Chapter Twelve
Nikki
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” I asked Maeda as we walked holding hands to Bottomless for brunch the next morning.
She barked out a laugh. “Five years? Dolly will be ten, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Hell, I’m trying to figure out where I’ll be in five months.”
“What do you mean?”
She let go of my hand and started playing with the ends of her hair, a nervous tick of hers I noticed.
“I mean, my lease ends in August. I need to find somewhere cheap to rent, and I’m trying to finish my novel.
I have started sending out query letters to agents and I have a few who are interested, but I don’t have the pages done to send to them.
” Maeda rubbed her forehead. “It’s a lot of pressure, and I’m thinking about going back to school just so I can maybe get a career doing something else and the student loans would carry Dolly and I through the next few years. ”
“How can I help?”
She laughed weakly. “You’ve done so much already. Really, I’m okay. I’m resilient. I endure.”
“But—” I was going to interject, but she stopped me with a raised hand.
“No, Nikki. It’s my responsibility. If it means Dolly and I have to start over, then we will. I’ve done it before, I can do it again if I have to.”
I felt shaken. Why was she talking about starting over? Yes, she had returned to Pine Grove after leaving Tristan, and before that, she had left Pine Grove to be with Tristan. “Why would you want to leave again?”
Maeda stopped and looked at some wildflowers next to the sidewalk. “It wasn’t to hurt you. When I left the last time, it was just… I was scared. You meant so much to me, I didn’t know how to handle it.”
All those insecurities came crashing back in.
I was taken back to that night. Maeda and I had been close, spending all our time together.
I had just started working at Lucky Lanes, and she worked part-time at Deja Brew on summer break from Harvard.
It was the day before the annual Pride Parade, and we were at a party out by the racetrack when I confessed to her mid-makeout session that I loved her.
She left.
The next thing I heard was that she was engaged to some guy named Tristan. I had, per the advice of my therapist, blocked her on all social media after that, which is why I didn’t know about Dolly.
“I did the math.” She looked at me, confused. “Dolly was born in April. So, she had to have been conceived around the night you left.”
Maeda’s mouth dropped open. She looked like she was trying to find something to say, to interject and excuse.
“Save it.” I took a deep breath. “I know you are a flight risk. Hell, I’ve been hurt by you before. Even so, I want you to stay.”
Maeda reached out and held my hand. “I can’t take it back, and I can’t even say that I would if I could because then I wouldn’t have Dolly.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, telling my anxieties to shut up.
I felt as though I just dropped a grenade on the budding relationship we were trying to create.
“I want us to move forward. To do so, I feel like we need to address that night.” My heart squeezed against the vulnerability required of me, but I pushed on.
“You ran away after I confessed my feelings for you. That… hurt.”
She embraced me then, her vanilla-scented shampoo calming me. Too soon, she pulled away. “I hate that I hurt you, so I didn’t want to. I think a big part of it wasn’t even about you. It was just bi-panic.”
“That’s a weak excuse, Maeda.”
“I’m not trying to justify the harm I did.
I still have a lot of work to do to be confident with my sexuality, but six years ago, I was scared of how I would be perceived.
I wanted so badly to fit some mold of what a ‘good girl’ was supposed to look like.
I tried. I tried the heteronormative marriage with a kid and staying at home and being a good wife, but I never loved Tristan.
I followed the steps because I was supposed to, or at least I thought I was. ”
“It’s nothing,” I said again.
Maeda shook her head. “It’s not nothing. Stop saying that.”
“No, I mean, you don’t have to let these things weigh on you. You know the saying ‘making mountains out of mole hills’? This is the opposite, making a mole hill out of a mountain. Shrinking it down, it’s nothing. Make it smaller than you so you have power over it.”
She bristled at this and took a step back.
“But, some things are big. Even though I overcame my parents disowning me, and going through a hard pregnancy and postpartum depression, and even though I went through a divorce and I’m starting over, I don’t want to trivialize it.
Tristan cheated on me, and even though we weren’t in love, that was a really hard betrayal to endure.
Don’t shrink the hardships I went through. ”
“That’s not what I was trying to do,” I countered, but Maeda had taken a defensive tone.
“I make my way through, and I do it on my own without Tristan’s money or familial support,” Maeda looked at the floor. “Can’t we just enjoy this for what it is right now?”
I took a deep breath before responding. I heard what she wasn’t saying, that she was on the fence about us. That where she was could give me no guarantees. “Maybe think about what you want to do once Lucky Lanes is mine. Because, Mae, I don’t think this is pretend anymore.”
The door to Bottomless opened and released a roar of noise.
Maeda took my hand. “Let’s not fight.” She took a deep breath, “I think I want pancakes today.”
It was a plea for normalcy.
I squeezed her hand back and said, “Yeah, I think I want an omelette.”
As we took our seats, I was trying not to think about how different our various wants were.