When Laura and the terrier came in from their walk, the first thing Laura saw was Sophie smiling at her from the dining room table. It was such a surprising change from the sour expression Sophie usually shot her that she smiled back immediately. She unsnapped the dog’s leash and he skittered right to Sophie, putting his front paws up on her thigh.
“How was the walk?” Sophie asked as she stroked his wiry head.
“Nice.” Laura shed her coat. “It’s starting to snow again, but it’s the pretty, fluffy stuff.”
“I like that kind of snow.”
“Me, too.”
“How about some hot chocolate to warm you up? I just made myself a cup.”
Laura grinned at the offer, touched. “That would be great.” She stepped out of her boots and listened with a grin as Amy recounted a story about an obnoxious customer she’d dealt with in the restaurant she owned. Exactly why I stay in the kitchen, she thought. She noticed Molly sitting alone in the chair, staring out the window at the snow, and remembered the scene between Darby and Kristin a little while earlier. She wondered what had been said. It was obvious Darby was pushing Kristin’s buttons, and Laura had cheered internally when Jo had hauled her niece into another room for what she hoped had been some sage advice. Darby was so young. She had some lessons to learn.
“You look puzzled.” Sophie’s voice broke her out of her reverie as Laura sat down at the table.
Taking the mug from Sophie’s grasp, Laura laughed. “I was just thinking that I can barely remember my twenties.”
Sophie chuckled. “It seems like forever ago, doesn’t it?” She followed Laura’s gaze across the room to where Darby sat on the floor. “She’s pretty damn young.”
“Has Kristin come back yet?”
“No.” Sophie sipped from her mug. The terrier jumped at her until she allowed him up on her lap. He curled up in a ball. “This boy needs a name, you know.”
“He’s probably got one.”
“Then he needs a new one because we can’t just keep calling him Dog.”
“I’ll think about it.” For several long minutes Laura lapsed into listening to the conversation taking place between the others, then she asked quietly, “Do you think they’ll be okay?”
“Who?”
“Molly and Kristin.”
Sophie set down her cocoa. “Yes,” she responded with certainty. “I do.”
Laura was surprised. “What makes you so sure?”
“They love each other.”
“A lot of people love each other. It doesn’t mean they stay together forever.”
“True enough. How can I explain this?” Sophie chewed on the inside of her cheek as she searched for the right words. “Those two have had their problems since they’ve been here. That’s been obvious. But they’ve never once been mean to each other. They haven’t disrespected one another in front of us. I think that’s really important, and two people who love each other and want their relationship to work understand that.”
Laura studied Sophie’s face. Her coffee-colored skin was so smooth, Laura was surprised to find herself wanting to reach out and stroke it, just run her fingertips across Sophie’s cheek. “That’s an excellent point. You sound like you speak from experience.”
“Respect is the most important ingredient in a relationship, aside from love, of course. I didn’t have enough respect for Kelly,” Sophie said wistfully. Then her face cracked into a wry grin. “Of course, she didn’t have much for me either, so I guess we were pretty even.”
“I think I was hit with some poetic justice myself,” Laura said. “I obviously didn’t respect Stephen enough, but Amanda didn’t respect me. I think I may have gotten what I deserved.”
“What goes around comes around, huh?”
“Evidently.”
“You should keep the dog,” Sophie blurted suddenly.
Laura blinked at the abrupt change in subject. “What?”
“The dog.” Sophie stroked the brown fur as the words left her in a rush. “I heard a guy in the grocery store when we went to town yesterday. His wife left him and left the dog behind, but he hates the dog and locked him out of the house. He was a big, skeevy, gross guy and he doesn’t want the dog back. And if he had him back, I don’t think he’d be nice to him.” She took a breath. “So you should just keep him. He likes you. And you’re good to him. You should be together.”
Laura stared at her with raised eyebrows, trying to absorb everything.
“I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry.”
As if on cue, the dog lifted his head and looked at Laura, his brown eyes blinking at her with watery sleepiness. “He looks like a Ricky to me,” she said finally.
Sophie smothered a relieved smile and glanced down at him. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“Maybe we’ll try that on for size and see if he likes it.”
They sipped their cocoa in companionable silence, glancing at one another and grinning. Finally, Sophie spoke. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“It’s kind of personal.”
“I don’t mind.”
“How did it feel when Amanda called things off? I mean, how did you get over her?”
Laura spent a few seconds contemplating the most honest answer. “Well, first of all, I was completely shocked. Here I was, head over heels in love with this woman—my first woman, mind you—and in the process of leaving my husband for her. Now, in her defense, she didn’t know I had told Stephen about us. She had no idea I was leaving him.”
“Seriously?”
“I did it as a surprise for her.” She snorted at the irony. “I thought of it as a gift. Little did I know that she had no intention of embarking on any sort of life with me. As far as she was concerned, we’d just go on as we were forever…married to our husbands and sleeping with each other on the side. She liked her life just the way it was.”
“Damn. She sounds cold.”
“I didn’t used to think so. But you’re right. She’s very cold and I’m amazed that I fell as hard as I did for her.” Laura glanced out the window at the falling snow. “God, she was gorgeous.”
“Yeah?”
“Legs to die for.” Laura didn’t often allow herself to revel in the past, to reflect on how good it was with Amanda before it all came tumbling down. How many weekends had they spent together in bed while their husbands were away on business, leaving the bedroom only to grab some food so they’d have enough energy to have more sex? Laura had learned more about her body from Amanda than from anybody else in the previous thirty-plus years of her life. “So…back to your question. How did it feel? It felt…it felt like my world had been ripped out from under my feet while I stood there completely oblivious to what was going on. It felt like one minute I had two people that I cared very much about and the next minute, I had nobody. Nobody and nothing. I lost my house, my stability, my life. And I blamed her. Wrongly, but I blamed her.”
Sophie nodded. “It’s a lot easier to blame the other one than to look in the mirror, isn’t it?”
“Way easier.” Laura watched Sophie, who studied the contents of her cup. Her face had visibly softened since their earlier conversation. It was pretty amazing. Sophie’s judgmental expression was gone, replaced by something different. Something gentler. Her hair was loose, falling around her shoulders in a mass of corkscrew curls. She seemed a little thinner than she should be, and Laura found herself wanting to cook for her, to fatten her up a bit with gourmet meals served by candlelight.
She shook her head and chuckled internally at how strange life could be. When she had arrived barely two days ago, she’d been quite solitary and perfectly okay with that fact. She had a great duplex, a job she loved, and the hope that she wouldn’t be lonely for the rest of her life. Now it looked like she had a new dog and a woman who would be—at the very least—a friend. More specifically, a friend who understood what she’d been through over the past year. Laura couldn’t remember the last time she’d met somebody she felt connected to. Well, Amanda, of course, but that had obviously been some sort of lapse in judgment on her part…
Amanda.
She had taught Laura all about the opposite extremes of feeling. Nobody had ever made her feel so much love and then so much pain within the space of a few months. If she hadn’t been so damn beautiful, Laura would never have been so easily seduced. Would she? It was a question she pondered often, knowing now that she must have been a target for Amanda, a challenge. She could see Amanda’s gorgeous face in her mind’s eye, calculating how long she thought it would take for her to convince the naïve and married straight girl to sleep with her. How many other women had she seduced in the same way? Had they all thought Amanda was in love with them or had Laura been the only one to be that stupid? Did she have another conquest already? These were the questions that plagued her and probably always would.
The last day she saw Amanda was etched into her brain forever and no matter how hard she tried to forget it, she could still remember every detail, every word, exactly what Amanda was wearing and how she smelled and the precise second that she knew it was over. They’d met in the parking lot where Laura worked. She’d told Amanda that she was leaving Stephen, that she’d admitted their affair to him and had told him that she was in love with Amanda and Amanda was in love with her.
Amanda had looked at her with wide-open, wild eyes. “You told him what?” Her voice had registered disbelief and something else…finality? Resignation?
“I told him we’re in love.” Laura was giddy. She’d never felt so free in her life.
Amanda was looking edibly sexy, as always, in her black slacks and royal blue silk blouse, the simple gold chain Laura had given her as a gift sparkling invitingly at the base of her throat. She reached out to touch a strand of Amanda’s silky, dark hair. She was wearing it loose that day, down around her shoulders the way Laura loved it and Laura wanted nothing more than to bury her face in it, soak in the scent of this magnificent creature. She wanted to take Amanda to bed right then and there, to lose herself in Amanda’s body, to hear her begging Laura for release. She’d been thinking about it all morning, hadn’t been able to concentrate on work at all, her hands trembling and her panties uncomfortably damp.
Amanda caught Laura’s wrist before she could touch her, and pushed her away. “God damn it, Laura.” She said it quietly and then she turned and opened the car door. She dropped into the driver’s seat with a weary sigh.
“What? Honey? What is it?” Laura was confused and an inexplicable panic had suddenly seeped into her system like dry ice as she watched Amanda’s movements, felt her retreating. “I thought you’d be happy. We can be together now. Where are you going? Amanda, please.”
Amanda paused, her hand on the ignition. She turned to look at Laura, her normally mischievous and glittering eyes showing nothing but sadness and disappointment. “Can’t you see? You’ve ruined it. It was perfect and you had to go and ruin everything.”
The quiet and almost monotonous manner made the words even more painful than if she’d shouted them at the top of her lungs. She started the car and pulled away, leaving Laura standing in the middle of the lot at a complete loss, floundering like a small, empty rowboat that has drifted out onto the choppy ocean waves. It was the last time she’d ever seen Amanda.
In that moment, as she watched the black BMW turn a corner and disappear, Laura had known that she had just lost everything familiar to her. Everyone and everything comfortable was now gone. She was alone.
“Hello?” Sophie’s gentle voice cut into her reminiscing as she tapped a fingertip lightly on the back of Laura’s hand. “You okay?”
Laura looked up to meet concerned brown eyes and laughed. “You know, it’s sort of freaking me out having you look at me with worry instead of disdain.”
Sophie laughed with her. “Disdain is much easier for me. I’m a pro at disdain.” She tilted her head to the side. “Where’d you go just now? You seemed really far away.”
“I was just remembering the moment when I realized that my entire life had changed and nothing would ever be the same.”
“When you left your husband?”
“And then Amanda left me.”
“Was that, like…on the same day?”
Laura nodded slowly and sipped from her mug.
“Oh, wow.” Sophie grimaced. “That’ll wake you up, huh?”
“You aren’t kidding.”
She remembered the panic that had set in, as she stood in the empty parking lot. She actually wondered then if she could somehow make it up to Stephen, tell him she’d been mistaken, that Amanda had been a weird phase of some sort and she wasn’t in love with her after all, that she really loved him and could they just go back to the way things were and pretend none of the morning’s conversation had ever happened. That thought process had only lasted a few seconds. She’d known immediately that even though she wouldn’t have Amanda by her side, she had discovered the real Laura, the one who’d been hiding deep inside all this time…and she liked her. She wasn’t about to let go of her so soon.
“It’s a weird feeling, finding out that somebody you love is leaving you and there’s nothing you can do about it, isn’t it?” Sophie asked. It was more a statement than a question and there wasn’t even a hint of accusation in her voice.
Laura had a sudden flash of Sophie’s partner telling her she was leaving, of the pain that must have sliced across Sophie’s smooth features, creasing her flawless skin, forcing her to accept the fact that life as she knew it was over. The image made her want to comfort her new friend, to smooth away the lines of worry and stress. She gripped her mug tightly to keep from reaching across the table. “Damn right.”