The Love Bug

by Tara Wimble

  She nods and loosens. Jacque moves the pillows by the headboard closer together before shuffling until she’s got Bella pressed against her front.

  Jacque can imagine a little of what it must have taken for Bella to gather all of this to tell her. The bravery to break the careful line they’ve walked and the friendship that they’re scraped together. So asking if she wants to be held is the smallest gesture she can offer.

  It’s not entirely unselfish. Bella fits against her like she once did. Her hair tickles Jacque’s nose and her arm is quickly taken by Bella to press snugly under her breasts. They curl into each other. Soon after, Jacque hears Bella make that soft snoring sound she always does before falling into a heavy sleep and she’s managed to do something right tonight.

  Facing this new revelation can wait until tomorrow.

  *

  There’s a subtle shift when they wake up together. It’s a change that Jacque is familiar with though. That nagging feeling that Bella was holding something back for months has been brought to light and now that she knows what it’s about, things feel right again.

  All along it was this.

  Jacque lies on her back in bed with Bella still sleeping beside her. Her hand itches at the skin of her stomach, pushing her shirt up, and she stares up into the white abyss of ceiling that holds nothing but the reflected truth she has.

  Bella has feelings for her.

  Her hand stills.

  Bella has feelings for her. Romantic feelings.

  She’s still asleep against her side. Her hand has fallen off Jacque’s body during the night and rests slightly under her back but Jacque’s other arm is tucked under Bella’s head. Her hair is soft.

  Bella’s nervous confession, her bravery to tell her after everything that they’ve laid to rest, was a ramble of words that eventually made sense. She was trying to tell her everything that she’d been thinking about for months and months. Trying to sum it all up in a way that would leave nothing misunderstood.

  Jacque distractedly rubs her fingers in Bella’s hair.

  She’s straight. Heterosexual. Attracted to men. That is something Jacque has always known. It’s been her downfall and her distress for all the years she’s been in love with Bella.

  But never has she considered that it would cease to be a closed chapter. The exception.

  She turns her head to watch Bella slumber. How does this work?

  How did Bella figure this out? That she was attracted to her or even just had feelings for Jacque that surpassed what she ever expected. Why now? After enduring all the years and playing blind to Jacque’s feelings until it was necessary not to.

  A part of her wants to say, too little, too late but she’s no liar. It would never be too late.

  She knows that there is a spectrum and Bella falls to one side but not right to one side. Straight but for the grace of her.

  It’s something that she’s going to have to get used to for sure. It’s still early though. There’s no practice for them to go to today either so lying in bed with Bella is appealing and an avoidance tactic. They’ll need to talk about this. For Bella to explain it better when she isn’t so jumpy that she’s going to say the wrong thing and for her to figure out what this means for her.

  How does she feel?

  Her first reaction is a nostalgic happiness. These may not be the exact words she wanted to hear a year or two ago but the feelings and affection behind them are. God, the nights she dreamt about those words and the mornings she tossed and turned over them.

  To hear them now stirs a lot of conflicting emotions inside of her.

  Uncertainty. Is this all happening? Is this really happening?

  She feels horrible for even thinking that Bella might not be sure about this. She’s seen her slowly grow more and more upset in the days leading up to yesterday, the stress causing her to feel sick- to doubt her would be insulting.

  If she strips it all away though, the nerves and the confession, to the raw feeling. The sincerity in Bella’s voice that bubbled just below the words. The belief. She’d thought about this. She’d turned down every avenue and considered every other thing before coming to this final conclusion. Before she’d figured out her own feelings.

  Identifying as straight is just a label. It’s what she feels, an attraction to men, but it’s not the solid wall that Bella once thought it was. It’s unimportant to Bella’s feelings for her, when considering her only. Outside of that she knows that Bella is not attracted to other women. Not in the way that she is to her.

  Jacque takes a deep breath to stave off the headache she imagines will appear soon.

  “Good morning.”

  She blinks and Bella awakens. Still against her but for the tilt of her head to inspect how conscious Jacque is. It’s only then that Jacque realizes that they’re sharing the same pillow.

  “Hi. Good morning.” Jacque clears her throat of all of the thoughts she’s been having. “How are you feeling?”

  Bella moves her hand from under Jacque’s body and it makes Jacque stop moving her fingers through Bella’s hair. “I’m good.” Jacque can see that Bella doesn’t know what to do with her hand now that she’s pulled back. “Are you- are we ok-?”

  So she reaches, taking her hand from her stomach to take Bella’s, lacing their fingers together when Bella breathes out. “We’re fine. You can go back to sleep if you want.”

  Jacque has to get up. Think her way through the day. She needs open space. She’d go for a run but the panic on Bella’s face when she sits up and gets out of bed rules that release out. “I’m just going to make breakfast.”

  It doesn’t quell her much until Jacque smiles and pulls up the covers so that Bella can drape them back over her body again. “I’ll wake you when it’s ready.” She spots darkness under Bella’s eyes. “Get some sleep, alright?”

  Making a hot breakfast allows her to spend more time outside of her bedroom, thus giving Bella more chance to catch up on her sleep. She decides to make omelettes, because she doesn’t burn them as often as she does pancakes, with toast and orange juice. She cracks the eggs and starts prepping everything else. Bella takes hers with more cheese than anything but Jacque chops up some leftover turkey bacon and tomatoes to throw in there as well.

  She perfects the art of tossing the ingredients into the frying pan and watching it cook on a high heat, before the moment comes to fold it over. She does her own first and places it on the side before she starts Bella’s. The toast goes in halfway through and is buttered on a plate before she finishes the second omelette.

  She plates both of their breakfasts, toast and juice, and sets them all on a tray to take into the bedroom. Breakfast in bed, wow, that happened fast.

  Jacque tries not to stall as she takes the tray in but it’s hard not to with everything on her mind, and then added to that, the sight of Bella with her face pushing into the pillow, sound asleep once again.

  Quietly she takes the food around to the empty side of the bed and sets it down. She doesn’t wake Bella. Giving her another five minutes is better than food. Jacque does wake her up eventually, when the food turns hot to just warm, and then spends the remaining time trying not to get caught watching Bella eat.

  And she eats but she more like picks at the plate and it just makes the situation all the more stilted, they need to get out of here. Get out of this house and go somewhere where they can get some fresh air and some fresh perspective.

  The idea comes to her in a flash, seeing Bella eat and remembering what she heard some of her teammates talking about. “Hey, isn’t that Taste of Chicago thing today?”

  Bella looks up, chewing on a bite of food and shrugs.

  “I think it is.” Jacque continues, pushing herself out of bed. “We should go, it sounds fun, right?”

  Bella nods. “I guess, yeah. Let’s do it.”

  They take their time getting ready because they’d basically just eaten their breakfast and it’s a food festival but with the amount of time i
t takes each of them to get ready it’s about lunch time by the time they leave the apartment.

  It’s a short enough trip from their apartment to downtown so they decide to walk instead of trying to chance it with parking during such a huge event.

  Talking is sparse during the walk, mostly they just make idle comments about their surroundings and try to keep up a good pace, the call of delicious varieties of food already screaming their names.

  It’s with that in mind that they make it there in record time. Jacque pays for their tickets because she gets there first and she sort of wants to do it after everything.

  But still, Jacque feels like this lingering awkwardness between them is what they would have felt upon reuniting in Chicago last year if their divorce had been real. Bella folds the ticket stub for the Taste of Chicago food festival.

  In the end it’s a booth of English food that does them in and not even because they suffer the disservice of having to figure out what black pudding is, it’s just the memories that it jogs up. Memories of famous soccer pitches and bronze medals and Olympic patterned sheet, them together, and Bella spurning her the next day.

  Jacque pulls her off to the side, just enough away from the crowd that they aren’t blocking traffic and she isn’t hashing this out in the most public way she could. “You need to tell me about that night.”

  “What?” She’s so obviously caught Bella off guard. “That night?”

  The place is an itch at the back of her neck. One that won’t go away until they say it out loud. “London.”

  “I think I need a beer.” Bella deadpans and walks back towards the English booth, buying them two beers before walking back to where she left Jacque just standing there. She hands over a bottle.

  “London.” Jacque repeats it again like Bella’s somehow lost the plot. It’s not something she particularly wants to talk about but that’s their turning point. That’s where things came to a head. They can’t move on if they can’t move past that.

  They sit down and Bella spends five minutes staring at the bottle in her hand.

  “I know, I-” Bella rips the label on her beer bottle. She hasn’t drank anything yet. “There’s a separation for me, that whole night- I could blame it on the fact that we’d just won a bronze medal, or that I’d been drinking or-”

  Jacque knows that she flinches at that.

  “But I can’t. Because that’s another lie on top of everything else-” Bella scrunches the label up in her hands. “I was in that. I was in that hotel room with you and I wanted everything that you had to give me but I wasn’t as caught up. I wasn’t feeling what you felt and after we-”

  She stalls and Jacque can’t let her stop here. “Had sex.” It’s to the point. It’s clinically stating. Yet Jacque’s mind still conjures memories of the night they slept together and it sends a shiver through her body.

  Bella catches her eye. “I pushed you away.”

  “Why?” That’s the one thing she can’t make sense of. “Why didn’t you just talk to me?”

  “And say what?” Bella asks. “I was fucking flailing, Jacque.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I was,” Bella’s chest heaves and she puffs her cheeks. It doesn’t stop the sound of the dry sob in the back of her throat. “I was ashamed of myself.”

  Somehow she expected everything but that. Shame. It sounds so much worse than not wanting it or not enjoying it.

  “I knew what I was doing. I knew how you felt about me and I knew that once we got back to Canada you were going to leave me and I wasn’t ready to deal with your feelings, I didn’t even know about mine-” Bella grips the edge of the table. “-but I couldn’t deal with you leaving me.”

  Jacque stares at Bella’s knuckles turning white.

  “I slept with you because I thought that it was the only way I could-”

  “Bella-”

  “-I could hang onto you, somehow, and the moment after I felt like the worst fucking person in the world because I wasn’t even thinking about you-”

  “I was so ashamed of myself.” Bella admits. Jacque can see it lift from her shoulders. “Because I-I- I was having sex with you and I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t in the place that you were- I didn’t feel anything close to that-”

  Bella covers her mouth for a few seconds. Just breathing. It’s hard to swallow the lump in her throat but Jacque’s hand twitches to reach for her. She doesn’t. “It’s okay-”

  “It’s really not.” Bella snaps back. “What I did was not okay. You tried to deck Sadie at breakfast.”

  “You heard about that?” Jacque mentally flashes back to that moment, it’s not hard considering the conversation, and thinks about the set of events that almost led her to do something idiotic like that. But it’s lucky that she didn’t know then what she knows now, she’d probably owe Sadie favors for life.

  “Kathryn told me once, in passing, I think she thought I already knew so don’t get mad at her.” Bella placates, still drawn into herself, not moving to make any contact at all. But that’s not the important part of all of this and Bella knows it well so she diverts back to the point.

  “I guess I thought that it’d change me or something. That I’d wake up in the morning with you and everything would fall into place. You’d either be the person or not and I’d figure something out-”

  From the tone in her voice, Jacque can tell, that her expectations for a revelation wasn’t met.

  “Nothing happened. Nothing came to me. I woke up and I felt so upset because I had done this selfishly and I’d slept with you, Jacque. I slept with you to stop you from leaving me when I was the one who wanted you to leave in the first place.” Bella rambles on. “So I pushed you away, rather than admitting that I’d fucked up.”

  “That’s--.” The words get stuck in her throat, actually, there aren’t really any words there to get stuck. Jacque had opened her mouth in hopes that the way she felt about that would just fall out. But it didn’t because how can she even figure that out? How could she wrap her mind around the fact that Bella had slept with her basically to get her to stay, woke up and decided it still wasn’t worth it, and push her away. She’d basically been a pawn in Bella’ game of mental chess. It was--

  “Fucked up.” Those are the first words that come to her mind that actually accurately describe how she feels about it. And she’s parroting Bella but she’d hit the nail on the head. “I can’t even apologize for that. That’s fucked up, Bella.”

  “I know.” She mumbles, forcing herself to look Jacque straight in the eye. “I don’t regret it though. I won’t say I regret it because if we didn’t do that incredibly fucked up thing then I probably wouldn’t be with you here right now going the way that we are.”

  “No.” Jacque agrees softly. “Probably not.”

  “And I need where we are right now because it’s exactly where I want to be.” Bella pauses and reaches her hand out, touching Jacque for the first time in all of this, establishing a physical link as well as their emotional one. “I want to be with you.”

  Jacque accepts the connection but it opens up a new avenue because now she needs to know, she needs to know how Bella can be sure, how any of it could be real. She needs to know the process. It probably isn’t going to be easy to hear this. “When did-”

  “Paris.” Bella answers. Crowds of couples and children and bored students mull past them. The smell of the food in the air all starts to merge into a distinctive warmth.

  It wasn’t when Bella first heard her say that she’d fallen in love with her, or the inkling that drove her away from Blake, or even sleeping with her. It was Paris. It was another woman.

  Bella chooses to be brave still and looks her in the eyes when she explains. “There was a cafe, Cafés Verlet, it was about a block from the Comédie Française theatre and the Louvre- I liked going there after training even though it took forever. There was a woman who approached me after a few weeks. Said she liked my accent, knew I was
American, recognized me from the Olympics-”

  It occurs to Jacque that Bella would be known for being a part of the team that denied France a medal at the Olympics.

  “She was bold and she pursued me and I felt wanted by her in a way that none of the men I’d been seeing made me feel. I thought maybe this could be it, maybe I was gay and it would solve all of my problems.” Bella pauses. “Or maybe I wasn’t and it would solve them all still.”

  “But?” Jacque leads her on, needing to know.

  “It wasn’t that simple. It was nice, pleasant even, but it wasn’t that spark and not even the burst of something I felt with the men.” Bella stops for a moment to remember it. “It was an empty experience. It didn’t work out.”

  “What was it about her?” Jacque jokes, needing to inject the humor to not think about the fact that Bella fucked some other woman to get to this conclusion. “Too homosexual? Too French?”

  “She wasn’t you.” Bella says.

  In that simple statement Bella says a million other things. Blake wasn’t her. The women and men in Paris weren’t her. The person she may meet or make a connection with in the future won’t be her.

  It’s a lot to handle, a lot of pressure that’s suddenly put on that fact that she is herself. And really it just brings her back around the main point of this all. Because being the exception to the rule is just another thing that she didn’t even ask or plan for when she agreed to this all.

  “I don’t want you to apologise for London. Because if you apologize then-” Jacque sighs. “Then what that night meant to me, despite how it all turned out, - you might want to take it back but I meant everything I did that night.”

  She won’t go into it. There’s no words she can draw upon to describe what she felt that night. That was the highest point for her, followed by the lowest. She left everything on the table for Bella in London. She knows it all.

  “But if you’re serious about this you have to tell me because while I get what you’re saying, what you’re feeling, I’m not here for anything like it was before.” Jacque feels the weight of Bella’s hand in hers. “I can’t go back to wanting you and knowing that there’s nothing there for me.”