The One Percent

by Tara Wimble

  The water is freezing and she’s going to hate every second of it. “In a good way?”

  Bella ducks her head again, shying away. “Yeah, I mean, I know you so-” She forces her eyes up even though the words that come out elicit a dumb pride on Jacque’s face. “-I know you’ll make it good for me. I’ve just gotta make the connection, the one that makes me okay and not the one that reminds me of when it wasn’t.”

  It plants the seed in Jacque’s mind. An idea. “Alright.” She stays where she is. “You wanna take a bath?”

  “No chance.”

  Jacque grins because saying no doesn’t stop Bella from staring at her until Jacque tugs her shorts down just a little further on her hips. Then Bella is coughing and excusing herself.

  “Bella?”

  She whirls around so fast that she almost trips through the doorway again. “Yeah?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.” Jacque states. “I’ll be more than good to you, remember?”

  Bella’s expression softens as she straightens up again. “I know you will.”

  *

  Bella settles nervously beside her. Unsure where to look or touch or move. Jacque coaxes her to place her hand over her body to hold herself slightly over her torso. Bella otherwise sits on her right as she props herself up on her elbows.

  She’s had a few moments to get used to Bella’s eyes raking over her body. Being naked while Bella has her clothes on isn’t giving her any second thoughts. Her gesture is meant for more than just their bodies. It’s for Bella to get comfortable.

  Even if it took Bella a good ten minutes after she took her shirt off for her to actually let her eyes wander over her body.

  “You’re jittery.” Jacque whispers.

  Bella pushes her knuckles into the mattress, shifting and trying to find a way to sit it seems. But she doesn’t deny it.

  “Hey, here.” Jacque reaches out for Bella’s face, stopping until Bella meets her halfway and a small thrill goes through her at the response. “This is all about you getting comfortable. I’m just doing this for you to-”

  “To feel you up?”

  “To explore.” Bella’s small breakdown of words a few weeks ago was the turning of the tides. The buildup they’ve made of their time together. The years they spent over thinking and overacting to keep up a facade that slowly destroyed Jacque on the inside has become the neutrality of Bella’s revelations, the ones that came when the facade ended and life began.

  The thoughts Bella opened up to her with, that she was terrified in the months after London because she couldn’t sense that anything had changed for her feelings outside Jacque, yet when she was feeling for her it felt like fighting a landslide. She’s straight, to the universe revolving away from Jacque, but in the eye of it she’s something else.

  Jacque’s the exception that Bella is discovering bit by bit.

  Bella doesn’t seem to want to start or take the lead so with a slight dip in her gaze, Jacque is allowed to move them on. She brings Bella down as she rests against the pillow. Bella leans over, rather than on, her for Jacque to kiss her. It builds, as all things do with them, from nervous beginnings to Bella’s thumb tracing Jacque’s jaw. Bumping noses and smiles that are stolen back with the urge to trade deeper affection. Bit by bit, Jacque expects, Bella will open herself up to what Jacque is doing for her and bit by bit, things will move forward for them.

  Kissing until Bella is ready is a good way to go. It releases the tension. It’s that familiar feeling bubbling in the pit of her stomach. It’s Bella’s body tightening at the control she’s allowed and the boundaries that she’s spent years erecting fall brick by brick as she let’s Jacque hear the moan in the back of her throat. Noises and thoughts and feelings that she’s stressed over since coming back to the US, have been pouring out since the night she confessed and Jacque held her.

  Things like this, kissing her, seem almost unimaginable five years ago.

  Five years ago Bella Ansar became Bella Liresch for what feels like the briefest moment and Jacque’s sharp gasp into Bella’s mouth at the thought of that first time, that first surprising feeling in her stomach when Bella kissed her in front of their families.

  “Alright?”

  Bella nods and a small sigh of what seems relief falls from her mouth. Like she’s found something she’s looking for. “Yeah, yeah. You’re,”

  It’s a surprise though that the first raise of Bella’s hand is not to her stomach or her chest or legs but to her face. Her fingers that could lay upon anywhere right now, especially where she hasn’t touched or felt since London, go to somewhere that Bella could touch even if Jacque was wearing clothes.

  It’s to her hairline. Bella inches and traces before her fingers, like a comb, move in and tangle in her hair. Jacque swallows the aching in her throat. Bella’s laugh is like a sharp sigh, like she can’t quite believe she’s doing this, despite how normal this feels in the face of the situation that they’ve made.

  “You’re gorgeous, you know that right?”

  Bella is on the brink of a laugh and Jacque knows it’ll do her wonders to just let it out. “You’re just saying that because I used to be your wife.”

  She’s right so it works and Bella presses a kiss to her lips again. That laugh is the same as it was when Bella was twenty one. Full of wonder and it’s how genuine it is. Like there’s no joy left unvoiced. Jacque could fall in love with that laugh all over again.

  The strange thing is that she’s seen Jacque’s face, saw it every day for years and years and yet she’s never really looked at it before. Studied it and seen the little components that make up what she actually looks like.

  It’s pleasant. She has a kind face, if such a thing is inherently possible, and she trails her thumb down the definition of Jacque’s jaw, over the small laugh lines that are already beginning to settle on her face. And if Bella had to pick one thing she’d always noticed about Jacque it would be her almost ever present smile and the evidence left behind of those moments only endears her more.

  An idea comes to her, a way to enhance this moment. “Talk to me.”

  “What should I say?” Jacque whispers because Bella’s so close to her face that there’s no need, even if she wanted, to raise her voice.

  “Anything you want.” Her fingers brush over Jacque’s lips and she has tangible proof they’re as soft as they feel but it’s too soon for that.

  “Anything?” Jacque responds, her words like a kiss upon Bella’s fingers.

  “Anything.” Bella challenges.

  Jacque accepts.

  "I think there was a week or something, just after you turned twenty three and your hair, you didn't get a chance to dye it and I think you spent that whole week storming around the apartment in a huff, and I felt like banging my head against a door because it was so-"

  Bella closes her eyes and kisses her cheek. "Childish?"

  "Endearing." Jacque tilts her head away. “I thought it was cute.”

  Bella grabs onto her hand and pushes it to the bed again. “You always thought I was cute.”

  Those words can be echoed in her head with Jacque’s own voice the amount of times she’s heard it. Jacque bites her bottom lip, stretching in a grin, that makes her look cuddly rather than-

  Strong, she thinks, when her fingers fan over Jacque’s biceps. Scatterings of light and dark spots make her eyes play guessing games about the sun. There are scars, as there are elsewhere, but otherwise her arms are like hers. When she runs her fingers along the line of muscle, Jacque tenses, and out of the corner of her eye Bella can see her whole body react as well.

  She traces along her biceps, feeling Jacque fight against the natural inclination to tense and flex against her hand, there’s a white raised scar, just on the cusp of her tricep, almost the elbow. It’s shaped like a tiny horseshoe and Bella wants to know how it got there.

  Her finger traces it and she can feel Jacque’s sharp intake of breath. “What’s this from?”

 
“What?” Jacque asks and Bella draws her attention to where she’s looking, where her finger is still tracing, imagining the possibilities. “Oh that.” Jacque laughs and it’s such a break that Bella can’t help but smile along with her, amazed that she can be so free as open and vulnerable as she is. “Basketball. Grade nine. Some girl fouled me hard and I fell on top of a volleyball grate.”

  “Did it hurt?” She can imagine the scene, Jacque being tossed onto the ground and popping up, probably like nothing had even happened.

  “Only my pride.” Jacque admits. “I was bleeding but I didn’t know it and the ref stopped the game to look for the person with blood and I argued that it wasn’t me until he pointed to my arm. I had to go to the bench for treatment, I was so embarrassed.”

  There’s nothing that needs to be added but, on a whim before she moves on, Bella kisses the scar like she’d kissed her cheek, pushing Jacque’s arms up subtly.

  The lull only lasts for a brief moment because there’s still a question hanging in the air.

  “It wasn’t always straightforward. Never could be with you.” Jacque lifts her arms over her head. “I was jealous. For a long time.”

  Jacque winds her hands on the headboard when she touches her stomach. It would be oh so easy for her to push Bella, and she knows it would, when she brushes her knuckles over the rise of her hipbones.

  “Of him.” It’s easier to see the flickering spark in Jacque’s eyes now that she’s lying beside her, touching and exploring, instead of sitting. The closeness has her cautious of what she does but no less eager.

  Jacque holds her breath. Edging along the line that she’s thrown out while Bella reels in her hand over her stomach again. Firm, solid but soft. Bella doesn’t really want to hear this part but it’s a chapter in the story and Jacque deserves to tell it. Just as Bella needs to know all of it to understand. To move forward to the point where they fall together. “He was just that guy, that average looking guy that you like and I hated him before he even existed to me.”

  Bella takes her own deep breathes. Her fingers trickle up Jacque’s ribs.

  “Because you wanted him. Him and his flour covered face and sweet tooth and all the ways in which he wasn’t me.” Jacque closes her eyes and Bella inches her hand up. “I had a hard time with that.”

  There’s no apologies allowed on the bed. The past rears its head but only on the temporary screen that this reeling memory plays on. Jacque is the director of this narration. Bella becomes the actor. “I was bitter in everything after that. When you were together with him. I tried to make myself forget you. Forget the thoughts I had. Forget seeing you both.”

  Bella traces the valley of her breasts and Jacque clenches her fists. “But by then I couldn’t and when Germany came, I felt like I was losing you in the only way I had you.”

  Jacque voices the fear and it drifts to the ceiling above Bella’s head to be forgotten about. That moment, when she handed the divorce papers over was one that Bella had not suppressed. The first flash of white noise in her eyes when Jacque got closer, when Jacque expressed her feelings- no, when she expressed her desire for the first time.

  A desire, Jacque murmurs, that she threw elsewhere in a desperate attempt to mold it into something else. One not so easily done. Bella thinks of the woman in their apartment hallway, the twinge in her stomach at Jacque undressing someone else, and she gently moved her hand over Jacque’s chest. She watches the flutter over her face come as she cups her hand over, soft then more assured until Jacque can’t help but hold her hand down.

  “You know how I felt in London.” Jacque’s hand guides her own to not be shy. To grab and to touch. “There’s nothing I can say that we haven’t said or done but-”

  The conversation closes them together. Bella grows ever bolder and Jacque eases her just as she promised. “I thought that was my only shot.” Under her gaze and her touch Jacque looks smaller underneath her. “I thought, I’d fucked it all up-”

  So much so that Bella had heard about her lunging for Sadie and Oliv. That she’d tried to shut her down. That the simplest of motions, the jerk reaction she had of shame, had spiraled out of control.

  Everything she’s doing now is telling Jacque that she hasn’t.

  Wordlessly Bella rises up, Jacque’s hips jump too at how she disengages from touching her, to settle again when Bella touches the inside of her knee. If their positions were reserved, Bella isn’t sure how confidently she’d be able to open her legs to let Jacque between them. Not like this, with everything voiced and bared and with how much this means for the both of them.

  Her hands settle in the dips at her waist. Her eyes- they look. Of course they look. They look and she shudders and Jacque feels it so obviously and honestly. Bella kneels for a second, content to get used to this new position, to see the effects on Jacque’s face and listen to her again before she crawls down and over the planes of her body.

  “I hate seeing you cry.” Jacque drops her voice. Dripping raindrops of insecurity pitter into her words now. “I get the stupidest tight feeling in my chest when you cry. I don’t think I get that with anyone else. Something about you sets me off and it’s not just how you seem to do it with your entire body. Keeling over, red faced and-”

  Bella knows she’s talking about the Red Stars Office.

  “You asked me that day.” Jacque says with her head just lifting off the pillow. “You asked me in your own way to tell you that it was going to be alright, I don’t know whether you’d started to figure things out- how you felt for me- but even if you hadn’t, even if you felt nothing for me-”

  She sits up. Her knees pull up as well and Bella leans over her body. Close enough to kiss Jacque, close enough to get lost in the flecks in her eyes, close enough to actually feel physically like she is in her heart.

  “-I would have told you, I would have said that I loved you, that I wasn’t going anywhere like I said because I needed you. It didn’t matter how.” Jacque reaches out for the cotton collar of her shirt. “I may not have said the exact words but I meant them.”

  Her chest clenched in a silent sob of relief just as Bella kisses her. Because there’s nothing else she can do in the wake of that confession that the moment shared was one that they both needed. That it was a true moment.

  Jacque brings her down. Pulls them back onto the bed, to soft pillows and to Bella’s body pressing down on Jacque’s for the first time. To the shock of material against a naked body and the tensions that snap and sting in response. A long groan reverberates through them both.

  This makes her react. London was a lone firework streaming across the dark sky. Feeling the hard arching of Jacque’s back and the heat between her legs from a steady, insistent touch, the kiss becomes the fourth of July.

  It’s the most she can express and less than she wants to offer because Jacque has loved her so honestly and so loyally that it burns her up inside. They’ve danced, fought and hidden away from words and feelings and the corners in which truth resided for years. Each finding it in their own time and place until they met here. Until now.

  Jacque forgoes the word and she tangled her hands in Bella’s hair. From there it’s physical. Mapping her hands over the new until they become old and familiar. Conducting noises and affection into the places and with the desire she wants.

  This may be teasing without planning to follow through but Jacque remains pressed against her and encouraging. Place her hand here, kiss there, reach and rub and gasp and ignore everything but the sudden shudder that goes through Jacque like a shot.

  Bella is still straddling her, kissing her, when she feels it.

  That’s the only moment that Jacque becomes bashful and frustrated. “Sorry.”

  But there’s no acceptance to her apology, just a smile with a hint of flattery that has Bella pushing her hands into Jacque’s hair with a casualness that was once impossible. There’s a hint of a laugh when she says “No problem.”

  They’re still touching and Jacque f
eels like sighing into sleep as long as Bella is still there with her. Her shorts tickle her sides and Jacque chances holding onto Bella’s hips to keep her steady. As much restraint and patience she possesses, testing those any further will only make her more embarrassed. Jacque has felt herself turn pink and red and feel stripped before her over and over. She’s not strong to have endured Bella’s exploration, the edge was there for her to be tipped over, it just was never about that.

  “Are you alright?” Bella asks.

  Jacque shifts under her again and stifles a soft noise. Warmth. “I think I should be asking you that.”

  Bella drags her knuckles over Jacque’s cheek with such care that Jacque has to hold her breath. “I’m great.”

  Jacque doesn’t have a moment to bask or even to ask for confirmation because that answer is the sweetest word to her ears right now and she just wants to kiss her.

  Bella wears a stupid smile on her face when she sits up to press their lips together as if she knows all of the words and emotions muddled in her head right now. And mostly how they revolve around her. It’s cute and Jacque wraps her arms around Bella’s waist, holding them behind her back, listening to whispering kisses and the comforting weight pressing down on her hips.

  “What do you want to do now?” This is still Bella’s show to run. Jacque has given up the control for the night and it’s in her hands.

  “Stay here with you.”

  “Sap.” Jacque teases. “But I meant-”

  Bella presses their foreheads together. “Sleep. Just want to sleep with you.” Jacque sniggers and Bella bumps her head. “Actual sleeping.”

  Bella squeaks a bit when Jacque rolls Bella off her and kneels between her legs. “Flattery will get you everywhere and everything. Including me being the one to turn the lights off.”

  Bella’s hair fans out on the pillow beneath her and it seems that Jacque has stolen her breath from her yet again. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  It’s a deserved smirk that she wears to get up from the bed.

  No matter how much Bella managed to touch her, it seems that it’s not enough. When she stands up again Bella doesn’t take her eyes off her. She drinks her in as she goes about turning off the lights and checking the doors. Jacque doesn’t do anything to draw attention to her naked body yet Bella still stares, unabashed, as if there’s nothing more beautiful to her.