Chapter 6 #2
Sadie’s gaze was piercing. “I’ve loved you ever since that time I dragged you to Disneyland and you told Maleficent that being socially snubbed was a perfectly good reason to curse a baby. Likely even before then, but that’s the moment I remember realizing it.”
Anne had told Sadie she loved her, too. Sort of.
All right, maybe she hadn’t actually said the words, but she’d put her feelings into action, which was what mattered most, wasn’t it?
The special waffles Anne—who never baked or cooked anything—always made for Sadie’s birthday, with chocolate chips and raspberries baked in, and extra crispy, just the way Sadie preferred.
The care box Anne had put together for Sadie after her cat Wordsworth had died, filled with all sorts of comforts and distractions: loose-leaf chamomile tea, a bronze-and-green candle in the shape of a succulent, a biography of Shirley Chisholm.
She’d said it in texts: There’s a new season of Tiny Houseboat Hunters.
Did you remember to pick up your Adderall refill?
Happy first day of the semester. I got our tickets for Casablanca at the New Beverly Cinema.
Hope the keynote goes well; I’ll be thinking about you.
“But what does all of that mean?” Anne burst out. “What does loving me have to do with not wanting to make a commitment?”
“Because,” Sadie said quietly enough that Anne had to lean in a little, “the last time I promised my life to someone I loved, he broke my heart so completely, I thought I’d never get over it. And I refuse to go through that again.”
Anne couldn’t help herself. “This wouldn’t be like Fred. I won’t leave you. And besides, Fred was your husband. This is different.”
“You sure keep saying that,” Sadie said.
“I keep saying it because it is different.” Anne pulled her hand back abruptly and turned away from Sadie, taking a few steps toward the dining table before twisting back around in frustration. “Why is that so hard to understand?”
Sadie took a seat on the couch again. For just a second or two, she bit her cherry red lower lip, holding it taut between white teeth. “All right, then walk me through it. What, precisely, is the difference between what you’re proposing and a marriage?”
“It’s nothing like a marriage.” Nothing like Anne’s marriage to James, at any rate.
“Well, maybe it’s like those Boston marriages, you know, the ones that allowed women to focus on their own lives rather than take care of men.
But what I’m suggesting really has nothing to do with the twenty-first-century definition of marriage.
We wouldn’t do—what married couples do.”
“You’re talking about sex.”
Anne hadn’t been thinking it, hadn’t been the one to say it, it wasn’t her word, but it felt suddenly lodged in her throat anyway. She managed a breath. “I meant that we wouldn’t have a ceremony. Or a license. That sort of thing. I hadn’t even thought about—”
“Sex,” Sadie repeated. “So you’re saying we wouldn’t—”
“I never said we would.” The far wall was extremely interesting because it wasn’t Sadie’s face.
“Then what are you saying?” A strange tone tilted Sadie’s question. “Anne, I need you to be very, very clear with me right now. You’re proposing a permanent and exclusive commitment, possibly with cohabitation, that’s entirely platonic. Do I have that right?”
“Of course I mean a platonic relationship! We’re not lesbians.”
She’d never used that term in front of Sadie—lesbian—and Anne realized it at exactly the moment the saw-toothed word left her mouth, cutting right through their conversation.
The air in the room got thinner to accommodate what she’d just said, and maybe that was why Anne suddenly found it difficult to breathe.
“No,” Sadie said very slowly after a long pause. “We’re not lesbians.”
The low and careful note in her words sent the hairs standing up on Anne’s arms.
“I’m not a lesbian,” Sadie repeated. She smoothed her hands slowly over her thighs, a gesture Anne hadn’t seen her make before.
“But in the spirit of reciprocal honesty, I should tell you that I don’t think I’m entirely straight, either.
And maybe you should know that before you decide you want to spend the rest of your life with me. Platonically.”
Anne’s vision blurred. Her chest tightened. A small cry she couldn’t suppress flew out of her throat, and she sat back down next to Sadie, hard.
For some reason, an expression that looked like relief flashed over Sadie’s tense face. “You had no idea? You never guessed?”
“No! I didn’t—why didn’t you tell me?” Yet another critically important detail that Sadie had kept from her. What else was Anne in the dark about?
The strained smile that pulled at Sadie’s lips was nothing like her typical wide, sunny grin. “Oh, Anne,” she said, finally. “Oh, my dearest friend. Do you really have no idea why I might be scared to bring it up? What I might be risking?”
Anne stared at her, at Sadie’s big eyes, her gentle mouth, her graceful neck, her slumped shoulders, the different parts of Sadie she knew so well and might be seeing for the very first time.
All those compliments. All those small details about Anne that Sadie always remembered and pointed out. All those times Anne had caught Sadie looking at her. Salt would just slip right out of my food, she’d said, if you weren’t there with me.
Sadie’s hands were clasped tightly together like she needed something to hold onto. Like she couldn’t touch what she wanted to touch.
Sadie wanted to touch her.
“That’s right,” Sadie said flatly. “You see the truth now. And that look on your face—that’s exactly why I didn’t say anything. Because I’d rather keep the best friend I’ve ever had than do anything to risk losing you.”
“Did you—” Anne’s breath was coming fast and short now. “When did you realize?”
“Not until the last year or so.” Sadie lifted one shoulder in a gesture near a shrug. “The internet says I’m something called a ‘late-in-life sapphic.’ Probably some flavor of bisexual. Never too old to figure yourself out, I suppose.”
Was that true? “Sadie—”
“What?”
Anne could barely get the words out. “You said you didn’t tell me about the job because you needed to figure out why your feelings about leaving me were so strong. But you did know why, didn’t you?”
Sadie’s head bobbed in a small, hesitant nod.
Anne’s understanding opened like a creaking door. “You just couldn’t tell me what you felt. Because—because you thought I’d end our friendship.”
“When they asked me to apply,” Sadie said quietly, “my first thought was that it was the dream job, the one a million poets would kill for. An endowed position with time to write. Nearly twice my current salary. One ten-person seminar per semester. But my next thought wasn’t that I didn’t want to leave Los Angeles, or that I couldn’t leave Hal or Talisha or the baby or my students.
My next thought was that I couldn’t leave you. ”
The room trembled. Anne, still breathing hard, had to close her eyes. She felt dizzy.
“I told myself that if I stayed, I’d lose you anyway because it would only be a matter of time before you’d realize how I felt.
I’d let it slip, somehow. But even that certainty paled in the face of a life without my best friend.
I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving you.
I couldn’t even stand the idea of telling you I might be moving. And I knew what that meant.”
What did it mean? If Sadie would tell her—then maybe Anne would know the meaning of her own wild and swelling desperation—
“I can’t help what I feel for you,” Sadie rasped. “I’ve tried so hard to help it. I can’t. But I would never—you know I would never ask that of you. Don’t you? I can be content with what we have. I promise I can.” Her voice cracked with desperation. “I promise I can be good.”
Behind Anne’s tightly closed lids, flashes of light burst like fireworks.
“You want it, though,” she said, and it sounded hoarse, like someone else. She was nearly panting. “You want me.”
“Oh no,” Sadie said miserably. “Please don’t push me away—!”
Anne opened her eyes. On the couch next to her, Sadie had her beautiful face in her hands. Her spine was gently arched, her lush body curved and calling.
“You need it.” Anne whispered. Something alien was rising inside her, new and sharp and staggering. “Don’t you? You need that from me.”
“I don’t need it!” Sadie lifted her head, face pale with distress. “I just told you—I can control myself—”
“You need it, Sadie,” Anne said again, roughly. “You need it.”
“No! I’m not—”
Anne kissed her.
It happened so quickly that she woke up inside it, came alive to the press of her mouth against Sadie’s soft lips, her hands over Sadie’s temples, her breath ragged on Sadie’s skin. Her heart was all bell, all blood, ringing sticky in her chest and throat.
She didn’t stop to think. Couldn’t. On instinct, her hands slipped to Sadie’s jawline, pulling her in closer, and at the same time, Sadie made a shocked noise and pushed forward for more, lifting her own hands to cup either side of Anne’s head.
It was Sadie’s lower lip against Anne’s tongue, Sadie who wanted her, Sadie who tasted like her coconut lip oil. And as Sadie’s mouth opened slightly, Anne, unhesitating, deepened the kiss.
A small sound came out of Sadie. A whimper.
Arousal, sudden and undeniable, filled Anne up and ripped her apart. She gasped against Sadie’s mouth.
Sadie pulled back. Her eyes flared in a blaze of heat. “Anne,” she managed.
Just her name, that was all, just the single breathless syllable of Anne’s name through her best friend’s lips, the unmistakable sound of desire forming it, and a dull, faint ache began to beat in response between Anne’s thighs.
“Anne, oh my God—”
And now there was nowhere to go to look away, the staggering truth of it all around her, in Sadie’s words and droning through Anne’s body, too, parts of her awake that hadn’t come alive for so long.
Since high school and Missy Campbell’s toe streaking wet polish across Anne’s foot.
Since the late nineties, when she’d left that feminist group clutching a piece of paper with a number on it, discarded quickly into the trash.
Since that female talent agent who’d caught Anne’s eye during a Christmas party and held it, Anne looking back at her too long for it to be anything but what it was.
Since that sleepless night she’d spent with Sadie in her bed, not moving, not thinking about the full length of Sadie pressed hot against her back and ass and thighs.
She’d pressed her lips together and shut down entirely, refusing to hear herself.
She heard herself now.
A brand-new thought began to stand up on shaky colt legs. This is it. This, right here. I’ve run to the thing I ran from.
It was the end of Anne’s world, or the beginning of it.
“You meant that,” Sadie said shakily. She looked like she’d reached the borders of her own world. “You really meant it, didn’t you?”
It wasn’t a question, but Anne nodded slowly, unable to speak.
“This—” Sadie stood up abruptly, her hands shaking. Her red lipstick was smeared and faded. “Did you know too?”
Dazed, Anne shook her head.
“Then where the hell did that—”
“I don’t know!” Anne exclaimed, finally finding her voice again. “I just, I just—”
Had to. She’d had to do it, the same way one breath had to be followed by the next. Just that simple. Just that complicated.
Slowly, she pressed her shaking fingers against her mouth. This is where Sadie’s lipstick went. I have it now.
Sadie stood up abruptly. She pressed her hands against the top of her head, hard enough to make the lace-front edges of her wig strain.
“I—I can’t stay here. I need to leave. I need to figure this out.
I need to think. I have to—dear God, Anne, you, you—” A muscle twitched in one cheek.
“I don’t remember how to think. I need to go someplace where I can think. ”
Anne stared up at her, unable to process what she’d just heard. Sadie wanted to go home? Sadie wanted to leave her?
And then Sadie asked, “So will you help me figure out where we’re going?”
We.
“I need to hear you tell me” —Sadie was breathing hard—“everything you know about this. Everything you don’t.
And I need to do it someplace that isn’t where I’ve looked at you for—for months now, and tried so, so hard to stop myself from feeling—” She broke off.
“Let’s go. Please. Somewhere. Anywhere.”
Anne leaned back and let out a long, shaky exhale. Not alone, then. Not an anywhere that didn’t have Anne in it. An anywhere that did.
“Anne?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked. It was the only word that mattered, the only word she knew. “Yes. Yes.”