I am here now beside her on the soft couch in her apartment. She strokes my thigh and kisses my neck. I look over at the open bedroom door, wondering if I can keep from ending up in her bed again. But the more she touches me, the more I’m convinced a part of me is already there, spreading itself open, pulling the rest of me toward it.
STITCH AND BITCH
A. L. Simonds
Luisa was going to fall.
A split second before, she saw it coming. The world tilted; the ground rose to meet her.
She smacked down on her side, her hip and shoulder catching the worst of it, and slid a few inches down the asphalt ramp. Her skateboard sailed out of sight. The impact flashed across her vision and shook her nerves. She could have sworn she heard bells tolling.
She had to lie there, just for a couple of seconds, in order to remember how to breathe.
When she struggled up—first onto her palms, then her knees, then to her feet—she rolled her shoulders and shook away the worst of the pain.
“Ow, dude,” she said. “Ow.”
As the pain cleared, she realized that she did hear church bells, over on the university campus, tolling six o’clock.
She’d asked Charlie to watch the time for her, but, typical Charlie, he’d wandered down to the hot dog truck and forgotten.
She’d been so absorbed in working on her heelflip that the seasons could have turned, barbarians invaded and she wouldn’t have noticed.
Now it was already six and she was going to be late.
Cursing, she jumped to her feet, shaking off the reverberating pain of her fall, grabbed her bag from under the bleachers and kicked off her board.
She passed Charlie as she came out of the skate park and hit the sidewalk. He waved cheerfully at her and she had to swallow the urge to stop and give him a piece of her mind.
She’d just be later if she did that.
So she pushed faster, sailing off the curb into the street. Cars were hard to contend with when she was on her board, but they were big and easy to navigate around, unlike pedestrians, who were both slow and unpredictable. As she careened down quiet side streets, the low evening sun warmed her side and cheeks. She zigzagged through the lengthening shadows, breathing through the lingering ache of her fall, then turned a hard right onto Ossington Avenue.
She didn’t have time to stop and change her shirt, let alone shower.
She caught a draft and zoomed forward.
“Just like clockwork,” Toni, her boss, said when Priya arrived at the shop. “You’re a marvel, you know that?”
Priya grinned as she stowed her knapsack under the counter. “All in the planning.”
Toni shook her head. “You take planning to a whole new level.”
Priya allotted herself fifteen minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to walk from her seminar on campus to the yarn store, which was a pretty generous window, but not overly so. It was good to have the time to let the seminar sift and settle into her mind before she had to switch gears.
She was usually at least five minutes early. Today was no different.
“Quiet today,” Toni said from the back, where she was eating a takeout dinner.
Priya looked around the store, at all the vibrant colors and cozy furniture. “I’m sure it’ll pick up.”
Toni slurped some sesame noodles. “And then we won’t be able to get rid of them.”
Tonight was Stitch and Bitch. A regular crowd always dropped in for gossip, advice, and crafting time away from families, jobs and other responsibilities.
As the regulars arrived, Priya manned the counter to sell last-minute needles and splurge skeins of yarn. When she was not needed there, she tidied the shelves, returning stray balls to their rightful places, reorganizing lace-weight and sock-weight skeins, straightening and neatening the disarray from an ordinary business day.
“You don’t pay her enough,” one of the regulars told Toni when Priya emerged to join the group around the table in the center of the shop. “Look at her work, work, work!”
Priya ducked her head and focused on finding the one ball of blue sock yarn missing its label. Toni did not actually pay her at all; Priya kept the books and helped out three nights a week in exchange for wholesale prices on yarn and the bachelor apartment over the shop.
She had been lucky to get that deal. When her fellowship at the university fell through, she’d had to find a few part-time jobs just to cover tuition; a place to live had started to seem like an unattainable luxury. Although her apartment was little more than a creaky half-converted attic with questionable plumbing, she wasn’t about to complain.
Finally, when Toni had nagged her enough, and there truly was no more yarn to tidy or needles to inventory, Priya joined the group at the table. She pulled out her latest project, oatmeal-colored yarn flecked with green and blue, which she had unraveled from an unwanted sweater. She had spent an entire weekend pulling the sweater apart, skeining up the yarn, washing it and hanging it, weighted down with soup cans, to dry.
“Still doing the recycling?” Gillian asked. She was a newcomer to the group, and liked to wield her husband’s corporate Amex card for the finest silk and cashmere weights.
“Aren’t you worried about,” her nose wrinkled slightly, “pests?”
Priya shook out the sock she was knitting from the yarn and extracted the fifth needle from the center of the ball. “I didn’t get the sweater out of the garbage or anything.”
“Just from a piece of garbage!” Toni put in, and rubbed Priya’s arm.
“My ex,” Priya explained to Gillian, who looked both puzzled and nauseated. “That’s all she means. The yarn came from a sweater I made my ex.”
Gillian tossed back her impeccably bobbed hair. “Well, wherever it came from, I don’t see why you bother.”
“I like it,” Priya said, and pressed her lips together. She could have said more—recycling the yarn was therapy for her: reclaiming what she had given to Amy, cleaning it up and making it into something new, all of that helped her not only move on, but mark her movement, measure it as she grew farther away.
After her breakup, she gave up her ambition to become a theater director, and went back to school for a degree in elementary education. She promised herself that any new relationship, if there ever were one, would fit in with her new goals. Simple, careful and thoughtful were going to be her guiding lights.
As well, recycling the yarn was frugal. And if she hadn’t had knitting in her hands, she couldn’t be responsible for what she might do.
Gillian turned her attention to someone else now, an older woman named Catherine, who was struggling with making a cable. Priya sighed, happy to have a chance to work a few rounds on her sock.
The sock would be knee-high, with a plain foot and leg in a trellis lace pattern. She loved the way kneesocks looked on a woman’s legs, at once rustic and sexy. The wool and lace interplayed delicately, the wool robust and reassuring, the lace subtle and coquettish, revealing small patches of skin like light dappling and splashing through the leaves of a tree on a summer afternoon. The combinations and contrasts were what captured her fancy: smooth skin and slightly scratchy wool, nudity and covering, the curve of a calf and strong line of a shin, maybe a leather high-heeled shoe over the snug sock.
Just then, the bell on the shop door rang and Luisa crashed inside, a riot of color and wind and noise, skateboard in hand, corkscrew curls flowing around her face like a lion’s mane. Her face was flushed, her smile wide and bright as she greeted everyone with high fives and quick hugs, pecks on the cheek and squeezes of the hand.