Chapter 19 #2
Annika grabs my feet and suddenly I'm laying across Anjalee with my head on Naomi's lap, and the joint is pressed to my lips and Annika is expertly swiping pink polish onto my toes.
I look up at Naomi. "I don't eat hearts, Nay-Nay. That was a joke."
She sputters behind her hand. “I know. It was funny. You're scary sometimes, but not, like, serial killer cannibal scary."
"At least there's that," I deadpan. I turn my attention to Annika. "You're very good at this, Annika."
She shrugs, focused on the task. "I did a lot of travelling for volleyball. Lots of girls, lots of downtime on buses and in hotel rooms. We did each other's nails a fucking lot.”
"Do you miss it?" I ask.
She nods, gaze fixed on my toes and her hands. "God yes, every day."
"What do you miss most?”
A tip of her head to one side. "All of it. The bus rides—although that’s a love-hate thing.
You really get close to your girls when you spend hours and hours together on the bus, especially those fucking interminable overnight trips across the Midwest. I miss crashing out on sugar and adrenaline in the rooms after a game.
Watching tape. Practices." She pulls back, dips the brush into the bottle, hesitates.
"The games, though. Fuuuuck, I miss that shit.
The rush. The crowds. The way everyone would lose their minds when I got a gnarly kill. "
I blink at her. "Kill?"
"Spike," she clarifies. "That's what I was best at—where you jump up close to the net and hit the ball really, really fucking hard."
I nod. "Ah, yes."
She shrugs again. "I miss it all. But…I wouldn't go back. Is that weird? That I can miss something like crazy but also not want to go back to it?"
Tatiana shakes her head, pointing at Annika with her cup. "No, it is not so strange. Not to me, at least." A sigh. "I miss Tata. I miss Zagreb. I miss my business and my girls. But like you have said, I would also not return to that life. I quite like my life here, with you all, quite a lot more."
Annika finishes with my other foot and twists the top onto the bottle. "Now. Fingers. Pick a different color."
I shake my head. "Surprise me."
Someone takes the joint from me, puts it to my lips—I puff, and it's gone. I exhale, head spinning, light and floaty and loose.
I hear a chorus of shouts from the men, followed by groans and laughter. "Who won?" I ask the room at large.
"Kane won one and Chance won one," Annika says. "This is the last of three, and I think my man's gonna get the W."
"Oh no," Anjalee says, "Kane is going to win. He is the…oh my god, I have forgotten the word. Down dog? No, that is yoga. Something to do with a dog."
"Underdog?" I offer.
"YES!" She exclaims. "He is the underdog."
I open my eyes and realize Tatiana is painting the nails of my right hand a pale, sea foam green, and Terra is painting my right hand a garish yellow. "Wow," I mutter. “That is a hideous shade of yellow, Terra."
She cackles. "I know! Isn't it marvelous?"
I lapse into a hazy, contented silence, eyes closed, listening to a half-dozen different conversations wash over me. I hear a door click closed, followed by howls and wolf whistles from the men. I crack open one eye and see Terra sauntering toward us, grinning ear to ear.
She plops down on the couch next to Annika and smacks her thigh. "I win."
Annika frowns. "Um, you two were in there for like five minutes. No way in hell that man plowed you that fast."
Terra pretends to huff on her nails and buff them on her shirt front. “What can I say? I've got a magic poonani."
Anjalee splutters at this. "Magical poonani? What is this poonani?" Her accent has gone rather pronounced as she gets drunker. "Is it your yoni?"
"Yoni?" Terra echoes.
Anjalee points at her crotch in a broad gesture. "Yes. Your lady cave."
Terra covers her face with her hands, cackling. “Lady cave! Anj, fuck me, I love you. Yes. Poonani means pussy. Which I assume yono or whatever you said does too."
"Yo-ni,” Anjalee corrects. "It is the Sanskrit word for the vulva, or the womb, but really, it means the feminine energy as a whole.”
"So then, what's the word for dick?" Terra asks.
"Lingam."
Terra nods. "Well, there you go, Anni." She pronounces the nickname AH-nee. "I have a magical yoni which Saxon's lingam doesn't stand a chance against."
Annika frowns, shaking her head. "No way! Less than five minutes? Sorry, darlin', I call bullshit." She whacks the back of the couch with her cane. "Saxon!"
"Yo!" Comes the shouted response.
Terra lunges off the couch and tries to clap a hand over Annika's mouth, but Annika has the reach and the strength advantage, and easily wrestles Terra's hand away.
"Did you just fuck Terra in under five minutes?"
"Hell to the fuck no!" Saxon answers, indignant. "Under five minutes? When I was fourteen maybe."
Terra is still trying to out-wrestle Annika, and Annika is cackling as she fends off the smaller woman. "Not another word, Saxon Cabot!" Terra screeches. "Or I swear to god I'll never suck you off again!" She immediately goes limp, flopping away and smacking herself in the forehead. "Fuck me."
Annika smacks the couch cushion with her cane again with a loud thwack. "You blew him?"
Terra shakes her head. "Nope!”
"Terra!"
"FINE!" Terra groans dramatically, stomping her feet like a toddler having a tantrum. "Fine! I sucked him off."
"The wager was fucking," Annika says. "That was the deal. Oral doesn't count."
I watch the exchange, puzzled. "Why are you wagering on this?"
Annika snorts, shrugging. "For fun."
"But you discuss these things…openly?" I ask.
Terra pats my thigh. "Sure we do. Those walls aren’t exactly thin, but they're not soundproof either." A shrug. "We're all adults, we all have a lot of sex, and so yeah, we talk about it, and sometimes tease each other. Why?"
"I…" I close my eyes again. "I couldn't talk about…that."
Naomi, surprisingly, answers me. "I felt the same way when I first came here.
Myka, Anjalee, and Annika openly discussed their sex lives with each other.
It made me very uncomfortable at first. Where I came from, such things were not discussed—at all.
I…I felt like it was private. Personal. Sacred, even. "
I blink up at her. "Do you not feel that way anymore?"
"Oh, no, I do. It is personal and sacred.
But my relationship with these girls…" Naomi looks around, eyes misty.
"It's very…intimate. And I…” she blushes, ducks her head.
"I was very innocent about sex when I met Silas.
Talking to women who have more experience than me has helped me in my relationship with Silas.
I can ask questions. Share things. I never had friends, let alone girlfriends.
We joke and we laugh and we tease, but we do know how sacred it is for all of us.
It is very liberating to be able to talk openly about it with the only other people on the planet who can understand exactly how I feel.
What it's like belonging to this group."
"So…" I sit up and turn to put my back to the couch back, holding my hands out to admire the color, although I hate the yellow with every fiber of my being. It's a fun kind of hate, though. "You tell each other things? Personal things? Details?"
Annika shrugs. “Sure. Not, like everything."
"You told me you queefed, Anni," Terra says. "And why. That's pretty personal."
"Because it was funny." She snickers. "It's still funny."
Terra can't help dissolving into snickering. "Queefing is always funny."
"Tell us something, Soph," Scarlett says, leaving her corner and joining the group crowded together at the opposite end of the sectional. "Just jump in with both feet. Trust us."
I look back over my shoulder at the men and find Lorenzo's eyes. He smiles—I may be reading things into it, but the smile seems to communicate how happy he is to see me with the girls like this, bonding, unwinding. Letting my guard down.
"I…" I feel a million thoughts percolating, and struggle to put one into words; my brain feels foggy and disorganized, as if my thoughts are a billion fluttering moths and I have to catch each one in order to create a sentence, but when I catch one, another flies out of my net.
Or something.
"Rafael was a hideously depraved man. The things he enjoyed—his sick peccadillos would horrify even the Marquis de Sade.” I stretch out my hand, and someone reads my mind, fits the joint into my fingers; I take a puff, inhale, hold it, exhale.
"One of the things he enjoyed doing to me was violent oral sex.
It was...traumatic, painful, shameful, degrading.
He would hold my hair and…" I shake my head, blowing out a sharp sigh.
"You can imagine. So, after I escaped, I avoided all sex.
I avoided people. Jakob, the man who owns this building and put the Broken Arrows together…
my relationship with him has always been purely platonic.
Boss and employee—friends. Perhaps even older brother and younger sister. "
I puff again and try to catch the fluttering thoughts whirling in my brain.
"I held much shame and fear about sex. But Lorenzo…
he…when I am with him, I forget all of that.
I felt desire, sexual desire, for the first time in a very, very long time when he and I reconnected.
The desire made it easy to forget what I'd been through.
Until it became time to…do things. To allow him to touch me, to try and touch him. "
Naomi slides an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into a side hug. "I am so, so sorry you experienced that, Sophia."
"Thank you, Naomi." I let her hold me—and I find it comforting. These women support me. Accept me. Understand me. "Today, earlier, Lorenzo and I…" I blush, duck my head, roll a shoulder.
"Got it on like Donkey Kong?" Terra suggests.
Annika elbows her. "I don't think she's at the teasing stage yet, Ter."