Here, there wasn’t anywhere for Edie to bebutclose.
At first, the incidental brushes of Edie’s shoulder against hers as they bent their heads over the guest book hit as bright as the lightning, briefly fuzzing Cosima’s senses with too much input at once—but then the sensual static broke up into clear impressions. She recognized the almost lemony, cut-grass smell of Edie’s skin from the amber bars of Pears soap that the inn provided for free. Even with her middle exposed, that skin was warm where her arm pressed against the heavy silk of Cosima’s robe sleeve and along her thigh.
Some bit of Edie was always moving, shifting, or fidgeting. Cosima liked it. It gave her plenty of ongoing information about where Edie’s body ended and began, and if she was likely to talk or be quiet or take a sip of her boiling-hot, sugar-sweet green tea.
Edie turned the figurine around in her hands. “It has a hole in the bottom where it came out of the mold.” She skimmed the pad of her finger around it, then held up the figurine, closing one eye, and tried to look inside. “I can’t tell if there’s anything in here.”
“If there were, you’d think it would have fallen out. Or that you could hear it rattle.” Cosima lifted her own shepherdess to look in the hole made by the slipcast funnel, but it made her feel faintly ridiculous, closing one eye and squinting as Edie had.
“Use your phone flashlight.”
Cosima turned it on and aimed it into the hollow space of the figurine, Edie leaning against her to look, too. “I don’t see anything.”
“I think there’s a spider. Do you see her? Or it could be a bit of dirt.”
Cosima handed the phone to Edie. “Look inside yours.”
Edie pointed the light as the thunder found a bass-note rumble that gave Cosima goose bumps all over.
“Holy smokes,” Edie whispered.
“What?” She leaned over to look and spotted the edge of what looked like canary-yellow paper. The hairs on the back of Cosima’s neck stood on end. “Oh! That’s the color of my mother’s stationery.”
Edie’s smile was so wide that Cosima could see a tiny divot on her otherwise smooth incisor where there must have been a bracket for braces. It was perfectly kitty-corner to a deep brown freckle on her lip line. Probably Edie had hundreds of constellations like this, all over her body.
“Can you get it out?” Cosima asked.
Edie angled the tip of her finger into the hole, but it only rustled the paper. Then she turned back to Cosima, reached up, and slid out one of the hairpins that kept the shorter curls near Cosima’s face from falling out of her braid. “I’m going to borrow this.”
Cosima touched the place where the hairpin had been. She watched Edie slide the pin onto the edge of the paper, tugging it closer to the hole. She tried to use her finger again to ease it out.
Knocked loose by Edie’s fingertip, the hairpin pinged onto the floor, and the paper curled away.
“Fuck.” Edie bent over and grabbed the pin. She held it up with a laugh. “Despite what it looks like, I’m not trying to pick you up.”
Cosima’s brain glitched. “Pardon?”
“You know. I dropped a hairpin.” Edie’s cheeks had gone pink.
“I don’t understand the relevance.”
“It’s an old-fashioned signal. You see a girl you fancy, and you drop one of your hairpins. If she picks it up, then she’s—” Edie wrinkled her nose and brows like Cosima had suddenly gone out of focus.
“Gay?” Cosima guessed. She’d never heard of this.
“Yep. I like to learn about that kind of thing. Queer life in history. I love looking at antique pictures of sapphic couples that everyone thought were roommates.” Edie pushed the hairpin inside the statue again, clearly distracted now. “I have this book,Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, by a lesbian photographer who called herself JEB. She published it in 1979, and it’s probably my favorite book.” She darted a quick, unguarded glance at Cosima. “I love all of the layers of meaning and code and elaborate Easter eggs that queer women and girls got up to. How they figured out to do that so they could make lives for themselves that felt bigger than what the world was willing to let them have. I think about how amazing it would’ve felt to receive an acrostic ring from a girl you were desperately crushing on, you know, spelling out A-D-O-R-E with an amethyst, diamond, opal, ruby, and emerald, and then wearing it to your history lecture so she would see it. I’m glad no one will put me in an asylum for being a lesbian anymore, probably, but I do wish there was something with a little more depth and meaning than swiping right on a phone screen.”
Cosima blinked. Her eyes stung, which was absurd. Whowasthis woman who made gourmet vegan food and dreamed about romantic history while wearing what were obviously her brother’s castoff pants for pajamas? How had someone so singular and imaginative not found a place better than a foam-hatcheesehead town that made fun of her for not being the same as everyone else?
“I can see what you mean.” Cosima didn’t know what else to say. Most of what came to mind risked swerving them into a deeper involvement than made sense while they were both guests at an inn, distracting themselves from their lives.
The stormhadn’twoken her up. It had been an anxious, throat-closing dream about Duncan weeping, accusing her of throwing him away. Her mother wasn’t in the dream, though Cosima looked for her while Duncan was yelling. When she woke up, she texted him for the second time since she’d come here. The first had only been to confirm where she was staying, because she didn’t want the world looking for her. She trusted Duncan to keep that from happening.
When she woke up from her nightmare, though, she texted to tell him that she was resting. Eating good food and taking walks. It was a scenario Duncan would approve of, though she imagined it wouldn’t be long before he tactfully asked for her return date.
Her mother’s company remained headless. The specter of the market loomed. A small city’s worth of people depended on her to keep it aloft so they remained employed. Even if Duncan stalled and rescheduled whatever he could for their soon-to-be-filming show, she guessed they were already losing thousands a day.
She thought of Edie’s story about her mother’s boyfriend. How he’d left when he no longer had a reason to stay. But Duncan wasn’t leaving. He had put something in motion that meant that he genuinely needed Cosima for years to come. Even worse—even from here—she could sense the pressure Duncan felt to do right by Phoebe by making their gardening show and the studio it spawned successful.
