chapter sixteen
Just when Laurie thought the year might end without any further drama, two things happened in quick succession. The Darling bought the Unicorn, making Vic her coworker once more. And the celebratory, unified holiday party would be held on a luxury yacht. Once aboard, they wouldn’t be able to leave until the yacht docked. There were few things she wanted less than to be stuck on a boat among a thousand drunk techies, but as an admin she had no choice but to go.
One of the other admins came by to give her Mal’s wristband for the party.
“She never came by to pick it up, and I remembered you live together.”
They didn’t anymore, but the HR systems hadn’t been updated. Laurie took the wristband. Beyond the stabbing pain was guilty thrill. An excuse to visit Mal. She stopped by after work on a Wednesday, and Tara let her in.
“She’s in her room, packing.”
“Packing?”
“Says she needs a road trip.” Tara gave her a pointed look. “What did you do?”
“I sabotaged us.”
Tara nodded sagely. “Yeah, that tracks. You have that look about you.”
“What look?”
“The look of someone who’d panic and drown in three feet of water because someone once told you that you couldn’t swim.”
“Hey!”
“What’s going on?” Mal asked, opening the door. She stared at Laurie and pursed her lips. “What brought you here?”
“You never picked up your wristband,” Laurie said, fishing in her purse. “Here.”
Mal took it from her, carefully not touching her fingers. Twirled it around her thumb. “You didn’t have to bring it by. I wasn’t planning on going.”
“I wish you would. I have to go, and I’m not looking forward to running into Vic.”
“Why? You didn’t betray him by taking up a new job. He laid you off.”
Laurie glanced at Tara in reflex, but the sting of shame was gone. After everything they’d all been through together, it seemed like such a small thing.
“Besides,” Mal said, “I was thinking of going south, all the way to Mexico. Do you know I’ve never been?”
“Neither have I,” Laurie said. Tara inched away subtly, leaving them the illusion of privacy, although in the small apartment she’d be able to hear them.
“You could come,” Mal said softly. Uncertainly.
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t want you to feel obligated to do anything you don’t want to.”
An impasse. God, Laurie wanted to go with her. Screw the party, she could already feel the heat of the Mexican sun. She ached at once for the safe predictability of her clean, bright studio and for this other life, the passenger seat of a rented car and the slakeless thirst for adventure.
“I have to go to the party. My team is counting on me. You know one of them is going to get stuck and I’ll have to delay the departure, and another one’s going to be throwing up off the side of the boat.”
“Babies,” Mal scoffed. “Were we ever that stupid?”
Back at the Unicorn? Yes .
“We were worse, and you know it. We didn’t even have an HR department.”
Mal wandered into her bedroom. “Speaking of HR, it hit me the other day, that at my seniority, dating someone at work would probably be an abuse of power.”
Laurie followed her, knowing she was skirting around something important.
“Tell me something honestly, and I swear Laurie if you lie to me about this I’ll never speak to you again.”
“I promise,” she whispered.
“Did you ever agree to something just because I wanted it?”
“No!” She recoiled at the suggestion.
“So, that night—”
“Is that what’s been eating at you? No, I was there, I wanted it, you didn’t force me. God, Mal, how could you think that?”
“Well, what else was I supposed to think? You looked green the next day, you practically ran away and didn’t speak to me for weeks, and I know I can be… forceful .”
“You didn’t do anything I didn’t want. You never have.”
Mal whirled around to face her. “Then why are you so mad at me? Just tell me what I did! Whatever it was, whatever made you think I was using you, I swear I’ll stop it.”
Tears stung her eyes. It hurt to see Mal in such pain, pain she’d caused with her own doubts and fears. “I’m not mad, okay? I’m scared , and—” Mal flinched away, and Laurie quickly corrected, “Not scared of you. Never scared of you.”
“Maybe you should be,” Mal said. “You have no idea how much I want….”
“Tell me.”
“No.” She knelt to stuff clothes into her backpack.
Laurie hadn’t thought it was possible to fold underwear angrily, but Mal’s disregard for the impossible was always legendary.
“I wanted to feel safe,” Laurie said finally. “But you’d always said, if you can’t leave, it’s not love.”
Mal’s shoulders tightened, but she said nothing.
“You forget I’m older than you,” Laurie went on. “I can’t still be doing this when I’m fifty, hustling crazy, stressful work hours just to keep my health insurance, not being able to save for retirement because I have to pay the rent. Mal, you let me taste a life I never thought I’d get to have. I didn’t want to get greedy and ask for more.”
“But you wanted more?” she asked without looking up.
“I wanted more.” Admitting it hurt, made the disappointment real.
“You could still have it,” Mal said. “New York recognizes gay marriage, and we could write a prenup if it would make you feel safe.”
Laurie blinked, unable to process the words. When she did, she reached for the table to hold herself up. Then she started laughing. Her breath came in heaves, as if her lungs were wet with tears.
“Mal, only you would propose angrily . You’re so mad at me you can’t even meet my eyes, and you think we should get married?”
“Isn’t that what you said you wanted?” Mal asked, looking mulish.
“Not if it’s not what you want, and—” Laurie put out a hand to stop her protest—“I know it’s not what you want. Not really, or you’d have asked a long time ago. You aren’t exactly a beacon of impulse control.”
Mal looked so lost, so forlorn, she wanted to take her in her arms, except she had the feeling it wouldn’t go over well. Even if she hadn’t really meant to propose, Laurie could tell she’d hurt her pride by refusing. She asked Mal one more time to consider coming to the party, and then left. Tara had clearly been eavesdropping, but didn’t say anything to her on the way out.
It was only when she got home that it hit her. Her first proposal. She sat down on the sofa, stunned. She had said no .
· · ·
On the night of the party, Laurie managed to shepherd her team up the gangway without any sprained ankles. A woman from Sales in pencil heels wasn’t as lucky. Laurie kept to herself, wandering around the yacht so nobody would see her standing around and decide to make conversation. She felt split and superimposed upon her own past. She remembered vividly how awed she’d been when she first came to the Darling’s party with Sophia, but now that she worked here, now that she’d organized reward trips to Belize with swim-up bars and negotiated for private security for their executives at Ben Gurion, the wall of donuts made her stomach hurt, the photo booth set up at the bow to allow couples a chance to pose as if they were on the Titanic seemed childish, and the sumo suits with which people could wrestle each other to the ground were just plain ridiculous.
Maybe she’d grown too old for such things. As her coworkers bench-pressed each other laughingly to show off, she simply shook her head and moved on, into one of the other cabins. Of course, with her luck, she ended up directly in Vic’s sights. He was already drunk.
“LAURIE!” he bellowed, and everyone’s heads turned to her.
She kept a polite smile on her face.
“Laurie, you have no idea how things fell apart after you left.”
After you fired me. Asshole .
He turned to his gaggle of tall male friends and fake-whispered, “Laurie’s a witch. She runs the place like magic, but when she left I could swear we were cursed. Nobody knew where anything was. I missed a dozen meetings. Our valuation fell.”
She looked for a way out. Short of turning and running, there seemed to be no options. When she turned, her exit had been closed off.
“And now we’re all here,” Vic said dramatically. “All those dreams of making it on our own, running our own startups and retiring to our private islands, and here we are, corporate tools with golden handcuffs.”
She smiled and started inching away, when one of the other men frowned. “Do I know you?”
“Laurie Lamont. I’m an admin.”
“Yes, of course, Laurie. You were here years ago, weren’t you?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“I have an eidetic memory. I never forget a face. You fell in the water.”
Laurie gulped, promptly choking and coughing in graceless surprise.
“You were here with Sophia Melnyk. Her artist girlfriend.”
This couldn’t be the same guy, not after all these years. She couldn’t be this unlucky.
“What are you talking about?” Vic asked.
She stepped back, but the men had closed the circle to listen.
“Are the two of you still dating?”
“Laurie’s not a lesbian,” Vic said, laughing. “You aren’t, are you?”
She needed to get out of here.
“No more than I am,” said a familiar, beloved voice. A voice that sounded like a blade.
“Mal! You’re here too! We just need to find Nick and get the old gang back together.”
“Sure,” Mal said. “We’ll go find him.”
She placed a hand on Laurie’s wrist, gently guiding. Laurie followed her out of the room and into a quieter cabin, a smoking lounge with a bridge and pool table and some leather chairs.
“You okay?”
“I wish it didn’t bother me so much,” Laurie said. “I mean, these days everyone’s trying to fly their rainbow flag from a higher hill.”
“Doesn’t mean coming out got any easier, especially when it’s not your own choice.”
Mal leaned against the pool table, completely unaware of the effect she had. All these years of living with her, Laurie had learned to ignore it, but after a few weeks apart…
“Did you ever come out? I guess I’ve never asked.”
“I was never really in,” Mal said. “My first kiss was with a girl, at a school dance. As you said before, I’m not really one for impulse control.”
“What happened?” Laurie asked, overwhelmed by the thought of people jeering at a littler Mal, one who hadn’t yet built up her defenses.
“She freaked out and ran away, and I stuck to kissing boys instead.”
“But at least no one bullied you, or called you names?”
She shrugged. “Maybe they did. I wasn’t listening.”
“How do you do it? Shut out all those voices?” Laurie traced the smooth wooden edge of the pool table, her fingers inches from Mal’s. “How is it you always know what you want?”
“I thought that was what it meant to be American,” Mal said with a sardonic smile. “To feel the insatiability of desire. I don’t know, a lot of things turn me on, I never thought to label it. Men, women, horses, Luca Guadagnino films… It’s like my whole body is alive, my toes tingle, my heart pounds, and colors seem more saturated than they do on Smallville.”
Why had Laurie ever thought she was a contained explosion? Mal wasn’t contained at all, nothing could contain her.
“And me? If you felt… why did you never—?”
“ If I felt ,” she scoffed, and muttered something inaudible. “You’re the reason I felt all these things. After my dad died, I was so numb, for so long, and you… you notice everything, you feel everything, you’re like a copper wire stripped of insulation. When you fall asleep in the car I want to splash you with ice water. When you’re watching TV in that ridiculous Snuggie I want to fold you in half and squash you so you pay attention to me instead. I want to take you everywhere just to see that wonder in your eyes, to listen to you moan when you eat tiramisu, to watch you pet stray cats as if there couldn’t be anything more to life than that.”
Laurie started laughing. She hadn’t thought anything could beat the proposal, but this had to be the strangest declaration of love anyone had ever made.
“And that’s the best of all. You laugh like rain on a pond, the most intensely musical sound.”
“You love me,” she said, struck with wonder.
“Of course. Idiot.”
Mal was still hovering about six feet away, waiting for her.
Oh.
She’d always been waiting for Laurie to make the first move.
Suddenly it was as if she was truly seeing Mal for the first time, this woman who shone so bright that so many had scattered under her relentless attention or her merciless tongue. She’d held herself back from Laurie because she was afraid of scaring her away.
Because Mal wanted her that much more than the things she actually went after.
As if Laurie would ever tire of her. As if she couldn’t soak up every bit of what Mal had to give and still want more.
She walked up to the cabin door and locked it. Rested her head against the cool metal for a moment.
She took a deep breath, then turned around to face Mal. “Get on the table.”
Mal’s eyes widened comically, but she scrambled to obey so quickly that she sat on the pool table instead of the one Laurie had meant. Well, no matter.
Slowly, silently, Laurie slid the cocktail dress off Mal’s shoulders. Mal waited patiently while she undid the clasp of her bra, and lay back on the pool table and raised her hips so Laurie could strip her fully.
“All your coworkers are right outside that door,” Laurie whispered. “If you make too much noise, they’ll hear you.”
Mal shivered, and goose bumps appeared on her long, dark arms. Laurie smoothed them down but didn’t do anything else, leaving her quivering on the pool table. Mal pulled her lips into her mouth and dragged her teeth against them.
I wasn’t wrong.
“All those men out there are terrified of you. You say the word and they jump.” Laurie met her gaze. “And you hate it.”
Mal nodded mutely, her face slackening in utter gratitude at yielding control.
Laurie touched her slowly, straining her patience with tenderness, parting her legs and taking her time just looking, smelling, leaving small, feather-light kisses down the insides of her thighs. She had yet to kiss her mouth, and at times Mal lifted herself up on her elbows trying to reach her face, but eventually lay back and let Laurie set the pace.
She lapped at those secret places that tasted of the sea. Mal’s legs clenched with the effort not to crush her head between them.
Eventually, Mal relaxed, and it was the most beautiful thing Laurie had ever seen. Mal leaned back, pillowing her head in her arms. For a moment she looked at Laurie with all the challenge and invitation of La Maja Desnuda , then her eyes closed and her head rolled to one side. She whined softly as Laurie entered her with three fingers, then gasped as her thumb rolled gently over her clit. The pool table was ruined—it would forever smell of her. Laurie couldn’t help smiling at the thought of all the men who’d come here after, who would never know.
When Mal crunched upward at her climax, then Laurie kissed her.
She dove into her mouth when Mal thrust forward involuntarily, fed on her moan before it could gain voice. She held the back of Mal’s neck in her free hand to keep her in place, and used it to lower her back down afterwards. But she kept her fingers where they were until Mal’s legs and arms fell slack, and when she finally pulled them out, she tasted Mal and then ran her fingers over those reddened lips until Mal cleaned them off obediently.
A lurch let Laurie know they were docking. Mal, of course, had never met a moment she couldn’t ruin, so she popped right up and said, “We should hurry. It’s your turn.”
“No,” she said, stepping away and tossing Mal her clothes for good measure. “It’s not something I tell you very often, but you’re not turning this into a tit for tat or coming anywhere near my bits until you learn to slow down. We do this my way.”
She’d have to help her over time to still her restless mind and limbs, to stop trying so damn hard all the time. She could hold out until then; Mal would love the challenge.
Nobody was sober enough to notice that they smelled of sex as they disembarked the yacht. Since Tara would be at Mal’s they took an Uber back to Laurie’s place. They didn’t speak, but their hands met as soon as they got in the back. Mal had a wild look in her eyes. Laurie laughed, and it was a joyful reverberation that started at the base of her spine, gathering strength until it cascaded out of her mouth. The chill of the December air had filled her with a sense of urgency, and desire now pulled at her like an undertow.
They were tearing off each others’ clothes before the door fully shut. Mal picked up her legs and pulled them around her waist, carried Laurie up the stairs without so much as breaking the kiss for air.
“What do you want?” Mal begged. “Please, just tell me what you want.”
“You,” Laurie said. “Always.”
“Always,” she said, nodding solemnly, as if making a vow.