Worth the Wait

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  “Is it that bad to be a lesbian on TV?” Merritt asked.

  “It’s bad to betray your viewers’ trust.”

  They passed an empty playground. Tetherball chains clanged against their poles.

  “Do you hate me?” Merritt asked.

  “I should.”

  Alistair took up too much space on the sidewalk. Merritt kept edging onto the dried grass and cracked cement lots that lined the street.

  “Whatever you do to Avery, you do to me,” he said.

  That was not technically true, but like the kale, Merritt did not clarify the point.

  “And the crew. They don’t have families most of them. We’re family. They’ve passed that up so they could have this. And you…you get a few weeks of fun. At what expense?”

  My heart. My peaceful life, Merritt thought. The hope that someone would love me enough to stay.

  Alistair was about to start in again.

  “I want you to hate me,” Merritt said.

  Alistair slowed his stride.

  “I want Avery to have a friend who loves her most of all,” Merritt said. “Back in the day, I thought it was going to be me, and it wasn’t. But I want her to have a friend who hates anyone who could hurt her.”

  “You care about her. So leave her.”

  “She’s leaving me,” Merritt said.

  “I know. Of course she is. I mean, will you leave her alone this summer? We’ve basically got two weeks left. If you back off now, she gets out okay.”

  Merritt stopped. Traffic rushed by in a spray of dust and exhaust. A bus braked loudly. Some wilted riders stepped inside. There was a right choice. There had been ever since she’d walked into the Vale reunion. No, I won’t sleep with you. No, I won’t sleep with you again. (Wasn’t that how good choices went? They were hard to make the first time.) Now the good choice was, Yes, I’ll leave Avery alone. What were a few days in a prolonged one-night stand?

  They were everything.

  “No,” Merritt said.

  Alistair glared at her. She held her ground, her eyes never wavering from his.

  “I want to be with her for fourteen more days.” I want to be with her…forever. “I’ll be careful, but I won’t make decisions for her. And you shouldn’t have talked to me like this. You’re her friend. You said she was happy. How can you go behind her back and tell me to leave?”

  Alistair’s eyes seemed to bore into her soul.

  Finally, he nodded grudgingly. A little bit of the cute, paint-can Alistair crept back into his face. “I’m trying to hate you,” he said, “but I know you’re right.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and walked back to the set too fast for Merritt to keep up without jogging.

  Chapter 25

  A few days later Avery watched Greg pace around the Elysium’s front unit.

  “We need to tear out some dry rot! We need carpet. We need mantels,” he said. “How have we spent so much time outside?”

  It was a familiar grievance. Outside shots took longer. The light was tricky. The city was full of difficult sounds. Every filming season ended with Greg saying, Inside. Inside. This is a home show.

  “We got lost in this city!” he said.

  Didn’t Avery know it! It was like Portland had gotten bigger and bigger the more time she spent with Merritt. She wanted to explore every dive bar, every restaurant, every park. And she wanted to lay on the grass beneath the Saint Johns Bridge forever.

  “We have twelve days,” Greg said. “Let’s get some carpet down now.”

  Avery hadn’t seen Merritt the night before. She and Alistair had taken a quick flight up to Seattle so they could give a two-minute speech to executives from Amazon. Now she was filming laying the carpet while Merritt was downstairs actually repairing cracks in the brick mortar.

  The crew moved into the hallway. Avery and Alistair positioned themselves behind a role of green grass-like carpet. Greg had liked the idea, and it was removable. Almost everything was. Avery had made sure. The bedroom rested in the shadow of iridescent curtains. The walls were covered in velvet art depicting Portland scenes: Saint Johns Bridge, a rose for the Rose City, the Voodoo Doughnuts logo. Filament lamps danced in the corners. In the bathroom, they had replaced the clawfoot tub with a clear plexiglass wading pool, but Avery had arranged for the contractor to take the tub back to Hellenic Hardware. Sconces on the hall held curio art pieces, like friendlier versions of the exhibits in the Peculiarium, but she’d fixed the old light sockets so as not to disturb the wallpaper.

  Avery and Alistair pushed the carpet roll. It was supposed to unfurl in one swoop, but it hit the wall midway down the hall. They tried again.

  On the seventh try, Greg exclaimed, “Merritt could do this. Avery, look excited.”

  Avery grinned.

  “That says serial killer. Look at Alistair. He’s just unrolling the carpet with joy.”

  She tried again. This time the carpet rolled perfectly, but Greg protested, “Now you’re making love to it.”

  Avery imagined Merritt’s legs spread open before her, how the muscles in her thighs tightened as she reached climax. It was nothing like unrolling carpet.

  “Simple. Carpet. Joy. It’s not that hard,” Greg said.

  Everyone knew they could set a production schedule by Greg’s aggravation. A little panic as they landed in each new city. Several weeks of perfect calm. A bout of frustration as the last outdoor shots wrapped up and they realized, as they always did, that they had neglected the inside of the building. Then a fatherly calm as they glided—or, more likely, ran—over their finish line. No one took his outbursts seriously, but today his words stung.

  Avery’s mother had called to tell her about a new renovation show that was coming out in the fall. Marlene had scheduled a consultation with Dr. Miter. He’s the very best, she’d said in the same concerned way people talked about heart surgeons. And today on set Avery had not been able to steal a private minute with Merritt, except to get Merritt’s quick invitation. We’re doing an aikido demonstration at the Alberta Arts Festival tonight. Come watch. Besides that, Merritt had been downstairs, off set, or talking earnestly to the crew about equipment that, even after fifteen years, Avery had never once been interested in.

  “This stuff is so green and so…grassy,” Alistair said, smoothing his hand over the rerolled carpet. “Come on, Aves, you love lawn carpet.”

  * * *

  When they were finally done shooting, Avery and Alistair slipped away. Alistair opened the door of his comped Lexus and closed it behind her.

  “You okay?” he asked as he slid into the driver’s seat.

  “I guess.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  That was the last thing she wanted, and she felt guilty. Walking around a street festival in the twilight was just the kind of thing she and Alistair liked to do. But she didn’t want Merritt to see Alistair’s arm around her, and she didn’t want him sitting next to them, eating up the minutes she had with Merritt. Twelve days.

  “No,” she said. “I’m just nervous.”

  “Aren’t you all happy in your lesbian lust?”

  Lust? Desire? Love? The word had been hovering in the back of her mind like a camera just off set.

  “For twelve more days.”

  Avery had been excited to see Merritt off set and outside of her apartment, but now she wasn’t sure.

  “What if there’re other women who like her?”

  What if flirting with Avery on set was like flirting with a cubicle mate, just something to do to pass the time in the office? What if Avery was only good enough to be a clandestine lover? What if she wasn’t exciting in a crowd full of people who probably all performed burlesque and had threesomes and hung bondage slings from trees in the forest, where they made love and plotted to get Cascadia to secede from the United States.

  “What if she’s happier out there? She avoided me all day today. She’s mad that we went to Seattle. What if I asked her to keep things
going and she doesn’t want to? I think she’s pissed I went away for one day. What about months?”

  “It might not be Seattle,” Alistair said, watching the traffic intently.

  “What else?” Avery said.

  “I’m just saying it might not be Seattle.”

  He knew something, and he wasn’t sharing. She could tell. It was a strange feeling. Avery and Alistair always knew the same things because they told each other everything. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t want to know.

  “Do you think that she could fall for me?” she asked instead.

  She wanted more time. That was the thing about summer: It ended so quickly. She remembered the teachers at Vale telling them how they’d never get that kind of time again. A whole summer. You don’t get that when you’re working. But kids knew as soon as you woke up that first day of vacation, you were losing the summer, breath by breath.

  “Are you talking about forever?” Alistair asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re very difficult,” Alistair said in his British-mother voice.

  “I am not.” Avery feigned indignation.

  “Our lives are complicated to other people,” Alistair said more seriously. “You’re not like dating the girl next door.”

  “But I look like the girl next door. It’s not fair. I fail at pretending to lay carpet for a living. I’m like some bad housewife.”

  Alistair was supposed to say, Honey, don’t believe the lies. You’re fantastic.

  Instead he said, “We are nothing without girls next door and housewives. And your lesbian has the right to take a night off without you having an existential crisis. Do you want me to stop and get you a hidden-word puzzle book?”

  Ordinarily, Alistair’s puzzle book would cheer her up. Well, not the book itself. Protesting the book would cheer her up. The questions the book raised would cheer her up. Why find the hidden words? Did they have a cumulative mental health benefit, or would one do? Why had she never seen him finding the hidden word? She had asked him that once. Men do sudoku, he had said, as though that were an obvious fact. I’m a feminist, but there are still rules. But something had changed between them that a puzzle book couldn’t fix.

  “Just drop me off,” Avery said. “Please.”

  * * *

  The smell of patchouli and fried dough wafted down Alberta Street as Avery hurried through the crowd. Booths lined the sidewalks. A street band pounded on plastic buckets. A woman walked by with an iguana on her shoulder. Everything was coated in dust. As she strolled through the leisurely crowd, she tried to forget that it was a last-Thursday festival. She wouldn’t be in Portland for the next last Thursday.

  A moment later she came to an exhibition space that had been cleared in an intersection. Iliana was speaking into a microphone, explaining the peaceful practices of aikido.

  Avery’s heart quavered as she watched Merritt emerge on the other side of the mats. She wore a white linen jacket and flowing black pants. She looked happy.

  “Now, the thing that defines aikido,” Iliana said, “is the focus on subduing your opponent without injuring him.”

  Two of her other students stepped forward, knelt before each other, and performed a few moves. The assembled crowd clapped politely.

  A woman standing beside Avery said, “It’s so elegant, isn’t it?”

  The woman didn’t seem to notice that Avery was Avery Crown. No one did. It felt odd and liberating at the same time, as though the sky were higher, the street was longer, and the world had zoomed out in wide-angle distortion.

  “We refer to the practitioners as ‘uke’ and ‘tori.’” Iliana went on. “Tori takes the dominant role, but uke is not the victim. When they’re done, they trade roles. Tori always moves to protect uke. Even as she subdues her, she carries her.”

  Avery knew all about that, and her heart and body thrilled at the memory of Merritt flipping her onto the bed.

  “Now my friend Merritt Lessing and I will demonstrate. I am playing the role of tori and she the role of uke.”

  Merritt stepped forward and bowed to Iliana. Then she lunged at Iliana, and Iliana cast her to the mat. Merritt rolled and rose.

  “Falling is an important part of aikido practice,” Iliana said when Merritt rolled to her feet. “And no one falls as beautifully as my friend Merritt.”

  Merritt moved toward Iliana again, and Iliana threw her again.

  The crowd cheered. Merritt and Iliana moved quickly. Merritt hit the mat every few seconds, almost on the beat. Lunge. Throw. Fall.

  “How do you think they do it without hurting themselves?” the woman next to Avery asked. “I can’t even do a push-up without throwing my shoulder out.”

  Avery drew in a breath to answer, but neither of them spoke. They were both too focused on the demonstration. Iliana whirled Merritt over her back, then pulled her forward into a somersault. Faster and faster they flew until Avery could not release her breath because it seemed impossible that Merritt would survive unscathed. Then Iliana threw Merritt one last time. Merritt rolled into a standing position and bowed to Iliana and then to the crowd.

  A moment later Merritt made her way through the crowd, smiling. “It’s the gorgeous Avery Crown,” she said.

  The woman who had been standing next to Avery looked up at Merritt like a schoolgirl. The woman was pretty, Avery suddenly noticed, with dark hair and full lips tinted with just the right amount of berry-red lipstick. Avery hoped Merritt didn't notice.

  “You were so graceful,” the woman said, “that blend of power and elegance. I’ve been thinking about starting aikido.”

  “You should,” Merritt said. “Iliana’s dojo is right behind my shop, Hellenic Hardware. Do you know it?”

  “Oh, I bought tin ceiling tiles from you,” the woman cooed.

  “Well, we’re practically friends, then.” Merritt produced a business card from a hidden pocket in her gi. “I’m the top, and Iliana’s number is underneath.”

  She was the top!

  Avery guessed Merritt had not intended to smile wolfishly at the woman. It was just that her face was made for that hungry, confident smile. Avery could see the woman vibrating with delight.

  “Are you a black belt? That’s so amazing.”

  Watching Merritt was like staring into the set lights too long. In public, she was so cool, so confident. Only in private did she let her guard down. Those moments felt precious, but soon Avery would be gone, and Merritt might reveal herself to other women or not at all.

  Avery was saved from these thoughts by Lei-Ling charging through the crowd.

  “Oh my gosh. This is so exciting! You have to come out with us. Iliana and I have the biggest surprise.”

  * * *

  The bar Lei-Ling chose was tucked on a side street a few blocks from Alberta. One wall was lined with pinball machines, and a blackboard advertised cocktails with names like the Troglodyte. Merritt, Iliana, and Avery piled into a booth. Lei-Ling stood up.

  “Can we tell them?” Lei-Ling said to Iliana. She didn’t wait for an answer but tapped a fork to her glass. “Everyone!”

  The bar quieted.

  “Everyone, my name is Lei-Ling Wu, and this is my girlfriend, Iliana Koslov. And we’ve been together for one year today, and so on August twelfth, which is twelve days from now, we are going to get married.”

  The bar may not have known them, but they clearly liked a love story. Cheers erupted from every table.

  “We’re going to get married at the Mirage because that’s where we went on our first date,” Lei-Ling went on. “Our friend Vita is going to marry us. She got one of those minister certificates online. And everyone should come, and you should invite all your friends, because we want to celebrate with every single person in the world!”

  Merritt hugged her friends, slapping Iliana’s back and ruffling Lei-Ling’s rainbow-colored hair. “You two are disgustingly cute,” she said. “I knew it was coming. What am I going to
buy you? You’ve already got every Crock-Pot and Vitamix in the world.”

  Merritt laughed. Lei-Ling pleaded with Merritt to promise she’d be next. Merritt smiled at Avery cautiously, but as they walked back to Merritt’s truck, Merritt fell silent, and Avery could not tell what was in her heart.

  Chapter 26

  For the next week and a bit, Avery vacillated. Sometimes her time with Merritt seemed to stretch out forever. One night was a lifetime of pleasure and laughter. Other times she felt like a giant clock counted down behind her head. A minute gone. An hour gone. A day. Avery and Merritt didn’t talk about Avery’s impending departure, although everything on set was ten days left and nine days left and when we get to Cincinnati. Then there was one week left. Pam had texted flight arrangements for Avery, Alistair, and the crew. The semitrucks that moved the equipment had arrived. They had exactly one week together.

  It was too much to bear. She needed the kind of bad advice only DX could give. The morning of the seventh day before departure, Avery asked the van driver to take her to DX’s studio…because, of course, in the process of visiting Avery in Portland, DX had also set up a recording studio and was at work on her next soon-to-be-platinum album. The studio was set up in a Victorian house in an old neighborhood, half houses, half old businesses. Avery pushed the door open tentatively. A young woman in a leather bra and miniscule leather shorts lounged on a sofa reading a book and smoking out of a hookah. So much for security. DX was probably too cool to need it.

  “They’re down there.” The girl nodded toward a narrow door in the hallway.

  It was clearly the stairwell to the basement. A base beat rattled the wooden steps. The stains on the walls looked like horror-movie plasma. It was just the kind of place DX loved.

  And there she was. Behind a wall of recording equipment, DX belted out her latest opus while her bandmates milked every possible note of anguish and exhilaration out of their instruments. When DX saw Avery, she stopped mid-bar and stepped out of the studio.