in reassurance. “I’m perfectly healed. See?” She spread her arms wide.
She felt more than saw Mayson’s quick, hot glance at her body. At her nipples pressed against the shirt. Her bare legs. Renee smiled again.
She bit the inside of her cheek. “When you gave Grant to me, you gave me the wrong person.”
This time, Mayson’s look held something else. Shock. Fluttering eyelashes. Hands frozen in her lap.
“It wasn’t him that I wanted. It wasn’t his smell that I was looking for.” With a quick breath, she threw her heart into Mayson’s hands. “I wish you had come to me instead.”
In the dark, all those nights, it had been Mayson she was searching for. Craving the blindfold because she knew once she was able to see her lover, it wouldn’t be Mayson. It would be disappointment. And it had taken Kendra’s crazy love to finally rip her blinders off and show what she really wanted.
“Say that again.” Mayson’s voice was low, jagged. She held herself stiff and upright on the couch, a look of disbelief on her face.
“I wish you had come to me instead,” Renee repeated. “Will you let me come to you now?”
Without waiting for an answer, she slipped from the bed, padding on bare feet across the cool tile, over the rug, and onto Mayson’s lap. Arms wrapped convulsively around her.
“I hate Kendra.” She whispered the words roughly into Mayson’s throat. “I hate what she did to us. But if she hadn’t come along, I don’t know if we would have found our way here on our own.”
Arms tightened around her. “No!”
She drew back to look into her love’s face. “Yes.” Her fingers tangled in Mayson’s wet hair, pushing back the thick waves. “When she held me in that room, I saw clearly for the first time all the things I hadn’t done. All the desires inside me that were ignored or pushed aside or placated with substitutes.” Renee shook her head. “I don’t want that life anymore.”
“Do you realize what we’d be doing?”
The unexpected pain lanced through her chest and she jerked back at the shock of it. “Don’t you want this too?”
“God, yes! I do. More than—” Mayson drew in a harsh breath. “I want it so badly that it scares me. But I’ve loved you all my life. You’ve been my friend. I don’t want to lose that.”
“We won’t lose anything.” Renee clenched her hands in Mayson’s T-shirt. “You’ve been telling me for years to stop being afraid and to live my life. Be fearless with me.”
Mayson’s mouth tilted in a crooked smile. “Is that what I’ve been telling you to do? Just like this?”
“Yes.” Renee grinned. “I’ve already quit my job and I’m working on building a Web site for my photography. Now all I need is you.”
“Are you joking?” Mayson pulled away to look into her face. “You finally broke the ties with that man?”
“All the men. I’m a slow learner, but I do learn.”
The hair moved over Mayson’s shoulders as she shook her head. Her teeth flashed in laughter. “You know that’s not what I meant when I told you that, right?”
“It wasn’t?” Renee teased Mayson with a finger against her lips, tracing the full, laughing curve.
Their smiles faded.
They sat, foreheads pressed together, words exhausted. For Renee, love and desire had always been dueling oppo-sites. She’d never been able to feel both for the same person at the same time. But with Mayson’s soft breath against her cheek, the beloved shape against hers, desire and love, lust and adoration clicked cleanly together. These elements mingled into a bright flame that illuminated Mayson, her beloved, the woman she wanted to be her lover, for the first time.
She wanted to devour Mayson, to strip off her clothes and look at her, truly, all of her for the first time. The want sparked between their joined hands—up her arms, flooding into all of her. Renee closed her eyes and trembled with it.
“Are you all r—?”
Renee tucked her nose into Mayson’s throat, rasping her tongue along the sharp collarbone.
Mayson drew in a sharp breath. Her eyes widened. The flush of darker color under her love’s skin drew Renee’s eyes. Hungrily, she watched it creep down her throat, below the gaping collar of the oversize shirt.
Renee stood up and swept off her shirt, dropping it on the floor. “I want to see you,” she said.
Mayson didn’t respond; she only stared. Her fingers fumbled, warm and uncertain, against the back of Renee’s knee. “I love you,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“I know. Come show me.”
She tugged Mayson from the couch to the light-filled bed under the window, under the sun. Mesmerized, Mayson allowed herself to be led.
“Take off your clothes,” Renee said. “I want to see everything.”
But Mayson didn’t move fast enough. Her hands were clumsy at the hem of her shirt as she struggled, trying to watch Renee’s every movement and undress at the same time. Renee gently pushed her hands away, lifting the shirt over Mayson’s head.
Beautiful.
The buttons on the cutoff shorts easily released their hold on the cloth, separating over the naked sleekness of Mayson’s most intimate flesh. Renee’s hands trembled. It seemed impossible, deliriously impossible, that this was happening. Against the pale gold bedsheets, her long body was quiescent. Her breasts and belly trembled with each quick breath. Mayson. Cupped in the V of her open shorts, the beguiling flesh.
Renee reached out to touch her, then drew back. She looked at her short fingernails, then at Mayson’s seductive receptivity in the sheets.
“One fall, when we were in college, I had an affair,” Renee said very carefully. Mayson’s body was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Awed, she traced a line between her dark-tipped breasts and down the flexing belly. “She was a chemistry TA.”
It had been so obvious then. Why had it taken her ten years to see it?
“When?” Mayson’s voice was soft, disbelieving as she lay still slack under her touch.
“Our sophomore year.”
She and Mayson had gone to different schools in different parts of the country. Mayson wasn’t there when her hormones took her over, when she started to take chances and go after what her flesh craved.
“Once, I remember her touching me and she did some-thing—I can’t remember what it was now—it reminded me so much of you that I couldn’t see her again.”
Mayson lifted her hips to allow her to pull the shorts down. In the movement, the smell of her eased against Renee’s nose, floating over her taste buds. She swallowed. Mouth wet. Throat dry.
“I didn’t love her,” Renee said. “She wasn’t you. But I loved being with her. I loved loving her. It was winter break when I ended it.”
Mayson remembered that winter break. Renee had been strange, restless. There were entire days during that break when she avoided Mayson. Other days, she was everywhere, clinging and quiet. One night, she came into Mayson’s room in her sheep-print pajamas and
begged for a story. It was late, past midnight, and Mayson was tired. But she reached for a book and settled into the bed next to Renee. In the middle of reading one of their favorite chapters in Abeng, when she thought her friend had fallen asleep, she looked down only to see Renee watching her, eyes luminous, an unfamiliar expression on her face.
“Don’t stop reading,” she’d said that night, her voice a low hum in the bedroom. “Please, don’t stop.”
Now Mayson, knowing what had come before those moments on that long-ago night, closed her eyes at the memory and felt the vibration of its echoes under her skin. There had been another woman. Another woman.
The lover from her past wasn’t something she thought she’d ever share with Mayson, but with the heat of her so close and this new chapter of their relationship, it seemed important. She wasn’t coming to this as an experiment. She’d already tasted this wine and found it sweet. Now she wanted to drink from it always with Mayson as her loving cup.
She kissed the surprise from Mayson’s mouth. She tangled fingers in the thick hair and drew her closer, and closer, feasting. The mouth was plump and wet, like a fig between Renee’s teeth, under her tongue. The broad sweep of her cheekbones, the eyes that did not once look away from her. Eyes that remained open during the kissing, during the tasting. The slippery glide of tongues, breaths coming quickly. Renee took it all.
I want to see everything.
Renee didn’t ask. She didn’t demand. She took. Her hands shaped Mayson’s body in wonder. The throat was a hot, long column. Her narrow shoulders. Her breasts. Renee lingered at her breasts. She’d always been envious of their size, then curious, then ravenous to have them under her mouth. She touched them now. She curved her hands around their full weight, teasing the nipples between her fingers. A low moan left Mayson’s throat and she arched up, pushing her breasts even more into Renee’s hands.
Renee raked her nails over the deep brown nipples that hardened even more. Irresistible. She licked one. Delicious. Sucked the dark berry into her mouth. Mayson’s deep rumble under her lips. She drew back to look at Mayson in the light. She couldn’t get enough of looking at her. The luscious brown body. The wild growth of hair at the top of her thighs. Nipples wet from her tongue. Mayson’s mouth open, eyes closed. Breathless.
