The One That Ran Away Page 9

  Chapter 10

  Shannon

  Shannon stood at the bottom of the teahouse’s steps. Trepidation was the only reason she didn’t ascend.

  What if Jess is there? It’s Sunday night. She’s probably there. Wasn’t that the point, though? As much as Shannon enjoyed the bubble tea at this place, she didn’t have to come specifically on a Sunday night. Maybe it was better if she went home and hung out with Decks instead. Maybe have some coffee, as scandalous as that sounded when standing outside a teahouse.

  Shannon had fretted about the other night ever since she realized her reemerging, conflicting feelings about Jess. I thought we could pick up where we left off… until I saw that look on her face. Felt that cold edge to her movements. Tasted the bitterness on the air every time Jess exhaled.

  Stubborn to a fault, Shannon used her insecurities to fuel her ascent and begin her search for Jess.

  She wasn’t difficult to find, of course. The teashop was small, intimate. Even with a million people packed in so late on a Sunday night, all it took was one glance toward the bay window to find her giving someone an astrological reading.

  The line stretched toward the door. Shannon snuck in before Jess could look up and see her. Perhaps it would give Shannon more time to decide what she wanted, although the only thing she could think about after crossing the teashop’s threshold was Jess.

  Jess, Jess, Jess. Jessica. A woman who would always be more cool and collected than Shannon. That had always been the truth. When it came to love and sexuality? Jess might as well have been a pro. What was it like to be so confident in herself? To know what she wanted… who she wanted? Shannon had never been like that in her life. She was a girl who had developed early and always had a long line of guys waiting for their chance to ask her out. From the time she was fourteen, she never had to think about boyfriends vs. girlfriends. Boys were the ones her family deemed a natural fit, and if she didn’t dislike them, why wouldn’t she give herself that advantage? Boys liked her. Men liked her. In a fit of insanity, Shannon had downloaded a dating app and tried her luck at swiping right. It took her exactly one day to uninstall the thing. Too many matches. Too many weirdos wanting to show her their dicks.

  Maybe if she were desperate for companionship. Instead, she sold her soul to making things right with Jess.

  We were supposed to talk about that night during senior year. That had been Shannon’s goal when she asked Jess out to dinner. Now, as she thumbed through the tea menu, pretending she didn’t already know what she wanted, she dared to believe she and Jess could still have that discussion.

  Defend herself. That’s what Shannon wanted to do. Impart her feelings of confusion from that night and make Jess understand why it was impossible back then. Possibly now, too, although a part of Shannon was willing to try again.

  Her mouth went dry. Try again. With Jess. It wasn’t fate, was it? They had reconnected right when Shannon was single again. A part of her believed that was fate. Yet she also knew that there was no such thing as fate. Only a string of amazing coincidences that gave her hope.

  She hid her face behind a menu as the line progressed. When she lowered it, she saw a heterosexual couple snuggling on one of the couches, laughing about their day.

  It was familiar. Warm. Like an old friend patting the seat cushion and saying, “Sit your ass down here, silly girl. Stay where you understand everything the best. Why jump into the deep end of something you might regret, when you’re perfectly content being here?”

  She glanced toward Jess. The woman receiving her astrology reading motioned for a woman with a short haircut to join her. When refused, she blew a kiss. It was not a kiss of friendship.

  Shannon couldn’t account for the levels of jealousy swelling in her stomach. They flooded her heart, choked her throat, and made her want to gasp for the precious air of freedom. Of not giving a shit that other women were so comfortable in who they were.

  Who they might be.

  Bisexual was a word she always held in disdain. Other women could wear it with all the pride in the world, but it made Shannon want to smash her face through a pane of glass. She had never asked for those feelings. She had never consented to having her life turned upside down. She never wanted her one night, one month, one year of college experimentation to follow her into her thirties. It was supposed to stay in the past, where it fucking belonged.

  Dead. Buried. Like her memories of Jess Mills.

  One day, she would learn the words “compulsive heterosexuality” and how they had shaped her life. Until then, she would stand in a teashop line, begging to be put out of her misery.

  ***

  Memory #10

  I always avoided parties because I was too busy, too cool for them. They were where kids went to get laid and make messes of themselves. Get drunk. Get high. Get laid. The holy trinity.

  After my sugar daddy dumped me for a younger teen model, I decided to smoke more, drink more, and get laid more. Kelsey – who was the only one who knew I had a sugar daddy, and made sure I knew I would regret it – told me I was spiraling out of control. Senioritis, I called it, but she claimed to be worried about me. Just to piss her off, I went to the first big frat party of the year, determined to get as fucked up as possible.

  I don’t remember much about the party. I drank my way through the room, flirted with every guy who looked remotely hot, and took a hit off some random person’s bong. I wanted the full experience. I was alive. I was twenty-one. I was crashing harder than I ever had before.

  I remember enough to know that I was one of the lives of the party. My jeans were tight, and I didn’t wear a bra beneath my short, white T-shirt. I knew every guy grinding against me would try to cop a feel, and I didn’t care. It was what I wanted. What I convinced myself I wanted. My whole sense of self-worth was tied up in men wanting me. Some old asshole had dumped me because I was too old. Fuck him! I would get someone my own age and prove that I wasn’t yet an old maid.

  Everything I did was done in the name of “expressing” myself and attracting men. I danced for their amusement. I touched them when they brushed up against me. I giggled, laughed, and purred like a drunken kitten. When I convinced myself that it would make me happy, I made out with a long line of guys who told each other that I was fair game. My identity was nothing but what I offered men and their erections. I was an object. A willing object – one that became so inebriated that my dancing felt like floating, no, swimming, through a sea of depravity.

  I probably fucked somebody. I dunno. Maybe two somebodies. I try not to think about it anymore, because I don’t remember, and it had no repercussions on my physical health. All I know is that a few guys were whispering about me during class Monday morning. I think I had blown one of them. What the fuck do I know?

  I know something. I know that was the night I first kissed a girl.

  Such a cliché, huh? Drunk at a party and making out with some guy’s girlfriend. It was his idea, of course. He asked me if I would tongue-fuck his girlfriend, and I was drunk enough on cheap beer and liquor to slam my lips against hers and go for it.

  I wish I could say that kissing her was the thrill. It wasn’t. It was the excited cheers of a dozen men around us, their hands slapping together and the girl’s boyfriend receiving a million kudos. I don’t remember much about that kiss. Only that it happened, and I was too drunk to savor it.

  Who was it? Was it a girl from one of my classes? Did she go to my school?

  Do I care?

  I know who I thought about for a brief second. When my lips touched hers, I instantly imagined it was Jess, the lesbian my best friend claimed had the raging hots for me.

  Was that what it would be like to kiss her? To stick my tongue down her throat and get my fucking freak on?

  I blacked out sometime after that. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on a couch with a raging headache. Two women hovered over me, one of them trying to talk to me while the other begged her to call for campus safety.
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br />   “Shannon?” I recognized that voice, yet it was so far away it might as well have been my mother’s. “Shannon Marie!” she would shriek. “Get your ass up right this instance!” To this day, I can imagine it was my mother. “Are you okay, Shannon? Do you need help? Are you sick?”

  I slowly opened my eyes. It took a while for me to recognize Jess’s flushed face. What was she doing in a frat? How dare she not be drunk or hungover?

  “Hey…” I groaned. “What happened?”

  “No idea. Found you passed out here. Wanted to check on you and make sure you’re okay.”

  Her friend piped up. “Had to beat away a few assholes trying to grab your tits! You need to get out of here!”

  They both offered me their hands. I don’t know how long it took me to sit up, but when I did, I dry heaved into my lap.

  “We’re calling campus safety,” Jess’s friend said. “This is ridiculous. What if she’s really sick?”

  “Do you trust campus safety?” Jess said. “Last time a girl was found passed out at a frat party, they covered up all the nasty shit that happened…” She clamped her mouth shut when I looked up at her.

  “What happened to me?”

  They both shrugged.

  “Seriously. Did someone fuck with me?”

  “No,” Jess was quick to say.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” she continued, helping me up with one arm slung over her shoulder, “I’ve been watching you all night. You’ve been kinda hard to miss ever since we got here.”

  “You? At a frat party?”

  “I’m going to a football game next weekend. Checking off all the boxes before I graduate.”

  They helped me out into the cool night air. I lived across the busy public street, in the new dorms and apartments that had been built a few years ago. I shared a four-bedroom apartment with Kelsey and a couple more friends. I should’ve called her to come get me. At least she had a car she could swing by with. Instead, these two girls dragged me across the pedestrian bridge and up the stairs to my door.

  I remember Kelsey meeting us in my living room. She shrieked to see me in that state, and quick to admonish Jess and her friend for not taking me to the hospital instead.

  Back then, I thought of her as a good friend. Now, I wonder if Kelsey’s problem was that Jess had helped me. I didn’t yet realize how much disdain she had for a woman who rarely said a word to her.

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, as Jess and her friend put me to bed. Kelsey crowed in the background, already on the phone with someone. Campus safety, perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I didn’t care then, and I sure don’t care now. “I’m fine…”

  Jess’s friend went out to smooth things over with Kelsey. Jess, meanwhile, pulled the covers up to my chin and gazed down upon me, head slightly shaking.

  She was kinda beautiful, you know. Her hair was growing back in, and her shirt stuck to her sweaty body in ways that made me stare at her chest. A convenient place to set my gaze, until I realized it wasn’t kosher.

  “You okay, Shannon?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  She lingered as long as she could, but at some point, Kelsey shooed them out and fussed over me until I admitted what I had done at the party. She had never been so silent.

  In the morning, she wouldn’t speak to me. I was too hungover to care, and too consumed with conflicting feelings about Jess to care.

  ***

  Shannon paid for her drink and shuffled toward the alcove where Jess continued her astrology reading. The blond woman sitting across with her was rapt with attention, while her stoic girlfriend sat in one of the arm chairs, eyes glazed over as she stared at her phone. Shannon decided to sit in the empty chair next to her. Slightly out of Jess’s line of sight, but close enough to hear what she said.

  Until the woman next to her interrupted her thoughts.

  “In line to learn your horoscope?” That voice was deeper than Shannon anticipated. “Might be a while. She likes to get all the ‘facts,’ if you can call them that.”

  Shannon blushed. This woman was more stereotypically lesbian-looking than Jess, and Shannon had to often remind herself that wasn’t a feat. Everything about Jess’s appearance was still soft, even when she wore intimidating boots and cut her hair so close to her scalp that she looked like she was too cool for everyone in the room.

  “It’s interesting, I guess. Found out more about myself than the newspaper ever told me.”

  “Man, I guess. I usually don’t care until my girlfriend drags me in…”

  “Baaaabe!” The blond woman cooed from her perch by the window. “When’s your birthday again? I’m finding out if we’re destined for true love!”

  “What?” The woman next to Shannon was almost offended. “You don’t know when my damned birthday is?”

  “Sometime next month?”

  “It’s in April!”

  “Geez! No need to be such a butt!”

  Jess cocked her eyebrow and lazily asked, “Are you an Aries?”

  “Lucky guess when there’s only two signs in April…”

  “I mean,” the blonde interjected, “you could be a Taurus?”

  “Don’t lump me in with those bullshitters.”

  “Aha! See! You care about this stuff!”

  “I don’t… you… whatever.”

  Jess’s laughter filled the air. “That’s the usual response I get from Aries.” She leaned across the table, but didn’t do much to lower her voice. “They love hearing about themselves, but that doesn’t mean they like what they hear, no matter how true it is.”

  “Aaahhh, that sounds so much like her!”

  “Like you don’t like hearing people talk about you!”

  “Because I’m a Leo! I like being the center of attention!”

  Shannon’s companion sighed. “You can say that again. The fuck are you doing right now?”

  “Good news is,” Jess began, “Leo and Aries are a great match. There are few signs in the zodiac who can put up with a Leo’s personality.”

  “You can say that again,” the woman in the chair reiterated.

  The blonde tipped Jess for her help and took her girlfriend’s hand. They retreated to the other side of teashop, where one sat in the other’s lap, their giggly conversation filtering through the air. Amazing I can hear them with so many people talking in here. The acoustics weren’t the best, either, and the music was so loud that Shannon could barely hear herself think.

  Eventually, Jess turned around in her seat and looked at Shannon as if she had known she was there the whole time. Of course she did. Not like Shannon had tried to hide, right?

  Wow. Her eyes are so blue. How had she never noticed that before? Shannon barely knew what her own eye color was, though. I wonder if that has any significance. To anything.

  Like making Shannon host butterflies in her stomach. There was something about a pair of blue eyes that did her in. All of her exes had them.

  “Can I help you?” Jess asked.

  “Oh, uh… saying hi.” Shannon scratched her chin. “Sorry I haven’t texted you.”

  “Were you supposed to?”

  Ouch. Jess could be like that when she needed, huh? “No, I guess not.”

  Jess motioned to the chair next to hers. “Want a free reading?”

  “You already told me about being an Aquarius.” She hadn’t worn her necklace that day, but she had read her horoscope. Not that the super generic thing had made any sense. “Can you tell me my future, too?”

  “Astrology can’t tell you the future,” Jess said with a droll voice. “It can only offer you advice based on the energy from the stars.” She shrugged. “Or something like that.”

  Shannon slowly rose from her seat and joined Jess at her table. Someone looked like they had approached to ask her a question, but quickly turned away. Whoops. Well, if Shannon had caused Jess to lose some business, she didn’t seem too bothered by it. Was
it because they were friends? Or because she still liked Shannon?

  Why did she have such a need to be liked all the time? It was going to mean Shannon’s end at this rate.

  “Sometimes you sound like you don’t really believe in this stuff,” Shannon said.

  “Suppose I’m agnostic about it. The whole birth charts and tarot card crap started as a hobby because it was intriguing. Doesn’t mean I put all my stocks into it. End of the day? I care more about how my life is going right now. Tarot and astrology are means to figure out what’s going on in my head. Happens that I’m good at explaining it to other people.”

  “I see. Don’t suppose you tell your clients that, though.”

  “Of course not. They hate hearing that, especially the skeptics.”

  “Why the skeptics?”

  “Because it fucks with what they assume. They want me to be a crazy zealot out to ruin their days with cold, hard truths about being Scorpios.”

  “Scorpios, huh?”

  “Scorpios are always the worst about being told the truth.”

  “Didn’t you say you’re part Scorpio?”

  Jess wanly smiled. Shannon supposed that was part of the point.

  “That woman you did a reading for…” Shannon glanced at the happy couple snuggling on the couch while they drank their teas. “Was that true about them being compatible?”

  “According to the stars, yes.”

  “Could you tell me about that stuff?”

  “About what? Who you are most compatible with?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jess sighed. “Sure. Aquarius is pretty easy. After all, most of the people I’ve ever been in love with were Aquarians.”

  Is that true? Shannon hadn’t known that. Did that include her? She was probably in love with me, and I am an Aquarius. She had also said “most.” There were others? Why did that make Shannon a little… jealous?

  “So, give it to me. Who am I most compatible with?”

  “There are two who are most compatible with Aquarius, in my experience.”

  “What’s the first one?”