Experienced

Chapter Twelve

They had reached a semblance of an understanding before they left the restaurant. Enough, at least, for Ruth to have apologized again, pink-faced, as they were leaving, and promise to text over the weekend. Enough for Bette to have apologized too, in lieu of being able to apologize to Natalia. But the hurt of the conversation lingered like an unfamiliar bruise, one that she couldn’t help poking at. And so, hoping for a sympathetic ear, wanting reassurance that Ruth had lost her mind, she brought it up with Ash the next evening.

“I told Ruth about the Mei thing,” Bette said, dinner bowl on her lap, heels balanced precariously on the edge of the coffee table, Grey’s Anatomy on again.

Ash picked up a few flakes of salmon with her chopsticks, dipping the fish into the sauce pooled in the base of her bowl before lifting it to her mouth.

“Sorry, are we calling you skiving off work for an hour to sit on top of a toilet ‘the Mei thing’?” Ash said, mildly, apparently engrossed in Izzie and ghost Denny mooning at each other on the laptop screen.

“Yes.”

“Sure,” Ash nodded. “Bet Ruth was thrilled to hear all about it.”

“Actually, she was really weird about it. She basically told me I’m terrible at dating, and then refused to talk about Mei. Like, I know the Natalia thing wasn’t my finest moment. I’m obviously going to avoid stuff with any of Ruth’s friends from now on. But it was like she was taking it personally.” Bette was self-aware enough to recognize that the reason their conversation still ate at her was because she wasn’t entirely blameless; she could have handled the Natalia situation differently. But she resented Ruth for calling her out on it.

“Can’t imagine why that might be. Total mystery.”

“Guess they must be closer than I realize. If anyone did that to you, I’d take it very personally.”

“Yeah, no, that’s not what I meant.”

Ash was looking smug, and Bette suddenly realized the implication.

“Ash, for god’s sake. You’ve not even met her. So you have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, aware of how defensive her tone was, furious that the conversation hadn’t gone in the direction she had hoped. Ash had missed the point entirely. “Also, she’s seeing someone. Gabe. He’s a journalist. So whatever your eyebrows are suggesting, it’s not that.”

“Oh! Interesting,” Ash said, shrugging as she lifted a bundle of noodles toward her mouth. “And how are you feeling about that?”

“It’s nothing to do with me,” Bette replied, exasperated, wondering how on earth they’d ended up here. She thought back to Ruth’s flushed cheeks, to the embarrassed smile. It was good, obviously, to see Ruth happy.

“Right.”

“She seems to like him. So that’s—that’s good,” Bette said, and Ash smiled around her noodles, the chopsticks still between her lips. Bette refocused on the screen, wishing fervently that she’d never opened her mouth at all.

Part of the initial appeal of Bette’s job had been the overnight work trips. It was an odd joy to have a room at a Premier Inn, with a window that overlooked a car park. A small per diem that she could spend on an MS meal deal from the station, dinner in a pub she’d never been to before, a pint that someone would reimburse her for. A couple of hours on a train, away from the distraction of the office, to try and fail to catch up on emails. It was a little reset, an almost-holiday when she couldn’t afford one. At the very least, an occasional night in a bed she hadn’t made.

Over time, the little jaunts had lost their shine; the happier she felt at home, the less she felt the need to be away. But after a couple of years of barely leaving Bristol, of barely leaving her street, the idea of being somewhere else was undeniably appealing. And so when Erin emailed to ask for cover, while she was up in Edinburgh for wedding-planning, Bette claimed the trip within minutes.

It was too crowded on the train to pull her laptop out of her backpack. Most of the journey passed by instead in a blaze of green fields and gray skies, two episodes of a podcast Ruth had put her onto in her ears.

But as the train approached Weymouth, her hand hovered over her phone. Maybe it was worth a swipe. She was working, sure, but they didn’t own her evenings. Looking for something casual here, where she was unlikely to run into the woman again? It made a lot of sense.

She clicked in and refreshed her location. There was a new ten-mile radius, and new women. Women who had taken selfies with their dogs, women by the sea, women pouting in front of their bathroom mirrors, women clutching cocktails, women in boxing gloves, women at festivals covered in glitter, women in big round glasses. She paused. The woman in big round glasses. A receptionist, a dog-lover. A switch. Evie. As the train pulled into the station, she swiped yes.

The station to the care home wasn’t a difficult journey, and she had time to make it on foot. It was an awful day, the sky a swollen and threatening sort of gray. The sea reflected it back, cross and uninviting. It was a relief, really, not to feel the pull to the sea that she did on a sunny day. Work was so much easier, she thought, as she turned into a large car park and walked up the path to push open a heavy glass door, when summer was shit.

A woman with a shaggy haircut was behind the desk at the end of the corridor, a phone pressed to one ear. A pair of large round glasses kept slipping down her nose, and she wore an open shirt knotted over an olive-green tank top. It was the woman she’d swiped on the train. It seemed impossibly unlikely. But it was either her or an impressive doppelg?nger.

Maybe-Evie tucked her hair behind her ear and looked up, meeting Bette’s eye. A mouthed “One minute” and an apologetically raised finger stopped Bette in her tracks a few meters from the desk, and she hovered awkwardly.

“Can you send both for us to check?” knotted shirt was saying. She nodded, almost dropping the phone in the process, and rolled her eyes self-deprecatingly at Bette. “Yes. Yeah, that’s great. Okay. Talk next week. Thanks.”

Once the phone was back in the receiver, she looked across the desk and tucked her hair behind her ears again. “You must be Bette? Nice to meet you. Do you need to leave anything back here before we head through?”

Bette shook her head, turning and popping a hip to show off her backpack, instantly regretting the primary-school energy of the move. “It’s fine. I’ve only got this. You’re—” she said, and then paused, realizing that she was about to reveal herself and her swiping and potentially weird-out a complete stranger. A new colleague. “I mean, sorry, what’s your…?”

“Evie,” the woman replied, confirming Bette’s accidental detective work. She walked out from behind the desk to shake her hand, firm and confident, and then led Bette down the hall. “I’m the receptionist. I know Barbara’s supposed to be here for you this afternoon but honestly it’ll mostly be me. She’s pretty up against it. We’ll try and catch her later.”

“That’s fine! It’s really the session and the group I wanted to see—I can phone Barbara next week to talk if she can’t get away.”

Bette spent the next few hours sandwiched between two women: one so tall and pinched and the other so short and soft that they belonged together in a picture book. They were deliciously sarcastic and cutting about each other’s work, and sweetly brutal about Bette’s attempts at making something of her own. She spent most of the afternoon in peals of laughter, thinking of her nonna.

“Told you it was all going well,” Evie said from the doorway, as Bette crammed feedback forms into her backpack following the session. She had dropped in and out of the session all afternoon, but Bette had found herself deliberately looking around in the final hour; she’d begun to worry she might have missed her going home. “Barbara actually has forty minutes before she has to leave, if you want to hear how things have been from her end?”

“Oh that’d be great,” Bette said, picking up her backpack and following Evie out. She fell into step beside her; now that they were close, Evie had the distinctive clinical smell of a soap that probably disinfected everything it touched. But she could also see the light freckles that scattered along her collarbone, and the thought flickered back across Bette’s mind: receptionist, dog-lover, switch. Could she just…ask her out? Ask her what she was doing later? She was just gearing up for it when Evie rendered the line forming in her head obsolete.

“Hey, you’re staying over, right? Do you want someone to show you around town tonight?”

It was an easy walking distance between the care home and the Premier Inn, and there were maybe two pubs on the way. It was hardly Paris. She could survive without a tour guide, and Evie had to know that. This wasn’t an obligation offer, Bette realized.

“Sure,” she replied, a smile taking over her face. “Sure, that’d be really nice.”

Two pints and two and a half games of pool in, Bette made the decision to sleep with Evie. She was aware of the slightly questionable professionalism, but it wasn’t as though they were in the same office every day. And Evie was hot, in a Dr. Ellie Sattler kind of way. Hot, and unequivocally flirting back. It all felt like an unbelievable win on a night when she had a hotel room and a reasonable start time the next morning.

And the thing was, Evie was good at pool. Astoundingly good, making all sorts of impossible shots that utilized the sort of physics Bette almost understood in theory but could never make work in practice. Evie leaned over her pool cue, her shirt slipping off one shoulder and revealing the bare skin beneath. It was compelling, watching her make her way around the table, resting a hip against it while Bette fumbled her cue and hit a ball near-ish to the pocket. And then, just as easily as she’d made every other shot, she sunk the black from behind two of Bette’s reds, and smugly drained the rest of her glass.

“Another?” Evie asked, her body suddenly slightly too close to Bette’s to be polite. Bette wasn’t sure if she meant the pint or the game, but she glanced down from her eyes to her lips and watched Evie’s smile stretch wide.

“Or that’s fun too,” Evie said, and cupped a hand around the side of Bette’s jaw.

The kiss was confident, no prevaricating, no question in it. Bette could smell Evie beneath the sterilizing hand wash, like salt and summer, as if she’d swum in the sea before work that morning and it had dried on her skin. Bette fumbled with her pool cue in a bid to get her hands involved, and felt Evie laugh against her lips as it bounced on the floor at their feet. They both looked down, and then up at each other again, and Evie licked her lips. Ruth’s warning, to be wary of making out with girls in pubs, reverberated in her ears, but it was difficult to care. And so she leaned in again.

Evie groaned slightly as she bit gently into Bette’s lip, and Bette realized she had something she needed to say before they got too carried away.

“I’m not looking for anything serious,” she said far too loudly, cringing inwardly. “If that’s okay. I mean, I’m basically never here. But you’re gorgeous, and disarmingly good at pool, and this has been really fun, so if you’re up for it then—”

“Hey,” Evie said, tapping Bette on the shoulder with her pool cue, still grasped in the hand that wasn’t tangled in the hair at the nape of Bette’s neck. “I’m not looking for another girlfriend either. I have a partner. We’re ethically nonmonogamous. I’m looking for authentic connections, meaningful encounters with people I find interesting. No expectations from my end beyond tonight.”

Bette nodded, realizing that in any other context someone who said “authentic connections” or “meaningful encounters” with a completely straight face was not really the woman for her. But it was one night. It hardly mattered.

“Shall we—” Bette gestured toward the door. “I mean, I have a hotel room. Which might be better than the pub. If that’s—I mean…”

Evie laughed, sharper than was entirely kind, and Bette felt her face flush. But then she leaned forward and kissed her, hard and certain, and Bette decided not to worry about it. If she could manage to just shut up, she could probably pull this off. Evie stepped back, a grin still firmly in place, and raised an eyebrow at Bette. It was a clear challenge to take the lead again. And Bette loved a challenge. She picked up her backpack from beneath the pool table and walked out of the pub, determined to play it cool, not to look behind her to check that Evie was following. Near the door the Orpheus impulse nearly won out, but she walked determinedly through it and breathed a sigh of relief as she heard the door swing again behind her.

“You’re at the Premier Inn, right?” came Evie’s voice from behind her.

It was a performance, but she was determined to be sexy, to claw things back after fumbling in the pub. She looked back at Evie.

“Yep.”

Ten minutes later Bette was swiping her key card across the lock and pushing open the door. The performance was becoming harder and harder to maintain; she was nervous. Somewhere between the pool table and the brightly lit Premier Inn hallway, the sexiness had been chipped away from the evening. The hotel felt too clean, too stark, like an office. Bette wanted to throw a scarf over a lamp.

“So, do you want a drink?” she offered.

Evie laughed. “I don’t think that cupboard is a minibar.”

She was right, obviously.

“I could just go out and get…” She trailed off.

“I mean, you could try. But it’ll be a good twenty-minute walk to a corner shop. Everywhere else will be closed by now.” Evie shrugged, a sort-of explanation and apology for the town, for the lack of late-night options. “It’s fine though. I don’t need a drink.”

Bette nodded, knowing she must seem jittery and strange. They were still standing in the middle of the room, and her backpack was still on her back. She glanced around. There was a tiny desk, but otherwise there were no options for sitting that didn’t result in them being immediately in bed together.

“Hey, are you okay?” Evie asked, stepping forward and squeezing Bette above her elbow. “There’s no pressure at all. Honestly, if you just want me to go home, I can. No issue. Or we could watch something for a bit?”

Bette felt so grateful that she didn’t quite know how to convey it. “Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Just—yeah, let’s watch something?”

She kicked her shoes off, dropped her backpack to the floor and climbed onto the bed, on top of the duvet. Evie followed suit, bringing the remote with her. She scrolled through and found an old episode of Grand Designs, then put the remote on the bedside table.

“Okay, this is perfect,” Bette said, leaning back against the headboard and crossing one ankle over the other.

“Yeah? Kevin McCloud do it for you?”

“Ew, no. But any mention of underfloor heating really does.”

Evie looked over at her and grinned. “So, how did you imagine this going then?”

“Honestly, I didn’t think much beyond wanting to kiss you in the pub,” Bette said. She pulled her eyes away from the modernist cliffside build and suddenly pregnant owner, and over to Evie. “I mean, I did. I asked you to come back here. But I don’t…What do you like?”

It was a bit of a cop-out. But she realized the truth of it as she said it. She hadn’t imagined anything specific, wanted Evie to have the ideas. There were things that had worked for her in the past. But did they work because they were what Mei liked? When faced with the question, she couldn’t articulate what it was that she fantasized about, what she wanted. Not beyond: women. What if she asked for something and then couldn’t get off? What if she did something with Evie that she’d done with Mei and it didn’t work for her? Then Evie would know—that she was new, that she was inexperienced, that she was still figuring it all out. She wanted, desperately and with sudden clarity, to skip this whole phase. To just be done.

To her relief, Evie took the lead, moving with a confidence that felt reassuring. And so Bette made herself relax, tried to enjoy it as Evie maneuvered her body, as she stripped her of her Breton top. Tried to enjoy it as Evie kissed vaguely at her chest, missing the places she most wanted to be touched. As Evie settled on top of her, positioned her legs and started to rock, Bette didn’t say that it wasn’t really doing anything for her. She just tried to follow the rhythm. And then Evie sat back and pushed a hand inside Bette’s jeans, beneath her knickers. It was too dry. Too hard. But she looked so sure, so determined. It was probably supposed to be good. And so, after a reasonable length of time had passed, Bette pretended that it was.

There was an MS near the station, a little further along the front. And there was time for her to walk down to it before her train onward to Bournemouth, tasting salt from the sea on her still-kiss-swollen lips. Lizzo was in her ears when she stepped in front of the open fridge shelves, reassured by the familiar array of packet sandwiches, by the bright lights. She liked a sandwich shop, liked looking at the various fillings and constructing what it was she wanted for lunch. But she liked even more that she could already taste the prawn mayonnaise and the brown bread, and the salt and vinegar crisps she’d fill it with.

Once the sandwich and crisps were secure in her bag, she left the footpath and stepped down onto the sand that led to the sea. She walked back to the station along the shoreline, squinting behind her sunglasses and sweating through the back of her T-shirt. How was it possible for such a cold, gray day to turn into this one? It was harder, this morning, to avoid the fact that all she really wanted was to be in the sea. She took off her shoes, relished the feeling of the sand between her toes, and waded in.

Her skirt was too long, really, for her to be walking shin-deep in the waves. The hem was drenched by the time she pulled it up and tucked it into the lace-trimmed shorts Ruth had got her hooked on. But it would dry. There was a whole train journey for her to dry out. It was hard to regret anything when she could feel the sand between her toes and sun on her face and salt stinging where she’d just shaved her legs in the shower.

It was, of course, difficult to push her feet back into her shoes (her shirt from the day before was sacrificed to the sandy dusting-down), and she made it to the station with barely a minute to spare. There was a seat on the train, at a table, that was blissfully unreserved. Her quarter of it was soon a mini-office, her charger running across the table, her laptop open, work tabs and emails open.

By her feet, her phone buzzed relentlessly in the outside pocket of her backpack. There was a chance it could be Erin, and so although she had planned to ignore it, to get some work done, she contorted herself in her chair until her phone was in her hand.

It’s a match!Her notifications read. It was Evie, of course. In everything that had followed, she had almost forgotten about the swiping.

Evie:Such weird and perfect luck that I saw you here before the workshop finished yesterday

Evie:Anyway, had a great time last night, thought we had a really special connection

Evie:It’d be great to see you again

Evie:xxxx

There was a text too. And a voice note. A fourteen-minute voice note. She felt her skin prickle uncomfortably.

+447535******:Hope you don’t mind me texting too, got your number from work! Messaged you on the app. Would be great to hear from you when you’re next back!

Nope. Absolutely not.

All she could think of was how silent everything had been once they had switched off Grand Designs. It was unnerving. With Mei, with Charlie, with Natalia there had been so much conversation. It had struck her, after a decade of sleeping with men, that women were really good at talking to each other. Or at talking, anyhow. Maybe not at communicating directly, at saying what they meant—there was too much equivocation and uncertainty and protecting of feelings for that. But she had never been so consciously silent in bed with a woman. None of the laughter and filth and endless slipping from talking to fucking and back again that there’d been with Mei. None of Charlie’s heat whispered in her ear. Not even, for all that it made Bette cringe with regret to remember it, any of Natalia’s praise and pleasure and sweetness. None of the conversation, the spark, from the pub earlier in the evening. None of it.

And now. Fourteen minutes of, she assumed, the very opposite of silence.

Careful not to click on the message, she swiped at it to move it out of her notifications, and opened her texts so that Evie couldn’t see her on WhatsApp. Her finger hovered. Her initial impulse was to text Ruth, but it had only been a couple of days since their dinner. They’d messaged over the weekend, but things still felt a little delicate. So she texted Ash an SOS and then stared at her phone waiting for a reply. Her eyes fell on the clock top-left: 11:14 a.m. Ash would be in class. For hours. Bette sent a brief explanatory text so Ash didn’t panic later, swallowed her reticence about texting Ruth about a girl she’d slept with, and opened a new text thread.

Bette:you around?

Ruth:A text! Vintage. To what do I owe the honor?

Bette:oh thank god

Bette:thank you for having a job you can text during

Bette:that wasn’t supposed to be a dig

Bette:you know what I mean

Ruth:I do. I have exactly that job. For the next six minutes, and then I have a tutorial.

Bette:thank you, incredible, statues are being erected in your honor etc

Bette:anyway, I’m avoiding going online on whatsapp

Bette:hence the texting

Bette:because I met this woman at work yesterday

Bette:we went out for a drink afterward and…you know…

Ruth:Sure. A euphemistic…

Bette:yeah

Bette:it was fine

Bette:anyway I was really clear this time!

Bette:about not wanting anything beyond last night

Ruth:That’s great!

Ruth:I think that read slightly sarcastic but I really mean it.

Bette:but I get on the train this morning

Bette:and she’s sent a string of messages

Ruth:Sure

Bette:and

Bette:a FOURTEEN-MINUTE VOICE NOTE

Bette:that’s a podcast

Bette:a whole podcast

Ruth:Hahahahaha

Ruth:Look, it’s a good thing women are hot. Because they’re also just entirely insane.

Bette:obviously I’m going to listen to it at some point, I’m not a monster

Bette:but I just needed to say to you:

Bette:FOURTEEN-MINUTE VOICE NOTE

Ruth:I want a full podcast review from you by the time I get out of this tutorial.

What with the crowded train and the emails that needing answering and the taxi and then the session, there had been no chance to find the fourteen minutes that the message required until she was walking back to the station in the last light of the day. By then it had been bumped down the list in her notifications by exclamation points from Ash accompanied by an all-capital-letters FOURTEEN MINUTES?! GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT, by a text from her mother with train suggestions for her next trip back, by a link to an article about the Arts Council from Carmen, and by a—a—

A fourteen-minute voice note from Ruth. She plugged her headphones into her phone, and pressed play.

“Just thought I’d give you a little end-of-the-day palate cleanser as I walk between classes. In case you’re still avoiding another special little podcast you’ve been sent today, and you needed a lead-in. An amuse bouche, if you will. But for your ears. Ooh, an amuse oreille? Shit, that’s so lame. I regret saying that. I don’t have time to start again. Anyway. It’s a lovely late-summer evening in Bristol, and the city misses you…”

Bette rolled her eyes, feeling oddly smug that Ruth had given the quarter-hour she had between classes to Bette. Not to enjoying some silence, or listening to something herself. Not to Heather or Jody. Not to Gabe. But to Bette. She couldn’t stop the smile breaking out on her face.