Page 62 of Sublimate
Cadence was back to talking about the holiday. “Beau doesn’t have anywhere to go,” she mentioned. “His parents are dead and Finley’s mom has him this year, as per their custody agreement. She wanted him to come over so they could celebrate together. He’d asked her to have Thanksgiving withhim,” she reminded me, “but her parents said no. They hate him.”
“Why?” I wondered, and she became indignant.
“They think that he was trying to trap her with a baby, but she also knew about birth control. If anything, it was the other way around! Apparently, she thought he was so good-looking and well-dressed that she stalked him at work.”
“Maybe everybody had a part in it. Or it could have been nobody’s fault,” I suggested. “Things happen a lot, mistakes and wild stuff that you couldn’t have guessed at. One time, there was a natural gas leak in the house we were living in and it almost killed us all. That might have been due to an evil spirit, but it ended up being lucky. The people next door had been dealing so I was glad to leave, because they had really mean dogs.”
She dropped the curl she’d been tugging on. “You’re right,” she told me, nodding. “I just get upset about the situation because he’s so unhappy without Finley. He never thought he’d be a father and I think it surprises him how much he loves that baby.”
It also surprised Nolan, but people did have sides that you couldn’t always see. For example, one of my mom’s boyfriends had been a serial killer. Cadence was appalled when I mentioned that.
“Are you suggesting that Beau Gowan is a murderer?” she asked. She was so shocked that she didn’t even pull on her hair.
“No! I mean that we don’t always know people as well as we think we do,” I explained.
I’d been considering that a lot because examples had been rolling in—like Nolan’s mom, Madeline. She was demonstrating facets of her personality as she cared for his father that her son had certainly never seen before.
“She took off work to nurse him,” he had reported to me from downstate. He had stayed to help out but had his plane come to pick me up and bring me home to northern Michigan. “She’s in the kitchen, driving the housekeeper crazy and trying to make low-salt, high-fiber meals. They’re disgusting.”
And things were just as strange with his dad. “I hear them laughing together,” he had said, bewildered. “They’re talking and interacting like normal people.”
Nolan would be driving back home tomorrow and I was so glad. We had skipped the trip to Hawaii, obviously, but that didn’t matter. We had skipped having a traditional Thanksgiving, too, but he said that his parents had let the housekeeper have the night off and he had made chicken for the three of them (I’d had a sandwich). I missed being with him, doing everyday things like trying his newest bread and going on a run around our little town. We were texting a lot but it wasn’t the same as having him here, even if we didn’t share a bedroom. I was nervous by myself—but it didn’t have to do with shades from a nearby cemetery or poltergeists. I was still thinking that I saw someone, or something? No, it was someone, a figure in the shadows, a car that ducked behind a bigger truck, a movement out of the corner of my eye that was gone when I turned my head. It didn’t happen in the house, though, which had made me doubt that I was being haunted and believe instead that I was being followed.
Cadence wanted to talk about my living situation, but not my current state of anxiety.
“You don’t sleep with Nolan, right?” she casually asked. She had turned red and was curl-twirling, but I guessed that it was because due to the new topic and not because she had spoken his name.
“We’ve slept in the same bed but if you mean, did we have sex? No. We never did it.”
“And you don’t want to?” she asked, even more casual. She even fake-yawned but she was a very bad actress. It reminded me of when the police had come to our apartment and my sister Patchouli had promised that she definitely hadn’t broken into our elementary school at night. I had known immediately that she was the person who had clogged every teacher toilet, just from the way she was tossing her braids around. The police hadn’t been fooled, either, but their evidence was based on the cameras in the hallway that had recorded her carrying a bunch of rolls of TP to stuff into the pipes.
I decided not to share Nolan’s issue, that he didn’t have any desire, and instead explained my own sex problems. “I’m not going to suggest it to him because I’m fine without it. I’m so tired of it all.” Kolter had been nearly insatiable, and I remembered trying not to cry as he’d grabbed my arm and yanked me under him. My tears had made him furious.
“You’re not interested? Really?” She forgot to be casual as she stared at me in confusion. “You don’t want to rip his clothes off?”
“What? No.” I got to see a lot of him without having to rip off anything but it was funny she would say that, because I had been thinking more about touching him. Not in a sexy way, though. I wanted to run my hands over his chest, his arms, and his back, and I also wanted to press my body up against him. Not to initiate anything, but just because I…just because.
“Aren’t you attracted to him?” she asked. “He looks like the anti-hero inThe Long, Hot Summer. Don’t you get the urge to…” She stopped and swallowed. “I do. I really have the urge.”
“You want to sleep with Nolan?” Of course, I knew that she had a crush on him, which had started when they were in high school. But still, to hear it that way? My stomach jumped as if I’d driven over a speed bump too fast.
“No! I’m not talking about Nolan in particular,” she said. “I just meant in general.” She twirled and sighed. “I only did it once. Isn’t that pathetic for someone who’s nearly thirty?”
“You’re not even twenty-nine. Who was the guy?”
“Somebody when I was in college. We did it in his dorm room. He put on music really loud so that people in the hall wouldn’t hear and he hung something on his doorknob so that his roommate wouldn’t come in—I think it was a sock.”
“Was it ok?”
Cadence hesitated and then admitted, “No. I was very glad for the opportunity because I’d figured that I wasn’t going to get a lot more chances. I never had a boyfriend in high school and he was the only one who seemed interested. But after we did it, he blocked me and ignored me when we saw each other on campus.I saw him a lot, too, because he was also a Library Sciences major and there weren’t many of us. I tried to like it but his sheets smelled sour, as if he didn’t change them enough, and…” She dropped her voice even lower than her usual Reading Room whisper. “It was over really fast, before I could get used to it, and it hurt. I bled a little bit.”
“That’s also my experience. I don’t bleed anymore unless they get rough, but I do remember my first time. It killed.”
“It ‘killed?’” she echoed. “Who were you doing it with?”
I shrugged, because that had been a long time ago. “If you do want to have sex with Nolan, I’m sure he wouldn’t hurt you. He would be careful not to.”
“No, I’m not talking about him,” she told me. “But I read books about women who love it and I know that a lot of real-life people do, too.”
