Chapter Fourteen
Edie squinted, opening one eye. The sun lasered through a gap in the curtains.
She was mad about it, because the sheets against her bare legs were divine. She rubbed her feet along the smooth fabric experimentally and gave herself goose bumps.
The mattress was a cloud. The pillow, unlike Morag’s, did not smell like bleach, but lavender.
When she stretched her arms over her head, arching her back, it was as if the previous day of treasure hunting and travel and late-night driving had been whisked away by the magic of Normandy and the amenities of this hotel, with its steep off-season discount.
The twin beds were side by side in the small balcony room, not quite touching.
With their thick, white, square-cornered duvets, they had looked to Edie like perfectly proofed, matched Pullman loaves.
She and Cosima hadn’t even turned the lights on, only waited on each other to use the miniscule but expertly appointed en suite, grateful for the provided toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap.
They’d stripped down in the dark, backs to each other—though Edie had never been more aware of someone undressing in her proximity—and slid under the covers.
Edie hadn’t meant to draw a line that meant they’d leave behind the intimacy of the train entirely.
But in the room last night, she’d found herself too shy to avoid the uncomfortable series of moments when they were both awake and aware of each other but politely silent, and then she’d heard Cosima’s breathing slow and deepen.
She remembered nothing after that.
She rolled over to look at the other bed. The only sign of Cosima was a bouquet of curly, frizzy hair sticking out of the top of her duvet.
Edie slid carefully out of the bed, gasping when the cold air hit her bare legs.
She’d give a lot for one of her oversized sweatshirts right now.
Her button-up barely reached her ass, and because she’d taken off her bra from underneath, she’d had to undo the top several buttons.
She pulled a throw off the end of the bed and wrapped it around herself, creeping to French doors—French doors in France!
—that led to what she assumed was the balcony.
The curtains pulled back silently, the pale silver February sun only partially filling the suite. God. The view.
She turned the handle of the door slowly, as quietly as she could, and opened it just enough to step out onto the balcony, wrapped in her blanket, with the storybook of medieval Normandy laid open at her feet.
Her perch gave her a vantage in both directions along a lane of half-timbered buildings.
Their mullioned windows glinted against plaster and dark beams. At the end of the lane, there was a perfect, faceted, breathtaking slice of Rouen Cathedral—unbelievably tall, taking in all of the sunlight that couldn’t penetrate the crowded lane.
It was a dream. A good dream—one where Edie could be from any time in the past or future, because this view had always been here, and it was impossible to believe it would ever be gone.
And she was here, a part of it.
“Pretty.”
Edie startled, making a noise that scared away a pair of pigeons on the neighboring roof.
“Sorry.” Cosima was also wrapped in a throw, her hair felted on one side and enormous on the other. She yawned, and when she finished, the light caught her sleep-blue eyes and turned them aquamarine.
“Good morning.” Edie didn’t know why she was whispering.
Cosima sat down on a small wrought-iron bistro chair, wrinkling her nose. “It’s so cold out here.”
Edie laughed. “You’re not a morning person, are you, princess?”
“Who is? Morning is the coldest, darkest, most disorienting part of the day. Except in the summer, when it’s too bright, too soon.
Everyone expects you to be cheerful. It’s when they schedule the most important meetings, even though you’re either starving or vaguely nauseated, and there’s no predicting which.
There’s an entire period of time, right away, that you have to go through a tedious series of rituals to make yourself presentable, and at least one thing always goes wrong.
You didn’t pick up the dry cleaning. You smash the mascara wand into your eye and set your eyeball on fire.
You realize that you got into bed too soon after you painted your nails and now they all have sheet prints on them.
Morning is hateful.” Cosima yawned again.
“I love getting up early.” Edie sat down on the other chair. It was so cold that her hips began to ache. “In the morning, nothing bad has happened yet.”
Cosima looked at Edie, a long look that started out considering and then got disconcertingly soft.
“What?”
She shrugged. “We slept together.”
“We did not!”
“There’s so much that’s no longer a mystery. For example, you snore. Not a lot, not very loud, just a low purr. You yank all the bedding out from where it’s tucked into the end of the mattress.”
“It’s literally evil that they do that. Who wants their toes bound in place?”
“You only use one pillow. Maybe that’s why you snore. I stole your second one so I could stack my upper body up properly.”
Edie smiled at the view, pleased to have been introduced to grouchy morning Cosima.
Pleased with everything, despite the cold.
“So how do we do this?” she asked. “I’m thinking we find some kind of drugstore for a brush for me and whatever you need to tame your hair, then food, then serviceable clothes real quick, and then we get down to business. ”
Cosima raised one barn-swallow-wing eyebrow. “First we talk about yesterday. On the train.”
Edie bit the inside of her cheek to keep her heart from leaping into her throat. “We did. We have, two times. Very mature of us.”
“We achieved understanding, and we were both reasonable. But how are we supposed to keep sleeping together and traveling through Europe if we don’t talk about the elephant in the room?”
“Pink marble elephant.” Edie giggled, possibly nervously. “We didn’t sleep together.”
“Edie.”
We’re in international waters. That was what Cosima had said. As though there might be places in the world where they could do whatever they liked without consequence.
Edie had been very decidedly not thinking about Cosima saying that—the tone of her voice, the challenging arch to her eyebrow, the heat and tenderness and vulnerability in her expression—since nearly the moment she’d said it.
Instead, Edie had reminded herself of a joke her brothers liked to make. They said that she was the frog who a thousand princesses kissed without any one of them finding their prince.
Edie had never been able to figure out if this joke was mainly about her lesbianism, queers and their fond affinity for frogs, or more about her general failure to be an attractive adult companion, but it did have a way of drowning her desire for someone new in the wash of shame for the ways her previous relationships had crashed and burned.
All of them. Every one. With variations, cruel twists, some humiliation, but no exceptions.
“I don’t wake up with my body wrapped around someone else’s body,” Cosima said, in her new, velvety voice that was for saying sweet things Edie couldn’t figure out how to deflect.
“I don’t want to kiss people. I don’t fall asleep thinking about how close my bed is to the other bed someone is sleeping in, and I once shared a room in Park City during Sundance with Kristen Stewart. ”
Edie had done all of those things, too, except for the part with Kristen Stewart, unless she counted the number of times she’d fallen asleep with one of the Twilight movies playing, which was innumerable.
But she had never had anyone fall asleep on her shoulder, guileless and sweet, and then, with a sleepy inhale, curl themselves around her, fitting every part against her body, breath on her neck, hand in her hair sending unending washes of pleasure over her skin.
Not in any of her relationships or hookups or with any woman she was “hanging out with.”
She’d never been turned on by both the heat of a woman’s body and her boneless trust.
She’d never turned down the kiss of a woman who wanted to kiss her.
She’d never been afraid a kiss would break her heart.
Her poor, senseless heart. When had it wriggled its way out of the cage she’d tried to trap it in, burst through the bars, and thrown its bloody little self at the feet of Cosima Frank?
The first day, probably. The first moment she laid eyes on her.
No. Sooner. She’d heard this woman’s name—Cosima, which meant the universe, which meant everything—and Edie had been done for. The eyebrows were just a bonus. Their charming banter. The fact that such a glorious creature didn’t know how to pet a cat and would never call her “Frog.”
Watching her zest a lemon for the first time.
Seeing her careen down a grassy slope without hesitation because Edie had fallen down it.
Witnessing the way the flashing strobe of lights in a tunnel beneath the ocean on a train going a hundred miles an hour revealed the desire in her seawater eyes—what the actual fuck was Edie supposed to do, not fall in love with her?
“I don’t live in Los Angeles,” she said.
Cosima smiled. “Currently, I don’t have an address in Los Angeles myself.”
“You”—Edie pointed at her—“aren’t allowed to suddenly adopt such an attitude.”
“Attitude?” She smiled again, one of her new smiles that was knowing and terrible. “Describe my attitude.”
“I won’t.” Edie pulled the blanket around herself tighter. “You know what you’re doing with the smiles and the devastating Chunnel come-ons and this seductive comportment.”
Cosima let her blanket fall from her shoulder, revealing a thin silk strap.
“Like that.” Edie pointed again, this time at her shoulder.
“Which is why we have to talk about it.”
“I will, but it has to be talking. No innuendo or looking at me with your eyes all Bette Davis’ed. I’m nervous.”