Taped Up Preview
Taped Up
A Lavender House Novel
“Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive
more? To love harder?”
FROM “DEAD STARS,” ADA LIMóN
The hedge is early this year, and I’m in love with Sam Rivera. I guess I’m early, too.
I notice it at the corner, before I can see the building.
The lavender hasn’t bloomed yet, but the green is full and leaning toward the sun, and the smell is already there underneath, faint and promising.
By the end of the month it’ll spill over the porch railing and scent the whole block. Right now it’s just getting ready.
The door is propped open because it’s always propped open in summer. Bea’s policy. She says a closed door tells people they need a reason to come in, and she’d rather they didn’t need one.
Inside, I’m met with the hiss of the La Marzocco espresso maker, the smell of coffee and something with ginger, and Bea behind the counter already making my drink.
“Morning, Lani. How’s the ice machine?”
“Dying slowly. Making new sounds.”
“That machine has been dying since 2019.” Bea Navarro is fat and soft behind the counter, with silver threading through her dark hair.
She moves behind the counter without looking down, every surface at the right height, every tool where the hand expects it.
She sets the Calloway down — espresso, oat milk, lavender syrup she makes from the hedge.
It’s in one of the heavy ceramic mugs she uses for regulars.
They’re made by a local potter, Pat Levin, and they’re part of the comfort of Lavender House.
I’ve drunk out of this one on enough mornings to know the thin spots along the rim and the warm weight of it in my hands.
“How’s your brother?” Bea asks me.
“Still patching the roof. How are the cousins?”
“Marisol tried to change the dominoes rules again last Sunday. She was overruled eight to one. The one was Marisol.”
I take the cup. The Calloway is perfect. It’s always perfect.
Lavender House is a dusky purple Victorian with white trim that sits across the street from Ardmore College and has been sitting there since 1894.
Bea bought it twenty years ago and has kept the door open every day since.
In summer the regulars come in early and stay.
Bea lives there too, in a little apartment on the second floor, with windows that look out over the lavender hedge and the campus quad beyond.
This morning the room is doing what it does.
Gerald Fitch is at his table by the window with a Tupperware of sourdough bread, talking to nobody about chapter nine of his monograph.
Gerald is a medievalist in his late fifties, white, pink-cheeked, soft around the middle, and he wears the same corduroy jacket in every season, always unbuttoned, as though the idea of fastening it has simply never occurred to him.
He’s been working on this monograph for as long as I’ve been coming here.
Every few weeks he announces a breakthrough.
Kim looks up from her chair, her pale, freckled face smiling under her short, purple hair.
She tells him he said the same thing about the last chapter.
Gerald insists this chapter is different.
Kim turns a page in whatever book she’s reading.
Bea makes a sound from behind the counter that communicates awareness without opinion.
This has been happening for years. I love it. I love the rhythm of it, the way it runs like background music.
Rowan Chen is in the corner armchair in an oversized flannel and jeans, their legs tucked under them, a notebook open on the arm of the chair.
They’re short and skinny, with warm tan skin and close-cropped hair.
In the fanny pack on their lap, a hedgehog named Hammertime is curled up with its nose poking out, breathing steadily, unbothered by everything.
Rowan is staring at the notebook without writing, the pen resting between two fingers.
“When you’re paying attention to someone,” Rowan says to the room, “does it feel like reaching or receiving?”
Kim, from her chair, without looking up: “Depends who.”
Rowan considers this for a long time. Writes something down.
I sit at my table with the Calloway and let the morning move around me.
The espresso machine cycling, the light coming through the front windows, voices overlapping.
A regular I don’t know well is reading the paper at the corner table.
Two students from Ardmore are sharing a muffin on the patio.
Bea is wiping something that doesn’t need wiping because that is how Bea listens.
This is my morning. Most mornings. The Calloway, the room, the people in it.
The comfort of a place where nobody needs anything from me except my presence, where I can sit and drink my coffee and be Lani instead of the athletic trainer or the person who shows up with food or the woman who has been running a calculation about her colleague for two years.
I sit for a while, and the crowd thins. The espresso machine cycles down. The light shifts. I’m at my table with my empty cup and the peacefulness that settles over Lavender House when the room exhales.
The door is still open, the warm air coming through.
Sam’s here.
Sam Rivera is medium height and slim but solid, the build of a woman who’s been coaching soccer for twelve years and still runs the drills herself when she thinks nobody’s watching.
Her light golden brown skin is a shade darker already from the June sun.
Her black hair, a little wavy, is pulled back in the short ponytail she always wears.
Her hair is barely long enough for it, and a few pieces have escaped near her ears.
She has a scar through her left eyebrow, from when she fell out of a tree as a kid.
She’s in her dark green Ardmore coaching tee and black athletic shorts, and she looks good.
I let myself look at her calves for one second, then I put it away.
She goes to the counter and takes the coffee Bea has ready — not a Calloway, just black, because Sam thinks lavender syrup is an unnecessary complication — and comes to my table.
She sits down, leans back in the chair, and puts her hand on the back of her neck, pressing at the tension there.
She always does this when she’s been thinking about a problem too long.
She does this instead of talking about the problem.
I’ve been watching her do it for four years.
“Recruiting,” she says.
No greeting. This is Sam. She enters a room already in the middle of the thing she’s been thinking about, and if you’re the person she sits down across from, you’re expected to be in the middle of it too.
“I’m going to lose two seniors next year and I haven’t found the recruits to replace them. Plus this year’s formation is wrong. Clare and Jasmine on the left side. The communication won’t be there.”
“It’ll come. Jasmine talks, Clare listens. Give it three sessions,” I say.
“Two.”
“Three. The tissue needs time. Clare’s hip flexor will be tight from road running all summer. She’ll compensate on the plant foot, which means she’ll be half a step late on the read. Once the tissue releases, the timing will come.”
“You’re making a soccer argument with a tissue argument,” Sam says.
“I’m making both. They’re the same argument. You see the spacing, I see the body inside the spacing. Between us we get the whole picture.”
She drinks her coffee. I drink nothing because my cup is empty, and I don’t get up for another because getting up would mean leaving this table, and I am not leaving this table.
Here’s the thing.
I have been in love with Sam Rivera for over two years. The start date is not debatable. It was a bus.
Two Novembers ago. The team was coming back from an away game, the highway dark, rain on the windows.
I was in my usual seat in the middle of the bus, looking out the window.
Sam had been up front reviewing match footage on her phone for an hour, the screen lighting her face in the dark, her thumb swiping through clips with focused repetition; she was going to watch this footage until it told her something. She did this after every game.
Halfway home she got up, walked the length of the dark bus, past every other seat, and sat down next to me. She didn’t say anything. She just sat down, her shoulder against mine, and ten minutes later she was asleep with her head on my shoulder.
Forty-five minutes. The bus humming. The rain on the windows.
The weight of her head, which was not much, and the other weight, which was everything.
She’d walked past every other seat. She’d chosen mine.
And the choosing had happened before any of the layers that usually sat on top of Sam’s decisions had time to intervene.
I’d been noticing Sam for a while before that.
The way she coached, tough and tender at the same time, pushing a player past what the player thought she could do and then catching her on the other side with a word or a hand on the shoulder.
The way she ran the drills herself, demonstrating the footwork, and the pull of her shirt across her back when she planted and turned.
The way her quads flexed when she dropped into a defensive stance to show a freshman the correct position.
I noticed these things, and I told myself it was professional appreciation, one body specialist watching another body work, and I kept telling myself that until the bus made it impossible.
That was when I stopped pretending.
Since then I’ve been running the same calculation every morning.
The friendship is worth more than the risk.
The math comes out the same way every time.
Every morning I go to work, and I go sit on Sam’s porch in the evenings, and I do not say the thing.
Not saying it doesn’t make the thing smaller.
It just means it grows in the dark, the way everything grows in the dark around here.
Pacific Northwest feelings — big and green and fed by rain.
Sam is talking about the right-side rotation.
I’m listening. I’m also watching her hand on the back of her neck, pressing at the knot she carries there.
I let myself touch her shoulder sometimes, a brief press, my thumb finding the knot for one second before I pull away.
That’s the one touch I allow myself. What I want is to put my mouth there.
To press my lips into the spot where the tension lives and feel it release under my breath.
“You’re not listening,” she says.
“I’m listening. Right-side rotation, Walsh’s shoulder timeline, whether to adjust the press trigger before preseason.”
“That was three sentences ago.”
“I’m very good at listening three sentences ago.”
She almost smiles, the thing she does where the smile wants to come and she doesn’t quite let it out. I collect those almosts. I have years of them.
She finishes her coffee and stands. “How much water today?”
“Some,” I say.
“Lani.”
“I’ll have some when I get back to the training room.”
“Have some now.”
She’s already walking to the counter to get me a glass.
She hands me the water and goes. The door stays open after her. The warm afternoon air comes in where Sam was, and the air is not a substitute. I drink the water. I sit at my table for another minute. Bea wipes the counter. Rowan writes. Kim reads.
I walk back across campus to the training room.
The team doesn’t arrive until August, but the building isn’t empty in the summer.
There’s a youth soccer camp running through July, and I’m on call for the middle schoolers who slide on the turf and come in with grass burns and jammed fingers and the occasional dramatic ankle that turns out to be fine.
Between campers I restock and organize: the supply cart, the tape by width, the pre-wrap, the ice machine that needs coaxing.
I’ve been doing this long enough that my hands know the shelves without my eyes.
The training room at three in the afternoon is mine.
The light through the window is warm and long and the ice machine hums its dying hum and nobody needs anything from me for the next hour.
My head is still back at the table in Lavender House. Still in the room where Sam sat across from me and pressed the back of her neck and didn’t know the thing that was sitting right there between us.
The calculation says: the friendship is worth more than the risk.
The calculation doesn’t account for her hand pressing her own neck when she’s thinking. The hand on the knot. The tension she carries there.
You want to kiss it, Lani. You have wanted to kiss it for two years.
I’ll run it again tomorrow.