Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Avery felt at loose ends on Wednesday afternoon. She hadn’t seen Taylor the night before, the first Tuesday since the winery party that she hadn’t, and the first Wednesday since the pottery class that she hadn’t woken up with her. She hadn’t even heard from Taylor since that terse text the day before saying she couldn’t go out that night. Taylor always texted like that, though. Avery shouldn’t make a big deal about this. She wasn’t going to make a big deal about this.
It was Luke’s fault that she felt so lost and ill at ease just because she hadn’t seen Taylor since Monday morning. He’d brought up all that stuff about whether Avery had feelings for Taylor and wanted a real relationship with her, and it had made her think about what could be, and it had made her needy. She spent a lot of time alone, she had no problem with being alone, she was fine! She’d see Taylor whenever; it was no big deal. They were no big deal, wasn’t that the whole point?
But she still felt off. She didn’t have any meetings or calls for the rest of the day, she had everything squared away for her events for the weekend, and she didn’t have any plans tonight or tomorrow night. So she did the only thing she could think to do. She went to the garden.
There were a lot of people there, which was nice. She had people to smile at as she walked by, people to wave at across the way, so she wasn’t alone anymore, but she didn’t have to talk to anyone. She wasn’t really in the mood to talk. Instead, she got to work. She weeded, pulled off mottled leaves, harvested ripe tomatoes and discarded the fallen ones, plucked zucchini out of their hiding places, snipped herbs, pulled up a few radishes, and planted more radish seeds and cilantro seeds, hoping they’d sprout and grow for the next few months. Finally, she picked some flowers to bring back home to be a bright spot in her newly painted living room. They—she and Taylor—had decided on a soft pink and had painted it themselves. It made her happy every time she walked inside of it.
“Hey!” Beth said. Avery jumped, jolted from her thoughts about that night she and Taylor had started to paint, and what happened later. “I didn’t expect to see you here until later.”
“Oh,” Avery said. “I had some downtime, and it was such a nice day, so I thought I’d come by early to…putter around a bit.”
Beth dropped her garden basket at the edge of their plot and surveyed the work Avery had done.
“It looks great, doesn’t it?” she said. “Who would have ever thought we could do this? Not me. And yeah, it’s a gorgeous day, that’s why I came over here early, too. Greta and I just finished doing some tastings for our New Year’s Eve party, and I was going to go home and get some more work done before coming here, but it was too nice outside to waste the afternoon.”
Avery looked back down at the tomato plant as soon as Beth brought up their wedding. God, she was being so stupid about this. Why were her feelings so hurt that she wasn’t invited? She and Beth had known each other for only a few months, anyway. The same amount of time she’d known Taylor, practically. That wasn’t enough time to expect anyone to have strong enough feelings of friendship for someone to invite them to their wedding. Or strong enough feelings of…other things for someone to want a real relationship. She had to pretend that she wasn’t upset, that everything was fine, that she was just happy for Beth. She knew how to do that; she was an expert at pretending that everything was fine.
“Oh, that’s great,” she said. But it didn’t come out right, not how it was supposed to, not how it used to. Maybe now that she’d been actively working on not pretending about her feelings this summer, on being more honest, with Taylor, with herself, she didn’t know how to pretend anymore.
Beth looked at her. And then she smiled tentatively.
“Um, speaking of the New Year’s Eve party,” she said. “We aren’t sending out formal invitations, because, well, we don’t want people to think something’s up. But you know you’re obviously invited. Right?”
Avery’s head shot up. She didn’t even attempt to stop herself from smiling.
“Oh. No, um…I wasn’t sure. I thought since we didn’t really know each other that well…and you didn’t mention it, so…”
Beth shook her head.
“Didn’t I say we were bonded by soil? You’ll be there, right?”
Avery grinned back at her.
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good. Maybe you can bring that hottie of yours.”
“Oh.” Avery said. “We won’t still be together by New Year’s Eve, but thank you.” She tried to make light of it, even though she wasn’t feeling light about it. “Your party will be a perfect place for me to practice flirting. Just make sure to invite some good options for me, okay?”
“Why are you so sure you two won’t still be together by then? You seem to really like her, and from what you say about how she is toward you, she seems to really like you, too.”
Avery tried to ignore the tears that came to her eyes when Beth said that, pretend them away, crush her feelings down into a little ball.
But she was tired of doing that. She didn’t want to do it anymore.
The problem was, now that she’d opened the door to thinking about her feelings for Taylor, the answers were all too clear in her mind.
“I do really like her,” she said to Beth. “But from the beginning, we said this would be a casual thing. I’m realizing I might want more than that. I guess I’m kind of sad about that today.”
“What if she wants more than that, too?” Beth asked. “Have you even asked her?”
Avery sat down on the edge of their garden bed.
“Why did you have to ask me that?”
Beth laughed and sat down next to her.
“I guess that’s a no. What are you waiting for?”
Avery bit her lip. She was waiting for the same reason she’d waited so long to break up with Derek, for the same reason that she’d been so well-behaved throughout her teens and twenties, for the same reason she hadn’t asked Beth if she was invited to the wedding. She was waiting because it was less scary to wait than to take action.
“I’m waiting so I can become someone who can have strong feelings and be vulnerable and bold, but also never gets her feelings hurt.” She was waiting to become a different person. “How do you become like that?”
Beth put her hand on Avery’s shoulder.
“I hate to break it to you, friend, but you can’t.”
Avery dropped her head in her hands.
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“You have to talk to her, you know,” Beth said.
Avery didn’t look up.
“I don’t know that. Okay, fine, I do know that, but can I live in ignorance about that for at least one more day? I mean, two days, twelve days, thirty-five days, any of that would be better than one day, but give me one day? Can’t I just immerse myself in the garden or in baking more zucchini bread or learning how to make jam with these peaches that James dropped off for us or something, anything other than thinking about this?”
Beth stood up.
“Yeah. Come on.”
Avery looked up at her, relief washing over her.
“Really?”
Beth nodded.
“Yep. Promise me you’ll remember tomorrow, and deal with it tomorrow, but for now, turn off your phone so you won’t check it forty thousand times tonight, and let’s get out of here.”
Avery stood up immediately.
“Oh, thank God.”
Taylor didn’t know what to do. She left Erica’s house and went straight to Avery’s apartment, but she didn’t answer her door or her text, and her car wasn’t there. She must be out somewhere, but Taylor had no idea where. Probably if she’d responded to any of Avery’s texts that week in something more than monosyllables, she might know where the fuck Avery was, but that was one more mistake she’d made; there was nothing she could do about it now. She was probably at some work event, or maybe at her garden, or out with Luke, or something, but Taylor couldn’t call Luke to see if he knew where Avery was, because he would think something was wrong, and shouldn’t she know that herself? She did drive by the community garden to see if Avery’s car was there, but no luck. Eventually, she just went home and texted Avery again.
Taylor
Hey! let me know if you want to go out later or want me to come over
She started to reread her text, to see if she should change the wording or delete that exclamation point or whatever, but even thinking about that made her roll her eyes at herself, so she just pressed send.
And then she waited. And waited. And waited. She had obviously been cursed by someone, that was the only explanation for this. It could have been anyone, honestly. Anyone she’d dated and broken up with could have cursed her, or maybe they all had. Because now when she was all hyped up to confess to the person she was falling in love with that she was falling in love with her, she couldn’t fucking get in touch with her? That was definitely cosmic payback in some way or another.
And now she had all this time to just…sit here and think about this. Think about how Avery had been so nonchalant about the whole idea of them breaking up, about how she had no idea what Avery’s feelings for her were, about how this whole thing with Avery had started with her giving Avery flirting lessons so she could learn how to be more comfortable asking women out and dating them, and that maybe Avery viewed this relationship as the first of many relationships with women, and her actual feelings weren’t really engaged in this thing with Taylor at all. About how she was about to tell Avery how she felt, and she had no fucking idea if Avery felt the same way or how it would go.
And now there was no fucking way to know except to sit here and wait for Avery to text her back.
Finally, her phone buzzed, and she grabbed for it.
Avery
Sorry, I was at the garden, and then I had dinner with beth. I have to get up early tomorrow, but can we do tomorrow night?
Tomorrow night? She had to sit with this until tomorrow fucking night? Good God, this was a nightmare.
She wanted to text Avery back that no, she needed to talk to her right away, she didn’t care if she was tired and had to get up early in the morning. Why did it even matter if she had to get up early in the morning anyway? Taylor had slept over at her place lots of times when Avery had an early morning meeting; they dealt with that just fine!
But she knew that number one, that was probably not the way to handle this situation, and number two, Avery turned her phone on do not disturb as soon as she even thought about getting ready for bed, so it wouldn’t do her any good anyway. She picked up the phone.
“She had dinner with her garden friend tonight and is going to bed early, what am I going to doooo?” she whined as soon as Erica answered.
“Oh, honey,” Erica said. “I’m so sorry. Do you want to come back over here and eat some of the food I ordered for us and watch a very stupid movie and tell me all about it?”
“God yes.”
She stayed at Erica’s for four hours; they put a series of stupid movies on in the background, ate a lot, and talked and cried a lot more.
When Taylor left, very full of pizza and Diet Coke, Erica gave her another hug.
“It’s going to be okay, I promise,” she said.
Taylor shook her head.
“You can’t know that.”
Erica nodded.
“I can, because I know you, and I know us. I can’t promise that everything with Avery will turn out all right, or even that everything with Sam will turn out all right, but I can still promise it’s going to be okay.”
Taylor tried to hold on to that throughout her sleepless night.
The next day, she had no idea what the fuck to do. This wasn’t the normal “when should I text her?” game she always refused to play—she didn’t want to be pushy or make Avery think something was wrong, but she did, very urgently, want to see her and talk to her that night.
Finally, at three in the afternoon, right before Taylor was about to cave, Avery texted.
Avery
Were you still interested in getting together tonight?
Did that seem weirdly stilted? She thought it seemed weirdly stilted. Maybe Avery knew what she was going to say and wanted to get it over with because she would then have to tell Taylor that she didn’t feel the same way. She knew Avery didn’t like confrontation. Wait, was that why she hadn’t been around the night before and why she “had to get up early” and therefore couldn’t see Taylor? Because she didn’t like confrontation and so she’d been trying to avoid Taylor, and then finally she was like, Fine, I’ll get it over with ?
Oh God, she was doing that stupid overevaluating text messages thing, she never did that, she didn’t like being that person! Plus, why would Avery know why Taylor wanted to see her? She’d been the one who had assumed they were hanging out on Tuesday night, and Taylor had blown her off that night. Unless she’d wiretapped Erica’s house—which not even this unhinged mood would let Taylor pretend to believe—Avery would have no idea what Taylor planned to say to her when she saw her.
Okay, but once she’d even thought the word wiretap , she was officially unhinged. Time to stop thinking. Thinking was overrated anyway.
Taylor
Pick you up at 7? wear your favorite outfit
Shit, shit, she’d said that with no plan. What the fuck was wrong with her, “thinking was overrated” ? She at least needed to have some type of a plan for tonight. If she was going to tell Avery she was falling in love with her, didn’t she need to be sweeping and romantic or something? Shit, did she even know how to be sweeping and romantic?
Avery
No fair, isn’t it my turn?
Okay that was a normal text message from Avery. Taylor felt a little bit of her tension slide away.
Taylor
Nope, mine. but here: you can give me my dress code, and we can split the night
Avery’s response came quickly.
Avery
Perfect. wear *my* favorite outfit.
Did she mean Taylor should wear the outfit of hers that Avery liked the best, or did she mean that Taylor should, like, dress up like Avery and wear Avery’s favorite outfit? Unfortunately, according to the rules that Taylor had tacitly established months ago, no clarifying questions were allowed, so she just had to figure it out.
Taylor
Done. see you at 7
Taylor pulled up in front of Avery’s apartment at seven on the dot, wearing her favorite pair of jeans, the ripped ones that were a little snug in the ass, and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. She wondered what Avery would wear, what her favorite outfit was, but the problem was that Avery had so many clothes that it was hard to figure out what her favorite outfit would be.
Taylor turned her car off and took a deep breath. She had a plan now, and she thought it was a good one, but it didn’t matter how good or romantic or sweeping or whatever her plan was if Avery didn’t feel the same way. She tried to act calm, she tried to be calm, but her heart was beating so fast it was like she was midway through running a marathon.
Well, she assumed it was like that; she knew nothing about actually running a marathon and wanted to keep it that way, but still.
“Hey!” she said in too high a voice when Avery opened her front door. And then she took a look at her. Her whole body relaxed, and her smile got wide. “You look incredible.”
Avery was wearing that snug black sundress with the spaghetti straps that she’d worn a few times that summer, most notably on the night they’d first kissed. It wasn’t like Taylor to remember something like that, but one thing that was burned in her memory from that night was sitting at the bar with Avery, staring at those tiny little straps, and wanting so badly to slide her fingers underneath them.
Did Avery remember she’d worn that dress that night? She hoped so. Avery was the type to remember things like that. But maybe she was only wearing it because it was her favorite dress.
Taylor leaned forward and kissed her. It felt so good to kiss her. Their bodies fit together so well. They hadn’t kissed for days, not since Sunday night. They hadn’t seen each other since then, which was probably the longest they’d gone since they’d started dating. She thought about that first kiss, how Avery had been hesitant to kiss her, to touch her, and then as soon as their lips had touched, she’d relaxed, grown more sure of herself. She’d been like that with everything, from dancing to painting to sex: anxious at first, needing a bit of encouragement, a little push to get started, and then as soon as she did, her confidence grew. She experimented, learned more, asked questions, messed up a few times, laughed, and then tried again and got better and better and more self-assured with each try.
That was one of the things she loved about Avery: Yeah, she was scared to take risks, to try new things, to push herself, but once she’d committed to doing it, she was all in. She didn’t pretend she had all the answers, she let herself stumble, and then she would get back up and try again without being ashamed of herself for trying, and she would get better at it. That was something that Taylor could learn from Avery, actually. She tended to be too cocky, too convinced that she knew all the answers, when half the time she was crossing her fingers and hoping she was right.
She made herself pull back from the kiss. She couldn’t get distracted tonight. At least, not right now.
“God, you look amazing,” she said.
Avery smiled at her. “You already said that.” She lifted her thumb and brushed it over Taylor’s lips. “Rookie move—I already put lipstick on before you got here.”
Taylor shook her head.
“Rookie move, indeed. Are you ready?”
Avery nodded.
“Let me just put my shoes on.”
She slid her feet into flat sandals and grabbed her purse from the hook by the door.
“Where are we off to?” Avery asked as they walked toward the car.
Taylor threw what she hoped was an amused smile in Avery’s direction, but her heart was beating wildly again.
“You think it’s going to be that easy?” she asked.
Avery laughed, but it was her nervous laugh, the same one she’d used when they were at trivia that night around her friends, before she’d gotten more comfortable with them. Taylor wondered why.
“It’s never that easy, but I keep trying,” she said.
They were both quiet once they got into the car. Taylor thought of asking how she was doing, how dinner with Beth was, how work had been that week, but she was so full of what she needed to say to Avery, what she wanted to say to Avery, that she couldn’t make small talk. Yes, she cared about how Avery’s work was going, and yes, she cared about her garden and her gardening friend, but she couldn’t ask her any of that, she couldn’t talk about any of that, until she told Avery how she felt. When the big talk was all that consumed her mind, when the need to do the big talk was overwhelming her, small talk seemed ridiculous, unnatural. She had to get the big talk over with first.
Later—if things went well—she would tell Avery that maybe she had a point about small talk.
She pulled into a parking spot—not the exact space she’d wanted, but one a few spots down from it, and turned off the car.
“Okay, we’re here,” she said.
Avery got out of the car and looked up and down the street. They were back in downtown Napa.
“Oh, are we going back there?” she asked, pointing to the place they’d gone to the night of the flirting midterm.
Taylor shook her head.
“Nope, but good guess.” Avery glared at her, but a tiny smile danced around the corners of her eyes. “After this long, you still think I’m going to tell you any more than that until we get there?”
Avery shrugged, but now the smile touched her lips.
“Hope springs eternal.”
Taylor reached for Avery’s hand, and they walked together down the street. They didn’t talk as they walked, but this time the silence between them didn’t feel heavy, loaded, the way the silence in the car had. Now they were just comfortable, walking down the street hand in hand the same way they’d done dozens of times over the past few months. The same way they’d done ever since that night, when they’d walked together toward the Barrel, the same walk they were taking right now.
The same, but different. Now it was two months later, it was darker, cooler, at least at night. Before, that other time, they hadn’t even kissed yet. Before, they were just friends. Before, Taylor hadn’t fallen for Avery. Now, everything was different.
When they got to the same block as the Barrel but were still a few feet from it, Avery stopped and let go of Taylor’s hand.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know you have something planned, but I can’t take it anymore. I have to say this, I have to get this over with, in case we…in case it changes things. I’ve been holding it in, but I have to get it out now or else I might never do it.”
Taylor’s heart dropped. Avery was going to break up with her, wasn’t she? This was it. She was going to do it now, before Taylor could even say her piece. She wanted to fight, to say no, to say she had to plead her case first, but wow, how humiliating, to plead with someone to love her back. All she could do was look at Avery, her skin glowing in the streetlights, the warm breeze blowing her hair off her shoulder, and nod.
Avery took a long, shaky breath.
“I know that neither of us planned for this, between us, I mean. And that we both tried to avoid it, push it away when it happened the first time, for all sorts of good reasons. And we both ignored all those good reasons, and decided to jump into something, because we couldn’t help ourselves, because we were having so much fun and we wanted to keep having so much fun, but we both knew that was all it was going to be—fun, right?”
She looked hard at Taylor when she said that, and paused, like she was looking for a response from Taylor, so Taylor said what it seemed like she was looking for.
“Right.”
Avery nodded.
“Right.”
Were those tears in Avery’s eyes? She couldn’t quite tell in this light. She hoped that Avery at least felt bad about breaking up with her.
“The thing is—oh God, I don’t want to say this, I hate everything about this, but I’ve already started, so I guess I have to finish, and this is growth, I guess, confrontation and doing something hard that I don’t want to do, being vulnerable and all those terrible things.” She let out a breath. “Sorry, sorry. The thing is, that conversation we had the other day, about that bet, Erica’s bet, and how I said we should break up after Erica had the baby to ensure that Sloane won—”
“Yeah, I know which bet you’re talking about,” Taylor said. She was trying to let Avery say her piece, but she had to fucking get this over with.
“Of course you do. The thing is, that conversation brought up a few things for me, and I guess—I mean I know—over the past week I’ve realized that I don’t want to break up.”
Taylor’s head shot up.
“What? What did you say?”
Had she heard her right? Maybe she’d heard only what she wanted to hear? Maybe it was those other people walking down the street saying something that she’d heard instead of what Avery had actually said? Or maybe Avery didn’t mean what Taylor wanted her to mean?
“I don’t want to break up. I understand if you do, I get it. I know that all you wanted out of this relationship was some fun, and we’ve had that, and I know what you’re going to say to this, but I had to tell you…my feelings for you are more than just fun. I mean, that wasn’t a good way of putting it, let me try again, I want—”
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” Taylor said.
“What? What did you say?” Avery asked.
Now Taylor knew she had tears in her eyes.
“I’m falling in love with you. I realized it at the shower. No, I realized it a few days later, but at the shower, when I overheard that bet, I realized I hated the thought of breaking up with you. I hated the thought of breaking up with you in seven weeks, six months, whatever. I love having you in my life, I love talking to you and waking up with you and kissing you and laughing with you and coming up with surprises for you and being surprised by you, and I don’t want to stop.”
“Are you…Really? You’re serious?”
Taylor couldn’t help but laugh at the stunned look on Avery’s face. Though, wow, she hoped, she really, really fucking hoped, that it was a stunned and happy look.
“Does this sound like a thing I would joke about?” she asked. “I avoided you all week—I even bailed on our Tuesday night—because I was so hurt that you would just casually refer to our breakup, like it was no big deal to you, like it didn’t matter, like our relationship didn’t matter to you. But then I realized that maybe I hadn’t actually told you how much our relationship matters to me, since I hadn’t actually realized it for myself, and that I should probably tell you that before I determined that you didn’t care about me the same way I care about you. And most of all, I realized that I cared about you—cared about us—too much to just give up on us. That I wanted, needed, to fight for us. So, I brought you here—” She gestured in the direction of the Barrel. “Or at least intended to bring you here tonight, to the place we first kissed, because I was trying to be romantic, even though that’s not really my strength, so I could tell you that—”
Avery backed her up against the wall.
“Taylor?” she said. “Now is when you kiss me.”