by Julia Watts
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Other Books by Julia Watts
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Bella Books
Copyright © 2014 by Julia Watts
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Bella Books Edition 2014
eBook released 2014
Editor: Katherine V. Forrest
Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles
ISBN: 978-1-59493-396-7
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Other Books by Julia Watts
Bella Books
Wildwood Flowers
Phases of the Moon
Wedding Bell Blues
Finding H.F.
Secret City
Spinsters Ink
Women’s Studies
The Kind of Girl I Am
Beanpole Books
Kindred Spirits
Free Spirits
Revived Spirits
Acknowledgments
As always, my profound gratitude goes to my wise editor Katherine V. Forrest, to Linda Hill and the Bella Books team, to my family and friends, and to everyone who reads my work.
About the Author
A native of southeastern Kentucky, Julia Watts is the author of numerous books for adults and young adults, including Secret City, the Lambda Literary Award finalist The Kind of Girl I Am, and the Lambda Literary Award winner Finding H.F. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and teaches at South College and in Murray State University’s low-residency MFA program. She lives with her family in Knoxville in a house full of books and pets.
Chapter One
Forty. Chrys looked around at the students in the classroom and realized she was now twice as old as many of them. Even though forty wasn’t approaching the geriatric, it did feel like it should be a mature age—a time by which a gal should have some accomplishments under her belt (she had a few) and a pretty clear vision of where her life was going (she had no idea). There was no arguing that at forty, one was a grownup, and standing in front of a roomful of bored, restless teens and twenty-somethings made her feel like she was looking through the window of a hospital nursery. They were babies. They had just grown up enough to trade their diapers for blue jeans and their pacifiers for cell phones.
Teaching English composition wasn’t her preferred way of spending her birthday evening, but Meredith had promised to take her out for a late supper and cocktails once class was over. She let the thought of a dirty martini in a chilled glass fortify her as she turned and wrote the word Narrative on the dry-erase board. “Now since you’ve all had the chance to read Chapter Fourteen—”
“What page is that on?” This was from Brittany in the front row (there were five Brittanys in the class), the blond one who always wore low-cut tops that revealed the tattooed name Cody (Husband? Boyfriend? Son?) on her right breast.
“Let me check.” Chrys grabbed the textbook off her desk. She had noticed that many students expected her to know page numbers even when she wasn’t looking at the textbook, as though being an English teacher meant she was a walking table of contents. “It starts on page two thirty-six,” she said, then turned back to the board to write, A narrative tells a story by relating a sequence of events.
She turned around from the board to find herself face-to-face with another Brittany, the brown-haired, big-boned one who always seemed to be wearing the same Kenny Chesney T-shirt. “My sister just texted me,” Brittany Two said, “and she’s watching my baby, but now she has to take her dog to the vet on accounta something he ate.” She sounded panicky, but it was the same kind of panicky as when she forgot a pen or a paperclip. Panicky seemed to be her default setting. “If I was to leave now, would I miss anything?”
No, Chrys was tempted to say, we’d halt the class immediately and spend our remaining time praying for your sister’s dog’s recovery. “Email me, and I’ll let you know what you missed,” she said instead. “I’m kind of busy lecturing right now.”
After Brittany Two’s departure, Chrys said, “Now what are some of the elements of narrative—the things we have to have if we’re going to write a story?”
“Plot, character, setting, theme,” offered Liz from the third row. Liz was in her early thirties, and like many of Chrys’s brightest students, was a young mother who had decided to go back to college once her kids reached school age.
“Good,” Chrys said, writing the terms on the board. “And of course, a narrative can be fiction or non-fiction—”
Music suddenly blared—the chorus of a pop song celebrating the joys of binge drinking—and it took longer than it probably should have for Chrys to identify it as a ring tone. “Folks,” she said, “can we please keep the phones turned off during class?”
Incredibly, the offending party, a jocky-looking guy who owed her two papers, took the call. “Hey,” he said, oblivious to all but the person on the other end of the phone. “Not much, just sitting in class.”
Six years ago, Chrys had taught a different breed of student at a different breed of school. Conscientious and hard-working, most of them had arrived at college with above-average test scores and a few AP credits. Not all of them were brilliant, of course, but overall they tended to be motivated kids who really flung themselves into the college experience, and working with them Chrys often felt that she learned just as much as she taught.
But then she had gone and done the one thing that always changes everything. She had fallen in love.
Back at Western Carolina State, where Chrys had gotten her first teaching job a decade ago, her work life had been radically different. WCS was in a quaint little town in the mountains. It was a lovely campus with red brick buildings and old trees, and the kids, many of whom came from those mountains with big college dreams, reminded her of herself at their age. The regional university vibe of the school itself was reminiscent of Murray State in Kentucky where Chrys had done her own undergraduate work, so she had felt comfortable there instantly. It didn’t hurt that the members of the English department, many of whom were nearing retirement age, treated her like a child prodigy for being a newly minted PhD. When her dissertation on lesbian writers on the Left Bank was published as a book, they threw her a party with cake and ice cream.
Though Chrys had been happy during the work week at the university, she often found herself growing restless on the weekends, so she’d drive to Asheville, the nearest city, to wander the bookstores and funky shops. One Saturday while browsing the lesbian fiction section in Asheville’s lesbian-owned-but-not-
wholly-lesbian bookstore, she found herself standing beside a tall, athletic-looking blond woman. The woman picked up a copy of Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and Chrys heard herself saying, “That’s a fabulous book.”
The woman’s smile revealed straight white teeth and dimples. “That’s what everybody says. I can’t believe I haven’t read it. They’re going to take my lesbian card away.”
Chrys wasn’t exactly closeted at work, but she wasn’t announcing her sexuality from the rooftops either. It was refreshing to hear someone drop being a dyke as an opening conversational gambit. The conversation continued, first over coffee at the bookstore café, then over dinner at a restaurant way out of Chrys’s price range that served small mounds of artfully drizzled food on square white plates, then later on the high thread-count sheets in Meredith’s room in the Grove Park Inn after sex that was so much better than Chrys’s past experiences that it seemed like something else entirely. Chrys was a little shocked at herself for going to bed with a woman on the first date—and an impromptu first date at that. But she had been single for a long time. And she was smitten.
Meredith, it turned out, was a plastic surgeon with a practice at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. Chrys would’ve ordinarily been turned off by a profession that catered to vanity in an appearance-obsessed culture, but Meredith had explained to her how she had been literally “bitten by” her occupation. As a small child, she had been severely bitten on the face by a neighbor’s dog. She would’ve been permanently disfigured had it not been for the excellent work of a skilled plastic surgeon. Sure, she said, in her profession there was no shortage of Botox and boob jobs and butt lifts, but there was fulfilling work, too: facial reconstruction for victims of house fires and car crashes, new breasts for cancer survivors. Chrys began to feel that she’d judged a whole profession too harshly.
Fortunately, Chrys hadn’t been the only one who’d been smitten. Their conversation continued by phone and email and in person once a month when they’d reconnect in Asheville. They went on for a year like this before Meredith started talking about them living together.
Of course, there was no way Meredith could give up a successful practice, and so, after six months of agonizing, Chrys decided to give up a job she loved for the woman she loved. She moved to Knoxville.
Chrys had only had one other live-in lover, with whom she’d shared a crappy one-bedroom apartment when she was working on her master’s degree at the University of Kentucky. Her living situation with Meredith was a far cry from the student slum days. Meredith owned a four-bedroom faux chateau, complete with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, in an upscale Knoxville subdivision called Whittington Manor (all the frou-frou subdivisions in the area seemed to have “-ington” names). A Guatemalan maid was in charge of cleaning the house, and her husband did the mowing, blowing, and landscaping. It took several months for Chrys to feel like a resident in the house instead of one of the staff.
It took Chrys a full year to find a new job, and she wouldn’t have found it without a tip from one of Meredith’s acquaintances. A nurse who’d been a colleague of Meredith’s had taken a teaching job at Hill College and let Meredith know that one of the English faculty members there was retiring. Thanks to the grapevine, Chrys had found herself a gig teaching five sections of freshman comp (plus tutoring four hours a week in the Writing Center) to students pursuing careers as nurses, paralegals, x-ray technicians, and office managers. Her heady days of teaching English majors were gone, but still, she didn’t feel she could complain too much. In the past her love life had always taken a backseat to her academic life; it balanced the scales to shift the weight to the other side…especially for a lover as entrancing as Meredith.
Tonight, as her class’s nine thirty end time drew nearer, Chrys felt as restless as her students looked. She put them in groups for a while to discuss an essay they had allegedly read. But when she listened in on the discussions, the topics seemed to be what the students were going to eat or drink when they got out of class, what they had done last weekend, and what they were going to do this weekend. By ten after nine, Chrys decided that there was zero chance of any further education occurring and dismissed class.
She was a little early for her meeting time at the Brasserie (or the “brassiere,” as they always called it in private), but when she got there, Meredith was already there, waiting at the door, wearing a tailored suit and silk blouse combination that managed to look both professional and sexy. She kissed Chrys’s cheek and said, “I see you survived your class.”
“Only a little worse for wear,” Chrys said. “Nothing a drink won’t fix.”
“Well, shall we?” Meredith held open the door.
Once they were inside, the fawning commenced. The maitre d’, who was young enough to be a student at the university, said, “Dr. Padgett, what a pleasure to see you this evening! We have your special table ready for you.”
One of the things Chrys had to get used to in the early days of their relationship was the constant ass-kissing that came with Meredith being a doctor. At first, probably pettily, Chrys had been a little jealous. After all, she had a doctorate, too, and people didn’t fall all over themselves ingratiating themselves with her. But the logic behind the ass-kissing was obvious: M.D.s had way more spending power than PhDs in English. And then, too, if you were on a plane and a message came over the speaker saying, “Is there a doctor on board?” there was no doubt what kind of doctor they were asking for. They sure as hell weren’t looking for somebody in first class who could analyze the homoerotic imagery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Once they were seated at their cozy, white-clothed table, Meredith ordered a bottle of champagne and the mussels appetizer that was Chrys’s favorite. After the champagne cork popped, Chrys looked around the dimly lit restaurant with its black and white photos of Parisian life. “This is a far cry from the birthdays of my childhood. It was always hot dogs followed by a cake straight out of a Betty Crocker box.”
Meredith smiled. “For me it was usually a party with a bakery cake and a clown making balloon animals or something.”
It figured. Chrys had grown up a country girl while Meredith was solidly suburban. “How traumatic.”
“Not really.” Meredith smiled. “I don’t share your fear of clowns.”
“Which is lucky.” Chrys paused for a sip of champagne. “Because, you know, they can smell fear.”
Her entree was a buttery filet of sole surrounded by tender-crisp haricots verts. It was funny to compare these green beans with the ones she’d grown up eating back in Kentucky. Nanny would string the beans in the morning and leave them simmering on the stove for hours with a huge slab of bacon. Both Nanny’s beans and the Frenchified version in front of her were delicious, but it was hard to think of them as the same vegetable.
Over the meal, Chrys and Meredith chatted about the usual things—Meredith’s high-maintenance and sometimes crazy patients, Chrys’s high-maintenance and sometimes crazy students, whether or not the new movie they wanted to see would make it to Knoxville’s single art-house cinema this weekend.
When dessert arrived, Chrys closed her eyes to better experience her first spoonful of chocolate mousse. “I could fill a bathtub with this stuff and jump in,” she said.
“Order a second if you like,” Meredith said. “It’s your birthday.”
“But then my ass would be so wide I wouldn’t fit in a bathtub.”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ve got a pretty big bathtub.”
It was true. The tub in the master bath was a huge, oval jacuzzi in which they could both sit comfortably and soak up to their shoulders.
“Listen,” Meredith said, “I know you said no gifts, but I did get you a little something.”
“But—”
“I promise it’s just little.” Meredith rummaged through her bag.
The first three years of their relationship Meredith had showered Chrys with expensive jewelry—diamond stud ear
rings from Tiffany, a string of Mikimoto pearls. She had loved them, of course, but she was really more of a funky art-fair jewelry kind of girl. And besides, all the small gift boxes left at her spot on the dinner table or on her pillow had started to make her feel like a mobster’s mistress. “You’d better not have the Hope Diamond in there,” Chrys said as Meredith continued to search the compartments in her bag.
“Here it is,” she said finally and passed Chrys a flat, square box wrapped in purple tissue paper.
Chrys tore into it. “Oh, the Adele CD! Perfect. Thank you.”
“Because I’ve learned to respect your frugality, I shopped at Target instead of Tiffany.”
Chrys reached across the table and squeezed Meredith’s hand. “And I couldn’t be happier.”
Back at the house, tipsy from the champagne, Chrys started shedding components of what she called her “teacher drag” as soon as she got in the door. She stepped out of her flats in the foyer and unbuttoned her blouse as she climbed the curving stairs to the bedroom. Soon she was standing in front of Meredith in nothing but her diamond earrings, string of pearls, and black lace bra and panties. “So give me your professional opinion,” she said. “Do I look forty?”
“You look like a goddess,” Meredith said. “And goddesses are ageless. Besides, you’re not allowed to obsess over your age since I’m a decade older than you.”
“You don’t look it,” Chrys said. It was true. Though Meredith had never indulged in the surgical vanity of her patients, she looked much younger than her age. Her face, with its enviable bone structure and strong jawline, was wrinkle-free except for smile lines, and her body was toned from hours of running and tennis. Sometimes, especially when she was in her shorts and T-shirt, her short blond hair tousled after a run, she could almost pass for a teenaged tomboy.