Chapter 20
Rose
The ceiling was too high and the pendant light was in the wrong place. It took Rose a full ten seconds of staring at it before her brain caught up with where she was.
The kitchen. The wedding dresses on the floor. Lizanne’s mouth on her neck, her collarbone, lower. Her own hands in Lizanne’s hair. The sounds she’d made that she was going to have to find a way to set aside while conducting herself like a professional for the next year.
She turned over.
Lizanne’s side of the bed was empty, the sheet pulled back, the pillow still carrying the shape of her head.
Rose sat up, pushed her hair out of her face, and looked around the room in the morning light.
The astronomy book on the side table. The two photographs.
The alarm clock she’d put there herself three weeks ago, which now looked like it had always been there.
The curtains half open, pale early light coming through, the room quiet in a way that felt different from how it had been quiet before.
She wrapped the sheet around herself and went to find her.
Not in the bathroom. Not in the sitting room off the main bedroom. Rose followed the light down a short corridor she hadn’t been down before and came to a sunroom at the back of the house—glass on three sides, the valley below still half-buried in morning mist.
Lizanne sat on the floor in the center of the room, cross-legged, back straight, eyes closed. Gray t-shirt, loose trousers, hair down. She looked nothing like herself and completely like herself and Rose’s first instinct was to step back out before she was seen.
She took one step backward. Then another.
Her shoulder blade connected with the doorframe with a solid, resonant thunk.
Lizanne opened one eye. “You need to work on your ninja skills.”
“I was trying not to disturb you.”
“You disturbed me from ten feet away.” She opened both eyes. “Come and sit down.”
“I’m wearing a sheet.”
“I can see that. Sit down anyway.”
Rose crossed the room and sat beside her, pulling the sheet around herself. The valley below was still waking, mist in the low places between the vines, the light coming in clean and directionless.
“Have you ever meditated?” Lizanne asked.
“No.”
“It would help you.”
“I’ve been told that.”
“By who?”
“People whose advice I didn’t take.”
“Your mind doesn’t quiet,” Lizanne said. Not a question.
“It gets louder when I try to slow it down.”
“Because you’re trying to empty it. That’s not what you’re doing.” Lizanne looked at the valley. “You’re sitting by a road watching the cars go past. You’re not stopping them. You’re just not getting in.”
“That sounds manageable in theory.”
“Try it.”
Rose sat with her back straight and looked at the valley and tried to watch the cars go past. The first car was the kitchen.
The second was Lizanne’s hands on her hips.
The third was the sound Lizanne had made with her face against Rose’s neck, low and unguarded and nothing like her public voice.
By the fourth car Rose had left the road entirely and was doing ninety with no intention of stopping.
“It’s not working,” she said.
“What are you thinking about?”
Rose looked at her.
Lizanne wetted her lips. “Ah,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been having the same problem.” She said it the way she said most things—directly, no apology attached. “Since I woke up.”
“Has sitting here helped?”
“Not significantly.”
The mist in the valley shifted. A bird outside made a noise and stopped.
“There’s only one way to get it out of our heads,” Lizanne said.
Rose turned to look at her.
Lizanne reached over and pushed the hair back from Rose’s face and kissed her — slow, deliberate, fully awake. Rose’s hand went to her jaw. She kissed her back. The sheet pooled on the floor.
Lizanne kissed her with one hand at her jaw and Rose pulled her closer by the waist. The kiss deepened. Lizanne’s hands moved to her shoulders, her arms, her back. Rose pulled the hem of Lizanne’s t-shirt free and found the warm skin beneath and Lizanne’s breath shifted against her mouth.
“Bed,” Rose said.
“Floor is fine,” Lizanne said, against her jaw.
Lizanne pressed her back onto the floor and the morning light came through the glass walls from every direction and Rose stopped caring about that almost immediately.
Lizanne took her time with her breasts. Her tongue moved in slow circles around one nipple while her hand cupped the other, her thumb brushing back and forth, and Rose’s back arched up toward her.
The heat built from her chest downward. Lizanne switched sides and stayed there too, her mouth warm and deliberate, and Rose’s fingers tightened in her hair and her hips shifted against the floor and she could already feel how wet she was getting.
By the time Lizanne kissed down her body Rose’s breathing had changed entirely.
Lizanne pressed her lips to the inside of her thigh. Stayed there. Rose’s hips shifted before she could stop them. Lizanne looked up at her from between her thighs and then Lizanne lowered her head.
Rose’s hips lifted off the floor.
Lizanne moved through her folds without urgency, slow and thorough.
Long strokes first, the flat of her tongue moving through her wetness, and Rose pressed her hand over her mouth.
Lizanne made a low sound against her that moved through Rose’s entire body.
Rose’s hand came away from her mouth because she needed it, one in Lizanne’s hair, one gripping the leg of the nearby chair, just to have something to hold.
Lizanne circled her clit slowly. Pressed flat and held it.
Rose’s hips rocked against her face and Lizanne let them, stayed with the pressure, kept her mouth exactly where it was while Rose’s grip in her hair tightened and the sounds she was making got less controlled.
Then she shifted and Rose made a sound of frustration that she would have been embarrassed about if she’d had the capacity for embarrassment.
Lizanne did this twice more. Starting her up and pulling back.
The heat built and built without breaking and Rose had stopped thinking about anything except Lizanne’s mouth and the light through the glass and the ache that kept climbing and not cresting.
Then Lizanne slid two fingers into her.
The sound Rose made went off the glass walls.
Lizanne moved her fingers in a slow steady rhythm, her mouth still on her clit.
Rose was slick and tight around her and she pressed deeper, worked her open, found the place that made Rose’s whole body lock up and then stayed there.
Fingers curling and pressing into that spot with an insistence that didn’t waver.
Tongue moving in circles at the same time.
Rose said her name once, then again, then a third time in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own.
Her thighs were shaking. Her grip in Lizanne’s hair had gone past tight into something that probably hurt and she couldn’t make herself loosen it.
Lizanne pressed deeper and Rose’s back came off the floor entirely.
She came in a long rolling wave, thighs clamped around Lizanne’s shoulders, hips pushing forward, the sound she made low and broken and nothing like her usual voice.
Lizanne’s fingers slowed, easing her through each aftershock until Rose’s grip loosened and she lay flat on the sunroom floor with the glass ceiling above her and the sky beyond it pale and wide and completely still.
Lizanne kissed the inside of her thigh and rested her cheek there a moment.
“Floor was fine,” she said.
Outside the mist had lifted from the valley. The vines caught the early sun and the light through the glass was warm and even. They lay there without speaking, without moving, and the quiet between them needed nothing added to it.
***
An hour later Rose walked back across the grounds to the pool house with her hair still loose and yesterday’s wedding dress over her arm. The morning was warm, the sky already a deep, committed blue.
She pushed the pool house door open.
Kayla sat at the kitchen counter in shorts and an oversized t-shirt, eating toast, her eyes on her phone with the fixed concentration of someone who had not slept in their own bed.
“Morning,” Kayla said.
“Why are you still here?”
“Too much to drink last night. Safer to stay.” She looked at the dress over Rose’s arm. Then at Rose’s hair. Then back at her phone. “You’re holding your wedding dress.”
“Yes.”
“Which means you weren’t in it.”
“Correct. Not exactly comfortable to sleep in.”
Quinn’s door opened. He came out in a t-shirt and boxers, crossed directly to Kayla, and kissed her cheek. Rose stood in the doorway with her dress and looked at the two of them.
“How long,” she said.
“A while,” Quinn said.
“You could have told me.”
“You had other things going on.” He poured himself a coffee and looked at her properly—the dress, the hair, the state of her generally. “So. Where were you last night?”
Rose put her dress over the back of a chair and sat down.
She told them. Not everything—some of it she was keeping—but enough. The kitchen after the cameras left. Waking up in Lizanne’s room. The sunroom and the meditation that hadn’t worked and what happened after.
Quinn listened with his coffee halfway to his mouth. When she finished he set it down on the counter.
“This is great,” he said.
“Quinn—”
“No, think about it. If something real is happening between you two then you’re not performing a marriage for a year, you’re in one. That’s the best version of this whole situation by a long way.”
“It’s two nights,” Rose said. “It’s complicated.”
“It doesn’t sound complicated. It sounds like you like her.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Kayla had been quiet through all of it. She put her toast down.
“Can I say something.”
“Go ahead,” Quinn said.
“You’re not going to like it,” she said to Rose.
“Say it anyway.”
Kayla looked at her. “You were forced into this arrangement. That’s where all of this started and that’s still the foundation of it.
Everything happening now is happening inside something you had no real choice about entering.
And now there are feelings in it.” She picked her toast back up.
“I love you and I want you to be happy. I also don’t want you to get hurt inside something that was built to put you at a disadvantage from the beginning. ”
The pool house was quiet.
“She helped Daisy at the wedding without thinking,” Rose said. “Before anyone could have staged it.”
Kayla nodded.
“And she went off script on camera last night when she didn’t have to.”
“I know.”
“I’m not saying it’s simple.”
“I know that too.”
Quinn refilled his coffee. Outside one of the gardeners moved along the far edge of the lawn.
“What are you going to do?” Kayla asked.
Rose looked at her wedding dress over the chair.
“Shower,” Rose said. “Then figure out the rest.”
She got up and went down the hall. Behind her, she heard Quinn and Kayla speaking in low, hushed tones.
Rose pushed the bathroom door open and stood at the sink.
She leaned her weight on her hands, palms flat against the cold porcelain.
In the mirror, a stranger looked back—hair wild, those small gold wedding earrings still mocking her from her lobes.
She looked at her hand. In addition to the little ruby ring she’d decided to keep wearing as an engagement ring was an expensive gold band.
They looked good together, like a joining of her new and old life.
But Kayla was right. She hadn’t chosen this new life. Not without pressure. And yet, being with Lizanne felt good. Right, even…
She turned the shower on and stepped inside. She stood under the spray, letting the water run hot, and didn’t try to force an answer.