The kitchen went quiet.
Lizanne sat on the table, hand still over her mouth, while Rose rested her forehead against Lizanne’s knee. They both breathed like they’d run a marathon.
Rose looked up.
“That,” Lizanne said, when her voice finally worked, “was definitely not in the contract.”
Rose’s mouth curved. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
Lizanne looked at her—undone, warm, and finally, actually seen. She felt something settle in her chest, moving into a space it hadn’t occupied before. It wasn’t just the sex. It was the weeks of pressure finally running out of room to stay contained.
She reached out and brushed the hair from Rose’s face.
Chapter 20
Rose
The ceiling was too high and the pendant light was in the wrong place. It took Rose a full ten seconds of staring at it before her brain caught up with where she was.
The kitchen. The wedding dresses on the floor. Lizanne’s mouth on her neck, her collarbone, lower. Her own hands in Lizanne’s hair. The sounds she’d made that she was going to have to find a way to set aside while conducting herself like a professional for the next year.
She turned over.
Lizanne’s side of the bed was empty, the sheet pulled back, the pillow still carrying the shape of her head. Rose sat up, pushed her hair out of her face, and looked around the room in the morning light. The astronomy book on the side table. The two photographs. The alarm clock she’d put there herself three weeks ago, which now looked like it had always been there. The curtains half open, pale early light coming through, the room quiet in a way that felt different from how it had been quiet before.
She wrapped the sheet around herself and went to find her.
Not in the bathroom. Not in the sitting room off the main bedroom. Rose followed the light down a short corridor she hadn’t been down before and came to a sunroom at the back of the house—glass on three sides, the valley below still half-buried in morning mist.
Lizanne sat on the floor in the center of the room, cross-legged, back straight, eyes closed. Gray t-shirt, loose trousers, hair down. She looked nothing like herself and completely like herself and Rose’s first instinct was to step back out before she was seen.
She took one step backward. Then another.
Her shoulder blade connected with the doorframe with a solid, resonant thunk.
Lizanne opened one eye. “You need to work on your ninja skills.”
“I was trying not to disturb you.”
“You disturbed me from ten feet away.” She opened both eyes. “Come and sit down.”
“I’m wearing a sheet.”
“I can see that. Sit down anyway.”
Rose crossed the room and sat beside her, pulling the sheet around herself. The valley below was still waking, mist in the low places between the vines, the light coming in clean and directionless.
“Have you ever meditated?” Lizanne asked.
“No.”
“It would help you.”
“I’ve been told that.”
“By who?”
“People whose advice I didn’t take.”
