Her mom found her in the kitchen over a cup of hot chocolate, brooding and staring into the steaming, chocolate froth.
“Lovely morning out there, isn’t it? Ooh, that looks good.” Suzanne set the kettle back to boiling and spooned some hot chocolate powder into another mug. “You know, honey, you really shouldn’t look this miserable on a perfect winter day like this.”
“I’m not.”
“Could have fooled me. Listen, why don’t you ask your friend Vic over for Christmas dinner?”
“Can’t. She has to work. But thanks.”
“All right. Then how about for Christmas Eve?”
Angie felt the familiar tickle in her stomach whenever she thought of Vic. “I…we, ah, have plans, actually.”
“Are you…you mean a date?”
“Yes. A date.”
Suzanne lit up like it was already Christmas morning. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy for you. I like her, she seems lovely. So why the long face?”
“I don’t think I want to talk about this.” With you. She’d never been one to confide in her mother about past relationships. Before Brooke there hadn’t been anyone too serious, and Brooke, well, hadn’t exactly been popular with her family.
Suzanne poured boiling water into her mug, stirred in some milk and promptly ignored Angie’s comment. “Is it her link to Brooke and that whole sordid mess that makes you uncomfortable?”
“No, Ma. It wasn’t Vic’s fault that any of that happened.”
“All right, then what?”
I have a shrink, she wanted to say, but didn’t. Families were funny. There was that bond of unconditional love, of shared experiences, but for Angie anyway, confiding very personal things to her family didn’t come easy. It was all part of not letting people in, she supposed, and bit the inside of her cheek. Melanie told her to start with small steps. Maybe this was one of them.
“It’s just…well, you and Dad have always had a good relationship. And even Nicky seems to have managed it.” Nick, who used to chase the neighborhood girls with a freshly caught snake or frog dangling from his hand and who once got grounded for a month because he’d pranked a girl into believing his best friend had a crush on her. How the hell did Nick end up with someone as awesome as Claire?
“And you don’t think you can.”
Angie’s gaze drifted to the snow-covered vineyards outside. Her next day off, she’d drag out her snowshoes and do a circuit around the property. “I don’t know. It seems not, up to this point.”
“Look, I’m going to say this to you once.” Suzanne’s voice hardened into a tone Angie remembered well from childhood, like the time she and Nick had wrestled so intensely that they’d broken a chair. “You can do anything you set your mind to. We’ve always raised you two that way. And that includes a loving relationship, if that’s what you want. So stop acting like it’s something that’s just going to drop into your lap out of a clear blue sky. Like it’s winning the lottery or something. Love happens to people who go for that brass ring and grab onto to it for all they’re worth.”
Angie’s spirits plummeted further. “I don’t know what to do.” And I’m not sure I’d recognize this brass ring she’s talking about.
“First thing is, you find a good woman. Maybe you already have. Then you take a chance, you surrender yourself. And lastly, you hang on like hell and don’t let go.”
Angie shook her head, unable to subscribe to such a simplistic view. “That’s all there is to it, huh?”
“Yes. It’s easy, the simplest thing at first. And then it’s the hardest thing ever. You’ve got to fight for what you want, Ange, and then you’ve got to fight like hell to keep it. I’d have put money on Nicky as the quitter in this family, not you.”
Her mother’s words stung, but were by no means a knockout blow. “Who says I’m quitting anything?”
Chapter Eighteen
Vic had set about the task of cooking a turkey like she was on the path of discovering a cure for a rare disease. She consulted a handful of cookbooks and about twenty foodie websites (and placed an emergency phone call to Olivia) before settling on a method that included garlic, olive oil, and fresh sprigs of rosemary and thyme. By the time Angie showed up with a bouquet of flowers, two chilled bottles of chardonnay and a wrapped box, Vic had to admit the house smelled divine.
“Smells wonderful in here,” Angie said in the kitchen, breathing in deeply before kissing her on the lips. “You smell wonderful too.” She nuzzled Vic’s neck.
“You mean I smell like a turkey.”
“Well, it’s true you do smell good enough to eat.”
The glint in Angie’s eyes made something melt inside Vic. “I think I’d smell much better after a quick shower. Why don’t you start a fire and find some music to play? I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
“All right, but at ten minutes and one second, I’m coming up to find you if you’re not down.”
Vic kissed Angie. A deep, sizzling kiss full of the kind of promise she wasn’t entirely sure she meant. “Don’t tempt me,” she mumbled before racing off. She loved it when they flirted, loved how it set her heart thumping in her chest and, most often, the accompanying pulse between her legs.
But the thought of their words turning into action both scared the hell out of her and set her blood on fire. Karen had been her only lover in more than a decade, and sex between them the last couple of years had grown predictable, bromidic, increasingly rare. She feared she would disappoint Angie in the bedroom (if it ever came to that). The last time she’d gone through all the drama of dating and should they/shouldn’t they have sex, she’d had no baggage, nothing to stop her from diving headlong into an affair and nothing to cause her to fear sex. Now she felt like a virgin and a dried-up old prune at the same time. It’s just stupid, baseless fears, she tried to tell herself by way of expelling the pressure, the doubts. The times she let her mind wander without reservation, she could imagine Angie’s mouth on her breasts, Angie’s fingers dancing over her, inside her, and in those moments, she wanted nothing more.
By the time she returned downstairs, a glass of chardonnay was waiting for her and Christmas jazz music burbled softly from the stereo. Rosemary Clooney at the moment.
“I didn’t know if you owned any Christmas CDs,” Angie said. “So I brought a couple of mixes I made up. Hope you don’t mind.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” She couldn’t remember the last time a woman had spoiled her this way.
Angie pulled Vic down to the sofa with her. Sitting so close, sipping wine… It felt like something they’d done a thousand times before. “What I haven’t thought of, I’m counting on my imagination to figure out.”
Angie leaned close and kissed her, slow and deep, a hand resting lightly on her thigh, the other arm loosely circling her shoulders.
“I’m very interested,” Vic said as Angie’s lips moved to her throat, “in what your imagination is rustling up.”
“Are you now?”
Angie’s lips trailed along Vic’s jaw, and Vic’s eyelids fluttered shut. The touch of Angie’s lips, of fingers that had moved up another inch along her thigh, heated her from the inside. She’d not expected to become this aroused, this hollowed out with desire, so quickly. If she didn’t slam on the brakes and soon, her last shred of resistance would be gone.
Roughly, she whispered, “Ange, you don’t know what you’re doing to me.”
“But I haven’t even told you what I want to do to you. Let’s see.” Her tongue, wet and warm, tickled Vic’s earlobe. “I’d unbutton your blouse. Slowly. And I’d lick where each button exposed skin.”
“Dear God,” Vic breathed.
“I’d put my hands on your waist, feel the soft skin of your abdomen.” Her mouth moved to Vic’s other ear. “With my fingertips, I’d trace your nipples through your bra, feel them harden beneath my thumbs.”
“Please, you have to stop.” Vic pulled away slightly as heat rolled through her body.
Her breath came short and quick, and she feared she’d actually come if Angie said one more thing or moved her hand up her leg one more inch. “The…the turkey, I need to check on it. It…I don’t want it to burn.”
A smile, smug with victory. “Let me help.”
“No!” Her breath still ragged, Vic jumped up and held up a hand to keep Angie from getting up and following her. She knew exactly the kind of help Angie was proposing—backing her against the stove and kissing her senseless. “Stay there and enjoy your wine. I’ll be back in a minute. Maybe, um, you could add another log to the fire.”
“All right. And Vic?”
“Yes?”
“You’re awfully cute when you’re nervous.”
* * *
The turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and all the trimmings, was almost as good as Angie’s mother’s, and that was saying a lot. She raised her glass of wine to salute Vic. “To the chef. I didn’t know you were such a good cook. Dinner was absolutely incredible.”
“I’m not really, but thank you. I researched it and simply followed a good recipe.”
“Well, however you did it, it was amazing. You’re amazing.”
Vic blushed; she was so adorable when she did. Angie knew that her attraction to her, her admiration for her, the vividness and force of falling in love with this woman, should be making her nervous. It was all happening so fast, so unexpectedly. Instead all she felt was strangely calm. Vic was someone worth fighting for, that much couldn’t be clearer. The trick was figuring out how to fight her own insecurities, to fight the feeling that she didn’t deserve someone as good as Vic. That she didn’t deserve this kind of happiness. She knew how to romance a woman, but she had yet to figure out how to actually abandon herself to one.
“I’m glad it pleased you. Tea? Coffee? Or more wine?”
“More wine please. And more you.” There was that blush again that shot a streak of arousal right down to Angie’s toes. “Come on,” she said, rising from the table. “Let’s go into the living room. I have a present for you.”
“All right. But I have one for you too. I’ll meet you there.”
When Vic returned she was carrying a rather large box and a heavy one at that, judging by the way she struggled with it. She set it down with a thump on the coffee table.
“You first,” Angie said, handing the much smaller wrapped gift to Vic. She felt suddenly inadequate about it; it was so much smaller than whatever Vic had bought her.
“All right.” Delicately, Vic pulled the paper away. When she saw what was inside, her eyes grew wide and her smile nearly swallowed her face. “Wow. To Kill A Mockingbird.” She flipped to the inside page of the book. “Oh my God, it’s a first edition. Angie, you shouldn’t have.”
“Yes, I should have. Do you like it?”
“Do I like it? It’s my favorite book ever. And you remembered that it was, which means even more to me.”
Her eyes brimmed with moisture, but she sprang quickly up from the sofa to put the book onto the built-in shelf beside the fireplace, displaying it by leaving its cover facing forward. “It never occurred to me to try to find a first edition of it. Wait. That antique shop in Charlevoix?”
“Yup. That’s why I sent you away, so I could buy it and sneak it into my knapsack in the car.”
Vic laughed. “That’s some store. Your gift is from there too.”
“You mean this big box? How did you manage that without me seeing it?”
“When you went for a walk down the street, I saw you duck into that outdoor clothing store, so I quickly stashed it in the trunk.”
“Now I’m dying to know what it is.”
“Go for it.”
Angie tore at the paper rather indelicately. It was some kind of hard, black case.
“There’s a latch on it,” Vic said. “Open it.”
Angie did and slowly raised the lid. It was a typewriter. A very black, very old portable typewriter that, despite its age, somehow managed to gleam and look perfect. The keys were small and round and made of glass. Angie had only seen such a thing in magazines and old movies.
“Holy shit, Vic. This thing is amazing!” She ran her hands over it. It was smooth, delicate, and yet indestructible. She lightly pressed a key, then another one. “The keys even work! How old is it?”
“They assured me it works perfectly. It’s a 1937 Underwood. It’s what every writer needs in her office as a muse.”
“It’s beautiful, Vic.” It was the stuff of legends, or at least, the tool of legendary writers such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell and Patricia Highsmith. It was humbling to think they wrote entire novels on these contraptions. “I don’t know that I deserve this. I’m not really a writer yet.”
Vic touched her hand. “Nonsense. Published or not, you’re a writer, my dear.”
Tears pricked the back of Angie’s eyes. God, she was becoming such a crybaby lately. “I’m going to write a story on this thing, even if it takes me a month to type it out.” She thought about the one she was currently writing, about a mother who tries to overcome the guilt of seeing her young child hit by a car. It was material that had come directly from her job, a job that injected her into peoples’ lives at some of the most difficult and horrifying times. Venting that emotion onto a page felt gloriously liberating—a vindication of sorts.
“Good. That gives me a really nice image to visualize. Wait. You’re not going to do it with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and a glass of scotch beside you, are you?”
“I don’t know. If I do, will it make me a famous writer?”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“Come here.”
Vic nestled into her shoulder, her presence there feeling so right, so perfect. The air crackled with something at once untroubled and turbulent, peaceful yet incendiary—layers unseen but felt. The smallest fissure had begun opening in her heart, Angie could tell. She was letting this woman in, and it felt…strange yet exquisite. Perhaps it was the perfectness of it that was the strange part, because it had never felt this right, this complete, this easy with another woman before.
“Vic?” she said softly as the opening scene of It’s a Wonderful Life began playing on the television. “Do you mind if I just hold you like this a while before I go?”
Vic turned her face to her. “I’d like nothing better.”
Chapter Nineteen
Vic couldn’t remember a busier Christmas holiday, between working so many hours and then squeezing in dates with Angie. Mostly it was just a quick meal sandwiched between one or the other’s shifts. But now it was New Year’s Eve, and finally they were both off for the night. Olivia and her partner, Beth, had organized a private party at a golf course on the outskirts of town. It was invitation only, mostly people from the hospital and from the museum, where Beth worked. It was a mixed group of men and women, gay and straight, and the vibe was friendly and relaxed.
A buffet table featured everything from shrimp and cheese to fruit kebobs, while the cash bar served six different wines, four kinds of beer, two ciders, and ran the gamut of cocktails. No one was feeling any pain by the time the music started.
“Is your dance card free?” Angie said to her, holding out her hand. A slow song was playing: “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago.
“Boy, that’s an oldie,” Vic said, stepping into Angie’s arms. She liked how strong they felt around her.
“I didn’t mean to pick something so depressing.”
“I’ve never really listened to the words before, but you’re right. It is depressing!”
Angie’s arms stiffened a little. “You know something? I’m always scared that when anything good comes along, I’m going to lose it. So maybe the song’s appropriate.”
“I know what you mean. I never worried much about loss before. I was young when my mom and I became estranged, and when you’re young, you bounce back. You figure there’s lots more tomorrows, lots more victories on the horizon, that you can conquer
anything. Now I know different.” More collateral damage from their exes. It was like finding debris from a terrible storm weeks or months afterward. And suddenly, Vic didn’t want to talk about it. Not tonight. “Liv and Beth sure know how to throw a party, don’t they?”
“They do. Everyone’s having a good time. But if I’m honest, I can’t wait to get you alone.”
They’d not spent any time alone since Christmas Eve, in private. “It’s a bit early to leave.” It wasn’t even close to the midnight countdown yet, but Angie was right. Time alone seemed suddenly to trump everything else, and a small glow began to throb from deep in her stomach. “I did happen to notice the coatroom is, um, pretty isolated.”
Angie growled softly in her ear. “Let’s go. If I don’t kiss you, I’m going to die.”
The coats smelled faintly of aftershave, perfume, and cigarette smoke. Against a Canada Goose parka, Angie cupped her face gently and placed her mouth against hers in a kiss that Vic could only describe as tender. Angie had the softest lips, a mouth of velvet that Vic couldn’t get enough of. Their kissing had a nourishing effect on her, a restoration of some kind of life force in her that too often trickled out after a long or difficult shift at work or if she let in reminders of her failed marriage.
“God, you feel good,” Angie said, sliding her hands up Vic’s side.
“So do you.” Vic smiled against Angie’s lips, slid her own fingers along Angie’s biceps. She was wearing a crisp white tuxedo shirt that showed off her arms and shoulders. It would be so easy to demand more; she was fairly certain Angie would comply if she wanted to take things to the next level right here, right now or later tonight, back at Vic’s house. But something held her back. Not a lack of attraction, that certainly wasn’t it. She respected Angie, loved talking to her and spending time with her. Her heart lifted every time she thought of her or saw her. But dammit, Karen’s ghost still sometimes stalked the halls of her heart. Which she hated. And which seemed worse now that Karen had been texting her almost every day for the last two weeks, asking to see her. So far, Vic had ignored her, but eventually she was going to have to acknowledge the texts, since there was no indication Karen was going to let up.
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