“The impossible dream.” Edie smiled at her small joke.
Cosima smiled back with a shake of her head. “I don’t want perfect, Edie. My mother never settled for anything but perfect, and I think that broke Duncan a little, and it killed her.”
“Cosima?” Edie pulled the throw more tightly around her legs, unsure. She took a deep breath. “Did your mom have a problem with alcohol? Or substances? Something like that?”
Cosima’s expression didn’t register anger, shock, or sadness. She didn’t protest. She only leaned back as her body seemed to untie. “My mother was an alcoholic. It killed her. How did you guess?”
Edie made herself drop her shoulders from her ears. “I think one of the reasons so many people struggle with admitting they’re an alcoholic is because of what we think an alcoholicis. We think of mean drunks and people who get in trouble at work and with the law. We think of out-of-control people who are violent and get thrown out of places. But most of the alcoholics I’ve known aren’t like that. Remember I mentioned the guy my mom left Mike for, who she met at work?”
“I do.” Cosima gave her a very kind smile.
“Scott. He was a decent guy. Very hard worker. He’d worked at the factory where my mom met him since he was fifteen, and no one who ever worked with him had a bad thing to say about him. Very… hygienic.”
Cosima laughed. “Hygienic?”
“Maybe I mean barbered. Groomed. Always smelled like Zest soap and breath mints. Shaved twice a day. Our entire household revolved around him, but not because he was the sun. Because knowing how Scott felt, what kind of day he’d had, if he was going to need my mom so I would have to help my brothers with homework and put them to bed, was the way to keep everything as nice as he looked.”
“Oh.” Cosima put her fingers to her lips. “Oh.”
“He never hit us. He didn’t miss a day of work, never got a DUI, never yelled. But my mom did have to go to Al-Anon for five years after he left because she would have panic attackstrying to decide what to make for dinner. She learned about codependency. Sometimes, loving an alcoholic means living a life where you’re always trying to get ahead of disaster, until you feel like everything is a potential disaster. Like making ordinary conversation. Or your too-much daughter being too much.”
“Thank you,” Cosima said. After a long moment, she gave her shoulders a little shake and leaned toward Edie. “Whatever it is that I manage to claw back from Phoebe Frank Studios, and from Phoebe Frank”—she raised an eyebrow to acknowledge Edie’s preference for her mother’s full name—“and even from lovely, kind Duncan, it will be messy. Unruly. Thank you for giving me the understanding I need to be messy. Or try to be messy.”
“No problem, princess. I’m so sorry about your mom.” Edie stretched her foot across the balcony, into the cold air, and touched Cosima’s shin.
Cosima reached down and squeezed Edie’s foot, her hand warm. “So I want you to tell me,” she said, “is ignoring what we want going to keep us safe? Safe from hurt or heartache?” She met Edie’s eyes and held them. “I know that no matter what, I’m going back to LA thinking about nothing but you, and it will make everything that much worse and that much better.”
“Worse, huh?”
“Worse because you can’t be with me. Better because I’d rather know you and miss you and think about you than not. Both of us already ran away to feelbetter, and we both know life’s a lot more complicated than that. However far away you are from the problem, the feelings come with you, no matter how much you wish they didn’t.”
She ran her thumb down the inside of Edie’s arch, over her instep, and then eased back again.
Edie’s body buzzed and ached. Her bones were warm with Cosima’s words. Cosima was right. Ignoring what she wanted had never made her feel better. Getting what she wanted, losing it, and then ignoring it some more hadn’t made her feel better either.
Messy.
When Edie stood, her feet hit the cold tile of the balcony. The blanket was soft around her body. She could smell damp brick and lavender and then, when she sat on the small, low table that put her knee to knee with Cosima, she could smell Cosima, too, and she knew the smell came from Cosima’s hair because she’d buried her face in it on the train. Like vanilla, but deeper. More complicated.
Cosima leaned forward. She put her hands on Edie’s knees, and liquid fire raced up her thighs.
Edie reached for her, her hands finding her nape, hot under the blanket, and Cosima’s hands fully parted the blanket over Edie’s legs and found the back of her knees. With a screech of the table legs on tile, she pulled Edie between her thighs.
The rough, sudden jerk of it, the knots and ringlets at Cosima’s nape, her parted lips, turned Edie on so fast, her middle swooped with desire. Cosima slid her hands from the backs of Edie’s knees, over her arms, and then she felt Cosima’s thumb against her bottom lip, pressing the middle of it, so when Edie moved to kiss her, Cosima’s thumb was between their lips for a moment—was against Edie’s tongue for just a second—a sensation more explicit than anything she had ever felt.
“Edie.” Cosima whispered her name. It sounded good the way she said it. Her lips were soft, parting easily, her teeth slick, her tongue rough, the kiss pouring over Edie like hot honey, pooling between her legs. She traced the round muscle ofCosima’s shoulder beneath cold-prickled skin, the taut strap of her silky bra, the warm dip at her waist. She swept her tongue into Cosima’s mouth and swallowed the sound she made, a moan of surrender. Edie smiled.
“What?” Cosima asked against her mouth. Edie’s hair had somehow been gathered up into the tight grip of Cosima’s fist.
“You like kissing me. It’s like I never once exasperated you.”
Her scalp burst into hot prickles as Cosima pulled the ponytail she’d made of Edie’s hair. “You’re exasperating me right now. Although it’s possiblethat’swhat I like.”
“Lemme see.” Edie dropped her mouth to Cosima’s neck and scraped her teeth against skin so soft, it made her throb and soften to a kiss, then a kiss with tongue, tasting her skin, lavender-scented from the sheets.
This time, Cosima’s moan broke, and her hand left Edie’s hair, traveled down her throat, and found where Edie had unbuttoned her shirt. “Can I touch you?”
Edie tried to suck in a breath, pressing her mouth against Cosima’s shoulder. She was wet, her heart was bursting, she couldn’tbreathe. One taste of Cosima’s mouth, and then her skin, had made her mind go blissfully dark. She didn’t have words, so she took Cosima’s hand and moved it over the top swell of her breast, and even that contact made Edie’s hips lift.
