I watched her go and realized I was sitting there in a bra and panties. It was very warm in her apartment, and Sarah didn’t seem uncomfortable with our state of undress as she puttered around the kitchen, preparing dinner. I could watch if I turned sideways on the couch and put my legs up, so I did.
“Can I help?”
She shook her damp, blonde curls. “Nope. I’m fine.”
“So… what’s the deal with you and David?” I couldn’t fathom her rejection of him.
“You can’t deny he’s a total hottie.”
“He is, isn’t he?” She smiled, stirring the pasta. “Well, for one, he’s divorced.
Hard to trust a guy who made a go of it and failed, you know?” Ouch. Harsh. But that was Sarah—no one else we worked with could stand her. I was the only one who could tolerate her caustic remarks, even when they were directed at me.
“And, well… he works for me.” Sarah shrugged, putting something together in another pot. “And you know how Don harps about work relationships.”
“What about Chad and Lynn?” I snorted, knowing Don, our “big boss,” looked the other way a lot. “They’re permanently lip-locked and they work together.”
“Oh, them!” She waved a dismissing hand over the pasta pot as she blew on it, keeping it from bubbling over. “They’re on the same level, you know? It’s just not comparable.”
I sipped at my wine, which was almost gone and Sarah came to refill it.
“Hey!” I laughed. The fire was warming me outside, and the wine was warming me inside. I felt flushed. “You trying to get me drunk?”
“Might do you some good.” She tipped the bottle a little further, filling my glass almost to the top. I just rolled my eyes, watching her refill her own glass and set the wine on the counter.
“I don’t need to get drunk,” I mumbled into my glass.
“No?” Sarah licked wine off her lips and turned to stir the pasta. The sauce pot next to it had come to a slow-motion boil, splattering red sauce on the white glass surface of the stove. “I think you need something like it.”
“Sure you don’t need my help?” I offered as she slid a lid onto the sauce pot and shimmied it around for a moment before setting it on a back burner, reaching into the cupboard above her head to bring down a colander without even looking. I thought she was brave to cook in so little clothing.
“I got it,” she insisted, dipping a fork into the noodles and picking one carefully off the tines. “And don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not.” So what if I was? Sarah tossed a noodle at her kitchen wall and it stuck there, making a strange pattern that reminded me briefly of the Arby’s logo before slowly peeling away. She caught the strand and tossed it into the sink. “Was the wall hungry?”
She smiled as she picked up the pot and moved toward the sink. “That’s how my father taught me. The spaghetti’s done if you throw it against the wall and it sticks.”
“I’d hate to be around when you cook a pot roast.”
I loved when I could surprise a laugh out of her that way, when it wasn’t just a polite thing, but a genuine response. There was something so bright about her in those moments it made my chest ache. I watched as she plated our food, putting down silverware on cloth napkins, which had been carefully folded in a basket on the counter, before calling me to the table.
“Come on, let’s eat.”
The meal was warm and filling, although I didn’t pay much attention to it. Sarah peppered me with questions.
“So what’s after college?”
I sighed, twirling spaghetti with my fork like it was all I could think about. “I don’t know.”
“Have you and Tim talked about it?”
“Me and Tim…” I gulped some more wine, my eyes watering. Everyone always assumed we were an item, like we were one thing, one mind, one entity. Not that we weren’t. We’d been together so long, sometimes even I believed it. And sometimes it drove me crazy. “Yeah, I guess. A little.”
“First comes college, then comes marriage, then comes Lizzie pushing a—” Sarah nudged me under the table with her bare knee and I jumped.
“Don’t say it!” I stuck out my tongue. “You sound like my mother.”
“Life reduced to a nursery rhyme…” She shook her head, still smiling.
I watched her sip her wine, tuck her hair behind her ear, cut her spaghetti into pieces as if she were preparing it for a child. I wanted to say something, to break things open between us somehow, but I didn’t know the words.
As if she understood, she tipped her head at me and asked, “Isn’t that the usual order of things?”
“Who says I want to be usual?” My eyes didn’t move from hers.
“Now we’re talking…” A smile crept over her face, a smile I’d never seen before, something devious, exciting, her eyes lighting up with it. “And here I thought you were just gonna be another good sorority girl turned real Orange County housewife….”
“Well…” I dropped my eyes to my plate, feeling something heavy in my chest. “I probably am…”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Ha.” I snorted. “You don’t believe that for a minute.”
“Life changes you.” Sarah ate spaghetti with a spoon. I watched her taking delicate bites, amused. Here I was, slurping away at the noodles, and she was being as precise as a surgeon. “Sometimes you find the things that once did it for you just…
don’t… anymore.”
I studied her face, contemplating her words. “I’m not too young to get it, Sarah.”
“No…” she agreed. “But sometimes you just can’t tell people things. Sometimes they just have to happen. Life will happen to you. Trust me, it will. No need to hurry it along.”
“What if I want to?”
“Everyone says that.” Sarah took another sip of wine, looking at me over the rim.
“Until things start to happen.”
”What things?”
“Just life, sweetie.” She sighed, using her napkin and then putting over her plate, half her food still left there. “You’ll get it…when you’re older.” I rolled my eyes, mimicking her napkin-over-the-plate gesture. I’d lost my appetite. “Now you really sound like my mother.”
“What do you want me to say?” She stood, clearing our plates but leaving the wine glasses. “That I can give you a map?”
“I don’t want a map…” I stood, too, but didn’t follow her to the kitchen. Instead, I went the few steps into the living room, running my fingers over the edges of her furniture. “I just want to be…”
“Unusual?” she supplied, snagging both of our glasses like a professional waitress in one hand, the bottle of wine in the other.
“I don’t have the first clue how to be unusual.” I flopped down onto the couch in front of the fire.
“No?” Her voice was closer and softer now as she sat on the floor in front of me, her back resting against my crossed legs. “I think you know more than you let on.”
“I don’t.” Her hair was dry now, as was mine. It was silky against my bare legs, and I touched it. Her hair curled around my fingers and she sighed, leaning her head back, her eyes closed. I looked at her in the firelight. It cast shadows, making rippling patterns on her face, her arms, her breasts spilling slightly over her bra, turning her hair and skin a warm, tawny color.
“Sarah, you’re right. My life is as boring as they come. I was valedictorian of my high school class — I’m well on my way to graduating summa cum laude from college.
Tim and I went to the junior prom together and have been dating ever since. I got into a good sorority — not, you know, the one with old money, but still…My mother always tells everyone, ‘She’s such a good girl.’ And you know what? She’s right. I am a good girl.”