Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2)

by Eliza Andrews

  She bumps into Quinn at the edge of the makeshift dance floor, where she hangs on the arm of her beefy Sigma Chi boyfriend. He’s wearing a fedora cocked at an angle and a bowtie, but Quinn’s wearing the same silver dress as the last time Amy saw her at a mixer, the only change to her outfit a long necklace of fake pearls. Quinn twists the pearls around her index finger listlessly, gazing out at nothing in particular with a slight crease in her brow.

  The boyfriend says something into Quinn’s ear, pecks her on the cheek, and walks away. The crease in her brow gets deeper.

  Uncomfortable again. Clearly.

  Amy, who’s already had one strong mixed drink and is feeling extra cheery and extra social, bounces over to her.

  “Quinny!” she exclaims. “You’re back from Indiana! Did you win?”

  “Yeah,” she says without enthusiasm. “We won. It was a good game.”

  “You don’t look like you’re having a very nice time,” Amy observes.

  “I’m not.”

  Amy jerks a thumb over her shoulder to the dance floor behind her. “Then dance with me.”

  “I don’t dance.”

  “Pssh,” says Amy. “I’ve seen you dance.”

  “I don’t dance, Amy.”

  Amy pouts, sticking out her lower lip. “Not even for me? You’re not going to leave me all alone on the dance floor, are you? What if I get you a drink? Will you dance after a drink?”

  The crease in Quinn’s brow softens; the corners of her mouth twitch into what doesn’t quite amount to a smile.

  Amy gets her onto the dance floor a drink and a half later.

  They dance to a song. They dance a little closer on the second song. They grind together playfully on the third, much to the hooting delight of the nearby frat guys.

  A drink and a half after that, they’re stumbling up the stairs towards the bathroom, laughing about something they’ll forget by the next day, if not the next hour.

  Before they make it to the line for the bathroom, Quinn grabs Amy’s wrist, pulls her into the shadows of an alcove.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  Amy’s laughter dies down. “For what?”

  “For getting me to dance. For… rescuing me down there.”

  “Rescuing you?” Amy asks, confused. “From what?”

  “From these awful parties.”

  Amy starts giggling again but trails off when she realizes Quinn isn’t laughing with her. Quinn reaches out, pushes some of the hair that’s escaped Amy’s headband away from her face. Amy stills.

  “You’re a beautiful girl, you know that?” Quinn says.

  Amy is too stunned to speak. And she’s afraid that if she does speak, Quinn might stop touching her.

  “You’re not a natural blonde, are you?” Quinn asks. “What’s your real color?”

  “Brown,” Amy answers, barely managing to breathe. “Just… plain brown.”

  Quinn smiles — perfect, bright white against tawny skin. “There’s nothing plain about you, Amy. I’d like to see your natural color one day.”

  She leans forward, and her lips brush Amy’s tentatively. Amy remains statue-still, afraid that the slightest movement might break the spell, savoring the sensation of such soft lips against her own. No boy she’s ever kissed has been as soft or smooth or gentle as this.

  But Amy’s stillness has the opposite effect from what she’d hoped for. Quinn pulls back a moment later, shakes her head like she’s angry at herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she says to Amy. “I guess I’ve had more to drink than I thought.”

  Amy grabs her wrist before she can pull away completely. “Don’t be sorry.”

  Their eyes meet; a moment pulled as taut as a thread on the verge of breaking passes between them. When Quinn leans in to kiss her a second time, Amy’s ready. She grabs at the silver dress with both hands, bunches the sheer fabric in her fists. She pulls Quinn forward so hard that the soccer player loses her balance, snakes out a steadying hand to brace them both before they crash into the wall behind Amy. They kiss like it’s the last kiss they’ll ever have, they kiss like it’s what they’ve been waiting for their entire lives.

  When they break apart this time, they’re both panting for breath.

  “I’ve never kissed a girl before,” Amy whispers.

  “I have.”

  Quinn pushes Amy back, pinning her against the alcove’s curved back wall. It occurs to Amy that something was meant to be in that alcove other than them — a potted plant, maybe, or a bust of a famous fraternity member on a pedestal. Even as Quinn kisses her again, reaching under the fringed hem of her skirt, Amy finds herself wondering where the bust or statue or plant is.

  She thinks, Frat guys. Somebody probably broke the statue during a kegger a long time ago. And as if the thought is the conclusion of a long-standing inquiry, she realizes her time with men — dating them, kissing them, accepting their flowers and laughing at their jokes — is over.

  Quinn’s hand slides up the outside of Amy’s bare thigh. “I want you,” she breathes into Amy’s ear.

  Amy reaches down, moves Quinn’s hand from the outside of her thigh to the inside. Quinn’s fingers dance upward, push the crotch of Amy’s underwear to the side. Amy lets out a soft moan when Quinn’s fingers press against her. Amy’s thoroughly wet. She’s probably been wet since the dance floor.

  “You can have me,” Amy whispers, and pulls Quinn into another kiss.

  #

  Back to the present

  “Long story short,” Amy says, swallowing the last of her coffee, “one of my roommates caught us in bed about six months later, right at the beginning of my sophomore year. I didn’t stay a Pi Phi for very long after that.”

  “The fuck. They didn’t kick you out for sleeping with a girl, did they?” I ask. “I mean, you could sue them or something, right?”

  Amy shrugs. “They didn’t kick me out for being gay, no. Not directly, anyway. Officially, they kicked me out for telling my sisters a collection of mistruths and half-truths. They found out about my relationship with Quinn about the same time my dad showed up on the doorstep in full fatigues. I moved out of the sorority house a month or two later. It was fine, though. By then I was way over being a sorority girl.”

  I fiddle with the wooden coffee stirrer, dragging it through the pools of frothed milk at the bottom of my empty cup. “Whatever happened to Quinn?”

  “She broke my heart,” Amy says simply. “I should’ve known better. She stayed with her boyfriend even after we’d started sleeping together. Took her months to finally break up with him. But I was in love and insecure and twenty.” She shrugs. “We’re all stupid back then, right? Not long after we were finally an official couple, she cheated on me with a girl in the sorority house next door to Pi Phi.” Amy smiles, but there’s a sadness in her face when she looks down into her coffee. “But anyway. It’s ancient history. First gay relationships pretty much always crash and burn in the most tragic and dramatic way imaginable, right?”

  I roll my coffee stirrer between thumb and forefinger, thinking of Jenny. Thinking of the halfway decent conversation we managed to have over lentils and cornbread earlier this afternoon.

  “More or less,” I agree at last.

  “What about you?” Amy asks. “Tragic first girlfriend story…?”

  A couple seconds pass, and based on the way Amy’s face changes, I guess my silence says a lot more than I wanted it to.

  Before she can follow up with another question, I point with my chin towards the plate glass window at the front of the coffee shop and the falling sun beyond it.

  “Do you want to take a walk before it gets too dark?” I say. “I could show you that General Custer statue.”

  She scoffs. “Dead mass murderer on a bronze horse. That’s so romantic, Anika.”

  My cheeks get hot, but my skin’s coffee with a good dose of cream, and it’s stuffy in the crowded shop, so I doubt she notices my blush.

  “I know. But the
park’s nice,” I say lamely. “Especially at sunset.”

  She gestures towards the door. “Lead on.”

  Chapter 19: Of mice and women, rednecks and government conspiracy theories.

  We make the short walk to the park, and as promised, I show her the statue of General Custer. It’s like she said — not much to see, just an old dead white guy who killed a bunch of brown guys and got turned into a statue later. He’s fucking cocky and full of himself even in bronze death: cowboy hat tilted to the side, chest forward. Sword out and at his side, holding it like he’ll run an Injun through any second.

  Amy gazes up at the statue, and the dying sun plays on her head, bringing out red-brown highlights I hadn’t guessed were there before. I step forward until I’m standing right behind her, and the urge to pet her head like she’s a fucking puppy and I’m that big, dumb oaf from Of Mice and Men is strong. But I keep my hands on my hips.

  She turns around, squints up at me. The sun’s directly behind her now, splicing through General Custer, giving Amy’s head a halo of golden light.

  “Explain to me again why we’re looking at the statue of General Custer?”

  “Because it’s literally the only fucking thing to look at in Marcine.”

  The wind picks up, blows at my back. I got my hair cut to just a little longer than chin-length before I flew to Ohio, thinking it would be easier to deal with, but now the breeze pushes it forward and into my face. Irritated, I try to blow it away with little puffs of breath, and when that doesn’t work, I try to tame the mane by shaking my head.

  Amy reaches up, smiling, uses her two Tinkerbell-sized hands to push the thick, wavy stuff off my cheeks. But instead of letting go, she holds it there, behind my ears, stopping the wind from blowing it into my face again.

  “It’s not the only thing to see in Marcine,” she says.

  I give her a lopsided grin. “No?”

  “No. I’ve found something else I rather like looking at.”

  My hands come off my hips, find Amy’s waist, gently tug her forward. She keeps her eyes locked on mine, hands on either side of my face, waiting.

  I lean down into the kiss we both feel coming.

  It’s not awkward or sloppy, the way some first kisses are, with two people discovering each others’ rhythm for the first time. Kissing Amy feels natural. Easy. Like it’s something I don’t have to try at but can just do, fall into like shooting a basketball or trimming carrots into decorative garnishes. Like something I’ve done a million times before.

  Or might do a million times again.

  Maybe she feels the same way?

  I can’t say for sure, but when she pulls away, it’s with a contented sigh that ends with closing her eyes for a brief moment before opening them again and bringing her hands away from my face.

  I lace my fingers together in the small of her back; she leans against my hands, squeezes my arms.

  “There’s got to be something besides General Custer you can show me,” she says after a few moments of comfortable silence. “This park, for example.” She lets go of one of my arms long enough to sweep a hand around the expanse of rolling grass, budding dogwoods, park benches, basketball courts, covered bandstand. “I bet this is the kind of place you used to come to with your family when you were a kid, right? July Fourth picnics? Outdoor concerts in the summer? Barbecues?”

  She waits for me to nod. Which I do.

  “Then show me around. Tell me another story — like the one you told me on the plane.”

  I glance around the park, looking for something to trigger a memory. Everything does, of course — park benches I’d made out with Jenny on. Basketball courts I played on in the evenings after work after I left the WNBA in Phoenix and moved back to Ohio with Jenny to “focus on our relationship.”

  The apartment just the other side of the courts, where I found the positive pregnancy test in the bathroom six months after we moved back home.

  So much for focusing on our fucking relationship. I look away from the courts and search for something else.

  Marty McFly appears at my elbow. He tugs on my sleeve. “Hey,” he says. “What about that?”

  I follow his pointing index finger, and finally my eyes land on a memory that doesn’t have Jenny in it, at least, not directly: the covered band stand.

  I laugh out loud.

  “What?” Amy asks. She follows my gaze to the bandstand.

  “What’ve I told you about my brother Gerry?”

  “He’s the one who… owns the restaurants in Philadelphia?”

  “No, no, that’s PJ. The good brother. This is Gerry. The screw-up.”

  “The one who’s going back to school?” Amy says, and I hear the reprimand in her voice.

  “Okay,” I concede with a roll of my eyes. “The one who used to be a screw-up. Maybe.” I rotate her towards the bandstand, start walking. She takes my hand, laces her fingers with mine, and again it feels like the most natural thing in the world. I give her hand a little squeeze and start in on the story about Fourth of July, summer after my sophomore year in college. Gerry was fourteen at the time, and I caught him high as a fucking kite hiding behind the bandstand, ranting about a government conspiracy theory that involved rats equipped with sonar equipment.

  “…So my friend and I — ” (and I say friend because I’m skimming over Jenny’s involvement in the whole thing) “— took him back to my house before my parents got home, sobered him up enough to get him quiet.”

  I chuckle, shaking my head at the memory.

  “The things we do in our teens, right?” Amy says.

  I nod. “Though in Gerry’s case, it’s ‘the things we do in our teens, twenties, and thirties.’ If I had it to do all over again, knowing how Gerry’s life turned out, I wouldn’t have covered for him that night.”

  I take Amy’s hand again; we meander through the park.

  “And how did it turn out?” she asks cautiously. “If it’s okay to ask.”

  “It’s okay,” I say with a shrug. “Gerry’s story isn’t anything half of Marcine doesn’t know anyway. Probably even your friend getting married knows if she’s from here.” I take a breath. “Gerry… Well, everyone in my family dealt with being exotic freaks in different ways.”

  “Exotic freaks?” Amy asks, nose crinkling in a way that I have to say I find kind of adorable.

  I wave my arm around, trying to include in its sweep the whole of quaint-fucking downtown Marcine. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is a white bred, redneck little town. There’s maybe three other black families in the whole Marcine zip code. No Asians to this day. And then there’s us. Definitely not white but never quite black enough for the, like, ten other black kids. My brothers and sister and I, we were fucking zoo animals growing up. Spectacles.” I shrug. “Dutch bent the attention to her advantage, of course, because that’s what she does — made herself Queen Bee. And since I was… well, big, I poured my energy into being an athlete. I figured no one would mess with me if everyone knew I could beat the shit out of them. PJ thought he could win people over if he was smart and charming and worked harder than everyone else. But Gerry? Gerry just rebelled.”

  I let out a bark of a laugh. “And in a twisted kind of way, I respected him for it. The rest of us were all searching for approval even if we said we weren’t; Gerry had a sort of ‘fuck you’ attitude from the time he was eleven or twelve, but it turned into a drug problem by the time he was fourteen, fifteen. He went into rehab for the first time when he was seventeen; started using again as soon as he got out. Dropped out of high school. Fought constantly with my parents. They tried to fix him, but you can only be fixed if you wanna be, y’know? So he just got worse and worse and finally ended up running off with a bunch of friends when he was eighteen. We tracked him down to California, but he was full-on junkie by that point — a fucking walking, breathing public service announcement, living under bridges and eating out of dumpsters and shit. My parents brought him home, he stole from them, sp
lit again, they brought him back, he did it again. In and out of rehab. On and off the streets. Finally, a couple years back, he gave my mother a black eye and my father put his foot down. Told him he wasn’t a part of the family anymore, wasn’t welcome at home. And that was the last I’d heard about Ger. Until I came home a few days ago.”

  I look down at Amy, who has a pensive look on her face. Like she’s taking it all in.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. “Maybe all that was TMI.”

  She shakes her head. “Not at all. Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me.”

  We arrive at the edge of the park, across the street from the coffee shop we started from. Without discussing it, we end up next to her parked rental car a moment later.

  She leans against the car door, reaches up to brush hair out of my face again. Lets her fingers brush down my cheek and jaw.

  “Thanks for coming out with me tonight,” she says.

  I take both her hands. “Thanks for asking me out. Although I am a little jealous you beat me to it.”

  She smiles; I lean in for a goodnight kiss, but am startled out of it when I hear a male voice boom out from across the street, “Get a room, fucking queers!”

  I jerk my head in the direction of the voice, anger smoldering, and spot a twenty-ish, heavy-set kid with a beard and a baseball cap. He and a couple of his sniggering buddies are coming out of Dillan’s Bar & Grill down the street, not far from Ben’s record shop.

  As if we’d discussed it ahead of time, Amy and I both give the boys the one-fingered salute in perfect fucking synchronized timing. They return the friendly gesture. I open my mouth to yell something, probably like Fuck you! or Kiss my big black ass!, but before I can get a word out, Amy wraps both her hands around my shirt collar and yanks down hard, pulling me down into a ferocious kiss. She has to stand on her tiptoes to reach me, and even then I’m too far away for her taste. I get what she’s up to, so I help her out, hoisting her up, hands under her thighs, pressing her back against the car.