Page 17 of Anywhere with You

“She never liked me back. She dated a baseball player all through high school. I lost track of her after that.”

“She’s not on Facebook?” I asked.

“No, and I hate how weird I find that,” Cara said, grinning. “How can you be our age and not at least have a profile with a picture that’s ten years out of date?”

“That is mysterious,” I agreed.

“What about you, Honey?”

“I am not mysterious. I post crap constantly. If there’s a video out there of someone throwing cheese slices on a baby’s head, I’ve reposted it.”

Cara just stared at me.

I sighed. “I’m afraid I was a late bloomer. I was nineteen, and it was a woman I worked with at Subway.”

“No one at all before that?”

“Passing infatuations, mostly with celebrities and book characters. But then there was Tamara.”

“Pretty name.”

“Beautiful woman. I mean, the kind that could stop traffic, except…”

“Except?” Cara prompted.

“She liked to drink vodka and blue Kool-Aid.”

“So what?” Cara asked, amused.

“I mean, that’s all she drank. All day. She kept a thermos with her at the register and refilled it during her lunch break. She’d already had her license suspended, so she rode home with whoever could take her.”

Cara listened, wide-eyed.

“So, one night, that was me, and she was completely hammered by closing. She passed out in the passenger seat of my car, and I couldn’t get her to wake up long enough to tell me her address.”

“Dear goodness. What did you do?”

“What could I do?” I shook my head, pushing the last of the rice onto my spoon. “I took her home, to my house, to my parents’ house, I mean.”

Cara stared for a second, then laughed out loud. “What did your parents do?”

“My dad threw Tamara over his shoulder and carried her like a firefighter. My mom got her water and aspirin and got her tucked into bed. In my head, I was like, this is the beginning for us. She’s going to wake up, be so grateful that I took care of her, and love me forever.”

“Don’t tell me. It didn’t happen that way.”

“She snuck out in the middle of the night, and I never saw her again.”

“Wow,” Cara said.

“Her tongue was always blue,” I said a little wistfully.

“What’s Tamara doing now? Do you know?”

“Oh, she’s in prison.”

“You’re kidding,” Cara said, in a tone that said she hoped I wasn’t.

“Nope. She violated the Endangered Species Act.”

Cara leaned forward. The waiter passed by, smiled at us, and kept going.

“She was caught with a baby sea turtle during Mardi Gras,” I said.

Cara put both her hands over her mouth. “What?”

“Well, first she was arrested for public urination, then the officer saw that her pocket was moving. And dripping. That’s where he found the sea turtle.”

“You are making this up,” Cara said, dropping her hands.

“No, if I was making up a story, it would be believable. So the turtle is fine. It goes to a rehabilitation center. But Tamara goes to prison.”

“For turtle smuggling?”

“Well, for that and for punching a cop in the testicles for stealing her pet. She testified that it was a rare species of cat, then called the judge a stupid fuckface for not believing her. And then she vomited a bright blue substance, according to the news, all over her lawyer.”

Cara tried hard not to laugh, but she managed to say, “I don’t believe a word of this.”

But I expected that response, and I already had my phone out. I turned it to show her the article: “Houston Woman Convicted on Multiple Counts, Including Endangered Species Act Violation.”

There’s a picture, too. Tamara, still lovely, with a bright blue smile.

We finished the last bites of our meals and ordered dessert, chatting about our one-sided romances and cocktails that did not contain blue Kool-Aid.

“What about your first kiss?” Cara asked.

“Oh, it was magical. Freddie what’s-his-name. Sixth grade. On the school bus on our way back from a field trip to a drastically boring cave.”

“Hey, caverns can be cool.”

“Nerd. Anyway, we were holding hands, and he leaned over to kiss me just as the bus hit a pothole. He slammed his face into mine so hard that I broke a tooth.”

Cara shook her head, staring at me in horror. “That’s traumatizing. Is that why you only kiss women now?”

“Yes. That’s why I only kiss women now. Obviously.” I laughed. “What about you?”

“Oh, mine was much better. I was in fourth grade, and a boy on the playground kissed me…with tongue.”

“No,” I said, not sure whether to laugh, but Cara was grinning.

“Yes, except I didn’t know about French kissing, so I kept my lips together, and he just licked my mouth.”

I had to laugh, and Cara just shook her head at me.

“Gross,” I said. “But that doesn’t count. What’s the first kiss you actually participated in?”

“Oh,” Cara mocked. “Your dental injury counts, but me being lapped at like a dog doesn’t? Fine. It was five long, kissless years later.”

I tried to count with margarita-brain. It took me a minute. “High school?”

“Yes. No, the summer before high school. This is how I got over Melissa and her seductive guitar. My parents had some friends visiting, and their son—”

“Friends, right? Not family members?”

Cara looked even more grossed out than when she told me about the licking kiss. “Not family, you weirdo. No, friends from Mexico who were in New Orleans for vacation. Their son was a year older than me, with these big brown eyes and unkempt hair. I adored him immediately.”

“Did he play guitar?” I smirked.

“No.” She paused. “Piano.”

I smirked harder.

“Anyway,” she said, ignoring me. “He was hot, and he had this soft way of speaking, and I’d been listening to a lot of Enrique Iglesias. Honestly, it was entirely predictable. I don’t know what my parents were thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inviting an attractive teenage boy to stay for a week at a house with a… willing teenage girl?”

“You mean horny .”

Cara glared. “Passionate,” she said, then sighed as though giving in to my vocabulary. “Honestly, within two hours, we were making out behind the shed, and he snuck into my bedroom every single night. It’s a miracle I wasn’t pregnant after that week.”

“Wait,” I said. She had my complete attention, even though the waiter had arrived with cake. “Are you telling me that you had your first real kiss the same day you had sex for the first time?”

Fenske discreetly set down the plates and walked away.

“No,” Cara said. “We just kissed for the first two nights.”

“Cara, that’s still really fast. And you were what, fourteen?”

“Almost.”

I stared at her.

“What?” She was looking back at me, wide-eyed with confusion. “It was consensual.”

“Isn’t there some kind of age you have to be before you can consent? I don’t know what it is, but it’s not thirteen. You were just a baby.”

I sounded angry, but Cara seemed to understand that I wasn’t angry at her. She put a hand on my arm, and I tried to relax so she didn’t feel how tense my muscles were.

“I was fine,” she said gently. “I am fine. Yes, I was probably too young, but he was gentle and nice. We talked on the phone for years after that. He would tell me about school and his basketball team. I would tell him about having a different crush every week and about how desperate I was to get out of New Orleans and go to college somewhere new and exciting.”

I made my foot stop violently tapping. It was shaking the whole table.

“He’s a creep,” I said, “and I’ll hate him forever.”

Cara nodded. “I’m okay with that.” Then she opened my hand and put a fork into it.

The waiter had brought two enormous slices, cheesecake and chocolate cake, and Cara and I split them both, making noises that approached the erotic.

“This feels like the wrong thing. Shouldn’t we be getting makeovers or something?” Cara said, licking chocolate off her top lip.

“Uh…what?”

“That’s what you usually do to show your ex that you’re over them, right? You get a haircut, join a gym, start dating someone younger.”

“I don’t want to do any of those things,” I said.

“Neither do I. I also don’t think it would work. I got a haircut and joined a gym last year, and Lorenzo never noticed.”

I noted that. Either Cara’s gym days didn’t include running or she’d kept pace with me instead of leaving me behind while the rabid javelina was chasing us.

Cara the passionate teenager. Cara the compassionate adult. I was learning new things about her every day.

“By Christmas,” Cara was saying, “there were days I didn’t even see him. He’d be gone when I got up for work, and I’d be asleep before he got back. It was only dirty clothes in the hamper that showed he’d come home at all.”

“You should’ve started dating someone younger. I bet he would’ve noticed that.”

“Would he? I don’t know.” Cara picked up a stray piece of chocolate frosting and popped it into her mouth.

“Anyway, I never wanted to have to go searching for romance, you know? All those matchmaking apps and programs seem so hard, especially after all these years without practice. I don’t even know if I want to fall in love again.

I don’t know if it’s worth the trouble.”

I nodded. “All that getting-to-know-you, getting comfortable stuff is the worst. I want to be settled. I don’t want to have to ask the questions and have the doubts.

Maybe that’s part of the problem, though.

I didn’t ask the questions. Maybe I shouldn’t have assumed that she still meant what she said when we first got together.

Or maybe I should’ve paid more attention when she said she had doubts.

I thought we were fine because neither of us was getting arrested for turtle trafficking, but that’s a pretty low bar.

Maybe she grew into another person, and I didn’t keep getting to know her. ”

Cara was watching me, fork hovering above her plate.

“What?”

“That’s a lot of introspection. Here, have another margarita.”

I laughed and accepted. She gave a smile and a polite wave to get Fenske’s attention.

“I need you to get one thing straight, Honey,” she said as he approached. “None of this is your fault. You don’t take the blame for a cheater.”

She ordered us both a second margarita, and I took my empty glass and touched it to hers.

“Same.”

“Yes,” she said. “Same. I spent weeks doing that, wondering what I could’ve done, what I could’ve been, that would’ve made Lorenzo be faithful to me.

But the fact is, I was me, just like when I was a kid and in love with the guitarist with Elton John glasses.

And I’m going to keep being me, and if that’s not what they want…

if that’s not what he wants, then I’m glad he left. ”

She said it without quavering, but her eyes were wet. I placed my hand palm up on the table between us, and she took it, squeezing. I didn’t feel the heart-pounding awareness that had accompanied holding her hand in the cliff dwellings, but this was, in its own way, no less intimate.

For the hundredth time, I wondered how I’d spent so much time with this woman over the years without getting to know her.

“At this point,” I said, squeezing her hand tightly, “I’m pretty sure that no man deserves you.”

“I don’t know what that means coming from a lesbian.”

I was still laughing when our second round of margaritas arrived.