It was a dream. A good dream—one where Edie could be from any time in the past or future, because this view had always been here, and it was impossible to believe it would ever be gone.
Andshewas here, a part of it.
“Pretty.”
Edie startled, making a noise that scared away a pair of pigeons on the neighboring roof.
“Sorry.” Cosima was also wrapped in a throw, her hair felted on one side and enormous on the other. She yawned, and when she finished, the light caught her sleep-blue eyes and turned them aquamarine.
“Good morning.” Edie didn’t know why she was whispering.
Cosima sat down on a small wrought-iron bistro chair, wrinkling her nose. “It’s so cold out here.”
Edie laughed. “You’re not a morning person, are you, princess?”
“Who is? Morning is the coldest, darkest, most disorienting part of the day. Except in the summer, when it’s too bright, too soon. Everyone expects you to be cheerful. It’s when they schedule the most important meetings, even though you’re either starving or vaguely nauseated, and there’s no predicting which. There’s an entire period of time, right away, that you have to go through a tedious series of rituals to make yourself presentable, and at least one thing always goes wrong. You didn’t pick up the dry cleaning. You smash the mascara wand into your eye and set your eyeball on fire. You realize that you got into bed too soon after you painted your nails and now they all have sheet prints on them. Morning is hateful.” Cosima yawned again.
“I love getting up early.” Edie sat down on the other chair. It was so cold that her hips began to ache. “In the morning, nothing bad has happened yet.”
Cosima looked at Edie, a long look that started out considering and then got disconcertingly soft.
“What?”
She shrugged. “We slept together.”
“We did not!”
“There’s so much that’s no longer a mystery. For example, you snore. Not a lot, not very loud, just a low purr. You yank all the bedding out from where it’s tucked into the end of the mattress.”
“It’s literally evil that they do that. Who wants their toes bound in place?”
“You only use one pillow. Maybe that’s why you snore. I stole your second one so I could stack my upper body up properly.”
Edie smiled at the view, pleased to have been introduced to grouchy morning Cosima. Pleased with everything, despite the cold. “So how do we do this?” she asked. “I’m thinking we find some kind of drugstore for a brush for me and whatever you need to tame your hair, then food, then serviceable clothes real quick, and then we get down to business.”
Cosima raised one barn-swallow-wing eyebrow. “First we talk about yesterday. On the train.”
Edie bit the inside of her cheek to keep her heart from leaping into her throat. “We did. We have, two times. Very mature of us.”
“We achieved understanding, and we were both reasonable. But how are we supposed to keep sleeping together and traveling through Europe if we don’t talk about the elephant in the room?”
“Pink marble elephant.” Edie giggled, possibly nervously. “We didn’tsleeptogether.”
“Edie.”
We’re in international waters.That was what Cosima had said. As though there might be places in the world where they could do whatever they liked without consequence.
Edie had been very decidedlynotthinking about Cosima saying that—the tone of her voice, the challenging arch to her eyebrow, the heat and tenderness and vulnerability in her expression—since nearly the moment she’d said it.
Instead, Edie had reminded herself of a joke her brothers liked to make. They said that she was the frog who a thousand princesses kissed without any one of them finding their prince.
Edie had never been able to figure out if this joke was mainly about her lesbianism, queers and their fond affinity for frogs, or more about her general failure to be an attractive adult companion, but it did have a way of drowning her desire for someone new in the wash of shame for the ways her previous relationships had crashed and burned.
All of them. Every one. With variations, cruel twists, some humiliation, but no exceptions.
“I don’t wake up with my body wrapped around someone else’s body,” Cosima said, in her new, velvety voice that was for saying sweet things Edie couldn’t figure out how to deflect. “I don’t want to kiss people. I don’t fall asleep thinking about how close my bed is to the other bed someone is sleeping in, and I once shared a room in Park City during Sundance with Kristen Stewart.”
Edie had done all of those things, too, except for the part with Kristen Stewart, unless she counted the number of times she’d fallen asleep with one of theTwilightmovies playing, which was innumerable.
