Something True

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  Instead Laura unbuttoned the top two buttons of her shirt. She glanced at Tate.

  “May I?” she asked.

  Tate nodded.

  Slowly Laura removed her shirt and her bra, her heels and her nylons. She did not even feel embarrassed as she dropped her skirt to reveal the flesh-colored infrastructure of her spandex body shaper.

  “What are you wearing?” Tate asked. Her voice was gently teasing.

  Laura laughed and leaned over and kissed Tate.

  “This is something you should never know about,” she said and wriggled out of the tight garment.

  “That’s better.” Tate’s eyes lingered on her body. “That’s beautiful.”

  When she was naked, Laura slid into bed beside Tate and lifted Tate’s shirt over her head. Tears welled up in her eyes when she saw the bruises along Tate’s side.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispered.

  “Then don’t.”

  Laura knew Tate was not talking about the bruises. She ran her hand along the curve of Tate’s hip, so lightly she barely felt her skin. Outside, the first hint of dawn was turning the black sky navy.

  “What time is it anyway?” Tate asked, glancing at the bedside alarm clock.

  “Almost five,” Laura said. She kissed Tate on the forehead. “Sleep. I’ll be here in the morning.”

  Every morning.

  Gently, Laura pulled Tate to her, nestling Tate’s head on her chest, stroking Tate’s short hair. Slowly, she felt Tate relax into the rhythmic touch.

  “Sleep,” Laura whispered. “I won’t go anywhere.”

  Lying with Tate cocooned in her arms the night before, Laura had disavowed all earthly goods. She was ready to live in a studio apartment and eat brown rice and bike her compost to the community garden. But daylight came, and with it realism. People only changed so much in a lifetime, let alone a night, and she was not going to live in an apartment the size of a subway car.

  She lay on her side, watching Tate, who was watching her with a look of concern. That was what poverty did to people, Laura thought. It made them worry. And that was why this life—the tiny apartment, the missing health insurance, the day-to-day labor—was simply not going to work for her.

  Chapter 34

  Tate, I have to talk to you,” Laura said.

  Tate closed her eyes and fell back on the pillow, bracing herself.

  Laura slid out of bed, donned Tate’s robe, and went over to the counter, where she started a pot of coffee brewing.

  “Cream? Sugar?” she asked.

  “Just black,” Tate said without opening her eyes.

  She heard Laura moving around the tiny kitchen, opening a cupboard, stirring sugar into her own cup. Then she felt the futon sag as Laura sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Look at me.” Laura set both coffees down on the bedside table.

  Tate opened her eyes.

  Laura looked worried. She looked like a woman about to deliver bad news.

  Tate felt anxiety rising in her chest. I knew it.

  “Did I tell you I got fired?” Laura asked.

  “No.” Tate rose to a sitting position, wincing a little bit. She propped herself against the headboard. Don’t hope, she thought. But her body was more optimistic. She had fallen asleep to the comfort of Laura’s body easing away pain. Now she felt as though every nerve reached out for pleasure. Even the blue sky in the window seemed to caress her. Don’t be reasonable, her body said. She’s right there. It’s summer. She reached out and stroked Laura’s thigh. “What happened?”

  “I should have seen it coming. Clark-Vester has been working with my father for years.” Laura pursed her lips. “They’re not keen on having his gay daughter on the payroll.”

  “They’re bastards if they did that to you.”

  Laura did not look troubled.

  “Oddly enough, they actually have a nondiscrimination policy that includes sexual orientation. Don’t know what lawyer slipped that in. They probably figured no one would ever use it. You can see where I’m going.”

  “You want to sue them?” Tate asked.

  “And a nasty lawsuit it would be too,” Laura went on. “All sorts of interesting things would come out about Clark-Vester and my father. I’d probably lose, of course. No one wins discrimination cases. But it would be so awkward.” The smile she gave Tate was not the wry, self-effacing smile that said, Ah, such is life. It was a grin. “They agreed to an attractive severance package.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You might say, they offered me the rainbow parachute.”

  Laura slid into bed and curled up against Tate’s chest.

  “I just made a lot of money.”

  Tate shook her head.

  “You get fired and they pay you?”

  “Of course.”

  Laura kissed Tate’s chest on the side that had not been bruised. She cupped one of her breasts and gently stroked Tate’s nipple, sending a shiver into parts of her body Tate thought were too deeply buried to feel an outside touch.

  “So I was thinking of doing what I do best and buying something.”

  “Like a dress?”

  Laura chuckled. “I was going to start with a house.”

  So that was the kind of “attractive severance” Laura was talking about.

  “And then I was going to buy some space, maybe a small building with retail on the first floor and apartments up above. Maybe something with a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop. I think you have a point about coffee shops. The ones people love aren’t the clean brand names. Everyone likes Starbucks coffee, but no one loves them the way they love their dingy, local independent. Now if you could somehow get the Starbucks efficiency into the local shop or start a chain with the independent feel, there is money to be made. Portland is an emerging market even with the recession.”

  Laura looked so hopeful—her eyes wide and shy as she watched Tate, waiting for her response—Tate almost said yes just to see the smile spread across her face. But she had made that mistake before.

  “I don’t want to work in a coffee shop anymore,” Tate said.

  “Neither do I,” Laura said casually. “It’s too much work. But you could consult. You know the industry. You know the city.”

  “I want to go back to school and finish my degree, maybe then start my own place.”

  “Fine. Good.” Laura was suddenly serious. “What I’m saying is this: As far as I can tell, you’ve spent your whole life taking care of other people, and I want to take care of you. I want to buy a house in Portland, and I want you to move in with me. I want to find a job for Maggie. I want to help you do whatever you want to do. And I can because I have a lot of money.” She took Tate’s hand in hers and kissed her knuckles. “I got lucky. And I know you’re going to say no for all the right reasons. It’s too soon. You’re your own woman. Maggie doesn’t want my charity. I know. And I love that about you. But I thought, maybe, this time, since you don’t have anything else going on right now, you could just pretend that you weren’t so noble. We could go drive around the city today and look at houses. We could find one with a garden, with room for a dog and a study for you if you want to go back to school.”

  The robe had fallen open around Laura’s shapely body, and now she gathered it closed, hugging herself as though the room had suddenly gone cold.

  “You could keep this apartment, and if I disappoint you, you could go back to this life, exactly like it is. You won’t owe me anything. You don’t owe me anything. I know what you think, and I’m so sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry you’re afraid that I’m going to leave. You have every right to worry after the way I treated you in Palm Springs, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  Tate’s eyes followed the curve of Laura’s long, graceful neck as Laura looked down at the floor.

  “I know it’s too soon. It’s crazy. It’s not the way people do things. But what if we just pretend that we don’t know that?”

  She actually thinks I mi
ght say no, Tate thought.

  “I’ve heard,” Tate said, “you really haven’t seen Portland until you’ve looked for houses.”

  Laura stared at Tate. For a moment, she could not make sense of her own good fortune. It was a ridiculous notion: the idea that she could just ask Tate to be happy with her, that they could just ignore all reasonable cautions and rush out into the world like kids running headlong into summer vacation. No one did that in real life. There were jobs and paperwork and schedules and recriminations. But Tate had just said yes. Tate was smiling. She was sliding her arm around Laura’s waist.

  “Come here,” Tate said. She kissed Laura gently on the lips.

  They kissed for a long time. Laura felt like she could go on kissing Tate like this forever. Then Tate slipped her hand between Laura’s legs. Suddenly, Laura felt alive with happiness. It amplified every touch. She wanted to cry out for more, to press Tate’s hand to her, but she whispered, “Your leg…are you sure you’re okay? I don’t want to go too quickly if you’re hurt.”

  “I think…” Tate slowed her touch and made it lighter, rubbing a tiny spot below Laura’s clit until Laura could not keep from squirming. “I’d be a failed lesbian if I let one little motorcycle accident…”—she removed her fingers, licked them quickly, and returned to her delicate ministrations—“…keep me from such a beautiful woman.”

  With a touch so light it could have been a dream except that Laura’s whole body arched toward her fingers, Tate stroked the opening of Laura’s sex, drawing the moisture up to her clit.

  “You’re teasing me,” Laura whispered.

  Tate smiled. “You said you didn’t want to go too quickly.”

  “For you. I didn’t want…” Laura lost her voice in a cry of pleasure as Tate slid her fingers into Laura’s body and then around every fold of Laura’s sex.

  With each caress, Laura felt her body respond, dampen, swell, until she did not know if Tate touched her clitoris or if every part of her sex was as sensitive as her clit.

  “There,” Laura cried, although she did not know where “there” was anymore, only that she needed Tate’s touch everywhere.

  “Here?” Tate asked gently.

  “Yes.”

  “Or here?”

  “Yes.” Laura needed Tate to consume her, to take her, to touch all of her.

  As if intuiting her desires, Tate leaned over, kissing her deeply. Then she rubbed harder, gathering all of Laura’s sex—her clit, her labia—into her hand and massaging in deep, hard circles. Laura wanted to tell Tate that she felt like a teenager, that everything she had known about sex before had just become words on a page, that she finally understood why people could not sacrifice this—not just the sex but the love that swelled in her heart—for money or position. She wanted to tell Tate all of that, but the orgasm was mounting inside her, and a minute later she was coming uncontrollably.

  When her breathing had slowed and her pulse had returned to a steady beat, Laura opened her eyes. Tate was watching her, and nothing about her gaze made Laura self-conscious. Without looking away, Laura gently rolled Tate onto her back.

  “I want to feel you come,” Laura said quietly.

  Tate stared at her, as if in amazement, and said nothing.

  Carefully Laura eased her fingers inside Tate expecting to feel at least a hint of resistance as her body opened, but Tate’s body was wet and hot. The walls of her vagina contracted as soon as Laura touched her, and she cried out softly. Laura knew from the tension inside Tate’s body that she was already close to orgasm, and she was delighted that she knew. She knew. The first time they had had sex, her desire had warred with her fear that she would make some terrible mistake, that Tate would sit up and say, You haven’t done this before, have you? Now she knew how to caress Tate, how to make her wait, how to strike that perfect balance between tenderness and force, how to touch all of her, then to circle Tate’s clitoris until Tate fell silent, her mouth open in a silent moan, her hands grabbing the pillow behind her, her back arching, her hips thrusting into Laura’s hand.

  Laura felt the orgasm take Tate’s body. She held Tate until the last spasm had subsided. Then she slowly withdrew her hand and wrapped her arms and legs around Tate. She could not see Tate’s face nestled against her shoulder, but she could feel Tate smiling and hear her whisper, “You set me on fire, Laura Enfield.”

  Epilogue

  One Year Later

  Tate stood on the second-story porch that jutted off the master bedroom. Below her, the graduation party—her graduation party—was in full swing.

  Literally. Vita was swinging a woman across the lawn, waltzing to the Decemberists’ “O Valencia!,” which blared from the massive speakers Vita had borrowed from the Mirage. The girl she danced with was, Vita swore, the one. Tate had her doubts, but the girl did wear a lot of animal print. They looked terrific together in a performance-art-on-acid kind of way.

  Krystal and her new girlfriend, a beatific, reedy girl with a modest black scarf tied over her hair, tried to tango through the interlacing circles of Vita’s waltz. The couples collided, laughed, pretended to enact a kung fu vengeance on each other, and went back to dancing.

  Maggie and Janice watched their antics from a set of reclining wicker armchairs and called “Whoa!” when the dancers got too close to their lemonades. Every few minutes, a customer from their new shop, Out in Southwest Portland, would stop by to thank them for the invitation. Janice would hand them a flyer for an upcoming open mike. Then Janice would lift Maggie’s hand to her lips to kiss. Maggie’s smile made her look a decade younger.

  Lill passed around a plate of vegan chia-seed and hemp brownies. Meanwhile, Butch, the Rottweiler puppy Laura had given Tate at Christmas, followed the plate, doing the other party guests a vital service by eating the fibrous blocks behind Lill’s back.

  In the far corner of the yard, Lill’s husband helped Bartholomew and Sobia set up a slip and slide.

  Tate’s closest friend from PSU, an Iraq veteran with a bicycle covered in Veterans for Peace stickers, took the first slide, going down gown, mortarboard, and all.

  “I’m putting that on YouTube,” Tate called to him.

  He stood up and raised his arms in soggy victory.

  Behind Tate, Laura emerged from the bedroom.

  “What are you doing up here?” she asked, kissing Tate and leaning her cheek on Tate’s shoulder. Tate put her arm around Laura’s waist.

  “Just watching. Waiting for you.”

  “That was my brother on the phone,” Laura said.

  “I guessed.”

  “Dad didn’t get the nomination.”

  “I’m sorry. Was he mad?”

  Laura shrugged.

  “The other candidate worked it.”

  “You being gay?” Tate asked.

  “Not exactly. It was everything that happened after that. Dad letting his business partner fire me because I was gay.”

  “Really?”

  “The other guy, Todd Gaven, said my father didn’t stand by his own.” Laura sounded incredulous. “He said I’d been a faithful daughter who dedicated my whole life to my father’s campaigns, and the minute he discovered my sexual orientation he denounced me.”

  “That’s kind of what happened,” Tate said.

  “And the Republicans picked Gaven. My brother said there’s a big push to get the centrist vote and the libertarians. Disowning your gay daughter and lying about it doesn’t get you the capital it used to.”

  Tate shook her head.

  “Who would have thought?”

  Laura looked down at the garden party. Crown Princess Margarita and his boyfriend and a dozen other members of the Gay Men’s Choir were filing in, shaking hands with Krystal’s Mennonite relatives. One of the aunts and Jeff the baritone struck up a beautiful harmony, their “Amazing Grace” mingling with the Decemberists’ declarations of love.

  “You know, I used to think this whole place was an illusion,” Laura said. She gestured t
o the skyline view, to the perfect snowcapped peak of Mount Hood, and then to the party below. Finally her hand rested on Tate’s cheek. “And you…”

  Laura stared at her with a look Tate recognized because she had seen it in her own eyes.

  Tate had spent the first months of their relationship waiting for it to end, waiting to realize she’d played the fool again. But every morning she had woken in Laura’s arms, in the beautiful house, with a pile of textbooks spilling out of her backpack and the new Harley parked in the garage. Every evening, she had returned from class to find Laura finalizing some paperwork for her latest project with Portland Green Developers or standing in the kitchen staring, with cocked head, at the contents of the refrigerator because she had the inclination to cook and absolutely no previous experience. And every night, Laura pulled her close and whispered declarations of love that Tate both returned and finally…believed.

  Now she pulled Laura into her arms and kissed her temple, inhaling the scent of her orange-blossom perfume.

  “It’s all real, sweetheart,” Tate whispered. “It’s all absolutely real.”

  About the Author

  Karelia Stetz-Waters is an English professor by day and writer by night (and early morning). She has a BA from Smith College in comparative literature and an MA in English from the University of Oregon. Other formative experiences include a childhood spent roaming the Oregon woods and several years spent exploring Portland as a broke twentysomething, which is the only way to experience Oregon’s strangest city.

  Her other works include The Admirer, The Purveyor, and Forgive Me if I’ve Told You This Before. She lives with her wife, Fay, her pug dog, Lord Byron, and her cat, Cyrus the Disemboweler.

  Karelia loves to hear from readers. You can find her at KareliaStetzWaters.com.