I tip my head back, stare at the ceiling for a second before letting out a breath and looking down at her. “If it stays quiet, maybe I can sit with you for a minute.”
She beams a smile at me that’s all heart, a laser beam of concentrated sunlight that nearly blinds me, and even though there are the beginnings of crow’s feet crinkling around the corners of her eyes, even though three babies have added a bit of padding to her petite frame, she’s still the perfect vision she always has been.
Jenny. My Jenny.
Chapter 15: Things you don’t reminisce about over lunch.
Preamble
We end up having a civil lunch like she wanted. Jenny talks about her kids and avoids the topic of her husband Mason; I talk about being back in Ohio and avoid my mom’s cancer diagnosis. Once I stop resisting, we fall into comfortable conversation and banter with less effort and in less time than I expected, and she even makes me laugh a few times.
The whole ninety minutes she’s there goes like that, friendly and jokey things that snake around all the things we don’t talk about, but the past still there, bubbling beneath the surface like a fucking dormant volcano, and I can feel it and I know she can feel it and it’s shitty because as soon as Jenny leaves, kids in tow and one last glance over her shoulder to give me a friendly wave, the volcano erupts. Everything that goes unsaid rushes to the surface, and it’s all I can fucking think about for the rest of the afternoon, a whole list of unanswerable what-if questions, impossible thoughts that will land you in a fucking mental hospital if you’re not careful.
Which, case-in-point: Marty McFly shows back up in the middle of all my reminiscing, shoves me into the DeLorean, even though I tell him I don’t want to go. But he’s insistent and it doesn’t help that the restaurant’s slow as fuck and I don’t have anything else to do except lean on the podium and think about the past.
Back to the future: Ten years ago. I’m twenty-eight.
I drop my gym bag by the front door and walk over to the couch, where Jenny’s watching TV and sipping a glass of white wine. An empty Chinese food container sits on the coffee table in front of her, chopsticks jammed into a mound of white rice still in its box, a cracked open fortune cookie next to it.
I lean over the couch, kiss her cheek. “Hi, babe.”
“You smell nice,” she says distractedly, not looking at me.
I climb over the back of the couch with my shoes still on, even though she hates it when I do that, and land next to her heavily. “I know you like it better when I shower before I come home.”
She sips her wine, still won’t look at me when she says, “As if you ever come home.”
I frown. “What’s that supposed to mean? We had a game tonight. The team went out for drinks afterward; I came home. I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
She puts her glass down, covers her face with both her hands and shakes her head. “I am, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve had a long day.”
I reach an arm around her, about to pull her into my lap, but she pushes my arm off.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t try to make me feel better.”
I huff out an acidic laugh. “Oh, right, because it doesn’t make any fucking sense to try to make you feel better after you just said you’ve had a hard day.”
“I didn’t say I had a hard day. I said I’ve had a long day.”
I want to say, Is there fucking a difference?, but I manage not to. I reach for the fortune peeking out of the cookie, because I need something to fiddle with if we’re going to do this right now. Take the time to think before you act, the fortune reads cryptically.
I rub the little slip of paper between my thumb and my forefinger, and for once I try to think before I speak. After a moment, I ask her softly, “What’s happening with us, Jen?”
She stares straight ahead at the television screen.
I crumple the fortune in my fist. “Talk to me. Please?”
She runs a hand over her head, finger-combing long blonde hair to one side, and folds her legs up beside her. Still doesn’t look at me.
“You’re never home,” she says at last.
“It’s basketball season. Travel is part of the job. You know that. But we had a home game tonight, and… I’m here now, aren’t I?”
She lets out a long breath. “I made it through college because I kept telling myself — because you kept telling me — that it would be different once we graduated. We wouldn’t have to keep doing the long distance thing. We’d be together at last. We’d be in the same state, the same city, under the same roof, sharing the same bed.” She glances at me long enough to meet my eyes, then looks away again. “We’d build a life together.”
Now I’m confused. “We do sleep in the same bed. And we are building a life together.”
“No, we’re not,” she says sharply. “You’re building a life. I’m working as a secretary and coming home to an empty house every night.”
“Baby, come on. That’s not fair. You know things are busy during — ”
“Do not fucking tell me again that things are busy during basketball season, Anika!” she shouts, hands curling into fists. And I know she’s really mad now, because Jenny never, ever cusses. “You’re never here. No matter what time of year it is. We’ve been living here for six years, and how much of that time we’ve actually spent together?”
I don’t answer.
“Do you know how many friends I have here, besides Cindy from work?”
I don’t answer again.
“All I do is sit here, on this couch, and wait for you to come home every night. When you come home.” Her voice drops, cracks. “I’m lonely, Ani. I miss my family. I miss Ohio.” She gives a humorless laugh. “Hell, I even miss winter.” She turns to face me, holds my gaze. “And I miss you.”
“But I’m right here,” I choke out, fighting back tears. “I’ve been right here the whole time. You’ve been the one pulling away — for years now. And it’s like it doesn’t matter how many times I reach out for you. The more I reach, the more you pull away.”
“I pull away because it’s like you’ve forgotten how to listen to me. To see me. Every time I try to tell you that I don’t like Phoenix, that I wish you were home more, that I wish we had more friends here, all I get is excuses. ‘Baby, I’m trying to build my place on this team.’ ‘Baby, I’m so tired when I get home, I don’t want to go out.’ ‘Baby, what do we need a bunch of drinking buddies for when we’ve got each other?’ Baby-this, baby that.” She shakes her head, eyes welling with tears. “I can’t keep putting my life on hold for your life, Ani. I’ve been doing it since high school, and I’m tired of it. I don’t even know who I am anymore; it’s like the only thing people know me as is Anika Singh’s wife. And that’s not enough for me. Not anymore.”
“I never asked you to — ”
“I know. I know you never asked me to be your little housewife. Not directly, at least. But that’s what our relationship has always been. For the whole ten years we’ve been together, it’s always been about me following you. Me waiting for you. And I can’t do it anymore.”
“Baby…” I reach out for her again, but she shrinks away from my touch. I’m not sure which hurts more — the fact that she won’t let me touch her, or the fact that she’s been feeling like this for way too long and I’ve been utterly oblivious.
I sit back on the couch, giving up trying to hold her, to comfort her. I straighten out the fortune that I crumpled in my hand, smoothing it against my palm.
Take the time to think before you act.
And it hurts to ask the question I know has to be asked, because I don’t know what the answer is going to be. “So what do you want to do?”
Chapter 16: People I wish I’d never met. Things I wish I’d never done.
Back to the future: One year after that tense fucking conversation in Phoenix. I’m twenty-nine.
I’m traveling t
he last week in September, playing a game in a big, dirty city that looks like all the other big, dirty cities I play in, and for once I’m actually sharing Jenny’s nostalgia for small-town Ohio. Or for Rosemont. If any place ever felt like home, it was there.
The team goes out for drinks after our win, and I get invited, but I turn them down. Instead, I head back to the hotel and talk with Jenny for an hour before I take my shower.
Things are better than they were a year ago — at least, that’s what she tells me. To me, it feels about the same. It feels like we were always magnets before, drawn together despite all odds, stuck together with an inevitability that felt as predictable and permanent as the laws of physics and JFK conspiracy theories. But now, it was like our magnets had reversed their polarity, and we kept pushing away from each other no matter how hard we tried to come back together.
Our hour-long conversation is familiar and strained at the same time. We fill it with safe mundanities, reviewing things like weather, errands, plane flights, basketball plays. (We don’t know it then, but the conversation we have ends up being a lot like the one we’ll have in Soul Mountain, ten years later, when she comes to see if I’ll finally talk to her again.) She tells me about her new classes — because she’s going back to school now, working on a degree in Early Childhood Education so that she can become a kindergarten teacher — and I tell her about the weight-lifting regimen Coach has put me on.
“So when can I look forward to some six-pack abs?” she asks, and it’s supposed to be teasing and flirty, but it falls flat somehow, like our whole conversation, and so I just say,
“I don’t know,” and there’s a long pause heavy with unsaid words, and finally I decide I’ve had more than enough of this. “I need to hit the shower. I’m stinking up the hotel room.”
She lets me go. I shower. I call Alex when I get out, but she doesn’t pick up, and I imagine she and Graham out somewhere, having a late dinner or catching a movie, and for some reason, the thought stings.
So I decide maybe I’ll hit the bar after all, see if my teammates are still there.
#
“What do you have on tap?” I ask the barkeep, a cute young thing with way too much eyeshadow and a long brown ponytail streaked with blonde highlights.
She rattles off my choices, and I pick one and put a stool beneath me, because even though I don’t see my teammates anywhere — maybe I got the bar wrong or they decided to go somewhere else in the end — I’m here now and I’ll stay long enough to at least have a fucking beer. Or two. Maybe three. Drinking by myself in a bar might be depressing, but it’s less depressing than watching TV in a hotel room by myself.
I sit there nursing my beer, my back leaned against the bar rail so I can people watch.
Which is how I spot the top of a blonde head, a long face ending in a square jaw, winding its way through the crowd and towards the bar. Towards me.
“Motherfucker,” I mutter under my breath.
She walks straight up to me but doesn’t look at me; hails the barkeep with that attitude of superiority she’s always fucking had, orders herself a beer. It’s only after she knocks the cap off the bottle and refuses the glass offered to her that she leans sideways against the bar and looks me up and down.
“Where’s everybody else?” Rhianna-Fucking-Jerkins asks me, sweeping a hand around the sparsely populated bar as if I didn’t fucking realize the rest of my team isn’t here.
I shrug, stare straight ahead.
She laughs. “What, are we pretending we’re in high school now? You’re going to pout and act like you don’t know me?”
I look at her. “Why would I be the one pouting? I beat you tonight. Again.”
“You beat me? I out-scored you, just like I always do. Shut you out of the paint, just like I always do. Almost succeeded in fouling you out. Like I always do.” She straightens a little, like she wants to remind me that she’s still got two inches on me. She gives me a cocky smile.
Rhianna is to Anika as Thor is to the Incredible Hulk: One’s a blonde goddess and the other’s green with envy.
I roll my eyes. “And you did foul out. Like you always do. You’ve got no grace, you rely solely on brute strength and size, and my team won. Like my team always does when my team plays yours.”
Rhianna frowns and shakes her head. Sore loser. She takes another sip of her beer. “Not my fault we have a shit-for-brains point guard. She turns the ball over like it’s going out of style.”
I can’t help myself. I give Rhianna a really smug fucking smile. “Your point really did screw you guys over pretty good tonight. I’ll bet it makes you nuts.”
She arches an eyebrow, studies me as the beer goes back to her lips, and after a long pull, the bottle comes away with lipstick smeared along its neck.
Huh. So Rhianna Jerkins wears lipstick when she’s not in uniform. Not that I’m staring at her lips. Not that I think the color looks good on her. Without a jersey on, in boots instead of high tops, she looks kind of feminine. Like a Valkyrie instead of Thor.
“I’ve been stuck with bad guards ever since UConn,” she admits, changing the topic away from the night’s game. “What about you? Ever wish you still played with Woods?”
I break eye contact, watch a group of women laughing around a pool table. “Meh. We were good together on the court. But I like being in Phoenix.”
I’m lying through my teeth, of course. And somehow Rhianna seems to know it because she lets out a low chuckle and nods at my empty glass.
“Loser buys,” she says. “Let me get you another.”
#
My fidgety fucking fingers are shaking so hard that the door card slips out my hand and tumbles to the ground before I can fit it into the slot.
“Fucking Christ,” Rhianna says behind me, hot, alcohol-saturated breath too close to my ear. “Get it open already.” Her hand slides up the back of my shirt, and her palm is as hot as her breath, but it makes me shiver anyway.
I manage the door after two more tries, and the woman behind me doesn’t waste any time — she’s shoving me forward, ripping at my shirt simultaneously, pushing me against the bed until I stumble and land hard on the mattress back-first.
She’s straddling my waist in the next moment, hands working at the zipper of my jeans, and I sit up, grab her by the shoulders, wrestle her down to the bed, fumble at the buttons of her shirt with my fidgety fucking fingers.
“No you don’t,” she laughs, and she rolls me over, pinning my wrists to the bed on either side of my head and dropping her weight onto my torso. “When are you going to learn that I’m bigger than you and stronger than you?”
Her mouth dips down into the space where my throat meets my collarbone, and I’m expecting a kiss. Instead I get a bite. A hard bite. And it fucking hurts. I try to buck her off, but she’s right — she’s stronger. And heavier. And she laughs against my neck and I don’t get far before I give in and just let her pin me.
“I hate you,” I say, and she bites my earlobe, and it hurts even more than the bite to my collarbone, and I tilt my head back and suck in a sharp breath.
Rhianna kisses me with such sudden intensity that our teeth clack together, which draws a giggle from her that bubbles into my mouth. She pushes herself up with hands that are still holding down my wrists and looks me in the eye.
“You might hate me,” she says, “but you love this. Don’t you?”
And I can’t think of how to answer, maybe because I’m drunk, maybe because shame and guilt burn in my chest as I think of Jenny, maybe because I’ve never been with anyone else except my beautiful, Tinkerbell-sized wife, and in our eleven years of being together, Jenny’s never been able to pin me on my back, even if she wanted to. And I’m pretty sure she’s never wanted to.
I arch my head and shoulders up — not trying to throw Rhianna off anymore, just trying to get to her mouth so I can shut her up. I take her bottom lip between my teeth and pull, making her yelp, forcing her to follow me back down to
the pillow. The kiss that follows is long and wet and sloppy, smearing thin strings of saliva against my cheeks and my chin.
I hate it and I love it and I need to stop right now and there’s no way I’m stopping this and I can’t believe it took me until I was twenty-nine to be with someone besides Jenny.
Rhianna ends the kiss long enough to sit up, pull my bra off, then drops her sharp fucking monster teeth to one taut nipple.
It hurts. In the best possible way.
“God, I really fucking hate you,” I gasp out.
Her mouth works its way down my torso, alternating between biting and sucking and kissing in a way that I know is going to leave a trail of purple bruises behind, bruises that will still be there when I get back to Phoenix, but I can’t bring myself to care. She lets go of my wrists at last, and I use the opportunity to put both hands on top of her platinum blonde head, push her down towards my hips. She laughs, but her hands start working at my jeans again, tugging them down over sweaty underwear.
A surprisingly gentle, slow series of kisses follows the line where my underwear meets my abdomen. Rhianna looks up. “I’m about to fuck you so hard, Singh, you’re going to wish you never met me.”
I close my eyes, rock my hips up to help when she starts pulling off my underwear.
“I already wish I’d never met y — oh, fuck.”
A hot tongue slides against me, and I go breathless and silent.
But before my brain even has a chance to fully process the tongue sliding against my wet fucking clit, there’s a long finger pushing hard inside me. Then another finger. Then a third. Somehow, she manages to squeeze even her pinky finger up there, and now I’ve got Rhianna-Fucking-Jerkins whole fucking hand working its way inside me. It hurts, and I think about telling her to stop, but it doesn’t hurt enough that I want her to stop. And I can’t help it — I find myself wondering why Jenny’s never tried this, given that her hands are so much smaller. Rhianna’s face becomes Jenny’s. Jenny’s morphs back into Rhianna’s.
Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2) Page 9