“Right.”
I knew he was disappointed, but I didn’t care. Only drinks and the dark, close hours I spent with Lucinda in the wreck of my dank apartment made me feel okay anymore.
We met at the bar and holed up in the back, drinking pitchers of shitty domestic beer and making heavy eye contact. As I took that first sip and stared across the table at Lucinda, I couldn’t seem to care about how sorry my guts would feel come morning. I didn’t dwell on Brynn or my mother and father, or any of the worries that burdened me all day at work. There was nothing but the drinks and the smooth coolness of Lucinda’s fingers dragging across my forearm.
“Why don’t you keep taxidermy in your apartment?” Lucinda poured us each a taster’s sip. That’s what she called our first glasses, doling out an inch. We’d see how long we could last until one of us broke down and drank it. Then we poured full glasses and really went to work. The pitcher sat between us, a safe space to rest my eyes when I looked too long at Lucinda’s cleavage.
“Why haven’t I been to your apartment?” I let the smallest edge of the beer touch my tongue. It fizzed there and lingered, yeasty as bread.
“I don’t have an apartment. You don’t like taking your work home?”
She wore three gold bangles on her wrist. The wires were thin and chimed when they clicked together. Light bounced off them with every delicate turn of her hand.
“No, it’s not that.” I took my first full sip and let my taste buds weep. “You got a house?”
“I live in a condo. I have a roommate.” She smiled as I took another mouthful, and then took one of her own. “You’re losing fast today. So, if you taxidermy animals for a living and you don’t keep any in your own home, what does that actually say about you?”
I drained the last of it and let Lucinda pour me some more, still stuck on the word roommate and trying to wash it out of my head. “It says I don’t keep them in my apartment. Who do you live with?”
The last of her own slipped past her red mouth, lip prints gumming up the rim. Roommate could mean anything, but the way she said it, it sounded like wife. The woman from the gallery. I mean, I’d already known. Could tell from the body language. A hand. An elbow. That single stroke of flesh against flesh; I knew what that meant. I’d spent too much time watching their faces when I should’ve been watching their hands. I poured her more, but she stopped me when the beer reached the middle of the glass. “Why don’t you keep taxidermy in your house?”
One long sip for me. “I don’t want it to feel like home.”
Two more for Lucinda, who wore a black velvet top that clung to her body like a second skin. “That’s sad, Jessa. Everybody needs a place they feel safe.”
Home and safety weren’t synonymous. The times I’d felt most vulnerable had always been with my family. There was my mother, with her sudden deviation from anything I’d ever known or expected from her. My father had killed himself in a place where he knew I’d find him, leaving me a note that said it was my responsibility to take care of the things he wasn’t strong enough to handle. The only woman I’d ever cared for I’d shared with my brother, a person I simultaneously loved and hated for it.
Lucinda rubbed her finger along the indentation of her lip and I wanted to smack her hand away, ask why she was turning something that was supposed to make me forget into another agony of remembering. I wanted to kiss her, badly. I wanted to feel something else.
“Jesus Christ, could you just answer the question,” I asked, pouring the rest in my glass. Roommate, a word that you could use for a friend or a fuck buddy. Even though I’d fought to keep things casual between us, I wasn’t sure if I was up for another person I had to share. Based on the way I’d seen them together in the gallery, it didn’t feel like it was over. At least, it didn’t look like it was over based on the other woman’s body language. I knew what it looked like when you still loved someone after the person had long given up the ghost of romance. And that woman had longing written all over her butch baby face.
“I have a roommate because I bought the condo with that person and now I can’t ask them to leave without dividing up the property.” Leaning forward, she slipped an arm across the table and dug one of her fingers under the band of my watch. She left it there, wriggling below the face.
“I don’t keep photos in my apartment either,” I added. There was no art, nothing but the cheap eggshell paint that they’d slopped on the walls long before I’d arrived. “It’s just a place to sleep.”
The finger, still wriggling, slowly worked to undo the band. “You know I’m here for you,” Lucinda said, thumb smoothing into the crease of my palm. Her voice took on an edge. “All you have to do is ask. Give me a little, Jessa. Trust me not to hurt you.”
Trust was a word that carried too much with it. Things were already moving too quickly; unsurprising given the fact that so many queer women U-Hauled after the first date. It wasn’t how I operated, that level of emotional openness, but even the ladies I casually slept with occasionally tried to make things more than they were. I could feel it happening with Lucinda: I thought about her constantly, ignored her when she wanted attention, then got upset that she might be seeing someone else. Knew that she was seeing someone else. I didn’t know what I wanted. I exhausted myself.
Lucinda took the watch from my wrist and turned it over. My father’s, the one he’d died in. I wore it every day, the band slid smooth from his skin and my skin and my grandfather’s too. I could tell her all about me, maybe feed her bits of myself. But what happened when you chummed the water was that the biggest predators showed up and ate everything. There was no giving a little. It was all or nothing.
Large patches of sweat lined the back of my shirt and ran below my arms. I drank the rest of my beer and then I drank hers. “I’ll go pay the check,” she said once I’d drained everything and was looking around for more to dump into myself.
Outside was dark and unusually still, no noise, not even a rumble from the cicadas. Lucinda placed her hand at the meaty joint of my hip and squeezed, twice. I clenched up both times. “It’s quiet,” I noted stupidly. Lucinda nodded.
“How come nobody ever sees cicadas?” She leaned into me, smelling like the cinnamon mints she always chewed after drinking.
“What?”
“You hear them all night here, especially in the summer. So how come we don’t ever see them?”
It was a good question. Cicadas always hung out in the tops of the oaks, secreted away in the bark, or tucked below thick clumps of Spanish moss. There was a lot of shrieking, but I’d never seen them crawling anywhere. “I have part of one,” I confessed, breathing in her sweet smell and licking my lips. “The shell. It’s called a carapace.”
Lucinda’s hand crept down to the vee of my jeans. She pressed there lightly, waiting. There was no one else outside. The sole streetlight flickered overhead, one spasm, two, and then went out. Darkness overtook us. I leaned back into the side of my truck and let her navigate. She rubbed me gently, then stopped with her other hand wedged beneath a breast.
“Tell me more about the cicada.” She licked the lobe of my ear, sucked at it. “Everything you know about them.”