That was a year ago. In that year she had moved to Atlanta, embraced her inner domestic-partner-goddess and become a full-time writer who kept the home, planned the meals and generally did all the work you’d traditionally assign the wife. She liked it. She wasn’t bored. She cooked impressive recipes and plated them with an alacrity she gleaned from reading food blogs. Her novel was coming along, albeit slowly, and somewhere in the back of her mind she was considering getting pregnant. Sometimes she’d stare at her body in the mirrors at the gym, picturing what she’d look like with a giant belly. She was into it.
Sabina was standing in the laundry room of their apartment complex, flipping through a copy of Entertainment Weekly, waiting for her underwear to dry. Her heavy blonde hair was piled on top of her head, the mass secured haphazardly with a single elastic. Her white T-shirt came to the bottom of her cutoffs, the V-neck dipping low between her small breasts. Her muscular legs were sweaty, but shaved smooth and clean, and her flip-flops were decorated with gaudy plastic flowers. The look she was going for was Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman but in reality, it was probably a little more Daisy Duke if she’d gotten older and been through a divorce and maybe rehab. She was a little tipsy, having drunk most of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc over the course of the afternoon, and had decided it was a good time to take a break and finish the laundry.
The magazine was boring, but she continued to skim it, stopping on the “Who Wore It Best” spreads and fantasizing about celebrities’ naked bodies. What do famous people do in bed? she wondered. Do they fuck in real life like they do in movies? She liked to guess which celebs were actually queer. She’d been thinking about sex nonstop since summer started. Her head was full of wild ideas, and there was a near-constant buzz between her legs. Cassie wouldn’t be back for months, having accepted a summer-long research fellowship in Boston. She was studying neo-classical nudes in some boring archive, and Sabina was left all alone to deal with her insistent, unrelenting thrum. She wanted to finish her book over the summer, she wanted to make Cass proud, but mostly she’d been looking at the basest Internet porn she could find and watching episode after episode of trashy cable shows. Cass would have been appalled.
“Hey, stranger!” The greeting startled her out of her celebrity fuck fantasies and back into the reality of the dingy laundry room. Euclid Court, the name of their apartment complex, made Sabina think of an arcane feudal system where knights swore oaths of fealty to princesses, and kings went around raping maidens. In reality, it was a slightly rundown subdivision with an inordinate number of gay tenants. There were Pride flags in the laundry room and Steve, the tanned, shirtless building super, played club music while he replaced the belt on a broken dryer. It was a little like doing laundry on Fire Island. Sabina loved it and often hung out waiting for the clothes to dry, even though she was steps from her apartment.
“Long time no see,” said Syd.
Sabina took in the lanky frame and long brown hair, the untucked, checked shirt, baggy jeans, the nearly six feet of sex that was her ex-girlfriend and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Sabina was genuinely startled. It made no sense for Syd, who lived six hours away in Durham, to suddenly appear. She closed the magazine and put her hands on her hips. “So, this is awkward,” she said.
“Relax, Peaches,” Syd said. “I took a job in Atlanta for the summer.”
“Doing what?” demanded Sabina.
“Working for CNN. Doing stuff. Calm down. I got in touch with Veronica, and she told me where you live. I left you a voice mail. You still never check your phone.”
Veronica was Syd and Sabina’s mutual friend or mutual ex-lover, depending on how you looked at it. They’d had a few threeways, a lot of fights, and Sabina made a mental note to ask Veronica what the fuck her problem was. Most people are more formal about dropping in on someone, but Syd was generally uninterested in boundaries and privacy. She preferred living communally; she loved renting rooms in big punk houses, rock-star palaces full of artists and addicts. The kind of place where the house has a name, like a ship. She bristled at anything that felt like normalcy.
The buzz from the dryer was painfully loud. Sabina winced. “I have to finish what I’m doing,” she said. “Maybe we can get together sometime?”
“What about now?” was Syd’s answer. “What are you doing now?”
Steve looked up from his dryer project with a raised eyebrow. Sabina shot him a look and took a step back. She felt like she was on the edge of something big. Syd stepped closer and pulled the elastic band from Sabina’s hair. It tumbled down around her face.
“Your hair is so long now. You finally let it grow.”
Sabina ignored her comment. “There’s no food in the house,” she said. “I haven’t shopped or anything. Tomorrow might be a better time to hang out.” Syd’s narrow frame and sharp jawline reminded her of a Romaine Brooks portrait, maybe Peter, a Young English Girl or the Lady Troubridge one. Cass had taught her about Romaine Brooks. She thought silently about the trouble she was about to let happen, calculated how much it would affect her life and decided to charge ahead.
“How about I go pick up some food and some wine and come back in a bit? We can watch a movie. I haven’t seen you in forever, Sabina. It’s so good to see your face.”
“Fine,” Sabina said, mustering as much nonchalance as she could. “See you in a bit.” Sabina tied her hair back up, perched the full basket of laundry on her hip and headed back inside.
Syd’s beauty stemmed at least partially from being untethered and easygoing. She drove an old van and was not above sleeping in it. She lived in whatever way she wanted to and didn’t worry about what came next. Sabina stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The bathroom felt like neutral space; like unclaimed territory. She brushed her teeth. She put on lipstick. She put on perfume and then more perfume. She really wanted to fuck Syd, there was no denying it. And she was going to do it, so she may as well stop pretending she didn’t know what kind of trouble she had just invited over. Syd knew Cass was gone, that was obvious. Everything was obvious.
It was okay, she thought. “This is okay,” she said out loud. She was a grown woman and people cheat sometimes. It happens. She felt like an explorer; like a slutty lesbian version of Jacques Cousteau. Like she was entering new territory. It was exciting. She fingered her pussy through the denim of her shorts and felt the damp heat. Twenty minutes later she’d put the laundry away, wiped off her lipstick and put it on again, combed her hair and braided it and then unbraided it. Then she vacuumed the floor, mopped, and dusted whatever surfaces were in easy reach. “Jesus Christ,” she thought. “What am I doing?” Then the doorbell rang and her nervousness went away. She opened the door to find Syd with a pizza in one hand and a liter of red wine in the other. It was not a bad sight at all.
Syd set the bounty on the table and pushed Sabina onto the couch. Sabina nervously tried to tie her hair back up, but Syd grabbed her wrist and said, “Leave it.” They stared at each other for a few minutes, not kissing, faces close but not touching. Sabina’s insides turned warm and liquidy.
“So your girlfriend is out of town, huh?” Syd said with a smirk.