Worth the Wait

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  There was a round of hell yeahs and let’s get out theres.

  “She’s your type,” Alistair said under his breath.

  Sweet, asexual Alistair. Avery was never entirely sure how many of her romantic inclinations he shared. Sometimes he related. Sometimes he cocked his head with a bemused look. Now he nodded.

  “She’d be anyone’s type,” he added.

  When he was done with his announcements, Greg hurried over to Avery and Alistair.

  “Hello, loves. Are you ready? Avery, did Alistair tell you about the new property? He saw it this morning.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I was late. I was…I had a cold.”

  A cold was a lame excuse. Like she’d had a cold this morning for twenty minutes and then recovered.

  “Aw, kiddo,” Greg said in his pleasantly paternal manner. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  It felt a little sleazy lying to Greg. He knew she was gay. The crew did too. They protected her from rumors and reporters. But Greg had enough to worry about with a new house and the executive producer on set, and she wanted to keep Merritt to herself for a little longer.

  * * *

  When they neared the neighborhood, Alistair told Avery to close her eyes. He took the silk scarf from around her neck and tied it around her head.

  “I know you’ll peek.”

  “He doesn’t trust me,” she complained to Greg, who was riding in the front seat.

  “This is pretty spectacular,” Greg said. “I think this beats Austin.”

  Avery closed her eyes beneath the scarf. The houses were never her real passion. It was the cities. But Greg and Alistair’s excitement made her smile. She loved the way they all still cared. Every episode, every city, every season, every decorative flourish, and every fixed pipe made them happy, even after fifteen years. She felt the van slow to a stop. She heard the van door open. Alistair touched her arm.

  “We’re going to walk up a little flagstone path,” he said. He kept one arm around her waist. “I got you.”

  Avery remembered Merritt catching her on the stone stairs, her body lean but strong. She had lingered in that moment longer than she should have. Alistair would have said she was playing the girl card. Oh, my savior. Protect me. But she couldn’t lift her cheek from Merritt’s breast. She couldn’t pull away from the smell of Merritt’s cedar cologne. Then she’d seen herself from the outside, like a full shot. She was the plain girl from a high school dramedy; Merritt was the star quarterback. Although, now that she thought about it, those movies always turned out well for the plain girl.

  “All right.” Alistair stopped, his arm still around her waist.

  The air felt cooler. Avery smelled damp foliage and stone.

  “The resale on this place is amazing,” Alistair went on. “When we sell it, it’ll balance the budget for the season. And you will have so much room to turn it into quintessential Portland. Right now it’s Portland circa 1918, but we’ll modernize it.”

  “Okay. Okay. Can I look?” Avery asked.

  Alistair undid the knot in her scarf and swept it off her face. “Ta-da!” he said.

  Avery stumbled backward. Alistair caught her against his chest.

  “I know,” Alistair said. “It’s amazing.”

  The beautiful, weedy courtyard was already filled with equipment: disassembled scaffolding, C-stands, a portable generator. One of the sound guys was taking readings, walking around the space repeating, “Partridge. Dewar’s. Stout. Partridge. Dewar’s. Stout.” Someone was setting up a table with pizza for the crew’s walking lunch.

  Above their heads, the sky was a lonely blue.

  “We can’t buy this,” Avery whispered.

  “We already did,” Greg said. “Pam finalized the deal in the middle of the night. I don’t even know how she does it.”

  “Happy?” Alistair asked. “It’s beautiful.”

  Avery couldn’t speak. It was horrible. It was the worst thing she had ever seen. It was Merritt’s Elysium.

  Chapter 7

  That same morning, Merritt stood in the center of Hellenic Hardware, watching the water splashing in the Helen of Troy fountain, feeling sleepy in a way that didn’t need rest. Would Avery really come by? Perhaps around closing time when Merritt was the only person in the shop? Would they go up to the retrofitted office she was using as an apartment while she finalized the purchase of the Elysium? Could she take the time to offer Avery a polite cup of coffee when her whole body ached for Avery’s touch? She liked the way Avery had heard her when she’d whispered to the blank wall. Don’t forget. Girls didn’t hear her. It wasn’t volume, of course. It was something else. Merritt thought she was saying, I like you. Don’t hurt me. Please stay. Girls heard, My heart is a glacier.

  At Merritt’s side, her cochair on the Pride House board, Tate Grafton, stood with her hands in her pockets. They were organizing an end-of-summer fundraising dance, still months in the future. Hellenic Hardware would host a hipster prom for grown-ups, turning the warehouse into a wonderland of joy and, hopefully, the inclination to give large sums of money to the youth shelter.

  Tate was talking about power supplies and how they could help the Pride House kids get involved. Merritt couldn’t focus on their conversation. The memory of pleasure teased her to distraction.

  “I know it’s way too early to think about decorating,” Tate said. “We’re not putting this thing on until the last day of summer, but we’re trying to help the kids with preplanning, so do you mind if they come in here and scope things out?”

  “Of course not.”

  Eventually, Tate excused herself with a friendly, “Well, I’d better be off. You have customers.”

  Did she? Merritt hadn’t even noticed. After Tate left, Merritt took a penny out of her pocket and tossed it in the fountain. Then she sprawled across the wicker bench beneath the gazebo. She gazed up at the skylights, from where, perhaps, Uncle Oli’s ghost looked down on her. A half hour later, she was still staring at the white, wrought-iron lace of the gazebo. From the front of the store she heard a cheerful voice ring out, “Meri?” Lei-Ling stretched her name out over two long syllables.

  Merritt had long since given up telling her that no one had ever called her Meri and no one should. “Meri, I’m going to find you. Ready or not, here I come. Meri, your Realtor’s here.”

  * * *

  Merritt’s Realtor, Trisha Hayward, met her at the front of the shop.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you.” Trisha sounded tired. “I can’t sugarcoat it.”

  “Lay it on me,” Merritt said. “The inspection get held up? Title audit?” People who treated their closing date like a wedding always got disappointed. The trick was to be patient.

  “We lost the Elysium,” Trisha said.

  Merritt didn’t hear her. She was staring out the window. On Burnside, everything looked like it was moving in peaceful slow motion. She had slept with Avery! She remembered every second, and each one filled her with a kind of excitement she had made a practice of suppressing. If she saw Avery again, she would drink in Avery’s body like water. She would let Avery open her up. Merritt hadn’t let a woman go down on her in years. It was too intimate when she knew, deep in her heart, this woman, like every other one, would leave. But it would be worth it with Avery, so excruciatingly good…even if Avery was leaving in six weeks. At least Merritt knew the parameters. She knew what was coming and how soon. She imagined the exact moment when Avery’s tongue would first touch her. Avery might be inexperienced but she would be eager, and she would move her tongue up and down and across and in...

  “Merritt?” Trisha asked.

  “What?” No one was supposed to have these kinds of thoughts in front of their Realtor! “Sorry. What about the title—or was it the inspection? You were saying?”

  “I found another property I thought you might like. The neighborhood isn’t as good, and it’s more expensive, but I think the seller would negotiate.”

 
Merritt came back to the conversation like a car hitting a curb.

  “We’re closing,” she said. Suddenly Trisha’s words rang in her ear. “We were done. It’s all settled. They accepted my offer.”

  “Pending the inspection.”

  “I don’t care if the roof fell in.”

  “See, the way that works…”

  Merritt already knew. Either party could pull out because of a bad inspection, and it was up to the parties to define “bad.” The rule was there to protect the buyer, but the seller could opt out too. Then they could list the property at a higher price. It happened all the time.

  “I can up my offer,” Merritt said. “How much?”

  She would figure something out. She couldn’t lose the Elysium and the apartment Uncle Oli had rented for almost twenty years. It was the only place Merritt had ever called home. She would buy it and live there forever. She’d run Hellenic Hardware and live in Uncle Oli’s suite and wake up feeling like she belonged.

  “It’s not that,” Trisha said. “You can’t up your offer.”

  “Are they going over market value? Is it a company or private?”

  “They didn’t overbid you. I’m sorry, Merritt. We couldn’t win this one.” Trisha Hayward’s smile was on the back of every bus in Portland, but for once she wasn’t grinning. “I never saw this coming. It’s a television show. They’re offering SkyBank advertising and product placement in exchange for the Elysium. It’s going to be on some renovation-decorating show. I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

  “I don’t have a TV.”

  It was like stepping on drywall and falling straight through the floor…except more painful.

  “It’s King and Crown. They’re actually paying less than you offered.” Trisha paused. “They just came out of nowhere. Literally swept in in the middle of the night. These are real pros. The Elysium had never been listed publicly. Then there they were. We couldn’t have seen this coming.”

  Merritt looked down at her hands. They were clasped so tightly her knuckles had turned white. Avery hadn’t wanted her. Avery had distracted her.

  Chapter 8

  Merritt headed for the staircase that led to her office apartment and slammed the door. They swept in at night. Avery had seduced her so her minions could steal the Elysium. That almost made her angrier than losing the Elysium itself. The thought would have startled her if she’d had an eighth of her brain to devote to reason. She had wanted the Elysium for years! Now she just wanted her sweet memories back: Avery’s face surprised by pleasure, Avery’s arm across her chest. But they weren’t sweet memories anymore. She’d been a fool. Avery hadn’t held her. Avery had held her down, lest Merritt experience a surge of psychic power telling her to run to the Realtor’s office in the middle of the night.

  “You didn’t have to sleep with me,” she said to the empty apartment. “You could have faked an emergency. You could have had some decency and just roofied me.” She paced the room, her footsteps slamming into the floor. “How could you do it?!”

  For one sensible moment, she considered not going. Then she marched out of her bedroom and into the stifling heat of the day.

  * * *

  When she arrived at the Elysium, the street was already lined with trailers. A sawhorse bore a sign reading FILM CREW BARRICADE. THRU TRAFFIC ONLY. A security guard lingered by the trailers. A dozen men in pocketed vests hurried about. One of them broke away and came over with a clipboard in hand.

  “Are you with Warren Venner?” He looked like a kindly uncle who had suddenly been asked to appear in court.

  “I have to talk to Avery Crown.”

  “Are you with the TKO contingency? I’ll just need to get you a badge.”

  “I’m not with anyone.”

  “A fan? We love fans. But we’ve got a team of people visiting from our network. Our boss, you know.” He looked apologetic. “Avery and Alistair will be visiting with fans on July nineteenth at the Bagdad Theater. They’d love to see you then.”

  “I’m not a fan.”

  Merritt caught the man glancing at security. The kindly uncle looked like a pushover, but in that glance Merritt saw all the best contractors she had worked with. He could see the whole scene with his eyes closed. Merritt pushed past him. CROWN was written on green masking tape on one of the trailers. She pounded on the door. The security guard was at her side. He grabbed for her, but her hours in Iliana’s dojo were good for something and she slipped out of his grasp. A second later Avery opened the door, froze, her hand clutched to her chest.

  “Merritt,” she said. “I was going to come find you.”

  “Get away from her.” The guard grabbed Merritt’s shoulder.

  “I know her. I know her,” Avery said. “She’s my friend.” She pulled Merritt inside.

  “I am not your friend,” Merritt said. “How could you?”

  Inside, the trailer contained a tiny fake fireplace, a vase of fake lilies, and fake wood veneer. But the mirror was covered in real photographs, some faded, some crisp. In each picture, Avery and Alistair stood in front of a different vista, their curved fingers held together to make two sides of a heart.

  “I didn’t do it.” Avery’s words poured out. “I was going to see you. I wanted to see you. I could have died when Alistair showed me. I would never have let them buy the Elysium if I’d known. I told them we had to give it back, but I don’t have any control over anything.”

  Avery hurried to the window and closed the venetian blinds. Avery wore a ruffled white dress that looked like what the Kardashians thought people had worn on the Oregon Trail. Her hair was plaited in a beautiful wheat-sheaf down her back. She looked pretty and vulnerable. Merritt tried not to notice.

  Merritt trailed her fingers along the wood paneling. “This place is shit,” she said.

  “I had no idea. You have to believe me.”

  “Don’t even.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with the property selection,” Avery pleaded.

  “I’ve seen your show. You pick every property by hand, and then you stick a sombrero on it and pretend you understand Texas. You’re not going to make the Elysium look like Portland. You’re not going to make it better. You’re going to slap some paint up and then sell it to a developer who’ll tear it down and put up a hundred condos. You show up somewhere for two hot seconds and pretend like that means something. You don’t know anything about the places you leave. Your show is meaningless. It’s a waste.”

  It was cruel, and Merritt wasn’t a cruel person. Cold but not cruel. She’d barely even seen an episode of King & Crown. Somewhere deep inside she knew she couldn’t bear watching Avery, even after fifteen years. But sometimes it was on at the Mirage, so she understood the setup. Buy a building. Renovate a bit. Decorate with the icons of the city. Leave.

  Avery’s whole face trembled. “I love those places. That’s not what we do. We make people happy.”

  Merritt couldn’t look at Avery who was trying not to cry.

  “You have to believe me. Please, please believe me.”

  Avery touched her arm, trying to turn Merritt toward her. Merritt snatched her arm away.

  “We have an acquisitions department, and we have this woman, Pam. I don’t think anyone has ever seen her in real life. But if right now I said, ‘I wish I had a Bluetooth speaker in the shape of a bulldog,’ I would open my door and there it would be. She makes Amazon look incompetent. She buys properties and rents trailers and gets cars and vans and food and bottles of water and equipment. Sometimes she buys houses years in advance.”

  “You just bought the Elysium.”

  “There was a fire. We had to buy something on the fly.”

  “We.” Merritt felt her face twist into a knot of anger. “The Elysium wasn’t listed.”

  “Pam isn’t a mom with 2.5 kids searching on HomeFinder. I’ve been doing this show for fifteen years. I never choose a building, and I don’t care which one we work on. I would never mean to hurt you.”

&nb
sp; Outside, a man called out, “Where’s Avery? Venner wants to talk to her.”

  “I can help you buy another building.”

  “I don’t want anything you’ve touched.”

  Out of nowhere, Merritt felt a lump in her throat. She looked around the tiny room. She could smell Avery’s perfume. Merritt stepped forward. Infinitesimal particles of glitter sparkled on Avery’s cheeks. Merritt wiped the sheen with her thumb. Avery’s skin felt feverish.

  “Body glitter, really? Are we twelve? Is that the quintessential Portland?”

  “I thought it was pretty,” Avery said miserably.

  And more than half of Merritt’s soul wanted to throw her arms around Avery and hold her close. Of course it’s pretty. You’re pretty. You’re beautiful. You can cover me in glitter. Just don’t cry. Avery was so beautiful. Merritt’s body was a traitor. She wanted to wipe away the gloss on Avery’s lips. She wanted to kiss the tears that slid down her cheeks. Even now. As soon as Avery had left the Jupiter Hotel, Merritt had gone to the window and watched her Uber pulling away, consumed with tenderness and worry for every possible thing that might happen to Avery. Now she was the thing that was happening to Avery. Avery’s face tightened, and she took a couple quick, sharp breaths. Then something in her seemed to break. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but her tears flowed freely. But these tears were a ruse.

  Outside a man said, “Lock it up. We’re filming in two.”

  “What would you do if I walked out there and told all your precious producers we were fucking?” Merritt said. “What if I say, ‘Avery is my lover. We just had sex. Take a DNA swab. She’s all over me.’”

  “You can’t. The crew knows and Greg, but not the Portland hires and not the new guy from L.A.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  Even as she said it, Merritt knew she wouldn’t. She was so angry. And Avery was so wrong. But she could imagine Avery crumpling to the ground outside her trailer as her life crumbled around her. She could imagine Avery sobbing into her folded knees. Despite everything that had happened, Merritt knew she couldn’t do that to Avery.