by Tara Wimble
“How many have you missed now?”
“Probably most of them except Public Speaking because they have comfy chairs.”
“How are you even passing?”
Robin falls silent and pulls at the bracelets on her wrist. It’s the silence that tells her that maybe that’s a question that hits too close to home. Lexie can’t remember the last time Robin went to class or talked about doing work. The last time she even saw her in the library was before they got together. Christmas hats and coffee.
She treads carefully, wanting to understand. “Do you even want to be here?”
“With you? Of course.” There’s no hesitation.
“I mean at college.”
“That's a different question.”
More joggers go past. Some of them lag near the back and look at them jealously in the shade. “Why are you here then if you don’t want to be?”
Lexie knows the bands on Robin’s wrists. They hold no real meaning. They document a history though. Church camps, soccer camps, festivals and one hospital wrist band that’s from a few weeks before college started, when Robin had fractured her wrist. “Because I didn't tell my parents no? I thought I'd get into it honestly but it's not really meeting my expectations.”
“Why didn't you just say you wanted to do something else? Or wait a year?” It seems strange to not want to go to college. It’s all people seem to push kids towards. College. Debt. Better education. Better chances. Lexie knows a lot of it is ridiculous and not as true as they’d like to believe but the experience counts even if the lessons don’t sink in.
Robin saying that she only came because she didn’t want to tell her parents no? It doesn’t make sense.
“Because it's a lot of money and they were really into me going off and exploring. I thought even if it sucked I'd be better off but-” Robin pauses. Her voice never rises and she never gets frustrated. She just speaks with an honesty, without fear that Lexie will press her views on her. “I don’t even know what I want to do with my life.”
“Have you ever thought about dropping out?”
Robin giggles and it seems so out of the blue until she says: “I think I’ve thought about failing more than dropping out actually. Neither of them sound like much fun. And either way, I'd lose you.”
“What makes you think you’d lose me?” Lexie asks. “You might not be at college but you don’t have to leave. You could still live with us next year, I could teach you how to fix bikes or something.”
“Or I could see if Jasmine has a free job going anywhere.”
“Or that. How does we even do that?”
“Who knows.”
The sun beams down on them. Sore feet and dirty bikes but they’re together and happy.
“Would you drop out?”
The trigger question. It seems like an obvious choice if Robin doesn’t feel like this is all going anywhere but the thought of Robin dropping out, losing the stability, it scares her. It’s more of a fear she has for herself than anything.
“Maybe. I don't think I've given it much of a chance. Just drifted through. I mean, Janice hasn't even really planned for me moving in with everyone yet. I’ll end up with the box room at this point.”
Lexie bites her lip at the mention of Janice and the apartment. That’s another fear. Will they ever get there?
“Looks like you have a decision to make.”
“Not today though.” Robin decides. “Today is for this.”
Sunkissed faces, turning pedals and the kisses that come sitting on the side of the trail while people trek by them in exhausted envy.
*
Hope wets her feet. The waves coat the sand she walks on and every few steps she lets the water lap over her bare toes taking the few specks of dry sand from the tops of her feet. She carries on like this for a while.
The sun is starting to retreat. Janice stands still at the line of the ocean coming in. She stares down at the water, kissing her bare feet with its coolness, while Hope wanders back and forth. They’ve been like this for a while.
A while after the hours it took for them to drive here. A while after Janice realized where they were going and the silent panic that must have ensued when she realized. The beach house. Hope’s beach house. The place where things came to collide. Bodies and desires.
All that before the sinking feeling.
Yet if they’re going to talk about things, everything Hope can muster to talk about now, it had to be here.
She turns her back on the ocean and walks up towards the house again. When the sand dries under her feet, Hope sits down and waits for Janice, like she’s done for weeks now, to come and find her.
It doesn’t take her long. The sky is turning a vibrant orange and the warmth in the air is tainted only by the cool wind. Janice doesn’t move from her standing place by the sea before she’s ready. The way this has been played all along.
They haven’t really looked at each other after arriving. In the car it was different, Janice couldn’t stop looking at her. Hope snuck glances in the mirrors and at stop lights, just to make sure she was still there. Stealing snapshots of each other.
That flutter in her chest is still there. Stronger now they’re both here.
Hope had thought a lot about how this conversation would start and how it would end but, as always, Janice takes her by surprise.
“This is all a little dramatic.” Janice announces. “For you especially. You could have just talked to me.”
Hope glances at her and then the ocean a few times. “Dramatic? This isn’t dramatic. This is me taking this conversation away from everything going on back in L.A.”
Janice snorts and digs her heels into the sand. “No, this is you spending hours driving us to the beach and the beach house where we had sex for the first time. It’s dramatic.”
Hope flushes. It catches Janice so off guard that she stops for a second. The strain is there and the worry but the hardness she saw at the hospital and in the tone of her voice then has gone. She’s trying.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t bring people here.”
“Not even Henri?” Janice snaps out before she can stop.
Hope shakes her head. “No.” She replies, like she expected the comment.
“Why are we back here?”
“Because the last time we were here I thought that we knew what we were getting into.” Hope murmurs, running her fingers over the soft glowing sand.
“Did I- did I do something wrong by thinking that we were together?” Janice asks the question she’s been carrying around with her for weeks now. “Because I was pretty certain when you took me to bed here, that this wasn’t something you did. It’s your grandparent’s beach house, Hope. You just said. Fuck.”
“I didn’t expect any of this.” Janice jumps when Hope laughs. “I was content to get on with everything after Henri y’know and then you.”
Janice keeps her mouth shut for fear of saying something to interrupt this now. Hope’s face breaks out into the biggest smile she’s seen her wear...ever. And she’s talking about her.
“You jump up out of nowhere asking me, what was it?” Hope shakes her head. “If that was a gun in my pocket or was I happy to see you?”
Janice burns as red as the predicted sunburn she’d wear for the rest of the week.
“Who says that anymore?” Hope bites her lip. “You were just this freckled kid who was cocky as hell. More than you should have been and you caught me off guard.”
That’s what caused Hope to touch her head. To look back when she left.
“I was supposed to forget about you, even with that smile, but you’re kind of one of a kind.” Hope makes a trench in the sand between them with her fingers. “And then you got into that fight.”
The fight. Oh.
“You were just this tiny ball of energy who thought that was enough to take on this 6”4 guy who was harassing your friends.”
“I got a swing in.” Janice defends.
“Yo
u dodged and he tripped over a curb before he chased you around the parking lot.” Hope reminds her.
“What? You thought my scrappy nature was cute and decided to mentor me for the greater good?” Janice pokes at the sand line Hope has drawn. “Because I have to admit, if that was your intention, I didn’t hear anything after you pulled those handcuffs out.” She’d die before she told Lexie or Robin that though.
“No.” Hope’s smile falls. “I gave you my number because I thought, why not? Why shouldn’t I?”
“And then every time I saw you it was, she’s just a kid, she’s young, she’s got her whole life ahead of her-” Hope pauses to gather her words. “Stopping me every time.”
Janice watches her smooth out the trench in the sand. Paving over it.
“When did you stop thinking like that?”
“I haven’t.” Hope notices her recoil and turns her head down. “Did you expect me to say something like, the second I slept with you? The morning after?”
“I didn’t know you had a problem with the age difference-” Janice burns with embarrassment as if this correlates to her experience.
“I don’t. Not a second. I had a problem with my life and how you fit into it.” Hope is quick to ease her. “But the second I realized that I should have given you more credit was the second I saw you at that police reception.”
When she saw Henri surround Hope.
“You looked so small. Smaller than I’d seen you and I thought, God Hope, you’ve really fucked up this time. Finalize a divorce and actually think before you start taking an interest in finding someone again.”
Janice’s dry throat lurches. “You haven’t fucked up.”
Hope digs her nails into the sand and Janice wants those sand grains embedded in her back before the sun pinking the sky.
“Then why are we here?”
Janice wants to make a smartass comment. ‘You drove us’ with a smirk that would turn sour. But she can’t. Hope looks at her and there seems to be less of a distance between their gaze.
“I’m 31, Janice, and coming out of the worst two years of my life and I’m sorry.” She says sincerely. “For not being honest with you and for not giving you a chance to prove to me that you could make it better.”
For not letting you in.
Janice ducks her head. It’s too much to hear it in Hope’s voice and see it in her eyes and think about that first time Hope touched her, gazing into her face, to see-
“I’m sorry too.” Janice utters. “For freaking out.”
“You don’t need to-”
“I do because I basically accused you of sleeping with your ex in the three minutes I saw him with his arms around you. Jumping to conclusions before you even told me who he was.” Janice states. “And I should have given you a second to breathe-”
Hope sighs.
Janice flushes. “You completely flipped me out over everything. You ruined my epic plan of college hook ups in less than a month just by walking into King’s at the right time and I should have told you that.”
Hope doesn’t look sorry at all.
“I’m nineteen going on twelve sometimes but it doesn’t mean that I don’t think you’re amazing or that we aren’t something to fight for or get lost in.” Janice rubs the sand in her fingers. “I admire your chivalry in this whole mess of trying to protect me from knowing about Henri and thinking you’re out to corrupt me or that I’m young and shouldn’t get weighed down or whatever but, can you just stop to listen to me when I say that I care about you. And if you’d been honest with me straight away I wouldn’t have cared.”
She reaches out to take Hope’s wrist, bigger than hers, between her fingers and turns it until her palm faces up. Sand sticks to the lines she sees and traces with her own. Hope doesn’t move, just lets her touch at her own pace. A rediscovery of something she took for granted. How long has it been since-?
“I care because I want all of you. If you’ll give us a chance then maybe we could see where else it takes us.” Janice waits in Hope’s silence for a minute. “I wasn’t looking to forget you.”
Janice wants her to know that she wakes up sometimes with Hope’s face still painted in her dreams. That she sometimes stares into shower tiles and remembers the exact feeling of being pressed between Hope’s body and the couch inside the beach house.
“Janice,”
It’s there. A spark. A want and Janice knows that there’s nothing left of them. Opened up on a deserted beach, an ocean view and all their secret fears finally out. Maybe she was too young, too cocky, too soon but Hope wants her and Janice knows now that she never wants the endured distance between them for as long as they stay together.
“It’s getting cold.” Hope states.
Come inside with me.
“We should go in then.” Janice says.
Sand falls from her hand and destroys all evidence from their drawings. Their meeting hands.
The stairs creak as they go up them. There’s one last thing that Hope has on her chest and it’s the one she least wants to hear but Janice feels it begin when Hope puts her hand on the door to the beach house.
Hope stops her from getting any closer. “The first time we slept together.”
The first time, the first wonderful time, that Janice has etched in a perfect memory but locked away from the tainted touches. Hope sweeps a hand over the dark clouds that threaten that memory.
“He signed that morning.” The rest was just paperwork and though she knows the process would have continued from there, he’d signed and he’d given her up. “I don’t want you to think any less of that weekend. That weekend was for us and it was perfect.
“I’m sorry if I ever made you doubt that it didn’t mean everything for me that it did for you.” Being under Hope’s honest gaze is reassuring. A shudder goes through her. Expectancy. “I’m sorry for lying to you.”
Janice nods. She nods and shatters the last of it all.
The silence was necessary for Hope to open the door to the beach house, the click of the lock and the hollow noise Janice’s back makes against the first wall it meets all have a part to play in the debut of their reunion. Together again. Hope lifts her with ease and presses into her until all Janice can do it lock her legs around Hope’s waist and whimper into her mouth.
Unlike the first time, there’s no reservations in Hope’s mind and Janice isn’t led to the couch and the soon to come darkening sky, but to the master bedroom.
Hope presses her against the wall beside the door. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“I know.” Janice’s hand comes up and cups the back of her neck. “Don’t be sorry about this though.”
Hope kisses her and the sun goes down.
Chapter 15
LAUREL hears the footsteps come past her room but she doesn’t move. The knocking down the hall has Amy sitting up next to her. Rousing her from her broken sleep.
“You still have a couple of hours.” Laurel notes, looking at her alarm clock.
Amy groans. She’s been curled into a ball all night with Laurel holding her. “I’m too nervous to sleep.”
“You’ve said that all night.”
“I’m too nervous for anything right now.” Amy laughs, tapping at Laurel's hand.
“You said that for a while too.”
Amy rolls over to face Laurel. “It’s morning though.”
Laurel hums happily and kisses Amy’s forehead. “It is.”
“Game day.” Amy’s attempt to say those words without squealing fails as always and Laurel beams in response.
“Game dayuh.” She says in a deeper voice. “And starting this evening is Amy Diaz-”
Amy covers her face in fake embarrassment about her girlfriend’s antics. “Don’t-”
“She’s a 5’4 forward coming off an impressive scoring streak in her last three games for L.A-”
“Laurel,” Amy blushes.
“-she enjoys long walks on the beach, mocking people’s accents and dat
ing Laurel Santos.” Laurel kisses Amy’s cheek and halts her announcer’s tongue.
“You got something right.” Amy wraps her arms around Laurel’s waist and sighs into her collar. She’s been restless all night thinking about the game. Laurel got as little sleep as she did with how loudly Amy seemed to emit her nerves.
“It was the accent thing, wasn’t it?” Laurel squints. “I’m pretty sure it was.”
The two of them still get up before they’re meant to. The communal kitchen is empty so Laurel takes her time with breakfast while Amy showers and gets ready. The club team bus leaves at twelve and the anticipation for the game is a big one. They’re through to the playoffs if they can scrape a win against a more pressing Saint Mary’s side.
Laurel keeps her quiet confidence to herself, or she plans to until Amy is on the field, because she’s enjoying this morning. But she really wants them to get through to the playoffs. Playoffs means Amy extending her club season, scouts and a glorious road trip to look forward to before finals.
Her quiet is broken by the sound of her phone ringing and Amy placing plates on the table. Laurel picks up the call with a curious tone to the caller on the other end. “Good morning to you, Janice McPherson.”
She smiles hearing Janice say something.
Amy stares at her from the table with an infatuated look. “Yeah, I’ve got a small minute for you.”
“Lexie isn’t here as far as I know.” Janice hammers on her questions and Laurel does her best to fill in. She can only pass on the official message. “I think they might be at your room actually. They left on a trail trip yesterday. Didn’t see much of them but Lexie texted to say she wasn’t dying on the side of a road so-”
Janice interrupts her.
“Hm, I wouldn’t be able to say. You should call her.”
Amy quirks her lip as she catches part of Janice’s response.
“What? Not much reception at the beach?” Laurel teases. “You standing on a sand dune and holding up for signal or are you sitting in Hope’s bathroom trying to whisper this while she’s sleeping?”
Laurel pokes at her breakfast before laughing. “Or that. Most people are polite enough to get out of bed to take a call.”