Vanessa stared at the hand now on her own. And when Megan’s hand squeezed hers, one thing filled Vanessa’s mind.
Please keep it there. Just please keep it there.
Megan’s fingernails were trimmed short and painted a soft almost-not-there bubblegum pink. The polish on her ring finger was chipped just a bit. For some reason, Vanessa wanted nothing more than to bring Megan’s hand to her mouth and suck on that particular finger.
But then suddenly, Megan jerked her hand off.
“Oh my God! I am soooo sorry!” Megan said, a mortified look on her face. “I shouldn’t have done that with all this virus shit going on! I had no right. I mean, you don’t know me and I shouldn’t have presumed to touch you! You don’t know where my hands have been and—”
“Hey, hey!” Vanessa cut her off. “It’s okay!”
“Oh my God, are you sure? You just seemed sad and I wanted to comfort you and—”
Vanessa cut her off again by scooching a few inches closer and reclaiming Megan’s hand. The other woman then looked like she lost the power of speech.
“We’re World War Z zombies, remember?” Vanessa said, smiling.
Megan smiled back.
“Right, we’re zombies.”
Vanessa took a chance and intertwined her fingers with Megan’s. That Megan was a lesbian, Vanessa had no doubt, but she hoped Megan wouldn’t freak out at the intimacy of the gesture.
“Thank you for wanting to comfort me.”
Oh my God, her hands are so soft!
“Is everything okay?” Megan asked and then rolled her eyes. “No, of course everything isn’t okay! You’re a small business owner in the middle of the plague of the twenty-first century. Sorry.”
Vanessa laughed. It felt good.
“Things aren’t great, sure. But things aren’t catastrophic yet either. I had to lay off my two employees and don’t tell the three other customers I had today but I also had to switch to a cheaper brand of to-go cup. Hopefully they finished their coffees before the bottoms of their cups fell off.”
Megan laughed.
“Sorry, but that was a funny image. Anyway, my lips are sealed,” Megan promised. Then, “It seems so stupid and trite to say things are going to get better but they have to, right? I mean, this just can’t keep going, right?”
“God, I hope not,” Vanessa said with feeling. And she wanted to believe it; she needed to believe it. But it was getting harder to each day. When this whole pandemic thing started back in February, Vanessa couldn’t imagine it lasting this long. Like many of her friends, she didn’t think that this far into the twenty-first century, science wouldn’t be able to quickly come up with a vaccine, if not a cure.
“I’m luckier than most, though,” she continued. “I figure I could a
t least make it to the end of the year. Unless Cyberdyne Systems finally gets Skynet working and my espresso machines rise up and slay me.”
Megan’s eyes lit up. “Do you know I just read somewhere that most people think Terminator 2 is the superior movie to the original?”
Vanessa put a serious look on her face.
“Yeah, I probably wrote that because Terminator 2 is superior to the original.”
“What?! You can’t be serious!”
“Um...hello! Liquid metal T-1000? Epic chase scene at the beginning that destroys most of L.A.? Killer special effects?”
“Um…hello! Better storytelling and no annoying twelve-year-old kid with a whiny voice in the original?” Megan rebutted.
Vanessa shook her head. “I can see you’re going to be trouble,” she said with mock gravity. “I need to check if anti-discriminatory laws apply to a person’s movie tastes.”
Megan stuck out her tongue. Vanessa’s heart almost stopped.