“It’s been such a stressful day for everyone,” he said.
He reached for her hand, clasped it in his. Then he started to cry again too.
“You are right about the truth,” he said, eyes watery. “We all need to be more honest with ourselves.”
She squeezed his hand, a gentle consolation, and then released, but he didn’t let go. He pushed himself up to his knees and pulled her toward him, wrapped his arms around her body. He held her so tightly. She could feel the fear in him, the desperation for connection. She would be lying if she said it didn’t feel good to be held. He was comforting her in the midst of a despair he didn’t fully understand.
As he pulled away from her body, their faces remained mere inches apart. His eyes scanned hers, shifting back and forth as if reading her like text. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers.
She wasn’t sure how long they kissed. It felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a minute. Her mouth was immobile at first, a recipient instead of a participant, but then she let her lips move against his. Shecouldn’t deny the stirring in her lower belly. She desired him—that was just one more difficult truth.
Freya gurgled, and they stopped, separating from each other suddenly. It was like a spell had been broken.
“I’m sorry,” Erik said. “I don’t know what I was—”
“It’s okay,” Sasha said. Even though it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t.
“It’s been such a weird day.”
He got to his feet, a frantic scramble. Sasha did the same. As he turned to leave, Sasha turned too. In the same second, they saw her. Aurora. Standing in the doorway, all the color drained from her face.
Chapter 24
Britt
After Britt became Angeni, there was a period of transition when she did not know exactly who she was. Anyone who had known her as Britt continued to call her Britt. Rainbow and Aurora (née Becky) called her Angeni for the most part, but there were slipups. They were bound to happen, Rainbow said. This was part of the process, the caterpillar becoming the butterfly.
Rainbow’s congregation continued to grow and, with it, donations from members. The donations didn’t amount to much at first. Rainbow relied on her Reiki clinic to pay bills, and she relied on Aurora to help run the clinic. Aurora started painting and hanging her finished works on the walls of the clinic—she got a sale every now and then. Angeni got a job at a natural foods shop so she could contribute to the household. It was there that she began amassing a significant amount of knowledge about herbs and nutrition. She loved that her name tag saidangeni, that her manager and all the shoppers never knew her as Britt.
When she wasn’t working at the store, Angeni helped Rainbow prepare her sermons. Rainbow would share her stream-of-consciousness thoughts with Angeni, usually while smoking a joint, and Angeni would take notes and turn those thoughts into the week’s offering. Auroraacted as the administrative assistant, making runs to Kinko’s to print off copies for the congregants.
“You have a real gift for this,” Rainbow told Angeni one afternoon, after Angeni read back the sermon she’d written.
Angeni could feel her cheeks redden with Rainbow’s praise. In this new life with Rainbow, she felt she had purpose. She felt like she mattered.
“You think so?”
“I think you and I are on the same wavelength. You really get what I’m trying to say. You articulate it better than I can,” Rainbow went on.
“I don’t know if that’s true. Your sermons have always been beautiful, long before I started helping.”
“Maybe,” Rainbow said. “But they’re more beautiful now.”
“That means a lot to me,” Angeni said.
She had to look down because she felt like if she held Rainbow’s stare, she would cry.
Angeni had Mondays off work and usually spent the day alone in the apartment, lazing about or skimming one of Rainbow’s Buddhism books, looking for nuggets of wisdom they could interject into their sermons. On this particular Monday, she was startled by the front door opening, Rainbow coming through saying she wasn’t feeling great so she’d left the clinic in Aurora’s hands for the day.
Rainbow fell onto the couch in the living room and pulled her knees into her chest.
“Is it your stomach?” Angeni asked.
She knelt down next to the couch, put the underside of her wrist to Rainbow’s head.
“It’s a splitting headache,” Rainbow said.
She was closing her eyes hard, rubbing her temples with her fingers.
