Chapter Six
Ali closed the door behind JT and leaned her back against it. How could she have brought JT back to her house with boxes everywhere? How did she forget what it looked like inside?
She’d been having too much fun existing outside her normal life and forgotten the reality that she was a divorcée who still hadn’t put all her belongings away despite moving in well before the school year started.
When she divorced Kyle, she knew she was taking a hatchet to the perfect image folks in town had of her, and of them as the high school sweethearts who’d gotten married and settled in town.
But even though she’d known they would see her differently, it hadn’t quieted the voice in her head telling her she had to always appear perfect.
Coming home to a house filled with reminders that whatever perfection she wanted the world to see was a lie deflated her. She’d been in the house for far too long for there to be any excuse for it to look the way it did. JT didn’t judge her, but she felt like such a loser.
In all her mortification she’d forgotten that after so many years of wondering what it would be like to kiss a woman, she’d found out.
She’d kissed a woman and she’d liked it.
Screw Katy Perry for ruining that phrase forever.
Kissing JT was better than any stupid pop song more concerned about what a boy might think of two girls kissing.
Ali didn’t care what any boy thought. One of the many perks of being single for the first time since she was a teenager was that she didn’t have to consider what Kyle might think.
She could kiss as many women as she wanted.
She hadn’t gone into the night thinking she was going to kiss anyone, let alone the woman who’d spent most of her time in middle and high school hanging out with Tommy.
She could picture the two of them sitting side by side on the couch in their basement playing Nintendo for hours.
They’d yell at the TV and laugh but JT always stopped when Ali walked in.
She’d say hi and ask how Ali was doing. Ali smiled at the memory.
JT had grown up, but she hadn’t grown out of that soft kindness.
Ali walked to the kitchen for a glass of water to stave off the hangover she was bound to have.
Did she want to kiss a whole bunch of women?
She didn’t know. But she liked kissing JT, and she would have happily kept their night going if not for her inability to unpack her shit.
Maybe if she were a different person, someone who didn’t care so much about what other people thought she would have been able to keep kissing JT even with the boxes everywhere.
But that wasn’t her. She did care what other people thought of her. She often wished she didn’t, but so far she hadn’t found a way.
She chugged the first glass of water and refilled it before climbing the stairs to her bedroom.
She paused in the doorway and considered it from the perspective of a guest. From JT’s perspective.
What would she have seen if Ali had the courage to drag her up the stairs?
The bed was made. There were a few pieces of clothes—worn once but clean enough to wear again—draped over a chair in the corner.
Her closet door was open and she could see two small boxes, opened on the floor.
The walls were a pale pink. Ms. Grant had liked flowers, and Ali had been glad there wasn’t any flower wallpaper in the bedrooms, but the pink wasn’t her choice. She’d been meaning to paint.
She slumped onto the bed. She had a little over a week before school started again.
She swore to herself that she would have her house in order before she went back.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to sleep with JT that night, but she knew she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life not getting laid.
And when the right person appeared, she wanted her bedroom to reflect who she was.
Now all she had to do was figure out what that looked like.
Easy peasy.