by Cara Malone
She lifted Krys off the seat and unzipped the back of her dress, peeling it down her shoulders until Krys momentarily left her exploration of Darcy’s body to free her arms from the straps of the dress. Darcy pushed the fabric down around Krys’s waist, revealing the creamy softness of her breasts in the low moonlight. Her nipples were hard and the mere sight of them made Darcy’s body throb with desire.
She took Krys’s hand and put it back between her legs. Her thighs nearly went to jelly as Krys’s fingers found her bare skin and then her clit.
Darcy pushed Krys’s dress up and then yanked down her panties so that she was naked beneath her with the exception of her dress bunched around her waist. Darcy bent over her, rolling her hips against Krys’s hand as she licked and teased her nipples. She was already beginning to feel the first warm waves of an orgasm building in her core, but she wanted them to come together.
She kept her tongue on Krys’s nipples, enjoying every gasp and moan that she could draw out of her, and she braced herself against the car seat so she could put her free hand between Krys’s thighs.
She was dripping with desire and her whole body twitched and shivered as Darcy rubbed her fingers up and down over her clit. Krys wrapped her thighs around her, trying to pull Darcy closer to her as they touched each other in matching rhythms.
Darcy squeezed her eyes shut and bit down on her lip, trying to fight back the urge to come. She felt everything in her body clenching and craving release, but instead of giving in to it, she poured all of her attention into Krys. She focused on the sound of her breathing, intensifying into a panting sound as she came closer and closer to the edge, and on the way her hips twitched and moved beneath her touch.
Finally, Krys let out a desperate moan, whispering, “Oh, Darcy, I’m coming,” and then Darcy let go of all the tension she’d been holding in her own body.
They came together and then Darcy collapsed on top of Krys in a satisfied, exhausted heap. She caught her breath, then smothered Krys in kisses and gently put her dress back to rights for her. Darcy was going to climb back into the front seat so they could be on their way, but Krys clung to her.
“Stay here with me for a minute,” she said. “I want to hold you.”
So Darcy settled back down, lying beside Krys on the narrow back seat. They kissed, and after a while, Krys asked, “So, do you want me to drive you home now?”
Darcy laughed and said, “No, I’d be more than happy to behave myself while we drive back to your apartment, then do that all over again.”
And that was exactly what they did. Once Krys had a chance to let her heart rate return to normal, she sat up and turned around so that Darcy could zip up her dress, then they both crawled back into the front seat of the car. They looked around, but the street was just as quiet and empty as it had been twenty minutes before.
Krys started the car and they headed for her apartment. While they drove, Darcy kept her hand linked with Krys’s on her lap, and after a few minutes she said, “I’m seeing my mom on Tuesday. I have no idea what, if anything, will come of it, but at least I can say I tried.”
“I could go with you if you want,” Krys offered. “For moral support.”
“Thank you, babe,” Darcy said, squeezing Krys’s hand. “Daniel’s going to be there and I think it’ll be okay. He’s already the family mediator so he’s used to it.”
“Okay,” Krys said. “Well, I think you and I should go out after you’re done with your mom. If it goes well, you can tell me all about it, and if it doesn’t, then I’ll be there to keep you distracted.”
“That would be great,” Darcy said. They pulled up in front of Krys’s apartment building and she asked, “Do you want to distract me again right now?”
Tuesday came a lot faster than Darcy wanted.
She hadn’t come up with any good reasons for backing out of the coffee date with her mother, so she spent the first part of the week keeping her mind off it. She was grateful to return to the clinic and immerse herself in work, and Krys had arranged a date night the following weekend with Alex and Megan so she could explore the possibility of working as a paramedic, and all of that helped to keep her distracted.
On the morning of her coffee date, Darcy was eating breakfast over the sink in the kitchen when her dad came downstairs in his pilot’s uniform, ready to head out for another cross-country flight.
“Morning, sweetie,” he said as he went for the coffee pot.
“Morning, Dad,” Darcy answered. “Want me to make you some eggs or something?”
“Nah,” he said. “Just coffee’s plenty for me. How are you feeling about this afternoon?”
Darcy looked down at her cereal bowl, where her cornflakes were beginning to grow soggy. She probably shouldn’t have even mentioned meeting her mom to him – she knew there were a lot of old wounds still lingering between them. But now that he’d asked, she was grateful – Krys was supportive and Daniel had a stake in Darcy’s reunion with her mom, but neither of them really understood what it was like to be rejected by a parent.
Her dad had been there through the whole thing, and he’d been the only one to take Darcy’s side without reservation.
“I don’t know what to say to her,” she said.
“Why don’t you start by asking her what’s new in her life?” he suggested. “Keep the focus on her until you’re comfortable talking about yourself. And if you never do, then just take baby steps. I think it’s great that you’re trying to patch things up with your mother, but you don’t have to become best friends again in a single afternoon.”
Darcy snorted. “We were never best friends.”
“You know what I mean,” her dad said, coming over and kissing her on the forehead. “I’m proud of you for being the bigger person and reaching out to her. Keep an open mind and listen to what she has to say. A girl needs her mother as well as her father and you’ve still got time.”
“Thank you,” Darcy said.
“I have to get to the airport,” her dad said. “I’ll be in St. Paul this afternoon - text me to let me know how it goes.”
“I will,” Darcy said. “Have a good trip.”
She watched her dad turn the corner out of the kitchen, patting Harvey on the head as he went, and then she heard the front door close as he left. She looked down at the mushy cornflakes in her bowl and dumped them down the garbage disposal amid a flurry of anxious butterflies.
The meeting was at two o’clock. Darcy met Daniel outside a crowded café in downtown Evanston and they looked through the window together. Darcy spotted her mother sitting at a table by herself and her heart started clawing its way up her throat. Darcy turned around to leave and smacked straight into her brother's chest.
"Nope, I changed my mind,” she said. “I don't want to do this anymore."
"She’s not going to bite you,” Daniel said, putting his hands on Darcy’s shoulders to steady her. “She’s here because she wants to fix things just as much as you do. I know it’s hard, but if you wait another year or ten, it’ll only get harder. Let’s go say hello.”
Darcy took a deep breath, steeling herself, and they went inside the café. She wished Krys was by her side, holding her hand, but she couldn’t have this be Krys’s first meeting with her mother – especially not if things went badly.
“Mom,” Daniel called as soon as they got into the café, waving to her. To Darcy, he said, “There – now she knows we’re here so you have no choice but to go through with it.”
Darcy rolled her eyes at him, but then her mom turned around in her chair and smiled, actually looking warm and happy like the mother Darcy knew when she was a kid. She waved at Darcy and stood up when they approached the table. Darcy's heart was pounding as she walked across the crowded café, but she felt her brother's presence steady and solid behind her.
"Hello," she said, her voice clipped until Daniel prodded her with his elbow. Darcy shot him a displeased look, then reprised her tone. "How are you, Mom?"
; She looked like she might cry – that’s how she was doing. Darcy’s chest constricted and she wasn’t sure she could handle it if her mother started crying right now. Instead of answering Darcy’s question, she said, “I was happy to hear from you.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly my idea,” Darcy said, then looked at Daniel and saw the hope in his eyes. He needed this to go well almost more than she did, so she added, “but it’s probably a few years overdue.”
“Will you have a seat?” her mom asked. “We have so much time to make up for.”
Darcy pressed her lips together in a firm line. Was she really going to just skip right over the apologies and go straight to the catching up?
“Yes, sit,” Daniel interjected. “I’ll get us a round of coffees.”
“Don’t leave,” Darcy said out of the corner of her mouth.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, pulling out a chair for her. “Talk to her.”
Darcy’s mom handed Daniel a twenty-dollar bill to cover the cost of the drinks, then he weaved his way through the crowd to the ordering counter. Darcy could have killed him for abandoning her not two minutes into this uncomfortable reunion, but she had no choice now but to sit down across from her mother.
With her lips still pressed into that thin smile, she took her father’s advice and asked, “How have you been?”
Her mother smiled and Darcy could see some of her own features in her – the color of her eyes and the wrinkles that formed around her mouth when she smiled, more pronounced in her mother than they were when Darcy saw them in the mirror. It was strange to think that they hadn’t been face-to-face since the morning Darcy reported to the Army for boot camp – she hadn’t changed all that much.
“Good,” her mom said. “Still working at the dentist’s office, still doing a little music teaching on the side. I moved out of the house and got a condo last year, although I suspect your brother told you about that.”
“He did,” Darcy said. She wasn't sure if she was happy with that answer – it might have made her feel better if her mother’s life had been miserable without her these last ten years, but it sounded like it had gone on just the same as always.
“I’ve got a boyfriend now,” her mom offered, and that was one detail Daniel had never shared with Darcy.
“You do?”
“I met him through the studio where I teach,” she said. “He’s a gifted violinist. We’ve been seeing each other for about six months.”
For some reason, this unexpected detail was almost enough to make Darcy get up and walk out of the coffee shop. It had been almost thirteen years since her parents got divorced, but the idea of her mother moving on to be with someone who wasn’t her father felt like a slap in the face.
Before she could react, though, Daniel came back and set three iced coffees on the table. “How’s it going?”
“Good,” their mother said. “I was just telling Darcy about Robert.”
“Darcy has a girlfriend,” Daniel said. “I just met her this weekend.”
Darcy delivered a swift kick to Daniel’s shin beneath the table and he winced as he sat down. That wasn’t his news to share and she glared at him so he’d get the message. She wondered how many other details of her life Daniel had shared on her behalf over the years.
“That’s good,” her mother said, smiling at her in a way Darcy had a hard time hating. Even after ten years of silence, she realized she still craved her mother’s acceptance. How annoying, she thought. “Will you tell me about her?”
“Maybe another day,” Darcy said. She wasn’t ready to open up her life to her mother – she hadn’t even apologized yet, and there she was happily sipping her iced coffee and talking about her boyfriend. Anger started bubbling through Darcy’s veins and suddenly she had no more room for niceties. “Why haven’t you tried to contact me in almost a decade?”
Her mother looked at her as if she’d been struck and Daniel was giving her a face that said slow it down, but Darcy couldn’t stop the flow of resentment any longer.
“I’ve been home for five months,” she said. “You didn’t even come to see me when I was in the hospital.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to see me,” her mother said, setting down her coffee and looking down at her lap. When she looked at Darcy again, her eyes were glistening with unspilled tears. “The way we left things when you were a kid, I figured that showing up when I was unwanted would make things even worse.”
“You’re my mother,” Darcy said. “How could you make things any worse than you already did when you abandoned me at fifteen, and then again at eighteen?”
“I didn’t abandon you at fifteen,” her mother said, the emotion surging up in her voice. “You chose to live with your father.”
“Because you made him go through such a messy divorce,” Darcy said, crossing her arms defensively in front of her chest. “But that’s your business with him, and I never held that against you. What I’m talking about is when I wanted to enlist and you told me that you couldn’t be my mother anymore if I went through with it.”
“I was trying to save you,” her mom said. “Do you know how hard it was to get through each one of your father’s deployments, wondering if he was going to come back in one piece, or at all? And when you told me you wanted to follow in his footsteps, I couldn’t bear to do it all again.”
“So you disowned me,” Darcy said.
“I reacted poorly,” her mom answered. “I thought if you didn’t have my blessing, you might stay, but obviously I misjudged you.”
“Yeah, you did,” Darcy said.
They sat in silence for a minute, Darcy refusing to look at her mother as she silently cried across the table from her. Darcy was aware of how emotional she was getting and how many eyes had turned to them in the crowded café, but she didn’t care. Then Daniel said softly, “It sounds like Mom was acting out of fear and trying to protect you, but that she made a poor choice about how best to do that. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” her mom said. She reached for Darcy’s hand across the table but Darcy refused to uncross her arms. “Honey, I am so sorry. I know that I made everything worse by not backing down after you enlisted, and I was a coward. I thought you would hate me for how I reacted so I just stayed away. But I asked about you all the time and Daniel kept me updated about your life and about your recovery after you got hurt. I still care about you and I love you.”
Darcy looked side-long at her mother. Her face was wet with tears and her words sounded genuine. Darcy felt irritated at being in the position to choose whether or not she forgave her mother, whether or not their long feud would continue, but another part of her really just wanted to have her mother back.
"I guess the ball’s in my court now," she said. Her mother and brother were both looking hopefully at her and she let out a long sigh, then picked up her coffee for the first time and sipped it. Finally, she said, "I don't want to go another decade without speaking to you. I haven’t forgiven you yet but I’m ready to let you make it up to me, and I’m sorry that I didn’t reach out to you, either.”
“Apology accepted,” her mother said with a huge smile. “I’m going to make it up to you, honey.”
Darcy closed her eyes, trying to keep herself from crying publicly in the café, then she said, “I love you, too, by the way.”
21
Krys
Krys was standing beside her car in front of the café when Darcy walked out. She crossed the street and Krys opened her arms, pulling Darcy into a hug.
“How did it go?”
"Better than I expected," Darcy said. "But you can’t fix ten years’ worth of problems with a single cup of coffee. We’re going to work on our relationship, though. It’s nice to have a mother again.”
"I'm really happy for you," Krys said, giving her a kiss. "When you're ready, I'd love to meet her."
"You will, someday,” Darcy said. "So, where are we going on this secret date of yours?"
Krys smiled and s
aid, "Get in the car and I'll show you."
She’d been insistent on surprising Darcy for once. All the dates they’d been on in the last few weeks had been Darcy’s idea, and Krys thought it was time to take control. She opened the passenger door of her Honda and grinned as Darcy caught sight of the first little surprise Krys had planned. On the seat was a long-stemmed white rose.
Krys picked it up and handed it to Darcy.
“You’re not the only one who can buy flowers,” she said. “I got a white rose because that was the first flower you gave me, remember?"
"Of course I remember," Darcy said. She smelled the flower, then gave Krys another quick kiss and slid into the passenger seat. Krys jogged around the front of the car and got in, and as they drove away, she adamantly refused to tell Darcy where they were going.
“Come on,” she said. “I never sprung a surprise date on you.”
“I told you I’d be here to distract you from your meeting with your mother,” Krys said. “What’s a better distraction than a surprise?”
Darcy pouted and Krys asked her for details of her meeting with her mother. They were almost to their destination by the time she finished talking, and she wrapped up her recounting of the afternoon just as they were pulling into the parking lot.
“Mini golf?” Darcy asked with a laugh.
“What’s the matter, are you afraid I’m going to kick your butt?” Krys asked.
“A little bit,” Darcy said.
Krys parked the car and then turned to Darcy to ask seriously, “I figured you were up for it because your leg seems much stronger now. I hardly even notice the limp. Was I right, or is this a bad idea?”
“It’s a great idea,” Darcy said, leaning over the console to kiss her.
“Good,” Krys said. “I have one more surprise. Open the glove compartment.”
Darcy did, and gave Krys a confused look as she took out the only two items in the compartment. “Is this your hospital pager?”