Chapter 10 #2
She got her coat from the hook by the service door and went out the back, down the stairs and through the door into the alley, where the air had turned warm while she wasn't paying attention. She let the door fall shut behind her.
She could have ordered a rideshare, probably should have.
It was past eleven, and Elements was a fair way from her building.
The app was right there on her phone. But the night had turned warm, the first warm one of the year, and she wanted the walk more than she wanted to be home quickly.
She put the phone away and went up Main Street on foot.
The shops along Phoenix Ridge’s downtown front were dark—the bakery, the bookstore, Lavender's Café with the chairs stacked on the tables inside. The cherry trees down the center of the street were still in blossom, late this year and pale under the streetlights, and a few petals had come down and gone soft on the warm pavement. A couple passed her going the other way, slowly, leaning into each other the way people do to find comfort and contentment as they enjoy the evening. She kept her pace and didn’t sneak another glance at them as they walked away.
The quiet was harder than the noise had been.
She caught herself walking faster than the night asked for and made herself slow down.
She knew the town well enough now to walk it in the dark.
She'd come to Phoenix Ridge in the fall, for Mildred—for what turned out to be Mildred's last months, though nobody had called them that at the time.
She hadn't chosen the place. She'd come for her grandmother and stayed because leaving would have been too difficult and would have required Wren to make a decision.
She was tired of always having to decide.
The Sunday calls to Lillian had started soon after. Lillian had been Mildred's friend for thirty years. She lived two streets over from Wren, and she was most of what was left of that part of Wren's life now.
It wasn’t Sunday, but she had taken her phone out again on autopilot.
Lillian's name sat on the screen, one tap away.
She'd pick up by the second ring—eighty-two, awake at all hours, always glad of the call.
That wasn't the problem. The problem was that Lillian would hear something wrong in her voice before she finished a sentence and she'd ask, kindly, what was the matter and Wren would have to answer her.
She had nothing to say. Not in words. Not yet.
She put the phone back in her pocket and kept walking.
She had found the job in the winter, when the house was too quiet and she couldn't stand it anymore and needed somewhere to put herself.
Being useful to someone was the thing she'd always known how to do.
Cordelia had wanted someone good at it, and for a while, being needed had been enough. But now…
The last blocks were residential and still.
People’s porch lights were on, cars were parallel parked along the street, and blue light from televisions flickered behind some curtains.
Her building was the third on the left. She let herself in, climbed the two flights, and unlocked her door in the dark of the landing.
She stepped inside and locked it behind her.
The apartment was dark, but she didn't turn on the overhead light. Too much brightness all at once, and Wren didn’t want it to give her a headache. She switched on the lamp by the door instead, and it cast a small circle of light into the front room, enough for Wren to move by.
She set her bag on the bench in the foyer, and she hung her coat in the closet.
She took off her shoes and left them by the door, and the quiet of the place came up around her.
She was still mostly living out of boxes.
Besides some lamps, dishes, and a few clothes, she hadn’t bothered to unpack.
It was hard for her to see it as her home yet, so she hadn’t made the effort to make it one.
She went through to the bathroom and turned on the shower to what she hoped would be hot enough for her.
While the water warmed, she slipped out of her clothes.
The dark blazer, the blouse, the slacks, all of it folded and placed onto the stool out of habit, even though she knew nobody would see or judge her for not folding her clothes.
The mirror was already fogging at the edges.
She hadn't looked at herself properly in the mirror in the time she'd lived here, no more than the few seconds it took to do her hair in the morning, and she didn't look now.
She tested that the water was hot but not scalding, then stepped in.
The water was the perfect temperature, and she stood under the stream and let it run down her in rivulets.
For a while, there was nothing in her head but that, the heat and the sound of water, the first thing all night that gave to her instead of needing something from her.
She stood there for a few minutes, not washing her body and just letting the hot water loosen the knots in her muscles.
As she squeezed soap onto her shower pouf, her mind wandered.
All night, work had given her somewhere to be besides inside her own head.
Now there was just the water, and the thing she'd been outrunning caught up.
It bubbled up in her body before she could interpret the sensation into words.
Her face grew hot first, hotter than the water could account for.
Then something inside her chest dropped, as if she had fallen down a trap door in her own body, and she put her forehead against the tile to steady herself.
She let herself think about Cordelia. The dark dress she wore tonight and the pearl earrings that dangled and the plain fact of how she'd looked while crossing the room.
She thought about that one second, in the middle of the toast, when Cordelia had looked down the length of the table and found Wren, then held eye contact with her.
Wren let all of it in right then, the whole of it, for the first time in a month, and her body responded before she could think better of it—the flutter low in her stomach, her breath gone shallow and quick, a tightness climbing the back of her throat that wasn't quite sadness or nostalgia, but she couldn’t quite name it.
The water had gone lukewarm without her noticing, but she noticed now and still didn't reach for the tap.
The spray nipped across her shoulders, cooling down her back and her arms, but her cheeks still burned the whole time, so that she stood there cold and burning at once and did nothing about either.
She was so tired of not being touched. She hadn't let herself feel that until now either, standing still with the day finally washed off her.
How long had it been since anyone had put a hand on her that wasn't a handshake?
Several months, if not longer. And how much of tonight had she spent within a few inches of warm air beside a woman she wasn't allowed to want?
She'd been hyperaware of those inches all evening.
She had wanted to close them, but she restrained herself.
"Cordelia," she whispered.
She'd said the name at least a thousand times.
She said it every day on the phone and across her desk and to the woman's own face.
It came out easy and automatic, meaning nothing more than just her doing her job.
She had never once said it like this, though—her voice pitched low and resonant with all her feelings stirring underneath it, into the water, said to no one but herself.
It came out of her mouth sounding like a wish.
It came out sounding true. And she heard it, the realness in her voice.
That was the part she couldn't undo. Wanting Cordelia, she could have kept to herself a while longer; she was good at that.
Hearing herself say so, out loud, alone, with nothing to blame it on? That she couldn't take back.
She reached up and shut the water off. The pipes knocked once and went quiet.
The last of the steam hung in the air and started to thin.
She stood in the tub, not reaching for a towel or trying to undo what she had just thought, with the water dripping off her and the air conditioning forming goosebumps on her skin.