by Annora Green
Sophia leaned down to kiss the top of his head and he sighed heavily.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I won’t bother you any more.”
She went to her room and sorted through things in her closet, debating what to wear. Pants, skirt, dress? Scarf, no scarf? Keep it simple and stick to her favorite color - black - or go with something bolder, like red? A deep red, or aubergine?She could not decide. And then, she felt ridiculous, sorting through her clothes, fretting like a high schooler going on a first date. This wasnot a date.
Not at all.
Just two friends catching up.
Two old friends catching up.
Two old... well, more than friends... catching up.
She hated how nervous Veronica made her.
In the end, she decided on a simple black shift dress, a stylish leather jacket that was cut just right for her, the lapels draped in a soft waterfall-style cut in the front.
“You look nice,” Percy observed when Sophia went into his room to say goodbye just before leaving and to remind him that he had to go to bed by 11, no exceptions, although she would try to be back by then.
“I know, mom,” Percy said gruffly.
It struck her tonight in particular how old Percy had gotten. One second he was a little kid who demanded her attention, and the next, he was independent, smart, accomplished. He had his own life and interests and schedule, and he did not really need her to remind him to go to bed.
Percy was an age where the transformation from a boy to a teenager had been almost overnight. It seemed like barely a year ago he had been playing on the playground, and now he was nearly as tall as she was and working on complex homework projects, telling her he’s “got it.” His dirty blonde hair had also grown out from a boyish bowl-style cut to a darker, messier, shorter style that also made him appear older.
Where had time gone?Sophia wondered as she returned downstairs and pulled on her black trench coat and favorite heeled leather boots.
Percy was quickly leaving his childhood behind. Sophia knew that the day when he would be leaving home, leaving her to go to college or travel or work, was probably drawing closer. There were only a few years left until she had to face that reality.
It was starting to dawn on her that this house would be so big and empty without him.
She shook her head to clear her mind, trying hard not to think of that right now. The last thing she needed to do when going to a dinner (that she was already nervous enough about) was worry needlessly about Percy and things that were still several years away.
As she went out to her car and drove away, she shifted her thoughts from Percy to Veronica.
Vera.
She had met Veronica during her undergraduate program at college, in a course on Venetian art that she had taken as an elective.
She had been 21 at the time. Young. Foolish. Naive. Moody.
Veronica had been the young professor of the course.
Sophia had just come out of a terrible relationship. Only a couple of years prior, her mother, Callista, had forced her to break up with her high school sweetheart, Lucas. In a plot straight out of a fairy tale, her mother had said that the boy - who had truly been the kindest, sweetest man she had ever known, her best friend at the time - was not wealthy enough, not from a background worthy of being anything more than a high school crush for her. Callista had accused him of being only interested in her for her family’s wealth and connections, which Sophia knew was not true. Lucas was genuine and kind.
Naturally, Callista’s disapproval of their relationship initially galvanized it. Sophia grew distant from her mother and avoided family gatherings whenever she could. She hid in the comfort and safety of her little life with Lucas, in the tiny one-bedroom apartment they secretly rented together her second year of college. However, by her third year, Sophia began to be worn down by the tension between her family and her secret life with Lucas. At last, she allowed her mother to talk her out of the relationship.
After she broke up with him, Lucas, who was a year ahead of her in school, graduated and was accepted into a MBA program on the East Coast. He moved to another time zone, disappointed and bitter after Sophia ended things.
He eventually got his degree, got a job at a prestigious consulting firm in Manhattan, and found his way into the arms of someone else, a woman with whom he would eventually marry and have three children. Sophia never forgot about him, nor did she forget the feelings of regret and even guilt at having allowed her mother to influence her feelings toward him. She was sure he had long ago forgotten about her.
Meanwhile, Sophia started her final semester of college, and her mother set her up with a young man named Scott. Even though she was still mourning the loss of Lucas, Sophia decided to give it a try. Scott was someone with a fancy Ivy League background, and a good pedigree as heir to a big chain of hotels that his grandfather had established decades ago and had since grown into an international empire. Scott was someone who, with his elegant family and upbringing, Callista felt was much more worthy of her daughter’s time and affection.
Of course Sophia never loved him.
Deep down, Sophia knew her mother had, by and large, meant well, but she always was easily blinded by labels and appearances and had never really understood what would actually be in Sophia’s best interest.
Scott was not in her best interest.
Scott was everything that a decent man - or human being - was not: arrogant, aloof, disrespectful of her thoughts, feelings, wants and needs. He felt he could throw endless gifts and money her way, take her out to extravagant parties and affairs, and believed that Sophia would be perfectly content with just that. To be fair, at first she liked it. He was different and worldlier than Lucas had been. But it did not take her long to see that he did not behave well. Although when they first dated he had always seemed interested in what she had to say, as time went on he preferred the company of his friends to her. When he did spend time with her - often only for his family’s social events - she felt like the show pony she had once owned as a girl. Pretty and useful as a companion, but not something that was expected to have much substance or depth. She was a mere decoration for his arm.
His disrespect for her ran even deeper, to the point of resenting her for her intelligence and ambition. At one point, he tried to talk her out of applying for a graduate program, bluntly stating that it did not matter if she had the degree because she would never need to work. Why would she want a career when she could instead just take it easy and let him worry about the finances?
At the time, she was furious.
How can you possibly know what I want or how I feel about having a career? she remembered yelling at him one night over an expensive glass of red wine.
They had been eating filet mignon, seated next to a fireplace at the private club he was a member of.
Sophia, still desperate for her mother’s approval at the time, felt obligated to give Scott a second, then third, then fourth chance. Perhaps he would eventually recognize her ambition - that she had an interest in working, an interest in learning and growing - and he would accept her for who she was. Maybe he would even learn to appreciate her. After all, he was still figuring out who he was, too, she had reasoned. And he was always under tremendous pressure from his father to perform well and eventually take on the family business. Perhaps that was why he did not have time to consider her feelings.
As a result of her optimistic and generous attitude towards Scott, she gave him too much of her time. She went out with him the better part of her final year of college. But that summer, when he presented her with a three carat yellow diamond engagement ring a few weeks ahead of her 22nd birthday, she knew it was so wrong and everything about him made her miserable. She easily declined the offer and fled.
She was over relationships, she had decided. She had had enough. That summer she rented a studio apartment, alone, and she put on blinders and focused only on finishing the final two classes for her degree and
applying to grad school, abandoning any more efforts at finding a relationship.
On the night of her 22nd birthday, she was still bitter. It was a Friday and a handful of her friends from school had insisted on taking her out to celebrate.
“You only turn 22 once!” one of her friends said, trying in vain to cheer up the freshly broken-up Sophia.
“We said that last year when we all turned 21,” Sophia said, not impressed with the mantra.
But Sophia gave in and put on a tight dress and high heels, curled her long hair into loose waves, and agreed to let her friends take her out.
Not long after they arrived at the bar, she noticed one of her professors, a tall, formidable blonde who taught the Venetian art class, was also there.
Sophia quickly grew bored of drinking that evening (Scott used to drink a lot of fine spirits, and therefore alcohol, with the exception of wine and cider - the two things he never touched - had lost its appeal to her). She sipped on champagne for a little while, which was fun, but it made her head feel heavy and her body slightly lethargic, and so she slowed down as the night wore on.
Her friends did not slow down.
As they sipped on their drinks, they grew more and more enamored with the men who kept dropping by their table to flirt and ask them to dance. Sophia was indifferent to the attention from strangers. At first, her friends encouraged her to get out on the dance floor, making sure to point out to the strange, leering men that she was the birthday girl. But as Sophia stubbornly remained at the table, as the night wore on, they turned their attention away from Sophia and back on themselves and their own needs.
Her friends gradually drifted away, getting on their feet to dance with the suitors. Sophia stayed at their table, growing impatient to get home where she could change into something comfortable and just sleep.
But as she lingered at the table, slowly sipping her champagne, her eyes kept drawing back to Veronica, a few tables away.
The other woman was also alone. Her long, blonde hair fell around her shoulders in a mass, covering her face from Sophia’s view where she sat, but Sophia noted that the woman’s shoulders were slumped over. She was also nursing a single drink.
Finally, when Sophia decided her friends had been absent from their table for long enough, Sophia picked up her half-full glass and went over to the woman.
“Professor Schaefer?”
The woman looked up at her, and Sophia’s breath caught slightly.
Although she had often been distracted by the professor during lectures - she was tall, always smartly dressed, with full lips and long blonde hair that cascaded in waves over her shoulders - the woman was truly stunning in the low light of the room, her large blue eyes, full red lips, sharp cheekbones somehow more highlighted than usual despite the dim light.
Sophia mustered up her courage to speak again, shifting her weight to one side, hoping to look both casual and confident.
She took a deep breath.
“My friends left me for some guys they just met,” Sophia explained matter-of-factly. “Mind if I join you?”
“Do I know you?”
Sophia cringed internally. Of course. She was in a class full of 50 or 60 other students... she stared at Professor Schaefer every day, but she doubted the Professor had ever given her a second glance.
“I’m in one of your classes. The Art and Politics of Renaissance Venice,” she said, recovering quickly.
The woman took a sip from her glass and studied her for a moment with her darkly-lined eyes, then motioned for her to sit.
The night passed, and the two women did not talk much at first. They drank, slowly. They exchanged pleasantries, then brief, snide and snarky comments about the people surrounding them in the bar. Girls dancing in massive groups to subtly ward off the men swooping in on them like prey, people growing too tipsy to stand up straight or dancing in odd, trancelike ways, desperate single men trying harder and harder as the night wore on to catch the eye of women passing by.
The two of them observed and judged the social intercourse as couples at tables nearby flirted in the low light, then broke away from their groups of friends to disappear onto the dance floor or into a dark corner somewhere.
After a while, they both were talking, finding a renewed sense of energy with each other.
Later, they were both flirting.
When Sophia’s “friends” never returned to their original table, having been swallowed up in the late-night chaos, she followed Veronica out of the club as if pulled by an invisible string, trailing her back to a large and elegant, but very dark and empty, apartment with a view overlooking the city skyline.
She did not question or overthink anything as the woman brought her a glass of wine, which Sophia promptly set down on the coffee table and left untouched.
The two women were in each other’s arms almost immediately and spent the rest of the weekend together, neither one leaving Veronica’s apartment until Monday morning.
¨°¨
“So, I hear you have enjoyed quite a few achievements lately?” Veronica asked, taking a sip of sparkling water as she leaned back into the plush booth at the restaurant, observing Sophia as she mulled over her menu and tried to decide whether to order the mussels or the catch of the day.
“It’s been a good year,” Sophia said, smiling at her elegantly.
“It’s good to see you are doing well,” Veronica said.
Sophia kept smiling, her eyes soft, her shoulders relaxing somewhat. “Same for you.”
“So. Sophia. What’s next for you, my dear? Fame? Fortune? An empire built on lace and silk?” Veronica asked.
“Skipping the pleasantries and going straight to the point, as usual,” Sophia said, setting down her menu.
Veronica smiled smugly.
“I want to be successful long-term,” Sophia said after a moment of thought. “Not for fame, or fortune, but to prove to myself that I can make it. That I can take care of myself. I would be content to maintain a successful business, employing a few talented people and supporting their own careers and livelihoods along the way. That’s all I want.”
“Your mother isn’t still pushing you into rotten relationships, is she?” Veronica asked. “I hope not... nothing will hold you back more than another Scott.”
Sophia took a sip of her iced tea. She did not drink alcohol around Veronica.
“Not as much in recent years. I know better now. After Percy was born, it was easier for me to draw lines with her and find the strength to push back on her interferences in my love life.”
“You learned to bite back.”
“Precisely.”
“What about your batty sister? Is she still enjoying hunting down beautiful prey to play with before devouring them?”
Sophia laughed. “You are as poetic as always. She’s getting married this spring.”
“What a terrible fate for her fiancé.”
Sophia sighed. “I have to go to that wedding. Her third one. I also have to find someone to go with, otherwise my mother will jump on the opportunity to match me up with some miserable human being at the wedding.”
“There isn’t anyone in your little black book you could take?” Veronica asked, taking a delicate sip of her sparkling water.
Sophia shifted in her seat. She was hoping that Veronica would see their impromptu reunion at The Little Cafe as an omen, a sign that they should try things out again...
“I’m sure you will find someone,” Veronica said. “And if not, I’ve never known you to be afraid to show up at a social event on your own.”
“I’m not,” Sophia said.
“Whatare you looking for these days? Outside of building an empire of pretty little nothings, that is.”
Sophia paused.
“Nothing. I’m content with how things are,” she said.
“So, Sophia Black is not after romance. It sounds like your sole focus these days is Percy and your business. At least it seems things are going quite well for
you on that front.”
Sophia nodded. “Business is steady. I showed my collection at a show in New York at the end of last year. My next goal is to take my work to Paris, hopefully attract buyers to expand into European markets.”
“You must have a lot of energy to keep up with the demands of your career and your son. Is he a teenager now?”
“He is. I always thought I could do it all, and in recent years, I have found I just about can. It helps that he’s smart, and driven, and doesn’t need a lot of parenting anymore.”
“Sounds like he takes after his mother. But still, how do you manage it all?” Veronica asked.
Sophia shifted and took anther sip of her tea. “I just do.”
“You’re no longer the young, idealistic thing I used to know,” Veronica said, somewhat wistfully.
Sophia laughed. “Young and idealistic? When you and I were the closest, I was cynical and burned out from a bad relationship. And naïve. I had a lot to learn still. You were my only real friend at that time in my life.”
Veronica shook her head. “No. You were not in that bad of a place. A bright student, with her entire life ahead of her. I, on the other hand... I was a terrible person to be around back then.”
Sophia took a deep breath.
“You were genuine and respected me. One of the few people in my life who was truthful and honest with me,” Sophia said. “Your influence helped me grow up, pushed me to accomplish the things I needed to, in order to be where I am today.’
“How sweet, in retrospect. I am certain I was not that good for you. You were full of life,” Veronica said nostalgically, her eyes unfocused, her mind conjuring up some memory deep within her. “That... brought me back to life.”
“What do you mean?” Sophia asked softly.
Veronica looked into her eyes. “You know I wasn’t doing well, back when we first met.”
“Right,” Sophia said.
Veronica leaned in. “After I left you, I sought help for my addiction. It took years before I felt normal again. Then I started my own business as an interior designer, finally doing what I truly love. I even managed to reach out and see my daughter again. She’d been living with her grandmother, but I started to see her more and more as I got better, and things are good with us now. Not perfect, but good. I don’t know how I would have been motivated to get help if I hadn’t been with you. I owe you my life, Sophia.”