“Yeah.” Neera took Scarlet’s hand, the one with the keys wrapped around her fist, and loosened her cold fingers. She took the keys next and found the house key, realizing instinctively which one it was because it was red and the others were all silver, and threaded it through the lock again. She opened the door for Scarlet like she couldn’t manage to do it herself, then stepped back. “This isn’t where the world ends,” she whispered. “This is where it starts.”
“That’s some pretty big philosophy for a situation that is about to turn into a huge mess.”
“Huge messes can be grand messes.”
Scarlet realized she would never win by slinging protests. Neera would only turn them back around, reinvent them as poetry and feed it back to her as something sweet and nourishing.
As she stepped through the door, Neera’s hand landed on her arm. She paused, breathing hard, her breath steaming out in clouds around both of them. Neera’s was much more contained, her clouds smaller, but just as white as her breath mingled with Scarlet’s.
She didn’t say anything else, she just leaned in and slanted her lips over Scarlet’s in a gentle, burning kiss that made Scarlet realize just how cold it was because Neera’s lips were a thousand times hotter.
“Goodnight,” Neera said after she pulled away. She still wasn’t breathing hard. She squeezed Scarlet’s shoulder and she walked away, down the steps and back down the street, towards Elodie’s house.
Scarlet stood in the doorway and watched to make sure that Neera got in before she turned and walked through her own door. The heat made her skin prickle painfully as she shed her coat and took the leftovers to her fridge.
The tingles only reminded her of her own numbness. A numbness that she’d felt for a very long time. A few years into her marriage, she lost all faith in love, partly because she realized just how wrong she’d been to marry Bryan, and not because it was all his fault. She’d numbed herself out further to get through the next years.
Now she was single again. She was making her own choices, being who she always knew she truly was, living life on her own terms
. Neera was coaxing her towards her light, and Scarlet was going, going towards what could also be the darkness waiting just beyond that golden sheen. She was waking up slowly, with every kiss, with every touch, with every heated glance.
That waking up hurt as much as thawing from the cold did, the burning tingles consuming her entire body.
Chapter 13
Neera
“If I told you something because it’s really important to me, would you promise to keep an open mind?”
That was basically the same way that Neera had come out to her mom, years ago in high school. She didn’t believe in the don’t get mad thing. She couldn’t control how another person felt, and she couldn’t control how they reacted, but asking someone to consider before reacting was something that Neera had always found worked well.
Well enough.
In this case, she doubted that well enough was going to count.
Elodie shifted on the couch, tucking her legs up under her. She was wearing her favorite pair of pajama bottoms— the fluffy blue ones with the pink hearts on them. She’d just showered, and she was having a cup of apple cinnamon tea. She looked relaxed, and so Neera took a chance before the night ran out. She knew the tea was her mom’s countdown to bed ritual.
Elodie cupped her mug, wrapping her hands around the bottom for warmth. She inhaled the cinnamon and spices, then peered at Neera over the rim. “Sure. You know you can tell me anything.”
Her mom was maybe too relaxed. She wasn’t going to see it coming and that would be the worst sucker punch of all. “I know I can tell you,” Neera started. She tucked her legs up under her too, like that could make her stay because it would be harder to make a getaway with them folded like that.
“It’s always been the two of us,” Elodie said patiently like she usually did when Neera was about to steer the conversation to deeper depths. “Well, the two of us and Scarlet.”
“What if— what if that changed?”
Elodie shrugged. “It’s never going to change. There’s the family you have by blood, then there’s the family you choose. I think of Scarlet as my soul sister.”
Fuck, this is going to be bad. Neera didn’t want to let the panic creep in, but it was creeping alright. It was trickling in like water into a leaky basement, filling it up slowly, one stream at a time until it was flooded.
“What if Scarlet fell in love? Like, what if she wanted to give herself a chance? Not the way she did with Bryan.”
Elodie didn’t hesitate. “I would love that. She was unhappy for a long time. Longer than she admitted even to herself. I could tell. I could tell that there was something else going on that she didn’t want to talk about. Something that wasn’t caused by Bryan, and then later, when he started having affairs, that was all him. When Scarlet told me that she thought she was a lesbian, I wasn’t that surprised.”
“Were you surprised when I came out?”
“No. Not really. I guess you kind of know these things about the people you’re closest to. Scarlet never really bothered to hide herself from me. She didn’t need to pretend with me, and neither did you. I was honored that I was the first person you both chose to come out to.”
“She hasn’t even told her family yet.”