Three

I wake up to quiet swearing, a giggle, and cats voicing their displeasure.

It takes me a minute to remember both where I am and why I’m waking up more or less inside of a bookcase, but once I do, I recognize the swearing is Esmé on her way out to work.

There is a bit of bumping, and a “shhhhh” followed by more muted swearing. “How is it that you manage to make way more noise when you’re trying to be quiet?” Rose fusses, still giggling.

“Not now, Rose. Hey! Let go of me, I’m late.”

“You aren’t going anywhere without kissing me goodbye.”

I hear a groan, then a kiss, and a moment later the door shuts firmly. There’s a moment of silence before it is broken by the cats again, and I can almost hear Rose shaking her head as Esmé’s car starts up in the driveway. “Fine, come get your breakfast, you fat fuzzy gits,” she says with exasperated affection.

When I next open my eyes, sunshine is streaming straight into the library and it feels a little bit more like get-up time. Out in the kitchen, I can hear very soft music, and occasionally a warm, mezzo voice quietly singing along.

Rose is sitting at the kitchen table, busily typing at a battered laptop. Her face lights up when I come out. “Hey, how did you sleep?”

“Pretty well.”  I smile sleepily. “I woke up to some rather eloquent uses of the word ‘fuck’ earlier though.”

Rose rolls her eyes and smiles. “Esmé ran a little late this morning. Entirely my fault,” she adds with a wink. “Sorry if we woke you up?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I join her at the kitchen table, reaching down to pet a curious orange floof as he passes by my chair.

“So, what’s your morning poison?” Rose stands up and stretches, dumping a lap full of the other indignant orange floof onto the floor. “We have more tea than God, or I can refill the coffee pot.”

“Coffee, please.”

“Fancy Peruvian or Maxwell House?”

“Esme’s still drinking the bargain basement swill, huh?” I laugh.

“At least it’s not Sanka.” Rose smiles, shaking her head. “She’d be so defensive about that if she heard me talking about that. Never mind that I grew up on Folgers and seriously don’t give a shit what my vehicle for cream and sugar tastes like.”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh? I’ll leave the coffee choice to you, seeing as I also don’t really care about the so-called quality of my hot bean water.”

Rose chuckles, vanishing into the pantry to get the carafe. “Hot bean water?”

“That’s what it is. Theoretically, so is cocoa.”

“True. Still not quite as world altering as when my nephew pointed out that raisins were technically grape jerky.”

“That is… somehow a horrible yet true observation,” I admit. “Wow.”

“Innit just?” Rose’s head pops out of the pantry. “Can I get you anything besides coffee? We have cereal, an embarrassment of apple varieties… I could make waffles?”

“Nah, I’m good with coffee. Thank you, though.”

Rose nods, but lingers in the doorway, bouncing a bit on her toes and looking slightly distressed. “I don’t know if Esmé mentioned it, but please do tell me if the fussing gets on your nerves. I can be a bit of a hen sometimes.”

“Oh, you’re fine. if anything, I’m disturbing you,” I say, pointing with my chin to her still open computer.

“Oh, that? Not really. Everything pressing’s already done.” She grins. “One of the hardest things to get used to about my job post-pandemic is the idea that I don’t have to be productive every single goddamn minute. A lot of my time is just being the person on hand in case of fires. Stupid Protestant work ethic.”

“What do you even do? Esmé never mentioned.”

“Well, my actual position is something boring like ‘Director of New Media and Outreach’, but I find it’s more fun to call myself a Professional Internet Toucher.” Rose smirks. “What about you? Esmé said something about talent management, but I have zero idea what that entails.”

“Professional babysitter for rich, spoiled adults,” I answer in kind and Rose salutes with the large empty coffee cup she’s holding. “At least that’s what the company does. Thankfully I haven’t had to manage anyone aside from my staff in years.”

“Like what kind of rich, spoiled adults? Movie stars?”

“A couple. Mostly just inexplicably famous tech bros that are so used to having everything done for them since birth that they can’t function without some kind of minder. We keep them on schedule and not melting down on social media.”

“Oooh.” Rose grins before vanishing back into the pantry. “Anyone I’d recognize?” she calls back.

“Oh definitely,” I laugh. “But I can’t tell you who unless you sign a non-disclosure agreement.”

“Fair enough. Sounds interesting, though.”

“It can be. More often than not I end my days reading all the myriad ways human beings can be self-centered and horrid though.” I smile, but it feels thin and strained. “Very inspirational for raising two boys into decent people and not utter human disasters, though.”

The coffee maker beeps, and I hear Rose pouring coffee for us both before emerging from the pantry with the mug she had before and another the same size. “We also have a lot of creamer choices. Half and half, almond milk, Girl Scout cookie, or hazelnut?” she asks, setting the cups down on the table between us before yanking open the bright red refrigerator. “Oh, ew, never mind, the half and half expired.”

“Good thing I was going to pick the almond milk anyway.”

Rose sits back down, placing the carton of almond milk on the table along with the girl scout cookie creamer. We both cream and sugar our coffees, clink the mugs together in salute, and then sip them in companionable silence. I swirl my mug a little, watching the almond milk make cloudy patterns just below the surface of the coffee. “How is she? Like… really,” I ask, finally breaking the silence.

“Esmé? She’s… different.” Rose frowns, thinking. “Trying to figure out how to explain it.”

I raise an eyebrow and mime holding round objects in both hands at chest level.

“Well, yes, obviously,” Rose laughs, “but not quite what I meant.” She looks thoughtfully into her coffee mug. “She still has a lot of work to do mental health-wise, but she seems so much less like a vase expecting to be dropped from a 20 story window.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wrapped up solidly in twenty layers of foam, duct tape, defensive behavior and self-isolation to keep from shattering?”

“Ah. That seems about right.”

Rose chuckles. “I never considered her brittle, but I think she felt like she was constantly on the verge of breaking all of the time before and constantly reinforcing her walls as a result. Not so much anymore. Why’d you ask?”

I shrug. “I asked her how she was doing yesterday, but I also wanted to hear how she’s been from outside of her head, if that makes sense.”

“It does,” Rose says, sipping her coffee. “How did y’all meet up way back when?”

I laugh. “Diving into the ancient history, huh?”

“Why not?” Rose grins. “Origin stories aren’t just for superheroes.”

“We ran in the same circle of friends in college, mostly based around the science fiction club and its various offshoots. My best friend at the time, Sheryl, was dating Esmé’s best friend Pete, so there were a lot of dorm room parties we’d end up at together. It’s funny because I couldn’t stand her when I first met her.”

“Really?” Rose giggles.

“Really. Like full on loathing. To be fair, he… sorry, she, was a huge jerk back then.” I pause. “I know y’all weren’t dating that long before she came out, but do you ever have pronoun trouble when talking about the past?”

“Sometimes. We were friends for years before all this” — she gestures around the kitchen — “started happening so I occasionally fuck it up when talking about beforetimes. It does get easier with practice. But back to her being a huge jerk.” Rose smiles. “Funny you say that, that was my impression of her at first too.”

I shake my head. “She was not quite a frat boy? Similar flavor of obnoxious dude though.”

“A douchebag?”

“Not quite. Somewhere between a douche and a bro. But quiet about it, which was somehow worse because she’d just suddenly be offensive out of nowhere.”

Rose laughs. “That sounds awful. What changed?”

“I punched her in the face,” I say, grinning sheepishly.

Rose’s eyes widened. “You what? Why?”

“A very poorly timed joke about my height. She used to pick on me ‘cause I was the smallest one in the group, while she and Pete were the biggest. Most of the time it was quotes about being short from movies or plays. Shit like ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’” I feel my mouth twist a little. “I guess she thought she was being clever about it or something. Anyway we were gathering to play xbox and drink in Pete’s room one night. It was my first night back on campus after my Dad’s funeral.”

“Oh, no.” Rose purses her lips sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

I nod and keep going. “She hadn’t seen me all week so she’d been saving up the perfect burn, or so she thought. So I walk in, and motherfucker has a tape recorder queued and ready.”

“Oh, no.”

“So she hits play and the ‘We Wish to Welcome You To Munchkinland’ song from The Wizard of Oz starts blaring out of the speaker.”

If Rose’s eyes get any bigger, they’re going to fall out. “She didn’t!”

“She did,” I laugh. “She was so proud of herself, too. I remember her smug expression while she did it. What I don’t remember was the 15 or so seconds immediately after that. Next thing I know I’m shaking out my hand and wondering why it hurts. Also why it’s splattered with blood that isn’t mine. And why everyone around me is freaking the fuck out. Then I looked up, saw Ez and her split lip, and put two and two together.”

“Fucking hell.” Rose chuckles. “Little but fierce, indeed.”

“For sure. Anyway, Ez surprised me that night. I expected her to be pissed off, but she was like “nah, you know what, I absolutely had that coming,” and apologized. By that point I was horrified at myself, cause I’d never hit anyone for real before, so I apologized too. We had an uneasy truce after that.”

Rose raises an eyebrow. “How did the punching connect up to the dating, though?”

“It didn’t, not directly anyway. It just somehow dulled the animosity enough to let us be reasonably cordial to each other instead of at each other’s throats. A little fucked up in retrospect, but we were babies and didn’t know any better.” I pause, taking a sip of coffee. “Anyway. One day, weeks later, she happened to see me having dinner by myself in the dining commons and asked if I minded if she joined me. I was almost done, so I said ‘whatever, sure’ intending to finish and vanish. But we started talking instead.”

Rose drops her chin onto her fists, her face about as close to mimicking a heart-eyes emoji as a human face can get.

 “Once we started, we just kept going. It was like a dam broke. We just meandered from topic to topic and the next thing I knew it was 11:30 and the staff was asking us to leave so they could close. Ez offered to drive me home, if I didn’t mind walking down the hill with her to get her car. We kept talking on the way, in the car, and then while just sitting in my mom’s driveway. By then it was well after midnight, so she asked first if we could do something like this again, and I realized I actually wanted to.”

“Aw. Speedrunning the enemies to friends trope.”

I grin. “A bit past friends, really. I also wanted to kiss him… her, very very badly.”

“Did you?”

“Fuck yes. I had to do it from the top of our front stoop ‘cause motherfucker’s 15 inches taller than me, but I did it.”

Rose puts up her hand, and I obligingly high-five her. “And the rest is history?”

“Well.” I smile wistfully. “Ancient history at this point. Almost fifteen years.”

“And you’ve been in California for…” Rose tilts her head, doing mental math. “Twelve of those? About?”

I sigh. “Yeah.”

“So you and Ez were only really together for three, all told.”

“Sounds right. Two years in college, one year out. Short, but intense.”

“Yeah that’s how she’d describe you,” Rose teases gently before tilting her head thoughtfully. “Depending on how you count it, Ez and I have either just passed our third anniversary or will in Decemberish. Of course, in a lot of ways Covid fucked up time perception for a while, so there’ve been some lively discussions over whether the three months Ez and I couldn’t see each other count, whether 2020 as a whole counts, or whether the period of time between march 2020 and august 2021 counts, and if so for how much time.”

“How do you count it?”

“Depends on the day and how I’m feeling at any given time.” Rose grins. “Sometimes I start from that dinner date where the whole idea of doing a no strings kink experiment got proposed. Othertimes I’ll count from the Sunday Esmé gathered the gonads to both tell me that she was falling in love with me and come out to me.”

“She came out and confessed her feelings at the same time?”

“Yep. After making me breakfast because I was having a shit weekend.”

“That’s kinda sweet. And very Ez.” I smile, looking down into my nearly empty coffee cup. “Just get it all out at once.”

“Well, I did have to nag at least one of those out of her.” Rose takes a last sip of her coffee and puts her empty mug down. “Is it okay we’re talking about this?” she asks gently. “I know shit’s fucked on your end, and—”

“Yeah, it’s fine. Sorry,” I say, realizing I’d cut her off. “I’m not upset. I mean… you know why Ez and I broke up, right?”

“She said it wasn’t for a bad reason. You had an opportunity in California, and she couldn’t move with you.”

I chuckle. “More or less accurate. ‘Course, it took me a while to get over her refusing to come. I mean I understood her reasons why she thought she couldn’t intellectually, but it took a while to accept it emotionally. Years. I think I had Esmé listed in my phone contacts as ‘Fucking Coward’ for probably longer than we spent together.”

Rose giggles. “Damn, okay.”

I smile. “I might have been a tinge bitter.”

“I… don’t think she’d disagree with you in retrospect.” Rose smiles sadly. “I don’t think she exactly regretted her decision to stay, and she still genuinely thinks letting you go was best for both of you. But I think sometimes she wonders what would have happened if she’d had the courage to go with you.”

I shrug. “It worked out for the best I think. I met Gary soon after I moved, and he helped blunt the hurt a lot. Also if she had, she wouldn’t have you now.”

“True.” Rose’s smile turns wry. “On the other hand, maybe if she’d gone, she’d have transitioned sooner. She went so far back into the closet after you left that I think she met Mr. Tumnus and the White Witch.”

I choke on my last sip of coffee hard enough that Rose reaches over to give me a few concerned thumps between the shoulders. “I’d apologize, but that’s probably the best line I’ve come up with all week,” she says, once I stop coughing.

“You bitch,” I laugh, clearing my throat.

Rose giggles, then props her chin on her fist again, giving me a look that lasts long enough to make me vaguely uncomfortable. “Do you know what you’re gonna do, Saoirse?” she asks gently.

“Not a clue. Too many what-if’s on the table.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Honestly?” I laugh, but it feels hollow. “Part of me really just wants to say fuck everything and come back East. But I have too many things holding me out there.”

“The boys,” Rose says softly.

I nod. “The boys, the business, though I’ve had enough offers to buy me out over the years that if I really wanted out, I could probably negotiate a nice price for my client roster. But there’s no way in hell Gary’ll agree to them moving across the country. I mean they’re both young enough that if we did, they’d adjust? But Gary’s whole life and family is there, and in a lot of ways he’s just as resistant to relocating away from his comfort zone as Esmé used to be.”

“Still is, let’s be real.” Rose tilts her head again, which she seems to do whenever she’s thinking hard about something. “What kind of dad is Gary? I know things between you two have long gone sour, but  what’s he like with the kids?”

“Oh, they love him. He spoils them rotten when he’s around. But he travels so much and works such weird hours that they barely see him. I honestly think if we do split up with joint custody, he’d probably end up seeing them more than he does now.” I smile wryly. “Then he can truly be The Fun Parent. Even worse if he moves back in with his mom, cause it’ll just be a non stop spoiling circus over there.”

“Ugh.” Rose scrunches her nose, which catches me off guard as it’s a face I usually associate with Ez. But she reaches out, her hand hovering above mine. “May I?” she asks, glancing into my eyes. At my slightly mystified nod, she takes my hand, squeezing gently. “Let me know if there’s anything Esmé or I can do to help?”

It takes me a moment to register what she said, for at her gentle squeeze, a warm tingly wave of something rolls up my arm, spreads into my face, and settles as a fluttery feeling in my stomach. I can feel my eyes widen in shock, heat in my cheeks. “Oh.”

Rose raises an eyebrow and lets my hand go, shaking hers out. A sheepish dimple appears at the corner of her mouth, and her cheeks flush a little. “Well, that was unexpected,” she says, lightly. “And unintentional. Sorry?”

“No, don’t be.” I shake my head. “I… it’s been a while since anything like that’s happened to me. Not since I had Remi, I think. I was starting to think I’d lost the ability to be attracted to people entirely.”

Rose’s eyes gain a twinkle. “Well, I’m flattered, but that’s not quite what I meant by helping,” she chuckles. “Regardless. You know we’re both here for you if you need us, right?”

I nod, blinking back the annoying prickle in my eyes. “I do. Thank you for that. And, weirdly, for this too,” I add rubbing my arm until the tingling subsides.

Rose grins, dips her mug in my direction and finishes the last of the coffee in it. “You’re welcome.”

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