Chapter 22 #2
Lex looked at the three faces in and around the car.
Lou's steady captain's gaze through the windshield.
Camille's warm smile from the back seat.
Elise's stubborn, loving refusal to let her be alone.
The fight went out of her. She didn't have the energy to argue with people who loved her, and she didn't have the will to go home to an empty apartment and sit alone with her thoughts. She got in the car.
Lavender's was packed. The coffee shop had transformed for the evening into a place warmer and louder, the espresso machine still steaming but supplemented by a proper bar setup at the counter.
The overhead lights were dimmed, replaced by strings of warm bulbs that crisscrossed the ceiling, casting everything in a golden glow that made the bookshelves and the mismatched furniture look bohemian rather than thrifted.
Music played from speakers mounted above the poetry section, a smooth, bass-heavy track that vibrated through the floorboards.
The air carried espresso, vanilla, the collective perfume of forty women in a small space.
The crowd was all women, a mix of ages and styles and energies.
A group of women in their twenties occupied the largest table, laughing and passing phones around, probably comparing dating app profiles.
Two older women sat in the corner booth holding hands across the table and talking quietly, their intimacy so comfortable and settled it made Lex's stomach hurt with envy.
A pair of femmes in heels and lipstick danced in the small cleared space near the window, their bodies close, their movements synchronized in that way that suggested they'd been together long enough to read each other's rhythms without thinking.
Everyone in the room was living their life with the casual, enviable ease of people whose hearts were intact.
Lex slid into a booth with her friends and ordered a whiskey neat and tried to feel anything other than empty. A woman with short red hair and a smile that was more invitation than greeting appeared at their table and said, "Aren't you Lex Landry? I loved the SI shoot."
"Thanks," Lex said. She wrapped her hand around her whiskey glass without lifting it.
"Can I buy you a drink?"
"She's taken," Elise said pleasantly, leaning across the table to redirect the woman with a smile.
The woman retreated. Another appeared. Then another.
Lex Landry, local celebrity, Sports Illustrated model, the charming tattooed rookie who had captivated the city, was catnip in a room full of queer women, and every one of them wanted to talk to her and buy her a drink and take her home.
Two months ago she would have reveled in it.
Would have smiled and flirted and collected phone numbers and chosen the most interesting one and gone home with her and felt nothing in the morning.
Now the attention bounced off her like light off glass. She smiled politely and declined politely and nursed her whiskey and felt nothing except the ache, the constant, throbbing, inescapable ache of missing someone who was three miles away and might as well have been on another planet.
Elise was watching her with the careful attention of a best friend who knew the difference between sad-but-coping and sad-and-drowning.
Lou and Camille bracketed her in the booth like bodyguards, their presence warm and solid and undemanding.
They talked about everything except Mara.
About the upcoming schedule. About Camille's new home with Lou, how they'd argued for three days about where to put the couch before Lou had simply picked it up and moved it while Camille was at practice, and how Max, their enormous golden retriever, had immediately claimed it as his personal throne.
"Lou pretends she doesn't like the dog on the furniture," Camille had told Lex last week.
"But I have a photo of her spooning Max at two in the morning.
The evidence is damning." About the ridiculous DMs Lex was getting from fans who had seen the SI shoot.
About anything and everything that wasn't the woman who had broken Lex's heart.
Lex was grateful. And exhausted. The game had drained what little energy she'd had, and the two whiskeys were sitting warm and heavy in her stomach, and the noise of the bar was starting to feel oppressive rather than distracting.
"I should go," Lex said. It was close to ten. She'd had two whiskeys and they'd done nothing to soften the edges of the evening. "Early night. Early skate tomorrow."
"One more drink," Elise said. "Then we'll drive you home."
"I'm fine, El. I promise. Just tired."
She was standing up, reaching for her jacket, when the front door of Lavender's opened and the cold night air swept in and with it a woman in a dark coat with blonde hair streaked with grey and blue eyes that found Lex's across the crowded room with the focus of a laser.
Mara was here.
The room contracted. The noise faded. The music and the laughter and the clink of glasses and the voices of forty women in a warm room all receded until there was nothing except the six feet of floor between the booth where Lex stood with her jacket in her hand and the door where Mara stood with the night behind her and an expression on her face that was terrified and determined and absolutely certain.
Lex couldn't move. She stood there with her jacket gripped in her fist and her heart slamming against her ribs and watched Mara walk toward her through the crowd.
People turned to look. Heads turned. A few recognized the Valkyries' head coach and whispered.
Mara didn't notice them. Mara wasn't looking at anyone except Lex.
She stopped two feet away. Close enough to touch.
Close enough that Lex could smell her shampoo and see the redness around her eyes that said she'd been crying, that she'd probably been crying for over a week.
In public. In a bar full of people. Standing in front of Lex with no pretense, no walls, no professional composure.
"Will you go for a walk with me?" Mara said.
Her voice was quiet and rough and shaking.
The real voice, the one Lex had only heard in bed, in the dark, in the moments after Mara let go of everything she was holding.
The voice that said stay and please and don't stop and all the other words that the daytime Mara would never allow herself to say.
Lex looked at her. She looked at the woman who had broken her heart and was now standing in a lesbian bar on a Friday night in front of a room full of strangers, asking her to go for a walk.
Not in private. Not through a text. In person.
In public. The professional woman who had spent years hiding every personal emotion behind a wall of coaching discipline was standing in a bar full of queer women with tears in her eyes, asking Lex to go for a walk when she had a team to face and a professional image to protect, and the courage that required, the vulnerability, the absolute demolition of every wall Mara had ever built, was staggering.
The hope in Mara's blue eyes was so naked and so brave that it cracked the wall inside Lex's chest that she'd been holding together with sheer stubbornness for over a week.
"Yeah," Lex said. Her own voice was rough. "Let's walk."
She pulled on her jacket. Behind her, she heard Elise exhale. Heard Lou whisper to Camille. Heard the soft, collective relief of three friends who had been holding their breath.
Lex followed Mara through the door of Lavender's and out into the cold Phoenix Ridge night.
The door swung shut behind them and the music and the warmth cut off and they were alone on the sidewalk in the quiet of a Friday evening, the streetlights casting pools of amber on the pavement and the stars bright overhead and the ocean audible from two blocks away, its rhythm constant, patient, pulling at the shore as it had every night since before either of them arrived.
Mara walked beside her, close enough to touch but not touching, her hands in her coat pockets, her breath visible in the cold air.
Lex matched her pace and said nothing. Whatever Mara had come to say, she needed to say it first. Lex could wait.
She had been waiting for this woman since the day she'd arrived in Phoenix Ridge, and she could wait a little longer if the waiting ended with the words she needed to hear.