Neighborly Love

by Christine L'Amour

  “Oh,” Amy said.

  “Oh, my. Do you sound disappointed?”

  “Shut up,” Amy groaned, then gripped at the collar of her shirt to pull her forward into a kiss.

  The kiss was short and sweet, and Meghan licked the cherry lip balm off Amy’s lips with vigor. It felt like it had been so long since she had kissed anyone, Amy was perfect at it once she got past her shyness, sliding their mouths together and tasting Meghan’s tongue, biting softly on Meghan’s lower lip. Meghan relaxed against her completely, their bodies molding together, and wished fervently that Amy were okay with doing more tonight.

  It was the first kiss of many, and they spent most of the party in the kitchen, alone.

  Chapter Five

  Amy woke up with a crick on her neck, a faint headache, and very cold ankles.

  She blinked, her eyes opening, the prior night coming back to her in a rush of sweet memories—Meghan’s confidence and honesty as she said she was glad that Amy had come, the forward way she stepped into Amy’s space, the easy way she sighed into Amy’s kiss. Amy felt a flame go up to her face at once, even as a triumphant smile rose up as well.

  Agreeing to housesit for Brenda really had been her smartest idea.

  “What’re you smiling about?” came a faint voice from beside her. “It’s too early to smile.”

  Amy looked to the side and saw Meghan—they were both sitting on the couch and leaning against each other, sharing a blanket, which explained the crick and the cold ankles, and Meghan, who had probably woken up a bit before her, was scrolling through something on her phone though her eyes were very firmly closed.

  “How do you know I’m smiling?” Amy asked, peering at the screen of Meghan’s phone—she was scrolling through her emails, apparently, all of which seemed work-related. Amy felt a pang to her heart. Meghan hadn’t been joking when she said she always worked hungover on Saturdays. “How can you look at the screen? Your eyes are closed.”

  “They’re just a little bit open. Is Carlos around?”

  “Your friend? No, he was the last one to leave yesterday,” Amy told her, feeling a strangely smug feeling in her chest at the thought of being allowed to sleep over unlike everyone else, who Meghan had kicked out after a few hours. “I’ve got a terrible crick on my neck,” she admitted. “Can we lie down properly somewhere? It’s Saturday, we can sleep in, right…?”

  Meghan groaned, dragging her eyes open like it took the greatest effort in the world.

  “No,” she said, tone regretful. “I’ve got to work. You’ve got no idea how shitty it is to be a business owner sometimes. I have emails coming out of every possible orifice. I need to make some coffee and then drink about five cups of it.”

  “But it’s Saturday,” Amy protested in a low voice, leaning more of her weight against Meghan. She fit her head on the crook of the woman’s neck and didn’t look at her. “And if I’ve got a headache, I know you’ve got worse, because I only had beer and you did those shots with your friends. Why don’t we take a nap, then have a nice breakfast somewhere out, and just be lazy?”

  Meghan sighed as if Amy had described her most perfect unattainable dream.

  “I can’t afford to be lazy,” she said with a moan. “We really aren’t doing well these days. With e-books and big companies… a small press like mine takes a lot to stay afloat. Of course, it would help a lot if some people answered my damn emails.”

  “I really don’t know how the book market has been these days,” Amy admitted, snuggling closer to Meghan’s side because it was cold and because she could. At least the woman’s work could be done at home. “I don’t read much.”

  “What do you do with your free time, then?” Meghan asked, then said after barely a pause: “Video games.”

  Amy blinked at her, then laughed. “How did you know?”

  Meghan smiled. “You’ve got that air about you.”

  She meant it well, Amy knew, but she still heard the words behind it anyway, words she had heard many people say before: you look young. Like you don’t have your life together. Like you don’t have work. Like you sit at home all day doing nothing important.

  “What about you? What do you do in your free time? Read?” Amy asked instead, hoping to steer the conversation away from herself.

  “God, no. I already read too much for work. A lot of the editing and revising is done by me, as well as some work I do for clients as a freelancer… sometimes I wish I could do something other than read all those damn books.”

  Amy sat and pondered, curling her legs tighter against her chest so the blanket would be able to cover all of her. A part of her thought about being nice, about making that coffee for Meghan and maybe some breakfast, but it was Saturday and it was so pleasant where she was sitting right now. Meghan was warm as a furnace to her side, and Amy didn’t want to expose her bare legs to the chilly morning air, as hungry as she was.

  “I guess I’ll sit here and nap, then, while you read your emails,” Amy said, her eyes falling close again.

  “Won’t you make some coffee for us?” Meghan asked her, nudging hopefully at her shoulder. “Come on, you’re the one who can go to sleep immediately after.”

  “You’re the host, I’m a guest,” Amy countered, tucking her nose against Meghan’s neck. “You go make coffee.”

  Meghan shook her head. She touched Amy’s chin with a hand, making Amy open her eyes, and pressed an indulgent kiss to her lips. Amy accepted it easily, leaning against her. She didn’t know the rules of casual dating, having never done any type of dating before, but it was easy to follow Meghan’s lead.

  “You won’t bribe me into getting up,” Amy whispered after a few more kisses.

  Meghan sighed, wiping some of Amy’s make-up away with a thumb, and stood up.

  “I’m making it as black as I like and not adding any sugar or milk for you,” she warned as she sauntered to the kitchen.

  Amy let herself flop down to the supremely comfortable couch and wrapped the blanket, now entirely hers, around herself. She didn’t even care about the coffee—it would be nice, even, to see how Meghan liked to drink it.

  ***

  “Wow,” Amy’s mother said, stunned, as she looked around Brenda’s apartment. “Your friend lives here alone? How did she afford this?”

  “She’s rich,” Amy said brightly as she led her mother from the brightly lit living room to the equally huge kitchen, all of them filled with plants that were, Amy would dare to say, even more beautiful now she was taking care of them. She touched a new slick leave of the orchid that sat beside the fridge and smiled. “Her family has always had money, so she always had big savings from them to start with. It’s not like with us.”

  “Us normal people,” her mother said dryly. She walked from one side of the kitchen to the other. “It just feels like a waste of space to me,” she admitted. “After so long living in our small apartment, just the three of us, I don’t know what I would do with something this big if I lived alone.”

  “You would get used to it,” Amy said with a smile and a roll of her eyes. “Come on, Mom, I have to show you the bed in the guest bedroom, it’s huge. I’m half thinking about stealing it once I leave.”

  Her mother smiled at her indulgently and followed her to the bedroom a step behind her.

  “Amy,” she started, hesitant, as they went. “How long exactly are you going to stay here?”

  “Some time,” Amy said vaguely, not wanting to think about it.

  “Well, I was talking to Chelsea the other day, and we both agree that… well, you living in this place alone, so far away from home, isn’t really going to do you any favors getting motivated, is it? Though Chelsea did say you might look for a job anyway…”

  Amy winced and stopped at the door to the bedroom. Instead of walking in, she turned around to her mother and crossed her arms defensively—only to see that her mother had done it already. The two looked like mirror images of each other, with the same brown hair and eyes and the s
ame propensity to avert their eyes.

  “Mom, can we not talk about that?” she asked. “I admit I haven’t really started looking into jobs, but come on, it hasn’t been so long since I left my last one—”

  “It’s been almost three months!”

  “I’ve gone longer without a job! Why the rush?” Amy asked, defensive. “We’re not starving or anything, we’re all happy, aren’t we? What’s so wrong with me taking a break and just enjoying Brenda’s house while I’m here?”

  “Because then your break will have lasted half a year,” her mother told her, sounding haggard. She gripped Amy’s arms with her hands. “Amy, the longer it takes for you to get employed, the less likely it is that you’re going to find something you like, and you know what will happen. You’ll get bored, or hate your coworkers, or go in late too many days in a row, and then it all starts again. When are you going to start thinking about what you want to do for life?”

  “The world doesn’t work like that anymore,” she told her mother, looking away from her. She wanted to bat her mother’s hands away, but couldn’t do it; her mother would be upset. “No one has one profession for life, we all just try to make do—”

  “But you’re not trying to make do,” her mother argued. “You’re sitting and playing video-games all day!”

  Amy just stared at her, betrayed. Her mother looked back with regret in her eyes, but she didn’t take it back, and it wasn’t like Amy could argue against that. She just didn’t see the point in trying to find a proper, nice job, if those even existed anymore. She needed a degree to find anything that wasn’t the sort of small, part-time, excruciating jobs she had had so far, and she wasn’t going to land herself in thousands of debt to get a degree when she had no idea what she wanted to study.

  “I’m just saying that maybe you should start thinking about that,” her mother said softly, letting go of her. “Your friend lives here because she got lucky, and you’re lucky too, that we’re willing to wait so much for you, but life can’t go on like this forever. You have to find something.”

  “All right,” Amy said with a long-suffering sigh. “I’ll search for a job, Mom.”

  Chapter Six

  Meghan arrived at the greenhouse a bit late, with a latte in one hand and her phone in the other, and sighed when the warm air of it hit her. Outside was getting colder and colder and Meghan really wasn’t made for it—it made getting up to work even more awful. The coffee warmed her up, as well as the sight of Amy crouching by the strawberries.

  Meghan bounded up to her with a spring on her step, waving vaguely at the other people gathered around, and touched her shoulder. Amy turned around to her and looked up at her with a horrified expression on her face.

  “Meghan,” she said, “what did you do to these poor plants?”

  Meghan cringed, then looked at the strawberry plants. The two closest to Amy were, somehow, turning a deep brown color at the stems, like it was rotting from the bottom up. Meghan shrugged and gave Amy a thumbs up.

  “Black thumb,” she said with a shake of her head. “I told you.”

  “You killed them,” Amy said with a crestfallen expression on her face. “If you have such a black thumb, why did you sign up for this kind of thing? You aren’t secretly planning on murdering the entire greenhouse, are you?”

  “I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to water some plants!” Meghan protested. She tugged on Amy’s arm until Amy stood up, then pressed a kiss on her cheek. Amy let go of her dramatically wounded expression and smiled at her. “Besides, this can be natural selection. Only the hardiest strawberries can live.”

  “It’s not natural selection, it’s a damn extinction event,” Amy muttered.

  “Come on,” Meghan said, winding an arm around her waist and bringing her closer. Amy went easily, setting her hands on Meghan’s hips. “Stop cursing me like that or I really will end up killing everything.”

  Amy seemed distracted, not paying attention to their bickering anymore. She brought a hand up to Meghan’s face and swiped a thumb under her eyes.

  “You’re wearing make-up,” she said, “but I can still see how tired you are. Work…?”

  “Money,” Meghan said with a shrug, and it wasn’t really a correction—it was all the same. “I stayed up late yesterday doing some freelance work, trying to save some more money. The press isn’t doing so well, and, you know, I have people to pay.”

  Amy sighed, leaning forward into a hug. She hooked her chin over Meghan’s shoulder.

  “I can’t fathom having so much responsibility,” she said. “I don’t even have a dog, much less employees. And working from home really is the worst.”

  “Do you work from home?” Meghan asked, curious. Though they spoke a bit about her press, the subject never turned around to what Amy did. Her doing freelance work at home would explain how she could move to a friend’s place like this for so long with no problems.

  Amy grimaced, drawing away from her. “No, I’m, uh, in between jobs right now. I draw and sell some drawings online, but that’s not really working. It’s been a couple of months, but… eh, it’ll work out in the end. I’ll find something later. I don’t really like thinking about it. But I’ve worked from home before and it really sucks having to make your own hours. I always ended up sleeping the day away and then having to scramble up to do the day’s work at night.”

  “I like it,” Meghan said, pushing down her disappointment. Not everyone was lucky like her, she thought to herself, who had gotten help from her parents and managed to open her press. But a part of her knew that there was more to it than that—that Amy simply wasn’t driven like her, wasn’t someone who went out and got things done.

  Amy was soft. She took her time watering the plants and spoke to the neighbors and took about three naps a day, and Meghan liked that, even though she knew she would die if she tried to live like that.

  “It’s better than having to rent somewhere to be my office,” Meghan added with a smile. “Come on, show me how to water strawberries without killing them. I can see that the herbs you had been looking at are growing all over the place. You should become a gardener!”

  Amy laughed, and used her hold on Meghan’s cheek to bring her closer into a kiss.

  ***

  They left the greenhouse hand in hand when their time was up and made their way to Meghan’s apartment. She was glad then that Amy wasn’t working right now, because it meant the woman could spend more time with her, as long as she didn’t mind Meghan having to step aside to take phone calls and answer emails all the time.

  Not that Meghan arrived at home and immediately started to work.

  She took off her coat and sat down on the couch. Amy sat very close to her, their bodies touching from shoulder to knee, and Meghan smiled.

  “Hey,” she said, and before she could offer her a coffee or ask if she wanted to watch a movie, Amy surged forward and kissed her.

  Meghan relaxed into the kiss, turning so she could set her hands on Amy’s hips, sliding her fingertips under her sweater to touch the warm skin underneath. Amy shivered, hands rising to frame Meghan’s face, and Meghan shivered too—the digits were cold, even if Amy was touching her very lightly. Meghan tilted her head and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to Amy’s lips, which obediently slid apart for her.

  She was wearing that lip balm again, and it made the kiss sticky and sweet.

  Meghan swung a leg over Amy’s, moving her weight so she was straddling her lap, and let her hands wander higher on Amy’s back. They drew apart for a moment, and Meghan was so close, she could see how wide Amy’s pupils were even with how dark her eyes were. Meghan smiled.

  “Amy,” she said, “do you—”

  She was interrupted by the loud, insistent ringing of her phone. The two drew apart like they were teenagers who had just been caught doing something they shouldn’t, and though Meghan felt annoyance bloom in her chest at the interruption, she relished the sight of Amy with her face so red, looking bashful for
all that she hadn’t taken her hands from around Meghan’s neck yet.

  “Sorry, it’s probably work,” Meghan said in a low voice. “It won’t take long; I’ll tell them to fuck off.”

  Amy laughed, still too shy to look back at her face. Meghan fished her phone out of her back pocket and answered it without looking, too occupied with looking at Amy; she didn’t get up from her lap and Amy didn’t seem to want her to move.

  “Meghan Crichton,” she answered formally. “I’m sorry, but I’m busy right now. Could you call again later?”

  “You’re not getting out of talking to me now,” her father snapped.

  Meghan’s expression did the equivalent of vault doors being locked shut. She scrambled off Amy’s lap and started to pace around her living room, leaving Amy looking dumbfounded and empty-armed on the couch.

  “Dad,” Meghan said, forcing a smile onto her face. “How are you? I didn’t know it was you on the phone, or I wouldn’t have answered like that.”

  “Long time no see,” her father said pointedly instead of greeting her properly. “You said you were going to call me tomorrow weeks ago, and you haven’t been answering the phone when I call. I see now you only answered because you didn’t realize it was me!”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Meghan tried, even though it was a lie—of course she was avoiding her father’s calls.

  She turned around, a bit embarrassed that Amy was hearing this conversation.

  “Look, if this is about the money,” Meghan started, but her father interrupted her.

  “Of course it’s about the money,” he said, exasperated. “Do you think this is a joke, Meghan? I have your mother to take care of! I have your brother to take care of! I thought I could trust you, but you don’t give me updates on the situation, you don’t tell me when you’ll be able to give my money back to me, and you’ve been ignoring my calls for weeks! I don’t know what on Earth you were distracting yourself with—” Meghan glanced guiltily at Amy. “—but it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”