Page 4 of The Lovers
“Her name is Willa, and her Libra Moon really brings me so much balance,” she says.Swipe.“She works at Erewhon as a health and wellness guide,” she continues, “but her real passion isPilates.” This gets an eye waggle. “She wants to open gyms in Brentwood. She has investors—”
“Jesus Christ, Camille, I’m sitting right here,” Dad exclaims, just as Gary returns with the pitcher of pink sangria and our appetizer. He makes quick work of dropping off the food and drinks as I watch Dad count down to an explosion.
Mom reaches for a glass, pouring her own sangria since Gary doesn’t stick around for that part. Dad’s brows twitch. His nostrils flare. She shakes the ice cubes into the glass and pours in a little more of the soft rose-colored liquid. Dad’s hand curls around the hilt of his butter knife. She lifts the glass up to drink. He smacks the table and the dishes and silverware all clack in a metallic screech.
“Order your own pitcher,” Dad says, yanking the glass from her hands. “This one is ours.” He turns his eyes to me and then to my empty glass.
“I don’t see why you’re acting so immature about this. You’re the one who ruined our plan, you’re the one who spilled the beans right here,” Mom says, yanking the glass right back and chugging it down. She hiccups, shrugging dramatically and swiping her thick, blond-laced-through-with-gray hair over one shoulder. “We were going to sell the house and get the details all sorted before we told her—”
“That plan is out.” He looks at me. “I’m afraid you can’t stay in the pool house, cupcake, because that’s my current squat.”
Mom reaches over the ceviche growing warm on the center of the table and cups my chin. “We can help get you a short-term rental, Kitten.”
They had a plan.
I pull away from her grip. My chest grows tight. The steadilysimmering embers in my belly ignite into flames that travel up my esophagus and into my throat. They lick the length of my neck and consume my eyeballs with their heat.
They had a plan to keep me in the dark while they packed up my childhood home and sold it to a stranger.
“Katherine.” Dad says my full name. Mom immediately stills.
My throat is closing up and the only thing I can do is breathe in, out, in, out through my nostrils.
I push against the booth with my fists and stand, smacking my thigh on the underside of the table. I shake my head. I need a small, confined space where I can ride this out.
?I burst into an empty bathroom stall and slam it shut.
My eyes are frozen open. As much as I want to conjure my safe space from hypnotherapy, once I’m this far gone I can’t risk dropping my focus to get there. That means finding something to visually hold the weight of my spiral. I pick the small spot of chipped paint on the back of the door, press my fingers to my pulse in my throat, and breathe.
It’s been years since a panic attack took me by surprise in a public place. Hypnotherapy sounds very LA, I know, but I swear it’s on doctor’s orders. Myactualtherapist suggested it as a supplement to our sessions, a way to get off meds and reframe my triggers through my subconscious. It’s been a game changer. But as my adrenaline begins to drop back down, a wave of sadness and shame sweeps over me, hard on impact, cracking through all my resolve.
And I have to give in.
Her brown hair fell across shoulders that were sun-kissed fromspending all summer by the pool. I watched her walk away, her kiss still lingering on my lips, but my heart was already racing, running back over the promises I’d made as I fell asleep beside her.
I close my eyes and breathe into the feeling.
Let’s go on a date. A real one. Like at a restaurant with fabric napkins, she’d said.
I’d said yes, and I had wanted to mean it.
In the sunlight, I knew that I couldn’t.
I try to swallow the emotion down, down, down.
Still it bubbles up.
Hurting her almost destroyed me.
The one time I came close to dating a girl, it turned into a disaster tailspin of emotional confusion. Feelings got all jumbled and what I believed about myself—myidealof myself—came into question. Sure, it all settled eventually, and I tried to write it off, move on without looking too closely at what the whole thing actually meant.
But the yearning never did go away.
In college there was Maia. She sat next to me in Western Civ. She smelled like citrus, saffron, and rose petals, and her hair was long, dark, shiny. When we weren’t in class side by side, she occupied the space in my head between asleep and awake. Moments when my mind was vulnerable enough to wonder how the curves of her hips in her skintight jeans would feel cupped in my hands, or how her plump lips would taste, or what it would be like to make her laugh and then moan in the very next breath.
Midway through the semester I did the unthinkable and moved seats, causing a disruption to the implied structure of our auditorium classroom. I couldn’t take her passing in front of me to get to her chair anymore. She’d brush against me; she’dwhisper responses and critiques of the lecture, her necklace would taunt me from the dip in her clavicle, the pendant dropping down to disappear between the mounds of her breasts, and my eyes would drift, my pulse threatening to give me away.
My TA called me out on the move. Maia took it personally, and not for the right reasons. I almost flunked out of the class rather than attend in a cloud of embarrassment. Another massive mess, only that time I didn’t even let myself kiss her.
