Page 18

“Will you hand me that onion, sweetheart?”

Jen Sluslarski stood at the kitchen counter in Tressa Fay’s childhood home, chopping vegetables. She was a small, curvy woman who Tressa Fay guessed was younger than her dad, but by no more than ten years. Probably less, given her references and lifestyle. She had great skin and expensive pale blond highlighting cut into a feathery show of femininity that contrasted interestingly with her Carhartt button-down tucked into jeans.

She was making spaghetti Bolognese, which Tressa Fay knew, for certain, that her father had never eaten before in his life, and certainly not from scratch. Jen’s movements in the kitchen were expert and efficient, and balanced on her nose was a wacky set of purple readers with polka dots, which she looked through and over in a way that reminded Tressa Fay of a fast, plump bird on a branch.

Tressa Fay liked her. Even if she couldn’t have ever, ever dreamed that anything like Jen or homemade pasta dishes or eating with her dad anywhere but the diner or seeing her dad on a non-haircut or non-diner day would happen.

“So how did you two get to know each other?” she asked. “Tell me everything.”

“Aren’t you the sweetest?” Jen smiled wryly. “I bet your dad hasn’t said a single damn word.”

Tressa Fay leaned her hip against her dad’s kitchen counter. “Not a breath of a word. Does he talk about me? Regale you with cute stories of when I was a little girl? Go on and on about my successful business?”

They both laughed for a long time, and Jen was wiping her eyes when she said, “We met at church in the Sunday morning adult education class. We’ve both been going to that class for years, and I got gradually more and more fascinated with the mystery of this man who faithfully attended and never spoke. So I started making him talk to me.”

“How does that work? I’m guessing it involves small electric shocks.”

Jen hooted. “You’re not far off. I made sure that whenever I talked to him , I kept my shoulders back.” She demonstrated, showing off her impressive rack.

“I like you,” Tressa Fay said. “And what he said to you convinced you that you wanted to date him? Because if I got someone to print out on a piece of paper all the words he ever said to me and read it, I don’t think I’d be able to tell that whoever said them was my father, versus the cashier at Kwik Trip.”

“Oh, God, no. I have friends if I want conversation. My sister. Without sounding sappy, it was what he did, just as consistently as he went to that class. Listened, opened doors for me, showed up to help when I mentioned I had yard work or had to haul something somewhere or a window sash wasn’t working, and here’s the thing.” She pointed the chef’s knife at Tressa Fay. “If a man doesn’t talk, you know what else he doesn’t do?”

Tressa Fay shook her head.

“Complain. Without getting into my entire romantic history, because we’ve only just met, I will tell you that I’m a woman who can appreciate, more than most, a man who doesn’t complain, who lets me live my own life, and who does what he says he’s going to.”

“I hope you like fishing,” Tressa Fay said.

They sat around the dining room table, which hadn’t been used in so long that when Jen and Tressa Fay took off its foam protective cover, her dad had to spend some time with a rag and furniture polish to clean off disintegrated foam streaks. Jen lit a candle, of all things, and they ate her delicious pasta. Tressa Fay’s dad didn’t say a word at any point about anything, but before she left, he gave her a five-dollar bill and told her to have a nice night.

Tressa Fay stood for a long time on the stoop of the house she had grown up in, watching kids ride up and down the street on their bikes, listening to dogs bark. Then she got in her car.

She’d read her conversation over text with Meryl after her dad had told her about Jen. The feelings she’d expressed in the conversation were similar to the ones she’d had tonight. Incredulity. Shock that her dad had permitted a change in his life, let alone had sought one out.

Except that she and Jen had spent some time alone together in the kitchen, and so Tressa Fay had more of a sense of how it had happened. Why it had.

Did it really matter when or in what universe something happened if the feelings were the same?

She started her little Fiat and pointed it in the direction of the address Meryl had given her. It was a small two-story green house in an old neighborhood near the west side of downtown, the kind of house that would have scarred wood floors and creaky four-panel doors that didn’t always close completely and a tiny telephone nook carved into the wall.

There was Meryl’s sensible car in the driveway. Tressa Fay could see a light on at the back of the house on the first floor, probably the kitchen, and another upstairs. She walked up the drive, knowing that a house like this probably had a side entrance that everyone used instead of the big curved-top front door.

She knocked, her muscles buzzing, her face numb.

Meryl opened the door. She wore a pale pink pajama set, soft T-shirt material, the kind of thing a mom bought a grown-up daughter for Christmas. Her hair was loose, and her glasses were dark, heavy ones, the only saturated color she wore.

“I finished my experiment.” Tressa Fay felt the cool air from Meryl’s house against her shoulders, swirling with the warm, humid May night. She could feel everything, everywhere.

“What happened?”

Tressa Fay looked up at the light over the door, the moths fluttering around it. “I don’t care when or how I met you.” She looked right at Meryl.

“No,” Meryl said. “I don’t, either.”

Tressa Fay felt her heart in her ears. “I’m going to lose you no matter what. That’s how it works.”

“I know. I can’t believe we’re not completely solitary animals, like the desert tortoise.”

Tressa Fay laughed, but she stayed right in this moment she wanted to remember forever, backward and forward. “I was going to wait more. I mean, before I wanted this next part. Not wanted it, of course I wanted it. When I washed your hair, well, that was entirely in the neighborhood of…” She shook her head. “Wow. Okay.”

Meryl moved closer. “What do you want?” She stepped forward, then again, until she had laced one of her legs between Tressa Fay’s.

Tressa Fay closed her eyes. She heard a long horn on the river, a mile away. Insects. Meryl’s breathing, which was fast. The sound of it flipped a switch inside her that tightened everything between her legs, that made her have to bend her knee and lean in to stay upright, that overrode everything except the idea of skin and pressure and all things wet and fast.

She fisted the fabric of Meryl’s pajama top at her waist, her fingertips dragging into soft belly. Meryl made a short noise in her throat.

“Meryl,” she whispered. Tressa Fay couldn’t figure out how to ask her to make the throbbing connect with something, how to tell her she wanted too much at once and needed something tender and dirty to happen as soon as possible, all over, in a position that allowed leverage.

Meryl laughed and slid her hand up Tressa Fay’s body, her fingers catching in the edges of Tressa Fay’s clothes, until she put her hand through the back of her hair, over the side of her face, and echoed the grip Tressa Fay had on Meryl’s top at the nape of Tressa Fay’s neck. When their mouths met, Meryl’s was already hot and open, sending such a heavy pulse between Tressa Fay’s legs that she pressed herself against Meryl’s thigh and moaned, broken.

Meryl’s grip in her hair was tight, shooting sharp static down her spine, over her ass, down her legs. As she tipped Tressa Fay’s face to better rub their tongues together, she caressed her, slipping her thumb to the corner of her mouth, feeling their kiss.

“God.” Tressa Fay moved her hands restlessly over the soft fabric of Meryl’s pajamas. Her body was naked, or nearly, under the thin, soft material, and it was killing, killing her how Meryl’s hot skin felt through that barrier, how the pajamas slipped and caught over her curves and hips and belly and breasts. She hadn’t even touched Meryl’s skin yet, and she was aching and wet.

“Come on.” Meryl eased her hands away from Tressa Fay’s face and hair, sliding her palm down her bare arm, grabbing her wrist. “Come inside.”

“Were you getting ready for bed?” Tressa Fay looked around at Meryl’s snug kitchen with its original cabinets, everything in different colors of yellow and gold. There was an electric kettle on the counter that was steaming, and one of the cabinet doors was ajar. “I don’t want to—”

Meryl laughed. “Nuh-uh. You do want to, and when I don’t have any plans, I get ready for bed as soon as I come in the door from work.” She pulled Tressa Fay through a tiny dining room with a round table covered in binders, papers, and a glowing laptop screen, into the living room, where there was a big sofa in front of a fireplace Meryl had put candles in.

Meryl pulled her down as Tressa Fay collapsed onto the sofa, and then she grabbed Meryl’s hand and directed her over her hips to straddle her so that Tressa Fay could take handfuls and handfuls of her if she wanted.

Tressa Fay wanted . Meryl’s mouth was perfect, sliding, soft, a little bit desperate, and Meryl kissing was a Meryl who was directing her focus and power into taking apart Tressa Fay into her smallest, least inhibited pieces.

“Mm,” Meryl hummed into Tressa Fay’s mouth, licking into another kiss. “It’s you.”

“It is.” Tressa Fay shivered as Meryl’s mouth trailed softly over her jaw, her neck. Meryl kissed her throat and kissed up the other side, lightly dragging her nails over Tressa Fay’s sides, which were bare due to the slits on the sides of her tank. “Jesus.” Tressa Fay tried to take a deep breath, but she was starting to breathe hard, starting to move her hips against Meryl’s, starting to think about naked skin against naked skin and sucking and taking in the slow slide of fingers, grinding against a slippery palm.

Meryl sat back, breathing hard, putting her fingertips on Tressa Fay’s mouth. Meryl’s bigger upper lip was swollen and pink, yet another layer of freckles Tressa Fay hadn’t seen before was glowing against her skin, and her nipples were bunched under her top. “You’re here. In my house.”

“Under your delicious body.” Tressa Fay gripped Meryl’s thighs. “I had no idea engineers kissed like you.”

“We have to make up for the long dry spells in between.” Meryl shifted, forcing Tressa Fay to close her eyes, and Meryl’s fingers traced her lips, over her chin, up over her cheeks and eyes. “You’re gorgeous.”

“What have you been doing?” She didn’t want to stop kissing Meryl, touching her, learning the different shapes of her body. She could lose herself there, though—kissing her, fucking her—and not come up for enough air to think about what they needed.

Where they were at right now.

Meryl eased off Tressa Fay’s lap, but Tressa Fay didn’t let her really get away. She hooked both her legs over Meryl’s and leaned her side against the back of the sofa, taking Meryl’s hair up in a bunch and smoothing it over her shoulder. Meryl’s hands went to Tressa Fay’s bare legs, stroking just this side of constant shivers.

“I’ve been thinking. Science thinking, mostly. And about us.”

“What does science say about us?” Tressa Fay wrapped her wrist around Meryl’s hair over and over, letting it coil and release, watching how the sensation relaxed Meryl’s face. Her caresses over Tressa Fay’s legs had moved from her shins and knees to her knees and lower thighs. The sensation made Tressa Fay unwittingly fantasize about Meryl sucking one of her fingers.

Meryl smiled at Tressa Fay’s husked-out, sex-drowsed voice. “Can I tell you about it? I promise not to use too many science words.”

Tressa Fay touched Meryl’s forehead. “I love listening to you talk. I love how when you talk about things, you talk so fast, like you’re trying to keep up with your own supercharged brain.”

That earned her a small smile. “Can you imagine how many things I must come up with when my supercharged brain thinks about you?”

Tressa Fay’s lower belly tightened with a luxurious warning of how little it would take to send her right over with this woman. “Tell me one thing.”

“I want to watch you use my thigh.”

Fuck. Tressa Fay blew out a shaky breath, laughing just a little. “Tell me your thinking thing while I recover from that lethal blow.”

Meryl circled one of her fingers around Tressa Fay’s knee, smiling. “There’s a theory that when two similar universes are made to split, there’s a temporary interference between those two universes that eventually goes away.”

“Why does it go away?”

“Because the two universes start to become too different from each other.”

Tressa Fay thought about that. “What’s the interference? Like, what does it look like?”

“Possibly, it looks like the ability to perceive more than one universe at the same time. Like through a connection between two cell phones that shouldn’t exist but does.” Meryl’s eyes were steady on Tressa Fay. One of the lenses of her glasses was smudged from their kissing.

Tressa Fay shook her head. “But you said this interference goes away. When the universes start to be too different.”

Meryl nodded, her hands stilling on Tressa Fay’s leg. “Right. Then they evolve on their own.”

Tressa Fay’s hands curled into tense fists. “But aren’t they already too different? They’re in different places in time. They started with…different people in them.”

“I don’t know,” Meryl said. “I’m just trying to understand it.”

“No. We’re doing something, mixing everything up so you don’t disappear. So we can kick out the bad guy if there is one, or get everyone knocked into the same universe if there isn’t one.” Tressa Fay searched Meryl’s expression, which was so sweet and soft. This wasn’t interference ! It wasn’t fucking interference. Meryl’s hands were on her body. Tressa Fay had kissed her. She’d felt her breath fight with hers and her hips push up and heard her noises.

“If it turns out that I go on in some other universe,” Meryl said, “I don’t think it will hurt. I think it’s likely I won’t even know.” Her hand tightened on Tressa Fay’s knee. She was blinking fast. Tressa Fay could see her long auburn eyelashes trying to keep tears from forming. “I think it would just be . You’d be where you were, and I’d be where I was, and that would be what it was, only there was no interference anymore, so you wouldn’t—we wouldn’t— know . Right?” Meryl looked at Tressa Fay. “Everything would line up into its own separate universe, and where we ended up would make sense. Even if there was…none of me. Where you were.”

Tressa Fay had always depended upon understanding time in the sense of “the sun goes up, the sun goes down, all the little mice dance in the town.” She hadn’t, in all of her life, thought about anything like this. She hadn’t looked up in the sky at night and thought about how many galaxies every star represented. She hadn’t felt small in a vast outer space.

In school, she’d gravitated toward classes that got her out of her seat, out of her head. Ceramics. Painting. Culinary Arts. She hadn’t been coordinated enough for sports, but she’d wandered Green Bay with Guy and Linds, biking, walking, hopping on and off the city bus. She’d discovered sex earlier than what strictly lined up with her Catholic upbringing—as in, when she understood that when she begged the girl in front of her in history class to let Tressa Fay play with her hair during lecture, and she looked at that girl’s skin at the nape of her neck and wanted to put her mouth all over it, it meant she wanted this girl. Or another girl.

She wanted. She wanted to see what her body did when it desired someone else, and when she had that for the first time, Tressa Fay had loved it, and she hadn’t felt bad about it.

When she found Amy and Denay together in her bed, she’d cried. She’d hurt, right in the middle of her body, right in her chest. Her legs hadn’t worked. She’d curled up around the vital middle of herself, on the soft rug in her living room, trying to keep the hurt from tearing her body apart. For days. She was sore .

And then she started to move again, and it was okay. She slowly found a way—maybe it was a hurt animal way—of living her life.

That was real. Her life, her heart, her desire, was real. Her body. Meryl’s body.

Tressa Fay slid her legs off Meryl’s lap and put her hands around Meryl’s nape. She thought she would have to ask for the kiss she wanted, but Meryl leaned up and dragged her mouth over Tressa Fay’s, her lips already parted.

Meryl’s mouth was hot. Her upper lip bumped over Tressa Fay’s tongue, and she bit it, just a little. “Tell me what to do.”

“Anything. All of it.”

Tressa Fay leaned back. “I’ll take my top off.” She pulled it off, and Meryl laughed, immediately reaching up to brush her hands over Tressa Fay’s breasts, making Tressa Fay’s nipples go hard so fast, she hissed.

“Too much?”

“No. I like it a little rough there, but it will seem like I don’t.” Tressa Fay straddled herself back into Meryl’s lap, and Meryl steered her into place with her hands at the back of her knees, pulling her tight against her, lifting her hips.

“Do you want me to take my top off?” Meryl sounded almost prim and unsure, except that her hands were fully gripping Tressa Fay’s high inner thighs, her thumbs sending hot shocks zipping right through her.

Tressa Fay leaned back. “Do I want you to take your top off? That is what you are asking me.” She grinned.

“It is.” Meryl raised her eyebrows. “Maybe you’re not interested in my doing that.”

“You, Meryl, are a hustler . Here you are, with your librarian glasses and your Lands’ End jam-jams, fluttering your eyelashes at me like you don’t already know the nuclear power of your tits.”

“Take it off me, then.” Meryl leaned forward and kissed Tressa Fay’s breast to warn her, then sucked her nipple into her mouth, hard, with a little bite on the end. It made Tressa Fay squeal and jump and, in the liquid aftermath, get very, very close to the edge.

“Can’t,” Tressa Fay breathed. “Dying.”

But she scrabbled at Meryl’s sides anyway, got two handfuls of jersey, and pulled until there was nothing but Meryl’s skin and her hair and her beautiful, glorious body. “Oh no,” Tressa Fay said. “I am ruined.” Meryl’s nipples were tight, a darker shade of the same impossible color of her hair, and Tressa Fay smoothed her hands down the round curve along the sides of Meryl’s breasts and closed her eyes for just a second, overwhelmed with her soft skin, the tender shape of her stomach, the freckles everywhere.

“Touch me,” Meryl whispered, her hands back to Tressa Fay’s thighs. Tressa Fay leaned forward and pressed every part of herself that she could against every part of Meryl, and then she stroked her. Thumbs over her nipples, lifting her breasts and shuddering to feel how they were heavy and soft, and how her touching them made Meryl breathe faster.

Their kissing got rough. It made Tressa Fay feel like she was racing toward the edge of something in the very best way, like her body was made to do this, to touch Meryl, to be touched and stroked and to kiss her with her thumb against her jaw, taking her breath inside her body, her taste, her moans and noises.

“I want to fuck you.” Tressa Fay draped her arms around Meryl’s head, letting her hair fall over her arms.

Meryl kissed Tressa Fay’s throat, licked across her collarbone, making Tressa Fay shiver with the warm, wet glide of tongue against skin and then the hot surprise of Meryl’s mouth in her armpit, kissing and sucking. “Yeah.”

Tressa Fay had to pull herself away from Meryl’s body to shimmy out of her shorts and panties, and she watched Meryl shuck off her pajama bottoms, nothing underneath but more flushed skin and fucking freckles and wet curls. “I want to—” Tressa Fay fit herself over Meryl’s body, her thigh. She pressed herself against Meryl’s thigh while Meryl stroked her nails up her back, and she was so wet, she slipped against Meryl’s skin.

Meryl laughed, her voice hashed up. “Fuck, Tressa Fay.” One of Meryl’s hands settled at Tressa Fay’s low back, pressing, so Tressa Fay experimented to see if it was going to be enough, enough pressure, enough friction.

Oh, it was going to be fucking enough.

They were breathing hard against each other’s necks and squirming, kissing sloppy, complaining because they couldn’t get enough. Enough skin. Enough touch. Enough kissing between breaths.

“Let me be inside you while I fuck you,” Tressa Fay breathed, moving her fingers softly through Meryl’s curls.

“Yeah, let’s definitely do that.” Meryl smiled against Tressa Fay’s mouth and then took in a sharp breath when Tressa Fay slid a finger into her, watching Meryl’s face.

“Here.”

“Yeah. More of that.”

Tressa Fay gave her more of that, her other hand around Meryl’s nape, looking down at this erotic catastrophe happening in real time. She found a rhythm of short, explicit jerks that was going to get this done, and Meryl put her hand over Tressa Fay’s, both of their fingers wet over Meryl’s clit, Tressa Fay sliding inside of Meryl in time to her thrusts.

“Meryl.” She breathed out, couldn’t breathe in, everything winding up tight at that place where she didn’t know if she was angry or falling in love or a shameless, wet sex animal, but she didn’t care as long as she could come all over this woman until every feeling she’d ever had was wrung out of her and running down her body.

Meryl made a short, low hum that was different, and got tight, and that was it. That was fucking it. Tressa Fay lost it, and Meryl lost it, and maybe they were kissing, or maybe they were biting, or maybe they were fighting for air, but whatever it was, it was good.

“No, don’t move.” Meryl’s arms tightened around Tressa Fay. “Especially your fingers. Don’t fucking move them, ever. They live there now.”

Tressa Fay laughed, but it was a soft, soggy laugh. “?’Kay.” She collapsed against Meryl’s body.

“But maybe move them now.” Tressa Fay could hear the smile in her voice.

She was gentle, but Meryl gasped and shuddered, and then they kissed a little and settled in next to each other with a soft throw around them, the living room getting dark.

After a while, Tressa Fay started hearing a hard, sharp vibrating noise. “What’s that?”

Meryl turned her head to look at Tressa Fay. “My phone. It’s on the table.”

“Oh.” Tressa Fay closed her eyes.

“It’s probably you.”

Her eyes flew open. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Tressa Fay winced. “Should I talk to me?” She did not want to talk to herself. Especially right this moment, which was not a good time.

Meryl laughed. “I have no idea. Do you know how hard it is to cram quantum physics?”

She held her hand out. “Give me the phone.”

Meryl got up, and Tressa Fay had the extraordinary pleasure of watching her walk to her dining room table fully nude. She tried to take in as much as possible as a gift to future Tressa Fay.

Meryl put the phone in her hand.

my dad called me on my cell phone, which he has never done unless prearranged

Tressa Fay found she wasn’t even curious about what her dad had to say to herself months from now. Months that had Jen in them, months that included dinners with homemade Bolognese. She’d enjoyed her dinner at her dad’s. She liked Jen. Every muscle in her body was lax. It didn’t feel like anything could ever, ever be bad.

hey girl, hey. Tiff here

Three dots went up, three dots went down. Then again. And again.

Tressa Fay looked at Meryl. She kissed Meryl between the eyebrows, where she had a thinking wrinkle.

“I want you to meet James,” Meryl said. “I want him to meet Linds. I want to meet Michael and Guy and talk to Mary when she isn’t glaring at me.”

A message popped up.

don’t let her out of your sight