Her Bex #2
If acting was the only kind of work that made sense to how Sam wanted to talk to and about the world, Bexley Simon was the only person who, when Sam was with her, made sense of life itself.
“How can you wear those all day?” Bex asked, toeing Sam’s high heel with a foot covered in slipper socks.
Her voice was scratchy from the excited talking they’d done at Ramona’s, and from a singing performance she’d given at Ramona’s insistence.
It wouldn’t be long before Bex started freaking out about that husky scratch and boiling a huge pot of gross-smelling tea and warming up her facial steamer to breathe, but Sam liked it.
“You’ve asked me this so many times over the years.” Sam turned her body toward Bex.
“‘Because they’re beautiful’ is not an answer. My leather shorts were beautiful when the woman at Loewe brought them to my dressing room and zipped me into them, but I was under no illusion I would like wearing them.”
Sam reached over and traced her index finger over Bex’s exposed collarbones.
“Your body was meant for a seventy-two-year-old veteran costumer of Broadway to dress and no one else,” she said.
“Someone who has dress forms with people’s names signed on them and who knows that Bernadette Peters has two different sizes of feet. ”
“Bernadette Peters’s feet are perfect. I’ve never heard they are anything but exactly the same size.” Bex stretched her arms over her head and then let her hands feather over Sam’s hair and tug the neckline of her blouse. “I saw Fergus leave in your car.”
“You did? That rascal.” Sam slid off her heels and scooted close to Bex, pulling Bex’s legs into her lap.
“The house is so quiet.” Bex watched Sam’s face with a secret laugh in her expression. “I’m not sure what we’ll do?”
“Surely you have a plan.”
“I might. If I knew it was foolproof.”
Sam squeezed the sock-covered feet in her lap.
“But did you order me chicken and waffles?” Bex asked.
“The good news is that I did. The bad news is that they’re going to take at least an hour.
And there’s something I want to tell you.
” When Sam breathed in, she felt a hitch of fear, but she didn’t let it hold her back.
She didn’t want to compartmentalize her life like Ramona had to in order to be able to trust the people in it.
She didn’t want to get so much power and money that she had nothing more to look forward to than a midweek party in a giant house.
And she didn’t want to pay the cost of fame for fame itself, keeping track of the lies and secrets fame required until she was broken by acrimony or violence.
“I want to pack the same suitcase,” she said.
Bex tipped her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that no matter what’s next, I don’t want to be alone in my bedroom, with stuff from my closet everywhere and my agent on speaker while I pack to go on location, knowing I probably won’t see you for months.
I want to pack the same suitcase as you, knowing we’re going on vacation, or we’re going for work where one or both of us will do something amazing.
I want to start to make big decisions together and bring opportunities to you, and you bring yours to me, and we plan a life that makes us happy and keeps our toothbrushes in the same cup.
If, you know, that’s something you also want to do. ”
“Samantha Farmer.” Bex laughed. “You’ll flirt outrageously with me in sky-high boots and an even higher hemline, but whenever you’re up against confessing what you really want, you scuff your toe against the ground like a schoolboy.”
“Let’s see you do better, then.” Sam inched closer to Bex’s ear. “Talk right to the love of your life and try to choke out what you want like a person who has to ask to get it.”
Bex leaned close. She put her fingertips on Sam’s shoulders, her thumbs pressing into her collarbones. “You know what I think would be great?”
“What’s that?”
“If your toothbrush was in a cup with mine at Stella Tower in New York. Though not really in the same cup, can I say? I’m hoping that’s a metaphor. I have a whole oral hygiene routine, and when I’m performing, I can’t get sick.”
“I would love to keep my toothbrush far away from yours in our bathroom in Stella Tower. Tell me more.”
“And while I was there singing and dancing, you were probably doing something fabulous—I can’t wait to find out what—but also, at the end of the day, you would give me a foot massage.
I would drink my licorice bark tea for my throat while you told me about shooting at a New York sound studio, or meetings at 30 Rock.
Then the foot massage would get dirty, and you would have to tell me exactly, explicitly, what to do, because I wasn’t allowed to talk.
I would have to remain perfectly silent in order to preserve my voice. ”
The fantasy lit up Sam’s inner thighs at the same time it outlined her secret heart in lights.
She tugged a lock of Bex’s hair, gently at first, and then when Bex let out a sigh, she curled her hand into a fist and pulled her close enough to kiss.
She put her thumb over the pulse at Bex’s throat and thought, I love you, I love you, with every beat of her heart.
Sam reached out for Bex’s waist, warm and strong beneath her palms, and eased her onto her lap, where Bex settled happily, winding her arms around Sam’s neck.
“Logistically, packing together is going to be complicated because of having two wardrobes in different houses,” Sam said.
“And I’m not a light packer. I like a good costume change.
But it will get easier when we’re living together. ”
She held her breath, her lower back going hot with, yes, fear.
It was one thing for Sam to stay with Bex during the run of Follies, but what she was asking was quite a bit bigger, and even if Fergus thought it was inevitable, Bex’s big brown eyes had gone wide as a doe’s.
Her two main dimples sank deep into her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, did you just imperiously lay claim to me? ”
And then Bex raked her fingers through Sam’s hair and kissed her.
She pulled away, just a few inches, and looked Sam over, her eyes very dark.
“I will hand you the keys to this house—even though you already have a set of keys, I’m talking a symbolic set—if you tell me something right now.
Tell me about the project you’ve always wanted to take when you were accepting shows with spaceships and leather corsets and red-haired detectives you weren’t allowed to touch while you said the corniest lines in detective television so brilliantly that no one noticed. ”
Sam liked this question. She finally knew how to answer it.
“I want to do a movie that isn’t about what I look like.
It will be the kind of movie that gives the audience an excuse to cry about all the feelings they’re holding back, and it will be so gay that a cinema history book about queer movies has no choice but to mention it for a hundred years. ”
Bex kissed her, softly, and this time Sam pulled back. “And maybe I want to direct it. Bex?”
“Yes.”
Sam took a deep breath before she said the last thing.
“You’re my Bex.” Then she had to take another breath and swallow over the lump in her throat at the emotion she saw reflected in Bex’s eyes.
“I want us to be everything to each other. We can go to battle together. Spend too much time and too much money solving more mysteries if anyone else asks us to. I want to be the one who makes sure you have enough of your weird herbal teas and mixes up the clay mask for your skincare routine, and I know some people would say it’s too soon for any of that to happen, but—”
“We’ve already waited too long.” Bex pressed her face to Sam’s neck. “I missed you so much. Never leave me.”
Sam smiled, remembering Vic saying the same thing to Frankie. She took a deep breath of the crown of Bex’s head, smelling co-wash and styling products and her one, true, forever person. “I love you.”
Bex was breathing fast and shallow, smiling like a purring cat. “It’s funny you say that, because I have a plan for what to do right after.”
“You have a plan that kicks in right after I say ‘I love you’?”
Bex tipped her head to the side, her smile widening. “I don’t know if it’s a plan, exactly, or more of a fantasy? But it starts with my coming home, and you’re here—”
“I’m in your house in this fantasy?”
“Waiting for me. In all of my fantasies the past six months, when I came back, you were here, waiting in my house like you always used to be. And I took you by the hand and led you to my room—”
“What was I wearing?”
“In my fantasy?” Bex laughed. “You want me to tell you what you were wearing? You tell me what you’re wearing.
You’ve been costuming your life for as long as I’ve known you.
What does Samantha Farmer wear when Bexley Simon deflowers her in her absolutely messy bedroom?
I put that last part in so you won’t be shocked when you see what’s happened to any semblance of housekeeping since I had the falling out with Olive. ”
“Well, I did buy this shirt with you in mind,” Sam said. “When I was in Vancouver.”
“This see-through shirt?” Bex smoothed her hands down Sam’s arms.
“Because I spent a lot of time thinking about how to disarm you so I wouldn’t get so freaked out by how smooshy and vulnerable you make me.” Sam shifted, moving her body over Bex’s as Bex slid off her lap and leaned back into the sofa’s cushions.
Bex fisted the front of Sam’s shirt and pulled her close, wrapping a leg around one of Sam’s.
Her kiss started out as a smile against Sam’s mouth but quickly got serious, turning into another conversation that was deep and slow, until it needed more of their attention and Bex slipped from underneath Sam’s body and turned her over, making her intentions clear—her intention to learn the texture of Sam’s skin everywhere, to take her kisses to all the places she touched, to strip away their inhibitions as easily as their clothes, and to savor Sam’s body and love on a foundation of friendship and years of intimacy and care.
Sam was so grateful she’d made it here. She would never assume again she had plenty of time left to ask for what she wanted.
“Take me to this messy bedroom of yours,” Sam demanded between kisses and tastes of Bex’s skin.
Bex kissed her, finishing this one with a smile. “I’m so glad you didn’t ask.”