by Rachel Lacey
“If this is going to work, you and I are going to have to get to know each other, I think,” I told her. “I’m guessing if you weren’t pregnant, you’d enjoy a nice hike in the woods the way Taylor does with her dogs.”
Violet cocked her head to the side, staring at me.
“But maybe what you actually want right now is breakfast. Actually, so do I. And coffee, but that’s just for me.” I wasn’t sure why I was talking out loud to her, but she seemed like she might like it. She watched me closely every time I spoke to her.
What was I going to do with her? Last night hadn’t gone well, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t happy here. We went back inside, and I took off her leash before walking to the instructions Taylor had left for me. Violet would get a mixture of wet and dry food, the same as she had for dinner last night. “I do think it’s funny that you eat puppy chow,” I told her as I popped open a can and began to mix it all together. According to Taylor, Violet needed the extra calories.
I put the bowl on the floor and turned my attention to my own breakfast. I flipped on the coffee machine and popped a bagel in the toaster. My phone chimed with an incoming text message.
How did her first night go?
It was from Taylor, of course. And I shouldn’t feel a thrill at the sight of her name, because she was only inquiring about the dog.
Rough. She hates the pen we made her, I replied.
I have an idea for that. I’ll stop by after work, if that’s okay.
Sure.
Call me if you have any questions today.
I put my phone down, frustration rising in my chest as I looked at the living room, which was completely torn apart. I had so much work to do here, and I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get anything done today but worry about Violet.
I spread jam onto my bagel, poured myself a mug of coffee, and sat at the kitchen table. I had no idea what to do with a dog all day. My grandma had always had a dog around, but I couldn’t remember what Comet did all day. Sleep? Chew on a bone? Maybe I should give Violet some toys to play with.
“You don’t look like you’d play with toys,” I told her before biting into my bagel. On the contrary, Violet might be the most serious dog I’d ever met. If she were a person, I was sure she’d never smile.
Right now, she lay with her head between her front paws, watching me eat my breakfast now that she’d finished her own. Maybe she’d like to watch me do some work around the house later too. But first, we sat and stared at each other while I finished my bagel and coffee. It was unnerving. She didn’t seem to blink very often.
To distract myself, I picked up my phone and started thumbing through my notifications. My friend Courtney had texted to ask how things were going in Vermont and to let me know #girlagainstthepatriarchy had finally stopped trending on Twitter. I had deleted the app from my phone before I left Boston. I’d been proud of the photo for a hot second before it destroyed my life. Now I never wanted to see it again.
When you get back to Boston, we should talk.
The text appeared on my screen without warning, and I stared at it for a moment in shocked silence. It was from Sabrina, the first time I’d heard from her since she walked out on me two weeks ago.
Yes was the first word that came to mind. I wanted to reply that I’d be happy to meet her whenever and wherever she wanted, because maybe she’d had a change of heart. Maybe she realized she’d made a mistake.
But as I began to text her back, tears filled my eyes. Dammit. What could Sabrina possibly say to make this right? How could I ever trust her again? The truth was, I hadn’t spent nearly as much time here in Vermont pining over her as I’d thought I would. I was lonely, sure. But I had a sneaking suspicion that I was missing the rest of my friends and family in Boston more than I was missing Sabrina.
Tears spilled over my cheeks, and I wiped them away as I finished my coffee. On the dog bed, Violet whined.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “People cry sometimes. Didn’t your owner ever cry, or was she one of those eternally happy people?”
Violet just stared.
“Well, I cry,” I said. “Sometimes, I cry a lot, because I miss my friends and my condo in Boston. I had a whole life there, you know? And some random asshole took a picture of me without my permission and ruined my life with it.”
Silence from the dog bed.
“Anyway, if you and I are going to sleep in my grandma’s old bedroom, we need to pack up her things and make it ours. Hopefully, you’ll like it better tonight than you did last night.” I picked up my phone and deleted my half-formed response to Sabrina. She didn’t deserve a reply, at least not yet. For all I knew, she just wanted to ask for that sweatshirt of hers that I’d found in the laundry last week.
“All right, you,” I said to the dog. “Let’s go pack up my grandma’s bedroom.”
10
Taylor
I pulled into Phoebe’s driveway and parked in my usual spot behind the purple Nissan. I wasn’t sure when I’d started thinking of this as Phoebe’s driveway, though, because it wasn’t. Phoebe had never lived here. She’d visited as a child, and she was visiting now. And I needed to remember that distinction.
“I’ll be right back, you two,” I told the dogs in the backseat. “I just have something to give Phoebe, and then we’ll go on our hike.”
I cracked the windows before I shut off the car, laughing at the horrified look on Minnie’s face as she realized I was leaving her behind. This wasn’t part of our routine. Minnie had always been welcome at Margery’s house, but Violet needed time to settle in, which meant not introducing her to any new dogs at the moment.
I carried a stack of blankets and towels with me as I walked toward the front door, but when I knocked, there was no answer. Phoebe’s car was in the driveway, though, so she must be around somewhere. I knocked again, peering through the window, but I couldn’t see any sign of her or Violet inside.
I turned around to find Minnie with her fluffy nose stuck through the crack in the window, watching. “You’re ridiculous, you know that? I’ll be right back.”
I walked around behind the house, and the sight that greeted me sent a warm zing through my system. Phoebe lay on her stomach on a pink blanket beneath Margery’s rosebushes with her feet kicked up behind her and a paperback in her hands. Violet lay on the blanket beside her, fast asleep in the sunshine.
I pressed a hand against my chest, because oof, my heart. There was nothing sexier to me than a woman with a dog, and this woman with this dog had just put a serious dent in the armor I’d spent so many years strengthening. I couldn’t fall for Phoebe again, not unless I wanted to get my heart broken a second time.
I cleared my throat. “Hey.”
Phoebe looked over her shoulder with a smile as the sun cast golden highlights through her brown curls. “Hi.”
“I brought some new bedding for you to try in Violet’s whelping box.”
“Good, because she hates everything I’ve put in there so far,” Phoebe said as she rolled over and sat up, leaving her book face down on the blanket to keep her place. “But what makes you think she’ll like these blankets better?”
“Because they came from her owner’s house.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s sweet…or morbid, depending.”
“Comforting is what I was going for,” I said. “Hopefully, they’ll smell like home to her.”
“It’s certainly worth a shot, but…are they clean? Because you’ve just brought me a dead woman’s blankets.”
I laughed. “Yes. These things all came out of her linen closet.”
“How did you get them?”
“Her sister came to the shelter to pick up Dexter today, so I asked her to bring a few things that smelled like home for Violet.”
“That was good thinking. I hope she likes them.”
“Me too. Want me to set them inside for you? I left my dogs in the car, so I need to go get them.”
“Sure,
” she said. “You’re on your way out for a hike?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to stress Violet out by introducing them.” I opened the back door and stepped inside, frowning at the exposed particle board. I’d told Phoebe I’d help her lay new floors if she fostered Violet, and I needed to make good on that promise. I crossed to the kitchen table and left the bedding there before walking back outside. “Still need help with the floors?”
She nodded. “If you don’t mind. I didn’t get much done at all today with Violet underfoot. I keep worrying she’s going to sneak off and have puppies somewhere.”
“I can come by after work tomorrow and help for a few hours if that’s a good time for you,” I offered.
“That would be great. Thank you.”
Violet got to her feet and walked to me, tail wagging shyly. Her leash dragged behind her in the grass.
I crouched to pet her. “Contrary to what you might think, she seems like she’s doing really well here so far. She’s restless and unsettled with everything that’s happened, and her hormones are telling her to start getting ready for the puppies, but she seems to feel comfortable with you.”
“Well, I hope so,” Phoebe said. “But I still think she’d be better off somewhere else.”
“She likes you, Phoebe. Just look at her.”
Violet walked back to the blanket and plopped down beside Phoebe, tail wagging. Phoebe gave her a hesitant smile. “I can’t stop worrying about her.”
“Try not to. You’ll only stress her out. Chances are she’ll deliver the puppies just fine with minimal help from you. Animals are pretty good at this stuff.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“I’ll make sure someone’s here with you to help,” I told her. “And in the meantime, I’ll be back tomorrow without my dogs so I can help you with those floors.”
11
Phoebe
“We need to get some sleep tonight, Violet,” I said. “Both of us, okay?”
She looked at me with those soulful brown eyes. There was nothing flat or dull about Violet’s eyes. They showed everything she was feeling, and right now, they looked anxious.
“Taylor brought you a new blanket. It was your owner’s. Let’s see if you like it.” I patted the inside of the playpen, where I’d arranged the new blanket on top of one of my grandma’s.
Violet leaned through the open gate and sniffed, and then her tail started to wag. She walked all the way into the pen and pawed at the blanket, but this seemed less hostile than the way she’d pawed at it last night and more like she was trying to get comfortable. She nipped the blanket, and then she began to spin. She tugged and pawed and spun until I was dizzy just watching her, and then she plopped down in the middle of the bedding, looking up at me as her tail thumped the bed.
“You like that?” I asked.
Violet’s tail thumped again.
I took that as a yes. Thank God. I shut off the light, beyond exhausted after last night. To my relief, there was silence in the playpen. Violet seemed ready to crash tonight too. As I drifted to sleep, my last thought was of Taylor, spouting dog knowledge from those soft pink lips, the first lips I had ever kissed.
When I woke the next morning, Taylor’s face still lingered in my mind with a hazy kind of familiarity, as if I’d spent most of the night dreaming about her. Not only that, but the ache between my thighs suggested they might have been sexy dreams. I wished I could remember them. Our summer together had been so long ago, and we’d kept it such a secret that sometimes it felt more like a fairy tale than something that had actually happened.
I’d been so young and inexperienced at sixteen. It had never even occurred to me that I might like girls. I’d been so focused on boys because that was all my other friends talked about. And then there was Taylor, quietly confident as she told me she was gay. And more than that, she’d already had her first girlfriend, another girl in her class.
I’d been floored by the revelation, had felt naïve by comparison. I’d never even thought about kissing a girl, and suddenly, it was all I could think about. And not just any girl. I’d started daydreaming about kissing Taylor. I had romantic notions about us being more than friends, soulmates, even. Just like that, my best friend had become the only person I could imagine myself being with, the only person I wanted to kiss.
It didn’t happen for several long, dramatic weeks, afternoons filled with unnecessary touching and near misses as we fumbled our way toward our first kiss. We’d been sitting side by side on my bed, right here in this house, looking at something on my laptop, when we both turned our heads and our lips collided.
Something came to life inside me that I’d never felt before, a heat and a longing I hadn’t known was possible and had certainly never felt with any of the boys I’d spent so much time trying to impress at home.
After that first kiss, Taylor and I spent the rest of the summer sneaking every moment alone that we could. We’d spent endless hours making out, touching and exploring each other over our clothes. At sixteen, neither of us had been ready to go all the way with our bodies, but we’d given all of our hearts, professing our love every chance we got.
Ours had been an all-consuming teenage love, the kind of love that made me want to despair at the thought of not being with Taylor, that had me sneaking out of my grandmother’s house to meet her for moonlight kisses by the stream and fantasizing about her every moment that we weren’t together.
But I’d also been drowning in fear. There was a girl in my class who wore her hair short and dressed in masculine clothes, and I heard the way people made fun of her, the names they called her and the things they said about her behind her back. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to take it. And what if I wasn’t gay? Maybe this was just a phase some girls went through.
In the end, I’d panicked as the summer drew to a close. I was terrified of coming out to my parents, certain they’d be horrified and cause a huge scene. Taylor was already out, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I ran instead. I cut myself off from the girl I loved, burying my heartbreak behind a polished smile as I returned to school. I dated boys—a lot of boys—but none of them made me feel anything like what I’d felt with Taylor.
I played it straight all the way through college and lost my virginity to a guy on the tennis team. It had been an underwhelming experience at best. Once I started my career as a financial analyst, working with numbers for a living, I’d finally run a cost-benefit analysis on my own life.
Was it worth it to deny who I was and what I truly wanted just to meet my parents’ expectations? By then, it was too late to patch things up with Taylor. We hadn’t spoken since we were sixteen. But once I ran the numbers and committed to something, I was all in. So I came out to my parents and started dating women. And I’d finally found peace, the kind of contentment that came from being true to myself and no longer hiding my sexuality or what I wanted.
But something had always been missing. Nothing—not even my relationship with Sabrina—had ever compared to the way it felt when Taylor kissed me, like fireworks were going off inside me, like I could lose myself in that kiss forever, warm and safe and loved. More than that. Happy. I’d been so happy that summer.
Now that I was back in Vermont, I was starting to remember just how much I’d left behind here. Not just Taylor, but my grandmother’s cabin, the piano, music, dogs, long hikes in the woods, so many things that used to bring me joy.
And maybe it was time to recapture that joy, the way Taylor had done. She was living her life just like she’d always wanted to, doing all the things that made her happy. And she was more beautiful than ever. That ache in my core had only increased during my walk down memory lane, and when I pictured Taylor’s face, I felt a throb of arousal so intense that I shoved a hand down the front of my underwear, desperate for release.
I circled my clit, and my hips bucked up to meet my hand, reminding me that I’d neglected myself since I got to Vermont, caught up in my work around the h
ouse. My vibrator was still in the duffel bag in the guest room, but right now, I was so turned on, I wasn’t even going to need it. I rolled to my belly, thrusting against my fingers as need rose up inside me like a hungry beast, overtaking my senses.
A sharp whine interrupted me, and I wrenched my eyes open to find Violet standing beside the bed, watching me.
I froze. “Shit.”
Another whine.
“Violet, go lie down.”
The dog yipped, still staring at me. Either she really had to pee, or she was a nosy weirdo. Either way, I couldn’t get myself off with her watching. With a groan, I withdrew my hand and sat up, ignoring the unsatisfied ache in my core.
“Fine,” I mumbled. “Let’s go for a walk.”
I led the way back into the house five minutes later. As it turned out, Violet had needed to go pretty urgently, so I couldn’t really fault her for her inopportune interruption. Once she was squared away, I went down the hall for a shower.
Even though I was alone in the house, I closed the bathroom door behind me, needing a few minutes away from Violet’s watchful eyes. It was an adjustment having her around, and honestly, I hoped that once she was settled, she’d give me a little more space. It was unnerving to have her underfoot all the time, quietly staring at me.
Once the water was hot, I stepped into the shower, letting it rush over my face and shoulders, washing away my frustration. A couple of shelter volunteers were coming over this afternoon to give me a crash course in puppy whelping, and then Taylor was stopping by after work to help me put down the laminate flooring. Hopefully it wouldn’t be awkward now that I’d apparently started having sex dreams about her.
Where had that come from? I’d gotten over Taylor more than a decade ago. Maybe I was just horny, and my dreams had more to do with that than with Taylor herself. I’d been thinking about her when I fell asleep, so my unconscious mind probably just put two and two together. Surely that was all it was.