15. Julia #2
“You said you were bringing pajamas.” I mutter, closing the front door behind her, and in true loser fashion, taking a look against my threshold for black envelope.
Fuck me sideways and flip me over like a pancake, that’s pathetic.
“I did bring pajamas.” Her voice jerks me out of my self wallowing state over my actual stalker. Or lack there of.
I point at the bottle. “That is not pajamas.”
“That is emotional support.”
“You know I have two bottles in the refrigerator.”
“Yes, but those are your bottles, and this is my bottle. If we drink yours first and then need mine, I have contributed. If we don’t need mine, I take it home and have lost nothing.”
I stare at her. “That is disturbingly logical.”
“I’m an adult woman with a retirement account. I make excellent decisions.”
“You once dated a drummer named Cody because he had nice forearms.”
“He had exceptional forearms, and we were twenty-six. Don’t rewrite history because you’ve become judgmental.”
She hooks one arm around my shoulders and kisses my temple before heading toward the kitchen as though she owns the place. I smile and follow because she kind of does, in a bestie-intimate way.
Within forty minutes, the carefully organized kitchen has been destroyed.
There is flour on the counter because I let her finish off the dough, mozzarella on the floor and a suspicious amount of wine missing from the first bottle.
Tessa has decided the pizza needs enough garlic to permanently eliminate both of us from the dating pool, while I am attempting to save the overly kneaded dough and stretch it into something vaguely circular and pull it into shapes that would be more useful for a geography assignment than baking.
“Mine looks like Wisconsin.”
Tessa leans over from beside me and considers it. “No, Wisconsin has more confidence.”
“Fuck you.” I fake frown.
“You invited me.”
“You kneaded the shit out of it.”
Eventually we abandon all concern for appearance, cover both pizzas in whatever we can find and put them in the oven.
Ten minutes later, we carry them into the living room along with wine, blankets and the streaming-service decision we will spend longer making than we spent cooking dinner.
It isn’t until halfway through the first slice that Tessa looks at me over the rim of her glass.
“So, how was Hot Doctor?”
I nearly smile. Some traditions apparently survive everything.
“Can we please retire that name?”
She shakes her head adamantly. “No, because you continue refusing to provide anything better.”
“He has a perfectly functional actual name.”
“Dr. Blackwood sounds like somebody who seduces widows in a gothic novel.”
I blink at her.
Tessa’s eyes widened slightly. “Actually, that somehow made him hotter. We’re keeping Hot Doctor.”
I pull the blanket higher over my legs and take another bite of pizza. “Therapy was good.”
Her expression shifts almost immediately. The joking doesn’t disappear entirely, but it moves aside.
“Good as in genuinely good, or good as in you’re saying good because you don’t want me to ask another question?”
“Genuinely.” She waits.
I’m aware of the decision before I make it. Kai’s assignment. What do I want before I begin calculating what Tessa might need from the answer? For once, the answer arrives clearly. I want to tell her.
“We talked about what happened when I was eighteen.”
Tessa puts her glass down. Not dramatically. She doesn’t lunge toward me or cover her mouth as though I have revealed something she doesn’t already know. She knows the whole story, including pieces I have never told anyone else.
“Okay,” she says carefully. “How did that come up?”
“We were talking about boundaries. About saying no.”
Understanding settles across her face. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” I rest the pizza plate on my knees and trace one finger along the edge. “I told him no is probably the most important boundary word for me and also the one I spent a long time feeling didn’t mean anything.”
Tessa’s mouth tightens. “That makes sense.”
“He asked why.”
“And you told him?”
“Pretty much all of it.”
She studies me for several seconds. “How did that feel?”
“Surprisingly okay.” I look down at the plate before correcting myself. “Not comfortable. Obviously. But it wasn’t like talking about Mom. I didn’t disappear on him or anything.”
“You’ve done a lot of work around that already.”
“I know.” The answer comes easily because that is exactly what has been circling my mind all day. “I actually thought I was completely done with it.”
Tessa tilts her head. “Thought?”
I take a slow breath. “There was still this tiny part of me that wondered if I could have done more.”
Her expression changes immediately. “Jules.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.” I lift one hand before she can launch into the speech she has given me in different versions over the years.
“I didn’t think it was my fault. Not consciously.
If you’d asked me yesterday whether I blamed myself, I would have said absolutely not and meant it.
But Kai pointed out how many times I explained why I didn’t fight before he ever asked. ”
Tessa becomes very quiet.
“He told me there was nothing to forgive.”
Her eyes meet mine.
I shrug slightly, suddenly uncomfortable with how exposed such a simple sentence makes me feel. “And apparently that was the thing I needed somebody to say in exactly those words, because I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”
Tessa reaches across the space between us and lays her hand over mine. “You know I would have told you that.”
“I know.”
“I probably have told you that.”
“You have.” I nod and squeeze her hand back.
“Repeatedly.”
“I know that too.”
She narrows her eyes at me, but there is affection underneath it. “Then I’m offended that Hot Doctor gets credit.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. “He doesn’t get all the credit.”
“He gets, like, twelve percent.”
“Maybe fifteen.”
“Absolutely not. I have seniority.”
Her thumb moves once across my knuckles before she lets go, and the humor has done exactly what it always does between us. It’s taken something heavy enough to require care and made room around it so neither of us has to suffocate beneath it.
“He didn’t fix me,” I said after a moment. “That’s not what I mean. I did most of that a long time ago. I think he just showed me one last place where I was still being unfair to myself.”
Tessa nods slowly. “That I can live with. Twelve percent.”
I smile into my wine.
For a while we move on. We argue about the movie, abandon the one Tessa chooses after twenty minutes because both of us hate every character and eventually settle on something neither of us has seen.
Halfway through it, she steals my blanket despite having brought her own, and at some point our conversation drifts back toward dating because apparently two women cannot consume wine on a sofa without eventually discussing men.
I blame biology. And hormones. Definitely blame hormones more.
Tessa is lying sideways against the opposite end of the couch, one foot tucked beneath my thigh for warmth, when she gives me a long look.
“What?”
“I’m thinking.”
“That has historically been dangerous.”
She ignores me. “When was the last time you got your cooch stuffed?”
I nearly choke on my wine. There is enough silence afterward for Tessa’s expression to become increasingly delighted.
“Why are we discussing this?” I squinted at her, not for the way she said it. That I am used to.
“Because I asked a question and you reacted like I requested your tax returns.”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while.” And that’s exactly the reason. It’s been longer than a while and I don’t want the math to start mathing. It’s depressing.
“How long is a while?” Of course she presses.
I search the ceiling as though the answer might be written there. “Long enough that I’d have to actually think about it.”
“Jesus Christ, Julia.”
“It hasn’t been that long.” It has absolutely been that long. Two-years-four-months-and-two-and-a-half-weeks long.
“Your inability to provide a calendar year is not helping your case.”
I laugh and shove her foot away from me, which only makes her tuck it beneath my leg again.
“I’ve been busy.”
“You have been busy since I met you. That explanation stopped counting years ago.”
“Maybe I simply enjoy peace.”
“You can enjoy peace and an orgasm. Women are versatile.”
I press my lips together around a smile.
Tessa studies me for another second before some of the teasing leaves her expression.
“I’m not actually telling you to go fuck a stranger because your psychiatrist made you talk about being assaulted.
That would be spectacularly bad advice even for me.
I’m just saying you have this tendency to put your entire personal life on hold and then act like wanting physical contact is some optional subscription service you cancelled to save money. ”
I stare at her. “That was annoyingly coherent.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You already used that this week.”
“It remains true.” She wiggles her toes under my leg and I swat at her leg.
I take another sip of wine and let my head rest against the back of the sofa. “I do miss sex.”
“There we go.” She raises her glass.
“Do not celebrate.”
Her smile is smug and annoying. “I’m not celebrating. I’m witnessing growth.”
“You’ve been talking eerily similar to Hot Doctor for someone who has never met him.”
“He and I are spiritually aligned.”
“That thought is terrifying.”
Tessa laughs, then watches me quietly enough that I know another question is coming. “Does talking about the assault make sex feel weird right now?”
I think about it. “A little. Not sex itself, necessarily. I’m just more aware of everything at the moment.”
She nods without trying to fill in the answer for me. That is one of the reasons she knows as much as she does.