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When the waitress came with the green bean appetizer, she quipped a congratulation to the happy couple. Kayla insisted that the waitress take their picture. As awkward as it was to lean across the table and pose with her girlfriend, Tove happily did it, because damnit… she was in love. Why not commemorate the moment when everything went exactly as it should?
Their romantic dinner went from another Saturday to yet another opportunity to tell each other exactly how they felt. Kayla confessed that she had long fallen in love with Tove but held her feelings close to her heart out of fear that her girlfriend wasn’t looking for anything “serious.” Tove asked her how such a thing was possible when they were going steady with no breakup in sight. While it was another example of how they came from different generations with different experiences and expectations, it wasn’t a hindrance. If anything, Tove found it a breath of fresh air that she wasn’t on the hook for a two-year “courtship” before potentially moving in together. Or, Heaven help her, putting a “ring on it,” as Kayla had mentioned.
Not that she expected to marry Tove anytime soon, she assured her. Women were always figuring themselves out. There wasnorush.
They went straight to Tove’s place afterward to celebrate their declaration. Tove had fantasies of watching the sunset from her back porch, cuddling, canoodling, and conspiring about their endless potential together. Instead, she was lured into the bedroom, where they shut the door in a cat’s face and immediately ripped off each other’s clothes.
How could she be a gold digger?Such thoughts haunted Tove as she got on top of Kayla and brought them both to ecstasy.When she wants this from me? When she loves me?Kayla could be lying about the love, but the sex? Tove knew for a scientific fact that her girlfriend wasn’t faking the orgasms or holding back anything but her own vigor for sex.
She makes me feel twenty years younger.
The thought was almost as fantastic as someone like Kayla loving her so much. Someone as beautiful, as funny, and as sweet as Kayla Smith, a woman who swept into Bend and made it hers. This town, which was touted as a sacred icon for a family like the Fredrikssons, could belong to anyone.To me. To her. Tous.
Twenty years. That was how long it had been since Tove was last in love. She barely remembered that woman now, but she couldn’t forget what it was like to be so sure about one core component of her womanhood.
I’m in love. That’s all that matters.
When she was with Kayla, she didn’t feel fifty. She didn’t see any difference between them. Sometimes she was reminded of their age gap, but only because their childhoods contained different music, TV shows, and other pop culture references that helped define their generations. Tove remembered a world before the internet, and Kayla had grown up with dial-up in her house.
But who cared?
I feel younger. I feel freer.Tove didn’t think about retirement looming before her. Nor did she think about her body having new issues, like that crick in her back or indigestion that plagued her when she ate the wrong thing that never bothered her when she was Kayla’s age. When she kissed Kayla, she was transported back to that magical time in her life when everything was new and intense. Back when love was a power to overcome every obstacle, no matter what the universe threw at her.
Kayla was a grown adult. She was in her thirties. If she chose Tove, then who was anyone to tell them it was wrong? It wasn’t wrong! Tove was in love, and there was nothing shameful about falling for a woman who made her feel more alive than ever before.
She lovedwomen,after all, and Kayla was a lot of woman, albeit in a small package.
Who else had her declaring love after such a short time? Who else reminded her that there was more to life than death and taxes? Tove had not been depressed when she met Kayla. Or, at least, she didn’t think she was. Life had merely fallen into a particular groove. The years had gone by. Kids had grown up, and the elderly became more infirm or passed away. Tove still felt the same at fifty as she had at thirty-two when the sentiments of coming home settled and things simply… were.
Yet the years had gone by. Tove wasn’t in her thirties anymore. Kayla was.
Kayla, like Tove, still had many years ahead of her. Why shouldn’t they be happy together? Why shouldn’t this turn into engagement, marriage, and… well, who knew where else it might go! Tove never saw herself as a mother, but that was when she spent her more mature years being single in a small town. Maybe Kayla wanted kids. Maybe she was up for that.
With Kayla, anything was possible. Such renewed purpose made Tove think of all the years, the whole decades, she let pass by without note.
She didn’t want to waste more time. She wanted to be wild, free, and unpredictable. She no longer saw cousins like Thomas as losers who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. He had made mistakes, but he was older and wiser now. He was going to be a father. His wife wasn’t so bad. They joked that she was a gold digger, but was Polly unhappy with him? Nobody thought that. She must have been okay with being forever tied to Thomas Fredriksson through their child.
Let us be happy, for God’s sake.
Kayla dozed off shortly after the lovemaking abated. Tove was wide awake, thrilled with the possibilities her future may hold.Our future…She gazed into Kayla’s sleepy face, which was not the most flattering expression a woman might have after sex. Yet Tove loved the crease of the brows and the turn of the mouth she had to hold herself back from kissing. She yearned to embrace the woman who had made her feel so alive.
I’ll find any way to make her mine.
It was love, but it was also pride. Tove couldn’t let her family dictate her destiny anymore. If Aunt Kiersten had her way, Tove would never be in a relationship if it wasn’t a direct gain to the family. And if her male cousins had anything to say about it, she’d be the butt of every joke to make themselves feel better.I will prove them all wrong.
Kayla snapped awake. As her sleeping frown became a smile of acknowledgment to Tove, the two of them snuggled together beneath the heavy covers. Outside, rain pattered against the bedroom window. It was the coziest Tove had ever been.
“Is it crazy to think that being in love isn’t enough?” Tove sleepily asked before she also drifted off to sleep.
“What do you mean?”
WhatdidTove mean? The feelings about to burst from her heart would kill her, but she couldn’t say that. To bask in poetry or convey herself in song wasn’t her style. Words tripped her up in ways that numbers didn’t. Yet Tove wasn’t talented enough to convey her emotions with math.
If a woman didn’t know how to say what was really on her mind…
“You’re someone I never saw myself with.” Tove pulled her tangled hair out of her face as she sat up and welcomed the fresher air of her bedroom. No matter how much the rain attempted to lull her back to sleep, she refused to answer the call. “You’re so much the opposite of me. Sure, you’re younger, but you’re also so… so…”
Kayla offered what Tove could not glean from herself. “So vibrant and full of life?”
