My body’s arousal fades away as I fake-cough and sleepily open my eyes, blinking up at Juliette’s pale, heart-shaped face.
What’s that saying? Never kid a kidder? The smirk on Juliette’s red, red lips assures me that my amateur acting is not fooling her for a second, so I sit up and regard her with narrowed, accusing eyes. “What are you doing here? I told you—”
“I’m so sorry to wake you,” she simpers, smoothing strands of damp hair back from my perspiring forehead, “and I know you wanted some…ahem…alone time…” She glances over her shoulder, blue gaze flicking toward Ash, who’s leaning against the doorframe wearing an odd expression. “But I was taking out the trash—you know, like I always do on Thursday nights—and M.L. just slipped right past my legs. Disappeared. I looked all over for her, called her name, but she’s black, and it’s dark out… I thought she might come out for you if—”
“You let my cat outside?” I seethe, dropping the tired act altogether and flinging back the covers to stand before Juliette face to face. “Do you know how dangerous the road is in front of the house? There’s constant traffic! And no one would ever see her if—”
“I know. That’s why I came to fetch you.” Juliette’s eyes are so cold that I shiver, wrapping my hands around my arms. “Good thing I’m a great guesser. Figured you’d be here with…” She cocks her head, still glaring at me. “What did you say your name is again, sweetheart?” she asks Ash, without turning to look in her direction.
“I didn’t say,” Ash tells her, crossing her arms over her chest. She gives me a questioning look, one brow raised, but I only shake my head, pushing past Juliette.
“Ash, I’ve got to—”
“I’ll help you.”
“Thanks. Come on.” I start to take her hand, but then I remember Juliette and sigh so hard that my hair flutters around my face. Sick with worry for M.L., I march out of the cabin and run toward the house, dimly aware of Ash beside me and Juliette following close behind.
---
It takes all of two minutes to find M.L. crouching in the shadows next to the shed in the backyard. She mews at me, stretching her upper body as if she was only out for an evening stroll. But once I pick her up, she clings to my bare shoulders so desperately that her claws draw blood, even as she begins to purr.
I wince but stroke her back and whisper soothing words, wondering vaguely if I’ll survive the rest of the night without requiring a blood transfusion.
“Is she okay?” Ash asks me, appearing at my side, her face shadowed and drawn with concern. “Any injuries? There must be a 24-hour vet around here somewhere. I could look it up on my phone—”
“No, no,” I whisper, after conducting a thorough inspection to make certain that M.L.’s limbs are intact. “I think all she’s wounded is her pride. Doesn’t want it to get around the neighborhood that she’s a scaredy cat at heart. Promise not to tell?”
Ash gazes deeply into my eyes, effectively turning my legs into cooked spaghetti noodles—and making me long for her mouth, her hands, the sensation of her beautiful body moving against mine...
“I promise,” she says, her voice warm as she offers me a small, sideways smile.
I swallow, shivering despite the heat. “Good. See, M.L.? Your reputation is secured. Now let’s get you back inside and—”
“Oh, the poor baby!” In one movement, Juliette wraps her right arm around my shoulders and uses her other hand to delicately pat M.L.’s head. “Oh, she looks so scared, like a frightened little kitten! Oh, remember when she was a kitten, Mol? Small enough to fit in our palms? I used to slip her catnip under the table while we ate breakfast.”
“Yeah…” I laugh, despite myself. “She would roll around all over our feet, high on ‘nip, batting at imaginary foes…”
“And she was so smart. We sang her that song—”
“Oh, how did it go?”
Then I remember, and Juliette and I sing the revised lyric from Cats together, in faux-British, trilling voices: “Was there ever a cat so clever as magical Miss Mona Li-i-isa…?” I move M.L.’s paws along with the beat—much to her mewling, feline chagrin.
“Come on, Grumpy Girl,” Juliette laughs, urging me around the house, toward the front door. “Hey, I picked up some milk this morning. What do you say we give her a bit as a treat? I know it isn’t good for cats, but it’s a special occasion, and I feel so terrible that I let her out…”
“All right,” I murmur, but I’m hardly paying attention, because Ash has begun walking toward the cottage, head bowed low. Her long silhouette pauses, then, as if she feels me watching her, and she glances back to give a short wave. But she moves on, doesn’t speak, doesn’t look my way again.
I open my mouth to call out to her, to ask her to come back, to come in, but before I can make a sound, the darkness swallows her whole, and M.L. yowls against me, her claws digging deeper into my skin.
“Okay, okay,” I whisper into her soft ear, sighing. “I know. Fun’s over. Time to go home.”
---
“Oh, my God. Slowest day ever,” Georgie moans when I stop into the break room to refill my coffee mug.
“I hear you.” The dark brown liquid sloshes up to the rim, and I scoop in one spoonful of sugar, pause for a moment, and then scoop in two more. “Oh, what the heck…” I pour the remaining contents of the sugar bowl into my mug, and the sugar-coffee mixture overflows onto the countertop, dripping over the side. I grab the dishrag to mop up the mess.
“Gross.” Georgie, seated at the little table beside the fridge, makes a gagging sound. “Why even bother with coffee if you’re going to do that?”
“Coffee is just an excuse to drink sugar. Didn’t you know?” I say, deadpan, taking a long, too-sweet swig. Truthfully, I love my coffee black as pitch. But I could use a serious sugar rush right now. I hardly slept last night, given the circumstances, and as the hours have passed by this morning and afternoon, my spirits have sunk lower and lower…because Ash isn’t answering her phone, and I can’t stop by the cottage until after work.
I down six more cups of sugar-coffee and am as jittery as a wind-up toy by the time the hour hand finally strokes five o’clock.
There’s a pulse-pounding moment on the highway when I realize that I’m speeding twenty miles over the limit—and of course there’s a cop right on my tail. But the cop never flashes his lights; he turns into the Bread Basket parking lot, instead, and I breathe a sigh of relief and offer a prayer of gratitude to whichever deity was looking out for me. In a matter of minutes, I’m pulling into my driveway, and the irritable tires spit out gravel until I brake beside Ash’s cottage in the woods.
I sit in the car for a moment, straightening my tie and smoothing my hair back into a loose ponytail. I had texted a message to Ash earlier in the day to ask her whether it would be all right for me to stop by, but she never responded—tripling my anxiety over my two unanswered calls.
Maybe she’s upset about Juliette’s interruption last night. But M.L. was in danger. It doesn’t seem like Ash to hold a grudge…
I chew on my thumbnail, eying the purple-and-silver bike leaning against the side of the cottage. If Xena’s here, Ash is probably here, too.
Inhaling quickly, I step out of my Volkswagen, walk around the bumper, and then raise my hand to knock on the front door.
But it swings open before my knuckles make contact.
“Ash!”
“Molly.” She looks into my eyes briefly, grey graze flashing, and then glances away, toward the trees. “Hi. I heard your car, so I…” Her shoulders rise and fall in a sigh, and her mouth slants into an uncharacteristic frown. She sighs again.
I watch her, agony mounting, and bite my lip. “So you came out to meet me?”
“Mm.” She shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other and crosses her arms over her chest. Her forehead is deeply furrowed, as if she’s worried about something, or angry… “Juliette…” She scowls, head hanging. “Molly, I just don’t know—”
“
Ash, I’m really sorry about last night. I mean, world’s worst timing, right? But M.L.’s a sweet girl, really. I’m sure you’ll love her once you get the chance to—”
“Listen, let’s not…” She shakes her head and points her gaze up toward the sultry sky. Then, closing her eyes, I watch as she slides one hand into her jeans pocket and produces a single key, which she presses into my palm. She gives me a sharp look—but what does it mean?!—and then she crosses her arms again.
“What’s this?” I ask her, dreading the answer, because I think I recognize the key. I think it’s the key to the cottage.
And just like that, the Anxiety Olympics are in back in action: every single event culminates at once—tennis balls and javelins and ski poles flying through the air, jabbing my liver and slicing into my intestines, bruising my stomach lining from the inside out.
Exhaling heavily, Ash kicks the door open wider and gestures behind her, revealing the piles of canvases and suitcases at her back. “I made some calls. Found a ride out of town.”
“But, Ash, what… I thought…” A sob claws at my throat, but I choke it down, blinking back tears. “Ash, are you—”
“Yeah.” She meets my gaze, and her lovely grey eyes, hard as steel now, flicker with grim determination. “I’m leaving.”
Part Three: The Art of Second Chances
Time stands still.
My heart doesn’t beat; my lungs produce no air.
And I realize—numbly, distantly, as if I am someone other than myself—that I don’t feel any pain.
Not yet.
I read an article in the newspaper about a moment like this. A local man, a volunteer firefighter, went skydiving a couple of months ago. He had completed the training, read all of the safety literature. So he knew what it meant when he leapt from the plane and pulled his parachute cord and nothing happened. He knew that it meant his equipment had failed, meant that he was freefalling, hurtling at a deadly speed toward the Great Lake far too many miles below.
He knew that he would probably die, that he might have only seconds to live.
But the thing about his story that stood out to me, that lodged itself into my memory, was that he told the newspaper reporter that those seconds, potentially his last seconds on Earth, felt like hours—or even years. He felt as if he were simply hovering, motionless, while the rest of the world rushed by him. He had all the time he could ever want to consider his life, his loves, his victories and his regrets… He felt as if he had forever.
Time is relative, Einstein said.
Because the firefighter didn’t have forever. He tore down through the air and crashed into the water and broke most of the bones in his body—though, luckily, not his neck or his spine.
Now he’s begun his recovery, but as his bones mend and the trauma ebbs, he was quoted as saying that he still can’t stop thinking about that frozen moment in which he had both all time and no time at all.
It taught him to cherish every second, to take no heartbeat or breath for granted, to treat every sliver of time as if it might be his very last.
I stare at Ash now, my face rigid, my whole being as still as a statue, and feel a similar sense of timelessness: the entirety of my life on pause. No, stopped.
Waiting.
Her words—I’m leaving—sounded final. Like a crash landing sans parachute.
Still…maybe she only meant that she had got a ride so that she could run some errands, see a movie, check out a bike path in another town. Maybe she didn’t mean I’m leaving so much as See you in an hour or two. I’ll be right back.
Au revoir, not adieu.
But then she looks away.
And then she sighs.
And then she rakes a hand back through her short brown hair and says, “I have to go.”
And my internal second hand starts ticking again, and the pain, undammed, fills my chest with a rush that steals my breath before I even have the chance to draw it in, and squeezes my heart until tears leak from the corners of my stinging eyes.
She’s leaving, really leaving.
And I don’t know why.
“You…” I whisper, because it’s all I can bring myself to say, to think. Maybe it’s the only word I know, or the only one that matters—that one small word that contains an infinity: you.
Ash stares down at her feet, at our feet together—hers clad in purple high-top sneakers, mine in matte black flats. “Molly, it’s just that…I’ve been through this sort of thing before. And it never ends well. For anyone.” She exhales heavily and licks her lips, and I remember how those lips tasted, how they felt at my ear and upon my neck…
Then she shifts her stone-grey gaze—up, up, tracing the full length of me, lingering for a breathless moment upon my mouth—until her eyes, dark as storm clouds, confront mine.
I tilt toward her, closer now but afraid to touch her, and too confused to speak.
“I’m sorry,” she says. One hand lifts at her side, moves toward my face, poised to cup my cheek. But then her arm sags, falls back, and she shakes her head, turning around to look toward her paintings and her luggage—assembled so neatly, so readily, as if she gave the issue very careful consideration and has, against all arguments, made up her mind.
Irrevocably.
Snap out of it, Molly. Do something.
I swipe at my eyes with the back of my hand; then I ball my fists and take some deep breaths. I may not know what Ash is thinking, why she has, literally, turned her back on me, but I do know what I am thinking: this isn’t supposed to happen.
This—her leaving—was never meant to be.
All along, Ash has insisted that fate brought us together, that our collision of a meeting wasn’t a simple whim of chance. And all along, I have resisted her New-Agey hypothesis.
But deep down, I feel—no, I know that she’s right. She has to be right. Because I’m drawn to Ash in a way that I can’t explain, that can’t be explained. I have known her for less than a week, and I’m half in love with her.
More than half.
And, honestly, that scares me to death.
My heart is a patched-together Frankenstein’s monster, a fragile mess of masking tape and staples and hot glue. I don’t know if it’s strong enough to survive another romance, let alone brave the risk of heartbreak… But the other option—losing Ash before we attempt to become a we—is a choice too painful to contemplate; it feels like giving up.
It feels like sitting upon a stool and staring at the cinders and never wishing, never believing in an ever after at all.
Resolved, I set my jaw and suck in another deep, terrifying breath of humid air.
I will not be a Cinderella, not here, not now. Not with her.
“Ash?”
Ash strides further into the room and slings a green knapsack over her shoulder; then, straightening, she peers back at me. Her brows are lifted high, her lips a sad, thin line. She doesn’t speak, only watches me expectantly—watches my mouth with her hooded, shadowy gaze.
I step forward and, heart in my throat, enclose one of her hands with both of mine. She’s warm, but I’m shaking, head to toe, and when I speak, my voice is shaking, too: “Ash, I—”
“Oh, Molly! Baby! I thought I heard your voice out here!”
I drop Ash’s hand, and my heart leaps from my throat and straight out of my mouth, flailing helplessly at my feet like some kind of gross dying fish—or it would do that, if my life were a cartoon or a surreal music video from the ‘80s.
Both of which would be somehow fitting.
In reality, though, I simply freeze in place and gape at the blonde woman posing in the kitchen doorway: she looks more like a pin-up watercolor than a living, breathing human: blue eyes saucer-wide, one high heel kicked up behind her, her mouth a perfect red O of shock. She’s wearing a sparkly swimsuit, of all things, a one-piece faux-vintage number in patriotic red, white and blue sequined stripes.
A distant part of my brain makes the wry observation that Juliette’s
current outfit would qualify as the most presentable clothing she’s worn since her arrival.
But my more burning thought—
OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod! WhatthehellisJuliettedoinginAsh’scottage?!
—is not so much wry as deer-in-the-headlights panicked. If I was tongue-tied before, I’m tongueless now.
Dimly, I become aware of the sound of tires crunching on gravel beyond the open front door, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the Ziegfeld Follies-esque spectacle that is Juliette. Her yellow hair is tightly curled around her face, and her skin twinkles with a golden sheen, as if she’s coated herself in glitter.
She probably has.
“Baby, don’t worry—I’ll have dinner on the table in a wink.”
“Dinner?” I feel like I’ve slipped into an alternate dimension. Any moment now, Rod Serling is going to step out of the shadows and begin a soliloquy: Normal, Michigan. Molly Mason just arrived home from work, eager to ravish her next-door neighbor Ash, but Ash appears to have become a different person overnight. When Molly’s ex-girlfriend Juliette appears dressed as an American flag, Molly knows there is only one explanation—all is not normal in Normal, because Molly’s just stepped into…The Twilight Zone.
I gape at Juliette, stammering, “What are you—”
“Hey, I’ve got great news!” Juliette slinks into the living room, making a show of winking one long-lashed, cornflower blue eye at me, and her arms stretch out until her hands clasp around my wrists. She bows her head impishly, nodding toward her bizarre, gleaming attire. “You’re looking at the lead in State’s production of Bathing Beauties Live! I auditioned this morning at the campus theater, and they panted after me like dogs in heat, begging me to sign on for the whole tour. Five locations in Michigan, Mol, including Detroit next spring. Wardrobe already fitted me for one of the costumes, see?”
“I see,” I murmur through gritted teeth, trying to loose my wrists from her grasp, but her fingers tighten and begin to tug. “Juliette, let go—”
“’Scuse us, Ash,” she says, pulling me toward the open doorway of Ash’s bedroom. “All right if we step in here for a minute? Mol and I need to have some girl talk, if you know what I mean. Get all our little ducks in a row.”
Drawn to You Page 14