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Yep, just like they were teenagers again.

They stayed silent for at least half a mile, Megan finding herself needing to concentrate really hard on not rear-ending the vehicle in front of her because she was so upset.

“Anyway, look, I gotta go,” Molly finally said. “I have one more online class before I’m done for the day.”

Megan knew that as the older sister, she shouldn’t allow the conversation to end this way, but she was also not wanting to deal with this while driving.

“Right. Talk to you later.”

Before anything else could be said, she jabbed the disconnect button on the steering wheel.

She sighed.

How much longer did she want to have conversations like this with her family? Conversations wherein she deftly avoided giving away any clue that she was a lesbian.

A couple of years ago, Megan had promised Cindy that she would come out to her family before she was thirty. And sure, now Cindy was gone but Megan was still planning on holding herself to that promise. But the clock was ticking. Her next birthday, which was less than two weeks away now, was number twenty-seven, but wasn’t it just yesterday she turned twenty-six?

Fuck, time flies when you’re adulting!

And what would happen when she moved to New York, got settled in and started meeting women? Presumably, she’d eventually meet and fall in love with someone there.

What if that happened before Molly’s wedding next year?

She chewed her bottom lip thinking about this.

Coming out before the wedding meant risking being uninvited to the wedding. It was positively medieval, Megan thought, but true. Her parents’ minds were stuck in some prior century. Molly wasn’t as bad, but of the two sisters, Molly had been influenced far more by Mom and Dad than Megan had. Megan didn’t know exactly how deeply that influence ran, but what scared her now was that if she came out before the wedding and created a rift in the family, it would ruin Molly’s big day. Megan loved her sister, and when the knucklehead wasn’t acting like a miniature Audrey Baldwin, they actually got along. The last thing Megan would want now was to take Molly’s wedding and make it all about Megan.

But waiting to come out until sometime after the wedding created an unpleasing potential scenario, Megan realized, because suppose she did have a girlfriend when the date of the wedding arrived?

“What am I supposed to do?” Megan asked herself out loud in the car. “Say to her, ‘Can’t meet up with you today, babe, because I have to fly to California to attend this very important family function that I can’t bring you to? Call you when I land?’”

Megan smacked the steering wheel in frustration.

“Fuck!”

She wanted something happy to think about and so she brought the fingers she had fucked Vanessa with up to her face. They still smelled liked her and Megan wanted nothing more than to close her eyes as she inhaled the scent but, of course, driving at eighty miles an hour made that imprudent.

***

Megan made good time, arriving at the Indian Palms Country Club in Indio, just outside Coachella, a little before four o’clock. Even though she was only staying one night, Megan preferred spending the extra money on nicer hotels. As a woman traveling alone, cheap motels, no matter how nice the neighborhood they were in, never made her feel safe.

She toed off her flats as soon as she entered her second-floor room, dropped her overnight bag on the floor near the closet and then flopped backwards onto the bed, luxuriating in how the tension of the drive just melted away. Remembering she had promised Vanessa to text her that she had made it safely, she picked up her phone.

Made it. :-) Safe and sound in my hotel.

Now, she had to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. Coachella, being a desert town, was far hotter than Carlsbad. Her car’s display had read 103-degrees when she arrived. Ugh! She was a coastal California girl, not bred for high heat. She had hated the summers in New York City, where, although the mercury hardly ever reached triple-digits, the humidity made even a 90-degree day feel suffocating. She had spent summers in the Big Apple hiding from the sticky and oppressive air in museums, art galleries, matinees on Broadway, antique shops and shady spots in Central Park. But Coachella was not New York.

No bother. Her room here was nice—and air-conditioned; she was not averse to remaining in here until dinnertime when she would most likely just have UberEats bring something by. After dinner, it should be cool enough to go for a walk. In the meantime, she could take out her iPad and do some drawing while watching a movie.

Her phone chimed. Thinking it was Vanessa, she eagerly snatched it up.

Cindy.

When do you get to town?

I got here a little while ago.

Oh.