For Good (14 page)

Marydale stood in the back of the Sadfire Distillery, trying to show the latest interns from the First House, a halfway house and felon rehabilitation center, how to affix the sepia-toned stickers to the tops of a new batch of Consummation Rye. She put a sticker on a bottle, perfectly centered with the label. The interns, Mike and Ax, regarded her with bored expressions.

“Now, we'll pay you minimum wage while you're here,” she said, repeating the stickering process again. “I remember what it was like to be out of prison and have everyone think they can cheat you because you're so damn grateful to have a job.”

“Do we get a bottle?” Ax asked. He was about twenty-five, with a blurry tattoo of a date and the words
RIP Jayden
on his neck.

“Yeah, dog!” Mike bumped fists with Ax, although Mike could easily have been Ax's grandfather.

“Do you really think bringing a bottle of alcohol back to a transition house where a lot of people are recovering from addiction is a good idea?” Marydale asked.

“We could drink it on the way back,” Ax suggested. “On the TriMet.”

Marydale shot him a look. She usually liked working with the parolees from the First House. She liked their banter and their bravado and the boyish humility that lived just below the surface of their prison tattoos and gold-plated jewelry. But today she had no patience.

“If you think this is about drinking whiskey out of a Coke bottle on the train—”

Ax and Mike laughed.

“It's not!” Marydale picked up a bottle. “Whiskey is about a story. It's about a place and time and a moment you share with your friends, your God, your land. If you want to pound shots, you might as well just hit your head against that wall there. Because that's not what we do here.”

She shoved a strip of labels into Mike's hand.

“Sheesh,” Mike said.

Ax said, “Sorry, ma'am.”

He tried sticking a label across the top of a bottle. It went on crooked, and he tried to peel it off.

“It's fine,” Marydale said. “Just put one goddamn sticker on every bottle. That's not hard.”

Aldean hurried in from the front office, where he had been checking purchase orders. He looked worried.

“What?” Marydale asked. “We're just getting started here.”

Aldean touched her arm. He turned away from Ax and Mike. “Kristen's here,” he said.

“Tell her to go away.”

Aldean shook his head. “She's called six or ten times.”

“And you've never dodged a girl's calls.”

“That's different.” Aldean dropped his voice to a whisper. “You're miserable, Mary. Just go talk to her. If you don't, I'm going to send her back here.”

Mike and Ax looked interested.

Marydale hurried to the back bathroom and checked her face in the cloudy mirror. She was wearing an enormous Sadfire sweatshirt, a misorder from an overseas screen printer. She could hear her mother:
bone structure, good posture, and bright eyes.
She straightened her shoulders and walked into the tasting room, where Kristen was standing by the counter.

“Hello,” she said as Marydale approached.

Marydale leaned on the counter.

“I wanted to see you,” Kristen said.

Aldean appeared in the doorway.

“It's freezing in here, Mary. You should take her down to the
Tristess
.”

Marydale didn't want Kristen sitting in her tiny houseboat with its cheap wood veneer and its peeling Formica counters, but she didn't want to talk to her in front of Aldean or in the range of Mike's and Ax's curious glances.

“I live around the corner,” she said reluctantly.

She didn't look at Kristen as she exited the building. Together they picked their way down the metal gangplank to the
Tristess
. Marydale threw her leg over the side of the boat and climbed onto the deck. She didn't offer Kristen a hand. When they were inside, she gestured for Kristen to sit on one of the benches that lined the living room. She sat across from her, as far away as the tiny space allowed.

“You didn't call,” Kristen said.

“You've never had a one-night stand?” Marydale stretched her arms along the back of the bench.

“Not with you,” Kristen said.

Marydale said nothing.

Kristen sat very upright. Beneath the open front of her overcoat, her suit fit her body perfectly, or perhaps her body fit the suit, like a mannequin designed to wear the smallest size behind glass. Still there was something raw in her voice. Marydale looked away.

“I know sex doesn't have to mean something,” Kristen added. “People sleep together and don't get married, but I'd like to see you, just to have coffee or a happy hour drink after work. I want to get to know you again.”

“I run Sadfire. There. You know me.”

“When I saw you at the hotel…” Kristen clamped her hands together with a decisive gesture. Marydale could imagine her negotiating with a lawyer on the other side of a case. She'd never raise her voice, and she'd never lose.
I have all day to wait for you to be reasonable
, her face seemed to say. “I'm not asking for a commitment, just a possibility.”

Marydale remembered Kristen sitting across from her in the jail five years earlier.
I worked hard to go to law school
. The five years that had intervened felt like a breath. Kristen had come back. Kristen had found her. But five years had changed everything, and Marydale had rehearsed this moment in her mind. She had practiced, so she would get it right now.

“You look great,” Marydale said, “and if it was just sex, I'd give it one more go, but I don't think that's a good idea, and I don't want to get drinks. New Year's Eve was fun. Let's make it a clean break.”

“I—” Kristen began.

“All the reasons why you left…nothing's changed.”

“I've changed,” Kristen said.

“I didn't think you'd stay in Tristess. I didn't think we'd get married and run a ranch,” Marydale said. “But I thought you'd at least write. I thought you'd at least be my friend. Maybe it was easy for you to forget—”

“It's wasn't easy!” Kristen stood and crossed the room in one stride. She sat next to Marydale. “I never forgot you.”

“And now you want to do happy hour. I had to live in Tristess for two years after you left. I had no one. Aldean was in Portland. They sanctioned me so many times. I was so
fucking
unhappy, and all I wanted was to know that you remembered me.”

As soon as she uttered the words, she knew her practice was for nothing. She had meant to be cool, a bit flirtatious, and absolutely certain.
I'm afraid you missed your chance, Ms. Brock.
She hadn't meant to be honest. Marydale looked down at her hands. Her nails were dirty, and there was a burn on the back of her hand from when she'd been soldering a clamp onto one of the tanks.

“You didn't look for me either,” Kristen said.

“I couldn't leave the county. And what would you have done if I'd shown up at your firm? A felon on parole on abscond?” Suddenly Marydale wanted to cry. “How could I feel like I had the right when you left because just rooming with me put your whole life at risk? You had all those dreams.”

“I wasn't just
rooming
with you.”

“New Year's Eve was a mistake.” Marydale pushed up her sleeves, revealing her tattoos. “I'm a con. I'm a felon. I'm never going to get away from that.”

Kristen reached for Marydale's wrist, running the fingers of her other hand up Marydale's arm, stroking the delicate skin at the apex of her elbow. Marydale tried to pull away…but not really…and Kristen held her with a gentle grasp.

“You've lived through so much,” Kristen said.

“Or not enough.”

Kristen touched Marydale's cheek and then her ear, rubbing the swirl of Marydale's ear with her thumb, around and around, until Marydale lowered her head toward Kristen's caress.

“I don't think we're just two people who slept together on accident,” Kristen said.

“It happens all the time,” Marydale said. “It's what single people do on New Year's Eve.”

In the back of her mind, Marydale thought of the women she had been with since Kristen left her in the Tristess jail. How many times had she hurried through a kiss or ended an embrace so she could grab her lover's hand and press it to her crotch.
Like this. A little harder. Faster.
Getting off: that's all she'd wanted. Now Marydale longed to sink into Kristen's arms like a lover, like a child, like a sinner in a country church. But between them was a wealth of cashmere and tailored linen. Kristen was a lawyer from Portland's most conservative law firm, or so the
Willamette Weekly
had labeled the Falcon Law Group. A professional. A winner.

“I live in a houseboat,” she said. “It's like a trailer on the water. It's poor white trash with a view.”

Kristen ran her hand down the front of Marydale's sweatshirt, and Marydale felt her nipples harden.

“You're lonely. You're bored,” Marydale said. “I've dated other women who thought it'd be fun to fuck a con for a while.”

She didn't tell Kristen that she had broken off most of those affairs. The ones she hadn't ended deliberately had ended in the silence of her unreturned phone calls.

“You're not going to take me to the company party,” Marydale added.

“If you knew how awful those parties are, you wouldn't ask.”

“Have you even been with other women?”

“It's just you.” Kristen whispered. She unbuttoned her blazer and dropped it on the floor. “You're the only woman.”

“That doesn't change anything.” Marydale said, but she felt like her blood was changing.

Kristen unbuttoned her blouse, her gaze fixed on Marydale. Then Kristen rose, unzipped her skirt, and let it fall. Behind her, the wraparound windows looked out on the river and the neighboring houseboats.

“Tell me to stop,” Kristen said.

Marydale could almost feel Kristen's lean thigh between her legs. She felt as though the delicate muscles of her core had awakened and were pulling tight, yearning, the fibers of her body sending out chemical distress signals. Release: her body already knew how good it would be with Kristen, how much better it would be than the quick, blunt orgasms she had had with other women. Her body longed for it. Her legs felt weak. Her stomach filled with stars.
Don't
, a voice in the back of her mind said.
You'll regret it.

Slowly Marydale knelt down by one of the benches and undid the latch that secured the hold. She lifted up the seat of the bench to reveal a tiny staircase. Kristen looked momentarily surprised; then she stepped out of her heels. Marydale lowered herself into the small bedroom in one practiced move. She held her hand out to Kristen, who climbed awkwardly down. The bed took up the entire room, and there was barely enough space to stand upright. Marydale turned on the pink salt-rock lamp by the head of the bed.

Kristen set her glasses on the bedside table. A second later, they were in bed, Kristen wrapping her nylon-clad legs around Marydale's heavy work pants. Her weight felt divine, and Marydale moaned. She pulled at Kristen's bra, and Kristen dragged Marydale's sweatshirt over her head. Then they were all arms and legs, fumbling as they tried to undress each other without ceasing the luxurious pressure of their intertwined bodies.

“Wait, wait,” Kristen breathed.

She stood up just long enough to pull off her nylons and her underwear. Marydale admired her body, as lean as a model, but real, not airbrushed to preadolescent perfection. She had a faint stubble of blond hair on her legs, a small surgical scar above her belly button, and red marks at her waist and around her chest, where her undergarments had pressed into the skin. Marydale thought she was even more beautiful for these slight imperfections, and then she couldn't think of anything, because Kristen pushed her back onto the bed. After a brief struggle, Kristen released the button of Marydale's fly and pulled her pants off, casting them on the floor as though their presence offended her.

Marydale had worn red lace panties because she had been almost out of clean laundry. Now Kristen stroked the rough lace, her movements quickening to a frantic pace that matched the urgency Marydale felt.

“I'm going to tear these,” Kristen said breathlessly.

Marydale gasped. Kristen gave her a sly smile and pulled. The elastic lace stretched and snapped back in place, stinging the delicate skin of Marydale's sex and sending a surge of desire through her body. She raised her hips, longing for Kristen to ease the sensation or to amplify it. Kristen pulled again, but the lace only stretched.

“What is this stuff?” Kristen laughed, and in her laugher Marydale heard an echo of the life they could have had. If they were lovers, girlfriends, wife and wife, if they were friends, it would be like this. Sex would be a funny, delicious game, and the pleasure they felt would be deeper than their skin, deeper than Kristen's fingers inside her…now…moving in and out, the damp fabric of her panties pushed aside.

“Fuck me,” Marydale cried out. She felt her body mounting toward orgasm.

Kristen pull Marydale's panties off and mounted her, sliding her leg between Marydale's thighs, tilting her hips so their bodies touched at their hottest, most intimate center. Marydale gasped. Kristen settled deeper into her. Marydale pressed upward, reaching for that heat. Perfect. Excruciating. She wanted to cry out for more and she wanted to hover there forever, their sexes touching but the architecture of their bodies preventing the deep rubbing that would relieve her longing. She wanted to tell Kristen how good it felt, better than any other woman she had ever been with. She wanted to beg her,
Don't leave me.

Then, before Marydale knew what was happening, Kristen shifted her position so she was riding Marydale's thigh. Marydale felt the moisture from Kristen's body, as Kristen dragged the folds of her own sex up and down Marydale's leg, crying out with each pass.