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Lily realized she was holding her breath and made herself exhale before she spoke. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re so beautiful that I don’t have the words. In either language.” Alex kissed the other side of her neck, brushing her lips against her skin so softly, Lily thought she might have imagined it. “And that thought has been on repeat in my mind since I met you.”
Alex kissed her, tracing the edge of her ear with the tip of her tongue, her hand warm and light against the base of Lily’s neck. And then she was gone, the space behind her empty, echoing like the sound of the door closing softly behind her.
Lily stepped into the shower and let the water run over her face, her thoughts racing. It felt so natural, being with Alex. Women hit on her constantly in LA, but there was something calm about Alex, something quietly respectful. She listened when Lily talked, her dark eyes searching for every nuance of meaning. Even her touch was familiar, as if they’d been lovers for a thousand years.
Lily’s fingertips brushed the nape of her neck where Alex’s breath had been as she stepped out of the shower and wiped the steam from the mirror. As she stared into her reflection, she realized what was different, why she finally felt safe to exhale.
Alex held space for her. She created the space for her to unfold, to relax and soften. For the last few years, she’d felt herself shrinking, disappearing, somehow reduced to her own words on paper. The paper had been passed through a thousand foreign hands, crumpled into a ball, and compressed into something unrecognizable. Alex held the space she needed to smooth out the paper and remember the shape and space she’d once inhabited.
She was playing a live recording of low country jazz when Lily finally walked out of the bathroom, the steam that followed her instantly rising into the cool breeze that shifted the curtains over her bed.
Lily drew in a slow breath, her eyes closed. “I love the scent of sand when the sun sets.” The sound of her own voice jolted her back into the present, and she looked up at Alex, who’d turned toward her to listen, her gaze soft and constant. Lily paused, wishing she could gather the words she’d just scattered into the air, but there was nothing to do now but go on. “It’s just…during the day, the sun heats the lake water, and the scent of it travels everywhere, but as evening cools, the wet stone scent of the sand has space to rise.”
She dropped her clothes into her laundry bag and turned back toward the bunk, wishing she’d remembered that her words often didn’t make sense to anyone else. When she was a child, she’d overheard her mother on the telephone with her second-grade teacher one evening after dinner. The memory was almost twenty years old now, but that moment still played like a grainy retro movie in her mind.
She’d been coming down the staircase when she heard her mother’s voice, the polished railing cool and smooth under her palm. She’d stopped still, listening as it shifted from friendly to coolly polite as the conversation progressed. Lily sank down onto the stairs and leaned her forehead against the railing, listening; there was a long stretch of quiet, and Lily had heard her mother’s nails strumming the counter when she’d finally replied to whatever her teacher had taken so long to explain.
“Lily doesn’t have her head in the clouds, Miss Morrison. You’re just wrong here.”
Lily had leaned against the railing and listened hard, the hardwood stair cold and unyielding under her corduroy cutoffs. Dust motes had hovered in the late evening light streaming through the glass panels in the front door. She’d waited, afraid to breathe in case she missed something.
“With all due respect, she learns by memorizing her entire world, not just two-dimensional words on a page like everyone else.” There was a long sigh, a pause, then just two more words. “She’s different.”
Somewhere along the way, Lily had realized her mother had been right. Her brain worked differently than most, and over the years, she’d learned it was easier to be silent than judged. Everything about her was different. How she experienced the world, how she responded to it, even how she described it in her writing.
The sound of cracking ice snapped her back to reality, and she turned to watch Alex as she chipped jagged shards off a square block, then wrapped it back in a cloth and returned it to the freezer tucked inside what Lily previously thought was a dresser.
“So that’s an icebox?” Lily walked over to look, her damp feet leaving footprints on the raw plank floors. “I swear that was a dresser yesterday.”
“That’s what I thought for the first week. The dresser face is actually just a door that swings open.” She pointed to the brass hinges on the side, and Lily leaned down to look, holding the front of her silk pajamas to her chest. “There’s one in every cabin. Sam had someone build them to hide a mini fridge so the staff had somewhere to keep drinks that wouldn’t ruin the mid-fifties aesthetic of the cabin ‘interior,’ or whatever the hell she said.” Alex laughed, dropping ice shards into two glasses and the remainder into a dented copper cocktail shaker. “I mean, I’ve got to give it to her. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Sam could give any self-respecting gay man a run for his money in the design department.”
Alex poured rum into the shaker, then added something from a separate flask she tucked back in the fridge. Lily watched as frost gathered on the outside of the shaker, mesmerized as Alex flicked it with her wrist, spun it on the flat of her hand, then uncapped it and strained it into the glasses. Alex nodded toward the opposite window.
“Will you pinch a couple of sprigs of mint from that plant in the windowsill?”
“You grow cocktail herbs in your cabin?” Lily smiled as she handed them over and watched as Alex placed them carefully in each glass. “If you’re trying to seduce me with your weirdness, it’s working.”
Alex winked and handed her one of the glasses, then motioned for Lily to follow her outside to the two slatted wood folding chairs set up by the door. The lake sparkled in the moonlight, framed by the massive, ghostly reflection of the dark grove of firs on the north shore. A slate-blue heron swooped low over the water, scanning the surface for fish, then dropped into a pure vertical dive and emerged from the dramatic splash with a reflective prize in its grasp.
Alex looked over at her and pushed the glasses up on her nose. “I could say the same thing, you know.”
Lily had noticed the contact lens case on the bathroom shelf, but it hadn’t occurred to her that Alex would wear glasses occasionally. They were perfectly round tortoiseshell spectacles with a Harry Potter vibe—if Harry had been a tall, intensely sexy Cuban dance instructor.
As if on cue, Alex handed over her glass for Lily to hold while she zipped up her black hoodie. The first ghostly vapors of steam started to rise and hover above the lake as the air sank into a cooler temperature than the water. She was wearing men’s jeans, faded to the lightest sky blue, and stretched out her legs in front of her as she glanced back to Lily, who had just remembered what Alex had said to her.
“What do you mean, you could say the same thing?” Lily sipped from Alex’s glass instead of her own before handing it back to her. “About what?”
“You asked if I was trying to seduce you with my weirdness. You’ve been doing that to me since the second I saw
you.”
Lily’s heart sank, and she looked out over the water as the only cloud in the sky moved hesitantly across the hazy surface of the pewter moon. She didn’t have to ask; she knew what Alex meant. She’d known since that night on the stairs, although as an adult, she’d tried not to notice when others perceived her as different. But now, all she wanted was for Alex not to answer. She just wanted another moment to let herself think that everyone around her didn’t see it.
Alex touched her knee to Lily’s. “Do you remember the first night we met? At the bar?”
“Of course.” Lily forced herself to smile, and her stomach tensed as she took a sip of her drink. Then another.
