Burning Tracks (Book Two: Spotlight Series)

by Lilah Suzanne

  Clementine glances at Flora, then at Gwen. “Sometimes my ambition gets the best of me, and I forget that people aren’t business strategies or things that I can accomplish just because I want them. I am really, truly sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Gwen reaches out to her and then thinks better of it, leaving her hand half-outstretched on the table. “I’ve sure as hell let my career compromise my personal life and judgment.” She never has quite figured out how to balance them both; maybe there is no such thing. “But wait,” Gwen pulls her hand back. “I get how being connected to Grady made sense, but me? Wouldn’t that be bad for your career? A woman? And not even a famous one?”

  Clementine’s spine straightens, her shoulders are set high, and that cool, confident ease permeates her body and expression. “A little controversy has always been good for my career.” With a wry smile and a flash of excitement in her eyes, she says in a newscaster’s bombastic tone, “What will she do next?” She switches back to her own lilting voice and says, “I like keepin’ people on their toes.”

  Flora stays quiet, holding tight to her mug with both hands, but not drinking. The clock in the kitchen ticks like a countdown. Gwen nods, crosses and uncrosses and recrosses her legs, and slurps her tea. Finally, Flora speaks, her tone even and measured. “It takes a good person to own their missteps and make things right. An almost-mistake, a lapse of judgment, is not something you should beat yourself up over. We all fall short sometimes.” She glances at Gwen. “I know I do.”

  Clementine turns the tea mug around and around in her hands. “I expect better of myself. One stupid mistake could end my career. That’s why I try to avoid relationships in the first darn place.” She’s solemn, until suddenly she sits up straight and her eyes light up. “Anyway! I didn’t come here to bring y’all down or dump my woes on you. I said what I wanted to say, and I’ve brought you something.” She unbuttons her coat and pulls something from the inside pocket.

  “Clementine, you don’t have to bribe us with gifts, we totally forgive you—oh my god, a kitten!” Gwen reaches immediately for the wiggly little meowing ball of orange and white fuzz. “Flor, look at the baby!” Gwen holds the kitten nose to nose and it meows loudly.

  Flora is melting and trying not to melt, Gwen can tell—an obvious internal war.

  “Don’t worry,” Clementine says, looking at Flora’s knotted brow and pressed-together lips. “I have a backup home for her, just in case. But we were coming up from Jacksonville, stopped for gas and Kevin was uh, relieving himself in the woods.”

  “Classic Kevin,” Gwen tells the kitten.

  Clementine smiles at the pair of them. “And he happened to see these little kittens in a box, just left there in the woods. So we brought them onto the tour bus and found homes for the others, but this little gal reminded me of your Cheese.”

  Gwen turns her tiny kitten body around. She has the same coloring and similar striped markings, but also a little splotch of orange next to her nose. Gwen bops it with her finger. The kitten mews at her.

  “Flora... Look... The baby...” Gwen singsongs, moving the kitten through the air toward Flora, who is rapidly losing the battle to keep a reasoned and safe emotional distance.

  “Oh, fine. Give her here.” The kitten cries a few more times, and then Cheese appears, staring at them from between the spindles of the stairs, not daring to come any closer. Flora tucks the kitten against her chest and she immediately snuggles into the softness of Flora’s breasts.

  “I feel a deep spiritual connection to this kitten,” Gwen says. She can hear the kitten purring away in contentment while Flora scratches at her teeny little head.

  Clementine looks pleased and much more at ease. “I’d keep her, but I’m gone too much. And now Cheese doesn’t have to be all alone.”

  “That’s really sweet Clementine, thank you.” Flora reaches across the table, hands Gwen the kitten and takes Clementine’s hand and holds it long enough for the air between them to go clear and light. “However, if you try to kiss my wife again you will be sorry.”

  Clementine chuckles again.

  “Oh, she’s not joking,” Gwen says. The kitten is gnawing on her hand.

  “No,” Flora says, flat.

  Clementine nods. “Understood.” She gives the kitten a parting pat as she stands. She clears her throat and says in a clipped tone, “I hope we can resume our working relationship now, Gwen.”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” Gwen scoffs. Clementine tilts her head. “Because we’re friends,” Gwen clarifies, standing to walk her to the door. “Friends who don’t care about luxury weekends away in a penthouse suite. Friends who want you to know that you definitely aren’t all alone.”

  “Yes,” Flora says opening the door, “Come by anytime.” She pulls Clementine into a hug. “And don’t give up on love so soon. You never know who might end up capturing your heart for good.”

  Gwen rises on her toes to join the hug. Scents of honeysuckle and wood polish and peppermint swirl in the biting cold air. “You’ll find a girl who loves you back, and likes you, just you. I know it.”

  When they pull away, Clementine wipes her eyes, smiles at Flora and Gwen, and turns the collar up on her coat. “Or a him, or a them, or...” She shrugs and steps onto the porch. “I’d like to keep my options open. I never did like settling for the status quo.” She winks and jogs down the steps, hair sweeping and shimmering, skin glowing and eyes bright. “I’ll see you gals soon!”

  Gwen closes the door and looks at Flora in stunned silence.

  “That was—” Flora says.

  “Yeah.”

  “She is really—”

  “Yep.”

  She really is something else, Clementine Campbell. Gwen is just glad to be an ally and not an enemy in Clem’s inevitable world domination.

  They name the kitten Crackers.

  They’re in the bath together that night when everything clicks into place for Gwen. She’s washing Flora’s hair, kneeling behind her with rivulets of flowery-smelling suds running down her arms into the bathwater. Crackers the kitten watches from the tub’s edge, batting occasionally at the bubbles.

  It’s so odd how things end up, what choices or mistakes or near mistakes led them here, the fragmented pieces of a puzzle that needed to come together just right.

  “Did you know Grady was raised by his grandparents?” Gwen works the shampoo through her hair, rubs at her scalp and temples.

  “Mmhmm.” Flora is loose and loopy; sex and a bath and hair-washing, and she becomes the purring kitten.

  “What do you think would have happened to him, if they hadn’t stepped in?”

  “Mmm, foster care, I guess?” Flora passes back a cup so Gwen can rinse and start with the conditioner.

  “Yeah, probably so.”

  Here they’ve been so focused on option A—when they’d be ready again, if they’d be ready again—that they haven’t even considered other paths. “Hey, Flor?” Gwen piles her conditioner-slick hair on top of her head. “Have you ever thought about adoption?”

  31

  “Why are you showing me this?”

  The next morning, Gwen pulls up a tabloid website while they eat spinach and mushroom omelets in the kitchen. The window is clouded with cold dew, the gardens and yard outside are brown and barren, and the trees are spindly skeletons. It’s the very first picture of her arm on Clementine’s waist; the one that started the rumors.

  “She was trying to get away from this pushy photographer. It was terrifying,” Gwen explains, feeling a pang of sadness for Clementine. It’s part of the deal, but sometimes Gwen isn’t quite sure why. Everyone should be allowed moments that are for themselves and not for show. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to show you. It’s this.” She points to a banner in the corner of the photograph. It’s blurry, but “Hope for Children” is legible in swooping yellow letters.
>
  Flora chews her omelet. “And that is...”

  “I only read a little bit of the brochure, but they help children in foster care find families, and help couples or individuals who want to foster or adopt. Classes and trainings and support groups. Counseling, events to meet waiting kids. Stuff like that.” Gwen opens a new tab on her browser and loads the Hope for Children page. “It’s like Nico said about the water spirits. Maybe there’s a little soul already out there, just waiting for us.”

  It’s as if she can feel it, this connection, fragile and invisible, but tugging at her. “I can go ahead and call, see what our first steps would be?”

  Gwen searches for a piece of paper and pen nearby and settles for using the back of the water bill envelope. She scribbles down the main number, the fax number, email contacts, and the street address for the main office.

  Flora is quiet, watching Gwen click and write and transfer all the pertinent info into her phone while Gwen’s breakfast and tea go cold and untouched. “You’re really excited about this,” Flora says, sipping her tea with a small smile.

  Gwen looks up from entering all the upcoming foster-to-adopt intro classes. “Yeah, I—” It’s not that the pregnancy, or the loss of it, was the wrong path. She’s still heartbroken over it, may always be so. But this feels like those times in her life when she took a sudden detour, like dropping out of college to work as a lowly part-time personal shopper’s assistant at Nordstrom’s and working at a salon to pay the bills—the salon where she met Nico, the store where she honed her eye for styling; locking eyes with the girl she never thought would give her a second look, much less a second date, and certainly not a lifetime; moving away from L.A.; going to Vegas in a panic and coming back with a fresh perspective and closer friendships. All these were things she never expected to work out the way they did, all were things that could have gone wrong, but instead led her to the exact place she needed to be.

  “It feels right,” Gwen says. Of course, she won’t do it without Flora. “Don’t you think?”

  Flora sips her tea and scans Gwen’s face. “I do.”

  The orientation they attend answers all of their questions and brings up several sets of new ones, and a ton of paperwork with even harder questions: What about a child with special needs? Or with a history of abuse? Prenatal drug exposure? Would they be open to a group of siblings? Older children?

  They sip watery coffee in paper cups in a church classroom, chatting with other hopeful adoptive parents, all of them excited and nervous. The couple who led the meeting, a college professor and his photographer husband who adopted three elementary-aged siblings last year, stay behind to offer seasoned advice.

  “Adopting from foster care requires two things,” the photographer husband says, “Faith and fearlessness.”

  Gwen turns to Flora. “Between the two of us, I think we have that covered.”

  Soon, though, they discover that more than anything, it requires waiting. Waiting for their next class or training, for the paperwork to go through, to be assigned a social worker. Making appointments for background checks and medical clearances and CPR certification. Then waiting for the home inspection and, after that, waiting for the results.

  Flora has years of calm in the face of long, difficult days under her belt from being an elementary school teacher, and Gwen has put in her fair share of drudgery while working her way up from coffee fetcher to respected stylist. Through it all, drudgery and paperwork and impossible choices and endless waiting, it’s something they’re doing together, not a strange phenomenon that is happening to Flora while Gwen watches, anxious and unsure, from the sidelines.

  They chug along with the certification process while winter continues in full force. Crackers is hyperactive and destructive, running around the house as though possessed, climbing curtains and bookshelves and Flora’s skirts and harassing Cheese. She makes up for it all by curling into their laps whenever they sit down, rumbling like a motor, and meowing to be held, petted, and loved.

  Spring comes and Crackers grows into a lanky, demanding adolescent. She eases off Cheese, though, and they finally start to get along: sunning in the square patches of light in their entryway, grooming each other, cuddling together under the bed.

  The miscarriage comes up in unexpected ways, as when they’re filling out the age range they’d prefer. “Do you think we’ll regret never bringing a newborn baby home?” Flora wonders, late at night when they confess their fears and worry to each other in the dark, held safe in each other’s arms.

  “I don’t want this kid to feel like a replacement,” Gwen counters. “We need to want them, not the baby we lost.” Still unsure, they mark down an age range of newborn to age three.

  And it comes up in expected ways: while painting the nursery in dark, rich browns and greens with a forest mural on one wall; while buying toys and clothes in a variety of age ranges and sizes, including newborn, just so they’re ready; when they put together a crib, knowing there was once someone else they were preparing for.

  Flora spends a long time smoothing out the fitted sheet on the crib mattress, getting every possible wrinkle out. Gwen stacks half a dozen packs of diapers by size in the closet.

  “You okay?”

  Flora frowns and rests her hand in the center of the empty crib. “Yeah, I think so.” Crackers bounds into the room and winds around Gwen’s legs, then Flora’s, then hops right into the crib. Flora tsks and scoops her up. “You are not actually a baby, you know that, right?” Crackers purrs her loud-motor purr and nuzzles her fuzzy head against Flora’s chin.

  On an evening when it’s finally warm enough to turn off the heat and crack a window open—all the waiting and preparation has led to them sitting around in the evenings, staring at their phones and willing them to ring—Gwen finally has enough.

  The cats are at a window watching the crickets and birds outside, and Gwen is watching them, slowly going mad. “I can’t take this. We should go out. See a show.” What is the point of living in the music capital of the country if they never go see any music?

  Flora gives up pretending to have any interest in her book. “Okay. Should we see if anyone is free?”

  Nico and Grady are back in town, but still looking for a new place. Clementine is finishing a press junket now that her tour to promote her new album is over. Some of Flora’s teacher friends are probably available, but—

  “Let’s just go out, me and you. We haven’t had a date night in so long.”

  Flora hums, then runs the back of her fingers on Gwen’s thigh. “That sounds nice. And I’ll even let you dress me.”

  “Really?” She stands, and Gwen, mind racing with possibilities, scampers upstairs after her. She never gets to do this anymore, never. Oh, and she has the perfect dress in mind.

  “Nothing low-cut,” Flora adds at the top of that stairs.

  Gwen freezes with one foot in the air. “What? Oh come on, that’s just cruel!” Flora laughs and disappears into the room, so Gwen races up the stairs in case she changes her mind.

  Gwen zips Flora into a slim, clingy dress. She brushes her silky dark hair with long strokes, clasps a delicate necklace around her throat, and then cups her chin and swipes lipstick the color of dark ripe cherries across her plush lips. She gets down from the counter and says, “Beautiful,” with all the reverence and awe Flora deserves.

  32

  The club is stone-walled and tin-ceilinged, and warmly lit in muted oranges and yellows like a sunset. The stage is small; the acts are all singer-songwriter types. Gwen and Flora sip wine and eat appetizers and enjoy the sort of easy, comfortable company Gwen has come to appreciate.

  It’s no hot-spot Vegas nightclub: no bouncers at the door, no celebrity clientele, no techno music thumping away the functionality of her eardrums. It’s the life she chose, not the life she flirted with. She’s grown since Vegas, she likes to think. Flora is not so
mething she needs to rebel against, and Vegas—or somewhere else—is always there should she need to go a little crazy again. That’s not a life, though, at least not one she has any interest in living full-time.

  The second act leaves the stage, and Flora looks at Gwen across the table, sips her wine and chuckles.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking about our first date and what a disaster it was.”

  “Oh god, I was so nervous,” Gwen groans. She is never going to live that picnic down. “I couldn’t believe that you actually called me and I was trying so hard to make a good impression.”

  “So you spilled illegally procured champagne on my skirt.” Flora tips her wine glass at Gwen.

  “In my defense, I really wanted you to take your skirt off.”

  Flora laughs, then sets her glass down, drops her chin into one hand and gazes at Gwen with a grin. “I thought you were adorable.”

  “I was trying to be cool, not adorable.”

  “When I first saw you,” Flora says, still gazing at Gwen with heavy-lidded eyes and quirked-up cherry-red lips, “I thought you were so cool and badass. All those piercings and that blue hair, dressed head to toe in black. That black lipstick you wore!”

  Gwen shakes her head. “If could I go back in time and tell myself that sometimes less is more...” Live and learn.

  “And then, you took me on a date,” Flora continues, “And you were so fumbly and adorable and you spilled wine everywhere. Then on our next date you spent half of it lecturing me all about the history of corsets, and I knew for sure, then…” She takes Gwen’s hand across the table. “That you were actually a huge dork.”

  Gwen pulls her hand away with a mock scoff and wrinkles her nose. “Corsets have a really fascinating sociopolitical background, okay?”