The night air hits me, swirls cold around my bare feet, and I’m moving so quickly I almost trip on my front stairs.
I’m running from Shane, running from her dominance and her touch and more than everything that feeling I get, so powerless, so unable to be anything but in love. I’m running from the tenderness in her eyes.
I walk, nowhere in particular. My toes start to chafe from the flip flops and they’re cold. I walk a block, then cross the street. A man walking his dog looks strangely at me, making me wonder if there’s chocolate on my face. I move over slightly to let him pass, and when I touch my face, it’s wet. I’m crying.
Then Jenny is right there, in front of me.
“Darah?”
I stand there, tears down my face. So powerless.
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
I open my mouth, try to form words. “Jenny…” is all that comes out.
“Is it Shane? is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” I say. Fine and blissfully unaware of this love that wants to tear my heart out, of how her carelessness burns me and her tenderness eviscerates me.
“Hey, come on. Come on, let’s go for a drive.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, my car’s right over here.”
“Okay.” I take in a breath, one shuddering inhalation, and try to calm myself. She glances over at me, concerned, as we walk toward the car. I get in. I smell like ***** and chocolate. Poor Jenny.
She slides in, sets her beaded bag on the seat, where it sparkles in the streetlight. “You wanna tell me what’s going on?” she asks quietly.
I stare straight ahead. A straight couple walks down the street, moonlight in their blonde hair.
“I can’t tell her.” I say. After a while I realize how cryptic that sounds.
But she just looks at me, not starting the car, just sitting there. “Okay. Do you wanna tell me?”
I do. I want to tell someone, and I trust Jenny.
I look at her. In the moonlight, she is wide-eyed, elfin, a creamy-skinned nymph.
“I… I love her, Jen.”
“Why can’t you tell her?”
I roll my eyes. “Are we talking about the same person here?”
“I assumed we were talking about Shane.”
The sound of her name. Spears electric emotion through my gut.
“I’ll lose her.”
She is silent for a moment. “Do you really believe that?” Quiet, her voice is so quiet, and high, and feminine.
“Don’t you?” I look at her. She knows Shane, in a way more objective than I do. She’s lived with her.
“I dunno,” she says, lilt to her girlish voice. “I don’t think so, not in the long term.”
“But in the short term the last thing I need is her freaking out on me.”
“How does she feel about you?”
I laugh, bitterly. ***** if I know.
“She loves you too. I can see it. We all can.”
“But not in the way I love her. I don’t think.”
“I dont know. I wish I could tell you,” she whispers quietly, in her ethereal Jenny-voice.
She scoots across the big front seat, pulls me into her arms. Smells so different from Shane. She holds me, not minding that I smell like a whorehouse or a candy store, not saying a word. I’m all cried out, but I relax into her arms. She smells of L’Air du Temps.
“Pretty Darah,” she whispers, pushing a lock of hair back from my forehead. “You’ll come to find each other. It’s gonna be okay.” Then she smiles, and I smile back. How can I not smile at her Jennylike sweetness?
Then she presses a chaste peck to my startled lips which part under hers and for a second we hover there, her eyes wide and lucid as a cartoon character’s, mine probably just as wide. A sliver of desire moves through me, then panic. I don’t move until she pulls away.
“Come on. Let me take you home. Shane’s gonna worry.” I nod, hear the asthmatic wheeze of her old car turning over. She takes me home.
“Look,” she whispers as she pulls in front of my house.
I lean over, look up through the dirty car window and gasp. The thin silhouette in my window is smoking, long legs bent, Shane’s slouch distinct even in shadow. It’s like a fist around my heart, tight.
I stare at Shane as her head turns toward the street, possibly wondering if it’s me. I stare until I realize that Jenny is staring at me, but even then I don’t take my eyes off of Shane.
“She’s so goddamn beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful together. Go.” she nods her head toward my house, smiling. I smile back at her, sadly, tears rising. “Go,” she says, and the smile breaks out into a huge grin.
I kiss her cheek, suddenly empty of words, and walk inside.
Shane meets me at the top of the stairs, wearing my scrub bottoms and a white beater. I stop in my tracks when I see her in my scrubs, just stop and stare. They’re the blue ones, the ones the little kids like, beause they’re covered with cartoonish puppies and kittens. She’s pulled the drawstring as far as it goes and they are still falling from her skinny hips. Mine. Wow.
Then I see her expression, and it breaks my heart. Her eyes are earnest and afraid. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”
The spell breaks and I’m able to move again. I move until I’m standing right in front of her, wrap my arms around her, press my face into my favorite space at the side of her neck. I touch her cheek. Hold me. Please, hold me, just for a minute.
She seems confused, but after a second her arms go around me, and I can feel the simple sexless comfort, the fact that she does care for me, and it feels wonderful but hurts more than I’d ever imagined, because it’s not everything.
“D? Talk to me. I’m freaking out here.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. It was amazing. Honest.”
I pull back and meet her eyes for the briefest of seconds. Honesty, assurance. I stroke her hair back, allow myself that tender luxury. And I step past her into the shower. I need to get the stickiness off. Peel my clothes, step into the hot steamy chamber.
I stand under the water, feeling the tears return and flow with the shower. I stand like that for a long time, until I sense a presence.
I pull back the curtain. Yes, she is standing there. “Can I come in?”
I nod. She steps out of my scrubs, her shirt, and meets my eyes as she steps into the shower.
There are so many questions in her eyes. Is this how I always look to her, when she withdraws behind that curtain of hers?
But, like me, she doesn’t ask, she just reaches for the shampoo, and pours some onto her palm. She pushes my head under the water stream, and I swoon with delight as she begins to wash my hair, not saying a word. Her fingers are strong, but I can feel the difference, the weakness on the left side.
She reaches up past me, pulls down the shower head, and rinses away the suds, careful not to get soap or water in my eyes. She cups my face, to shield me from the spray. Her tenderness, her simple thoughtfulness, smarts like a slap to the face.
She puts the showerhead back, turns me around, and reaches past me to pull some unknown potion from her own collection of toiletries. It is thick and sweet-smelling, a hint of her green tea smell. I close my eyes in pleasure as she works it through my hair, from root to end. Even when every strand is slathered, she keeps massaging.
Then, she reaches around me for the soap. I stand there, letting her. She lathers up her hands, looking at me. Catches me looking back at her, and smiles shyly.
I fall, even further. Plummet.
Shane. Her lucent eyes. Every time, it feels like going off a cliff.
She touches my shoulders, gently moving her skin on me, her gaze so intense that *****, maybe she does love me, maybe… She cleans my arms, gentle under my armpits, my *****, making me catch my breath, down to my waist and hips and crotch. The press of her lean body against mine makes me feel secure, especially when her arm snakes around the other side, holding me as she washes me.
She bends over, washing my legs. I feel like I’m shaking. Then she picks up the showerhead again. “Tilt back,” she murmurs and I do, and she rinses the thick conditioner out of my hair, fingers delving deeply into my wet curls. I moan at the pleasantness of the sensation.
Then, when all the slick product is washed out of my hair, she stands back and sprays me down, all the suds off of me. What was tender again becomes explicitly erotic, as I twist and turn to let her get every inch of me. I just stare, letting her take control.
She hangs up the showerhead, turns off the water.
“You were crying.” Statement, not question.
I look down, ashamed.
“D, please tell me what I did wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. That was amazing. it was just…really intense.”
She just stares at me. She’s not buying it. I meet her eyes, indulge my urge to stroke back the wet hair from her fair forehead. Her soul seems naked when she’s wet, her eyes larger, greener.
“I swear to god, okay, this is about me, not about anything you did.”
“Okay, um… I didn’t hurt you?”
“No. No, not at all.” She’s quiet, and I’m stroking her hair gently back, and she closes her eyes with the pleasure of my touch. That small confidence placed in me lifts me up, just a little.
She opens her eyes and turns her head into the direction of my touch. We stand there, water drying on our skin. “Usually I’m the one that goes running.”
I swallow. So we’re acknowledging this explicitly now? When did the rules change? Or were they only ever in my head to begin with?
“I don’t ever want to be something you feel you have to run from.” I say it from the bottom of my heart. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to love you.
She stares into my eyes, more intensely than she’s ever looked at me before. I feel I might burst into flame and blow away in ash. “I don’t want to be something you run from, either.” She’s saying it with all her heart, saying something to me. I feel powerless to speak.
“I mean it,” she whispers, crushing me close to her in a sudden hug. I can feel her arms around me, the honest press of her chest to mine, the love. At the same time I can feel the sexuality of it, the texture of her skin, the smell of her green tea in my hair. Tears rise to my eyes again, stinging like acid. When her hand strokes my back, soothing me like a baby, they overflow, and I’m thankful she can’t see them.
“Whatever’s freaking you out, can I do anything to make it better?” It’s her broken shoulder that I’m leaning on, but she feels solid and safe as a rock.
Tell me you love me. Tell me that you feel the way I feel. Tell me…
I shake my head no, though the gesture is lost in the crook of her neck, the scent of her. I shake my head no, but I say “Sleep with me?”
“You got it,” she nods.
So we crawl into the guest room bed, because mine is all sticky. She drapes her arm over me, leans close. Strokes my hair a few times, and even as I fall into sleep I feel the razor-sharp bliss-pain.
I’m spent and exhausted, and I sense that I sleep much more quickly than she does. Is she up worrying, still thinking she did something wrong?
I’m so tired that I eventually let go of the thought, and sink.