Two

“Hope you like books,” Esmé says as she unlocks her and Rose’s apartment. “We’re putting you in the library.”

“The what?”

Rose grins. “When I moved in, my eleventy billion books had to go somewhere so they got our second bedroom,” she explains. “Turns out Esmé also had a bazillion in storage, so we got them all in one room and combined them, built some bookshelves and boom. Library. I mean it’s still a functional bedroom too. Sorta.”

“Sorta?” I ask, wonderingly.

“You’ll see in a minute.”

We’ve all fanned out in the kitchen, and two large fluffy orange cats, after running to the door screaming mightily, are now cautiously circling my suitcase and sniffing. “Introductions first,” Rose chirps, sweeping one up into her arms. “This is Brain. That one’s Pinky. As you can see neither of them are pink and neither have a brain.” She scratches the cat in her arms behind the ears, who goes limp, eyes half-closed in bewildered bliss. “Do you, you giant hairy jackass?” she coos at him affectionately before setting him back down. “You have roommates by the way, unless you have issues with lizards?”

“Nah,” I smile. “My sons have a bearded dragon.”

“Oh, you’ll get on great with Goofus and Gallant then. They’re significantly less pointy.”

“That’s a deep cut from my childhood dentist office,” I laugh.

“Innit?” Rose giggles. “Ez vetoed Beavis and Butt-head.”

Esmé scoffs, rolling her eyes. “They’re too cute to be punished like that.”

The library is gorgeous. Almost every available wall surface is lined with overstuffed shelves, with a fat armchair in the corner along with a small table and a lamp. In front of the window is a low shelf with a small rectangular terrarium; a closer peek reveals two fat-tailed geckos twined around each other in a hollow fake rock, fast asleep. Esmé is right, they are very cute.

The one thing missing from the room is a place to sleep.

“Uh, so where do I…”

Rose grins, stepping to the far corner on the far wall of the room and tugging on the corner of the bookshelf, The entire front lowers, revealing it’s a façade. “What,” I say flatly as a full mattress emerges from the bookshelf, sheets neatly tucked around it.

Esmé sticks her head into the room, and grins at what is probably a very silly surprised expression on my face. “One of our pandemic projects,” she explains, coming in and pushing the bed back up. “Come look.”

The front panel is maybe only an inch deep, I discover as I inspect it more closely. The back of it is painted to give the illusion of depth, and the front is packed with what I realize are genuine book spines wrapped around bits of white foam, some even sporting plastic library jackets. “Wow, how long did this take you?”

“A couple months.” Rose runs her fingers over the spines and smiles a little sadly. “I lost an uncle at the end of 2020,” she explains. “He was kind of a book hoarder, and my younger sister and I ended up having to catalog them all afterward and sort out which ones to throw out, donate, sell, or give away. Most of these came from that.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“Thanks.” She brightens. “Esmé really did most of the work on this. All the painting and assembly anyway.”

“You helped,” Esmé protests.

“If you count being the ‘stand here and hold this’ girl helping.”

“Trust me, having a ‘stand there and hold this’ person when you’re assembling something is critical sometimes,” I say. “Jas and Remi are great for that when I have to put something together.”

And Gary’s completely useless, my brain adds nastily.

It takes a moment to shove the wave of resentment the thought causes back into the little box in my brain where I generally keep it. When I finally manage, I look up just in time to see Esmé and Rose look quickly away from each other, both of them quickly masking concerned expressions.

Shit.

I force a small smile. “It’s really beautiful. You did a great job on it,” I say, hoping the compliment covers the fleeting moment of awkwardness.

“Comfy too,” Rose chirps, letting the bed back down, this time locking it in place. “I’ll go find you some more blankets.” She grins, bounces once excitedly, and exits the library to look for the aforementioned bed accessories.

“Is she always like that?” I ask once she’s out of the room.

Esmé grins. “Yep.”

I sit gingerly on the edge of the bed, finding it surprisingly sturdy. “How do you deal with that level of…” I trail off, searching for the word I want. “Exuberance?”

Esmé sighs and sits beside me. “She’s not usually turned up to eleven,” she says. “That’s just ‘cause you’re here and she’s nervous about you being comfortable and having a good time.”

“Aw, that’s really sweet.”

“Well you’re our first overnight houseguest since Covid. And by extension since we got together. But yeah, she usually keeps it down to maybe a four. Also, I’ve met her sisters.” Her mouth twists a little, then resolves into a wry smirk. “She’s a lot, but the older ones make her look sedate.”

“Oof,” I groan and switch focus. “And how are you? I’m… still kinda wrapping my head around all this. I thought I was prepared for it since I watched you transition over Discord, but it’s something else seeing you in real life.”

Esmé blushes. “A good something else?”

“Definitely. It’s an adjustment, that’s all.”

I lean back a little, taking the long look at her I hadn’t yet managed in the rush of activity, lingering on smaller details: the four purposefully mismatched earrings dangling from her ears, the soft swoop of brown eyeliner at the edge of her eyes, the messy eyebrows and perpetual scruff replaced with thinner, delicate arches and a soft smooth jaw. It’s wild to me how a few very subtle changes to her face make her look completely different from how I remember her, and I find myself looking for what hadn’t changed, something to bridge the sad, sarcastic boy I knew and loved years ago and the woman sitting next to me now. Her eyes are still that uniquely arresting green-tinged amber ringed in brown, her nose still a hair too sharp for her face. And there were the same dimples bracketing her infuriatingly beautiful mouth, though age has deepened them some.

She lets me stare, looking back with a small smile. A decade and change ago she would have squirmed under the scrutiny until she found a way to break my gaze or escape.

“How does it feel?” I finally ask.

Esmé goes still for a moment, then her face brightens, like a sunbeam spilling through a cloud. “Honestly? It’s amazing,” she says. “You remember what I was like. All bent and tangled in myself like a fucked up Slinky.”

“That’s an image.”

“Thank my therapist for that one.” She smooths her hair back behind her ear. “Once I decided to actually do this, though? Holy shit. This is gonna sound stupid, but I felt like how it must have been when TVs switched from black and white to color. And the last three years have pretty much speedrunning the evolution from vacuum tubes to 4K Ultra.”

I giggle. “You absolute nerd.”

“As Rose would say, literally a huge nerd.”

“Yeah, I noticed you’re carrying that better. You’re a lot less awkward than I remember.”

She chuckles. “That part’s weird. I don’t trip over myself nearly as much anymore. You’d think the narrower stride would fuck me up a lot more, but the opposite’s true. Also, I can actually walk in heels. Makes Rose super mad.”

“Oh, God. You’re too tall as it is, you wear heels on top of that?”

“Heels on top of me would look silly. No, I wear them on the bottom,” she declares solemnly, pointing at her feet.

I roll my eyes and elbow her in the ribs.

“Yeah, I wear them sometimes. Apparently I’m no longer immune to cute shoes, aside from the fact that I can rarely find them in my size.”

“I keep telling you to actually take Tam up on her offer to take you shoe shopping sometime. She knows the secret cabals that keep the lore of Cute Shoes for Big Girls,” Rose fusses, coming back into the room with an armload of blankets and a couple more pillows. “Frost warning tonight,” she explains before setting them down, dropping a kiss on Esmé’s forehead and leaving again, pulling the door most of the way shut behind her.

“Who’s Tam?” I ask.

“Second of the four Thomas sisters. Rose the third. And, much to her constant annoyance,” Esmé adds, pitching her voice a bit louder and smirking, “the shortest.”

“Five eight is a perfectly respectable height, Sasquatch!” Rose yells back from the kitchen.

“I mean, she’s right,” I laugh. “Speaking from the ‘Lilliputian compared to both of you’ side of things.”

Esmé grins, then abruptly sobers. “Talk to me about you,” she says quietly, a faint line appearing between her eyebrows. “Been kind of off since you got here.”

“Have I, though? It’s been a while, how do you even know what off for me is anymore?” I tease, trying to steer away from the question.

It doesn’t work. Esmé just raises an eyebrow and waits, and after a minute I give up. “Goddamn you.”

She chuckles. “13 years later and you still do that thing with your mouth when you’re upset about something and hiding it. From everyone that doesn’t know your tells, anyway. So what’s going on?”

“You know, once upon a time, you would have noticed the mouth thing but not said anything,” I grumble.

“Yeah, well, once upon a time I thought growing a beard and getting jacked would solve my self-hatred issues,” Esmé retorts. “Fortunately for all of us my facial hair grows in patchy at best and I love donuts almost as much as I love the woman hovering in the kitchen pretending she’s just emptying the dishwasher and not listening to our conversation.”

“Oy,” Rose protests. “I was not—”

“Sweetie, you hate emptying the dishwasher.”

I laugh, but it sounds wrong even to me. Panicking a little at the tide rising from somewhere under my sternum, I look up and am hit with the full force of Esmé’s nakedly concerned face.

Big mistake.

“Fuck,” I whisper, before bursting into tears.

“Hey, hey,” Esmé says softly. “Shit. C’mere.” She scoots closer to me and pulls me into her arms. “There, I’ve got you.”

Between the words and the hug, the familiarity of it, the way I still know how to twist myself to fit against her (albeit with some correction for the breasts that weren’t previously present), how the weight of her arm across my shoulders still feels the same as I remember… it’s all too much, and I just break down, sobbing hard into Esmé’s shoulder.

I feel the bed shift gently on my other side as Rose joins us, adding her warmth to Esmé’s embrace as she hugs me from the other side. “I’m sorry,” she says in a cartoonishly small voice. “I’ll never empty the dishwasher while you two are talking again. Scout’s honor.”

I giggle despite myself, accepting the tissue box Rose offers me. “You’re fine. And thanks?”

Rose smiles sympathetically and leaves again, this time pulling the door completely shut behind her.

I look up at Esmé. “Sorry?”

“Don’t apologize, you clearly needed that. Now seriously, what’s wrong?”

I struggle with the answer for a moment but can’t bring myself to say it. Finally I just reach into my pocket for my phone, poke at it until I find what I want, and hand it to Esmé. She squints at the pictured document — she’s not wearing her glasses, I belatedly realize — and zooms in, murmuring the words as she reads. “‘Superior court of California, county of Los Angeles, blah blah blah, petitioner Gareth Cornwall Randall, respondent Saoirse McLeary Randall, petition for dissolution of…’ fuck, Sor, I’m sorry.”

I snort. “Don’t be, he’s a prick. Left on a sudden business trip two days ago and yesterday I got this fuckery in the mail.”

Esmé blinks. “Then where are the boys?”

“Oh they’re staying at their grandmother’s.” I smile a bit; once the kids were told they were going to sleep over at Maymay’s over the long weekend they’d barely cared about the whys. “As far as they’re concerned Mom and Dad get to take little vacations this weekend and now so do they. They probably think they have the better deal seeing as Margaret lets ‘em watch whatever they want and bakes all the sweets. And they have all of Gary and Britta’s old game consoles so I’m sure they’re going to be playing a lot of Mario when they get picked up from school.”

“That does sound pretty sweet,” Esmé muses.

“Seriously. I would have killed for a gourmet baker for a grandma. Mine just liked to tell me I was getting fat whenever she saw me until I got old enough to thank her for the eating disorder she probably partially caused.”

Esmé’s arm tightens around my shoulders. “Do they know what happened?”

“No point in telling them until I make sure Gary’s for real with this or whether this is one of his tantrums.” I say, sighing. “Part of me wants it to be real. I’m just so done with his bullshit and he probably knows that.”

Esmé runs a hand through her hair, pausing at the back of her neck to briefly dig her fingers into the muscles. “God, I remember how happy you were at your wedding, Sor. You never let on that anything was wrong before now. What happened?”

Thinking about that nearly sets me off again. Remembering that day as the one in the dress walking down the aisle was not as glowing a memory, and what with everything that’s changed for Esmé the glimpses of sadness I kept seeing in her eyes that day whenever I caught her looking over at me or my bridesmaids suddenly have a deeper layer underneath the bittersweetness of witnessing your ex marrying someone else.

I’d never told Esmé about the two screaming matches Gary and I had gotten into about her place in the wedding. He hadn’t wanted her there at all (he lost, obviously), then he threatened to call the whole thing off if I insisted on having her be on my side of the wedding party, let alone as my bridesdude of honor. (I lost.) I definitely didn’t tell her about how Gary and I spent our wedding night fighting again because I’d danced with her once during the reception.

“It wasn’t just one thing happening,” I say slowly. “it was more a death by a thousand shallow cuts. Gary’s very charming on the surface and for a while after we got married, he was still pretty great? But marriage… changes people. It’s not all sexy funtimes anymore, there’s practical shit that needs to be worked out like adults and a lot of the time he wasn’t capable of that. Then we had two kids and that changes you even more. All these tests are supposed to make you stronger as a couple, aren’t they? If the relationship survives them.” I swipe at my eyes again with a fresh tissue. “Ours didn’t.”

Esmé’s lower lip has wandered between her teeth, and she’s got the slight frown she gets when she’s struggling to understand something, barely more than a thin line between her eyebrows. The expression is so familiar that it aches. “Sor… why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

“You’re gonna hate the answer.” I drop my head, looking at the floor. “I didn’t want you to worry about me.”

Esmé groans. “You’re impossible.”

“Come on. The last thing you needed over the past decade and change were my problems on top of yours.”

“Would have liked to have decided that for myself,” she says, reproachfully.

Assertiveness is new from her, and it startles me. She has a point, though. “I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head, waving off the apology. “Did you tell anyone? I hate to think about you suffering in silence all the way on the other side of the country.”

“Oh, Mom knew, trust me. She flew out to stay for about a year after Remi was born. Terrorized Gary into behaving for a while.”

Esmé chuckles, no doubt remembering what a demon my normally sweet mother can be when pushed. “Does she know about the latest development?”

“I haven’t told her yet.”

“Oh.” Esmé bites her lower lip as she looks away from me, a strange expression crossing her face.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She’s not the only one who can still tell when the other’s bullshitting. I lower my head and give her my best dubious face, glaring at her through my eyebrows. It takes a moment, but she folds. “She doesn’t know you’re out East, does she,” she finally says.

I wince, then shake my head. “When we started talking about me coming out last Spring, I thought it’d be a family trip? Like a couple days the boys would stay with her, and Gary, depending on whether he came out with us, could do some stuff on his own while I hung out with you and Rose.”

“Yeah, I remember. Which is why I was a little surprised when the plan changed a couple weeks ago. But you said your mom was going to be out of town, so there was no point in dragging everyone across the country if she wasn’t going to be around.”

“Right.”

“But… she’s not out of town, I’m guessing.”

I drop my head into my hands. “Ez… there are a whole lot of conversations I don’t want to have with Mom right now. Not least of which I’d like to find out if this is actually a thing before I have to bail her out of jail for manslaughter.”

Esmé is very still and very quiet for a minute, and after the silence stretches too long for comfort, I look up. She’s not looking at me, but her face is blank in the way it tends to get when she’s upset but doesn’t want to show it. “Can I ask a question and get an honest answer?” she says finally, her voice tight.

“Oh.” I close my eyes, realizing what she’s about to ask and kicking myself for not seeing what it looked like. “She knows about you,” I reassure her. “It’s not that.”

The stony expression eases, as does the tension in Esmé’s shoulders. “Okay,” she whispers, reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose. “I had to ask.”

“I get it.” I half-smile. “I told her a while ago, actually. Not long after you came out to me. She wasn’t surprised, let’s just put it that way.”

A corner of Esmé’s mouth lifts slightly. “No one really was, weirdly enough. No one who mattered anyway. I mean some of the guys at work and in the game club took a while to come around but they’re all mostly cool about it now.” The slight smile fades. “Really the only people who were outright assholes to me were —”

“Your mom and dad,” I finished for her. Esmé’s mom and I did not get on well, and her dad tended to treat me as beneath notice. “You and Rose started dating before you came out, right? Did she ever meet them?” I ask in a softer voice.

“Mom, once.” Esmé smiles wryly. “I’ve never seen an instantaneous hatred at first sight before, but I swear, when Rose walked in the room you could feel the temperature drop. Granted Rose had been warned by then but still.” She scoffs a little. “I got harangued later about having one of ‘those people’ in my house. If I’d had silverware worth stealing she’d probably have told me to start counting it every time Rose left.”

“Fuck me,” I groan. “What a racist twatwaffle.”

“Not news, as Rose would say. But yeah, neither of us is particularly mourning the loss. Which is fine, if I hadn’t stopped talking to her when I did, you know she would have thrown all the tantrums if Sis and I even considered not coming for Christmas or Thanksgiving during the fucking pandemic.”

“Well, I’m glad you finally cut them off. They were always the absolute worst. Though… if you’re not actually talking to them anymore,” I muse, putting my chin on my fist and scrunching up my face as if thinking really hard, “have you considered accepting arson as your lord and savior?”

Esmé rolls her eyes. “I’m not driving out to the ass end of the state just to set their house on fire,” she sighs, “and neither are you.”

“You never let me do anything,” I pout. “Misogynist.”

Esmé splutters, gesturing wildly at herself.

“So? Do you know how many women actively hate other women? Especially other white women?”

Esmé grins. “Rose probably does. She went to Smith.”

“Oooof,” I laugh. “Poor thing.”

“Right?” Esmé shakes her head, then abruptly pulls me back into a hug. “I’m so sorry, Sor,” she whispers again into my hair.

I’d probably have stayed there just being held by Esmé in a way I didn’t exactly realize I’d missed very badly were it not for a small, high-pitched noise beginning in the next room which gradually gets louder until it’s at a full shriek. It definitely twigs me in the part of my head that reacts to kids crying, and my grip on Esme tightens before I realize it’s the tea kettle on the stove. It only screams for a few moments before I hear a muffled “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” from the other side of the door as Rose runs into the kitchen to take it off the heat.

“She never did figure out how to time a teapot correctly,” Esmé sighs, with fond exasperation.

“That’s a talent unique to you, gorgeous girl.” I sit up, wiping my face one last time. “If she’s making tea maybe we should be in the kitchen.”

Esmé nods and stands before offering me her hands. I let her pull me up before wrapping both arms around her waist and squeezing her. “Thank you,” I whisper.

“Anytime,” she says, hugging me back.

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