Kerry swung a little higher. Her toes launched off the porch a little harder. “I guess I am looking for more. I’ve had flings, off and on relationships, but nothing serious. It would be nice to have that, to settle down someday.”
“I can’t even picture that right now. Settling down.” Lara stared out into the expanse of April’s yard. Her spring flowers had been replaced by fall cucumbers and tomatoes. All of it looked good enough to eat. April would pick it soon, then let the ground frost over for winter. “I could once upon a time, and I hope I can again someday, but not right now. This feels like a fling to me, if I’m honest.” Lara gestured between the two of them. “A good fling. Maybe one I needed. But I don’t know if it will ever feel like more than that.”
“I guess we’re in different places, huh?”
“I guess so.”
Lara hadn’t expected this to be so easy. The conversation had seemed so intimidating when she’d imagined it in her mind. Part of her had been tempted to ghost Kerry, but she had already tried that with Paige. It hadn’t worked. It had just made both of them resentful and angry and searching for closure. Lara was glad she hadn’t given history a chance to repeat itself.
“If I’m honest,” Kerry said, “I kind of found someone else too.”
Lara was surprised by the revelation, but even more so by how jealous she didn’t feel. “Really?”
“Nothing serious,” Kerry promised. “I just met her. I could see myself going out with her.”
“Then you should do it,” Lara said. It felt like giving advice to a friend.
“Yeah?” Kerry smiled. Her legs stopped swinging. Her feet fell to the ground, and slowly the swing came to a halt too, each rotation back and forth a little shorter than the last, a little lower to the ground. She stood.
“Are you ready to go back inside?”
Lara looked out into the yard again at the trees and the playset and the birdbath. She smiled a little as the wind kissed her cheek. “Yeah.”
Kerry held the door open for her.
Lara had the only job in the world that could make her enjoy checking her email. The past couple of months had been a little rough, but now her inbox was mostly full of the usual cat pics and positive reviews again.
Lorraine had been right about sharing the Daily Page video to her audience. Apparently people actually liked learning more about her. Most of the comments were good now, even most of the articles were nice. There were fewer of them than there had been when Lara first became popular, but it seemed like the people who had stuck around genuinely cared about her and her work. Lara was fine with that. She would rather have a few loyal fans than a lot of random followers uninvested in her well-being.
Lara was just about ready to call it a night. She was curled up in bed with Rocket by her side and a small smile on her face from a particularly funny photo of an orange cat in an orange sweater camouflaged in a pumpkin patch. She scrolled through the last few emails and paused. The message was titled no differently than any of the others. Cat Pic :) was an email Lara received on a daily basis. But the email address was new.
Lara did not get cat pictures from Paige Daley.
Out of curiosity, she opened the email.
One for your Instagram :) was all the email said, and Lara opened the attachment, half expecting some chain email cat meme. What loaded was a picture of Paige and Cosmo wearing the matching sweaters Lara had made them. Paige’s smile was sweet as she eyed Cosmo lovingly and scratched beneath the calico’s chin. Lara could practically hear the purring as Cosmo stared back at Paige through hooded eyes so golden they put Paige’s blue ones to shame. Paige looked beautiful in the photograph.
It was the cutest thing Lara had ever seen, and she tried desperately to ignore the migration of butterflies fluttering in her belly.
She saved the picture to her phone before she decided whether or not she was going to post it. There was no reason she shouldn’t. It was a cute photo. Paige had given her permission. It was exactly the kind of thing she posted every day and exactly the kind of thing her audience would love. But it felt too intimate. Lara knew Paige, and it was so rare to see such a beautiful, vulnerable moment from her. She ran her finger slowly over the screen, along Paige’s cheek. No, she couldn’t bring herself to share this with the world, not quite yet.
If she posted a picture of Paige, everyone in Perry would see it. April would think they’d gotten back together. Her mother would see it and ask her why in the world she was giving Paige Daley the time of day after what they had been through.
They were all good enough reasons not to share the photo, but none of them were why Lara was so hesitant.
She imagined putting the photo out into the void of the Internet: strangers would critique the lighting or comment on how much cuter their own cat was or how the gap between Paige’s teeth made her ugly. No, she wanted to keep this moment to herself. This was a photo that belonged in a family scrapbook. It was a memory. It was something to cherish.
She made it Paige’s contact photo and shut her phone off to charge for the night.
CHAPTER 19
“Did you get my email?”
Paige was supposed to be working, not talking. Lara was here to keep her company, not distract her.
“Yes, I got your email.”
Paige’s grin was all cheese. The light from her laptop made her smile shine even brighter. “Cute picture, huh? When are you going to post it?”
Lara sifted through a couple more pages of the photo album in her lap. There was a grainy shot of Betty and her first car that Lara had never seen before. Cute, but not exactly the type of photo that was worthy of being hung up at Betty’s welcome home party. She thought for sure these old albums she’d found while cleaning out Betty’s house for the party would be more helpful, but in hindsight, there was probably a reason they were tucked away instead of on display.
“I don’t know. Are you sure you’re ready to be an Internet celebrity? Someone’s going to make fun of your drug store mascara, and I don’t want to have to console you when you cry it all away.”
Paige chuckled. “I’m a big girl. Besides,” Cosmo slinked into the living room and Paige scooped her up before she could scurry away, “Cosmo wants to start her modeling career. She needs her mommy’s connections.”
Paige made kissy faces at the cat, and Lara looked away so that she didn’t have to think about how sickeningly sweet it was. Paige pushed closer to Lara on the couch and shoved the cat between them, still cradling her in her arms and showing her off like Cosmo was a newborn infant.
Paige adopted a baby voice and spoke on Cosmo’s behalf: “Post the photo, Mom, so Grandma Daley can see it. I want her to see how popular I am.”
“Does your mom have Instagram?” Lara asked Paige.
“Oh, yeah,” Paige said, her voice returning to normal. “She sends me things all the time. I keep hoping her phone logs her out one day and she forgets her password.”
“Do you have Instagram?”
“God, no. Instagram, Facebook, it’s all the same to me. I don’t bother with social media. Waste of time.”
Paige was right about one thing: Barbara Daley would absolutely love to see that picture of Cosmo and Paige.
“Couldn’t you text your mom the picture? You do believe in texts, right?”
Paige pouted. “You’re no fun.” She rocked Cosmo back and forth, consoling her as if the cat was the one upset. “Is something wrong?” she asked more seriously. “You’re acting weird about this. Is the picture not good enough to post or something? Is it the wrong dimensions? Wrong lighting? I used my camera and everything. I didn’t even take it on my cellphone.”
“It’s not that,” Lara said. “It is a good picture. It’s a great picture. I just don’t…” Lara didn’t know where she was going with this. She didn’t know what to tell Paige. She didn’t know what to tell herself.
“What?”
Lara sighed. Paige tensed up, and Cosmo stopped purring in he
r arms. “It’s not that. It’s a privacy thing. It’s so personal. Why ruin such an intimate moment by sharing it with the world?”
“Newsflash: you and the world can both enjoy the photo at the same time.”
“It’s not the world, it’s this town. People talk, Paige. It’ll make everyone feel like they’re entitled to our personal lives. I don’t want to hear a bunch of rumors about whether or not we’re back together. I like to have some things that I can keep to myself.”
Paige scoffed. “Let them say whatever they want. It doesn’t matter what they think. You don’t know those people.”
“No, you don’t know those people,” Lara said. “I know everyone. Even if I don’t know them, I know them. That’s what it’s like growing up here, Paige. You don’t have to deal with it because you aren’t from here. You’ve only been living here for a few years.”
“This again?” Cosmo jumped from Paige’s arms. Paige took a moment to center herself. She wiped a few stray cat hairs from the front of her shirt. “Look, I don’t pretend to know what your childhood was like here. I know we grew up in different environments. I know we turned out to be different people. I know it’s hard to ignore whatever criticism you think you’ll receive, but the more you can learn to block it out, the better off you’ll be. You can’t spend your entire life worrying about what people think about you or what they’re saying about you behind your back. You need to distance yourself from that mindset.”
“I know. That’s why I moved to Oklahoma City and put literal distance between myself and that mindset.”
“Running away won’t solve your problems either,” Paige said. “You might be far enough away that people will start to forget about you, but it doesn’t solve the root of the problem, which is that you care too much about something that you don’t have any control over. You focus on pleasing other people more than you do on getting what you want out of life. It holds you back. It’s not that Perry is an awful place; it’s that you don’t take advantage of what it has to offer because you’re afraid of what others will say.”
Lara scoffed and sunk further into Paige’s lumpy couch. It was more uncomfortable than it had been two minutes ago. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you, Lara. You have things you love here.” Paige gestured to the photos of Betty in Lara’s lap. “You have your family, and yet you’re willing to leave them behind to escape the things people say about your grandfather. You have a club for your favorite hobby with your best friend, and you’d rather move away and knit in some dinky apartment by yourself to avoid the possibility that you might hear gossip about yourself. You had a job you loved that you got yourself fired from because you were more willing to start a fight than to professionally report your boss for having an unfair bias against you for something you were never even responsible for. The longer you keep caring so much what other people think, the more things you’re going to lose. What happens when you stay in Oklahoma City long enough for people to get to know you? What if you play your music too loud and your neighbor starts hating you? What if your regular Starbucks barista starts resenting you because your morning order is too complicated? You can’t keep moving your entire life to prevent people from holding you back. The only person holding you back is yourself.”
Lara hated how Paige always sounded so sure that she was right. Lara hated more that Paige probably was right in this case. “You don’t want me to move back because you aren’t over me. You still have feelings, and you want to keep me to yourself.”
Paige startled. She was a lion who didn’t expect the mongoose she was toying with to fight back. “You know it’s not just that, Lara. I really do want what’s best for you.”
Paige didn’t even know what was best for herself. Her living room was nicer than Lara remembered it, but the couch had more cat toys on it than it did pillows. Lara wouldn’t be sitting on it if she weren’t so tired. She’d stayed up half the night finishing the week’s orders so that she could devote the entirety of today to setting up for Betty’s party.
“I don’t really want to talk about this right now, Paige. I’m gonna be late.”
“Wait. I wanted to show you something.”
Lara huffed. “Make it quick, please.”
Paige disappeared into her bedroom and returned in moments with her hands full. The hanger she presented carried an article of clothing that Lara hadn’t seen in four years.
“You kept the sweater?”
Paige’s smile was beaming. “Of course I kept the sweater,” she said quietly. “I was never going to throw it away or anything like that. I know it seemed like I didn’t love it when you gave it to me, but I did like it back then, and I still like it now. I wear it every once in a while. It does spend most of the year in the back of the closet, but every time the weather starts getting chilly, I bring it out. It’s a good sweater. It’s warm and nicer than most of the other ones I have. I’ve always liked it.” Paige cradled the sweater in her arms as she spoke, talking to the fabric like a long-lost friend.
Lara wasn’t sure what to say. She had spent years thinking her work was unappreciated, but here it was, dangling in front of her in Paige’s arms. “You’re just saying that because I called you out on it,” she grumbled without much heat.
“No, I mean it.”
Lara thumbed the material. It wasn’t her best work. She was a lot better now than she had been four years ago, but she had poured so much love into Paige’s sweater that it had been one of her best pieces at the time. That was back before Lara took herself seriously as a knitter. It was before Festive Feline Fashion, and it was before Lara decided to find a group of people that would appreciate her knitting more than she thought Paige had.
Still, it was a good piece. At least Paige was getting some use out of it, even if the thought of her wearing the sweater brought out a painful clench in her chest.
Lara’s instinct was doubt Paige, but somehow Paige kept finding ways to convince her that she was genuine now. This was new. Lara wasn’t used to it. The old Paige would never have been this sweet or this vulnerable. Something had happened over the last four years. Either Paige had grown up or she’d become a better liar. Lara didn’t know which one was the truth or which one she wanted to believe.
When Paige cupped Lara’s face in her hands and kissed her for a second time, God help her, it was all too easy to let it happen.
Lara could feel herself sinking. It was a familiar feeling, one she was afraid she’d never escape. For the past four years, it had always felt like she was drowning—into pits of despair, into her own thoughts—but this time, she was falling into Paige’s arms, and Paige was there to help pull her back up to the surface. Finally, Lara had access to fresh air, and she took a deep gulp of it when Paige pulled her lips away from the kiss.
Paige’s forehead was warm pressed against her own. Her breath was hot on Lara’s lips as she spoke in a gentle whisper. “I’ve wanted to do that for days. I’m so happy you let me.” Another kiss came, this time feather-light across her cheek.
Lara wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but right now, whatever this was, she needed it. At least until she got out of Perry. She let herself be held for a moment until Paige pulled away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at the party?” Lara asked.
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Paige grinned.
Time travel was entirely possible.
Lara was transported back twenty-five years. The Welcome Home sign above the door was a Happy Birthday banner for a five-year-old who wanted a dinosaur-themed party and a zoo of stuffed animals. The row of presents on the kitchen table was that army of stuffed bears and giraffes. The scent of freshly Febreezed furniture and lit candles was the aroma of homemade birthday cake fresh out of the oven. Betty had given Lara so many good parties here, and Lara was overjoyed to finally be able to return the favor.
“Lara, dear, can you help me with the cake?”
It was carrot cake. Betty’s favor
ite. Lara’s favorite too. The baker was Evelyn, one of the Tight Knit ladies who was supposedly even better in the kitchen than she was in the sewing room. She was a double threat, and she only needed Lara’s help piping the icing. The arthritis had gotten to her hands, she said, and she didn’t have the fine motor skills. It was Lara’s hands that wrote out Welcome Home, Betty! in cream cheese. She had never used a piping bag before, but it was really no different than drawing. The ink just came out slower.
Taking a second to admire her work, Lara licked the remnants of icing from her fingertips. The dyed pink paste was way too sweet, but so was life right now. Lara wouldn’t have it any other way. Evelyn rewarded her job well done with a smile and left to join some of the other ladies in the living room.
The clatter of metal folding chairs collided with the sound of soap operas playing too loudly on the television. Lara felt rather than heard her phone vibrate in her pocket. She retrieved it and swiped a sticky line of sugar across the cracks in the screen as she answered her father’s call.
“Hey, honey, I’ve got—” A chair scraped against the wall, and a screaming ambulance caused panic on General Hospital. Lara pressed her index finger into her ear, but the underwater effect it created did little to block out the noise of the living room. It only distorted the sound.
“What? Hold on, Dad. I can’t hear you.”
Lara stepped over the threshold between the rooms and found her shoes among the growing pile that was forming in the living room. She pushed the screen door aside, then did the same to the front door and stepped out into the driveway. A quick search of the fleet of cars showed her that Hank would have no room to park when he did get here.
“What’s up?” Lara asked. “Are you guys almost here?”
“Honey, are you sitting?”
“No, I’m standing. Can you see me in the driveway?”
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