Bette was seated at a stool shucking the corn for their dinner. Half way listening to the conversation going on around her and half heartedly paying attention to what she was doing. This task was assigned to her because she couldn’t keep her hands from touching Tina. She knew it, and Tina knew it as well so as a mutual understanding between the two Tina simply handed her the corn.  Tina was talking to Cilia and hadn’t heard any movement from behind her where Bette was sitting at the island finishing her only contribution to their dinner. She turned her head a fraction beyond her shoulder and caught sight of Bette clearly taken by a daydream. She was slowly peeling small and ineffective strips from the corn.  Tina smiled to herself, she’d had her own quiet reflective moments lately. Cilia caught onto to Tina’s line of sight and looked towards Bette as well. She was hopelessly lost in her own mind, like a schoolboy infatuated with his teacher, she thought.  

That was until Tina hit her with a small handful of corn meal, abruptly ripping her out of her daze like state. A wide smile formed on her face as she stood to shake loose the remnants from beneath her shirt, Tina was braced for action, her shoulders were tight and her smile covered her prepared and determined face. But to her surprise Bette simply walked out of the kitchen and into the guest house with a warning of a smile on her face. Tina knew there would be consequences but for now she couldn’t help the howling laughter at the image of Bette’s shocked face registering the hit to her head.

……………………………………….

As Bette stood in the bathroom shaking loose the small particles from the side of her hair and her bra, she couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation. The same thought that Tina had shaken her loose from now tickled her and she kept laughing there in the privacy of the quiet bathroom. Tina was something that she had not expected to find in her lifetime. She had resigned herself to thinking that being alone was her destiny something she’d thought she’d made peace with in her own way. A lifetime of touching women and holding babies for moments in time but never being held by any of them. She thought for sure she had built up enough of a tolerance that she would never have a need for that type of intimacy. But Tina came along at a vulnerable point in her life, uprooted her beliefs and made Bette find fault in her own logic. Amazing.