She began taking off the sundress, leading the way as she had a tendency to do. It seemed only fair for me to follow suit, so I crossed my arms, took a deep breath, and reached down to the hem of my dress to pull it over my head. I didn’t dare look at her. In my mind the tension was palpable, although it was likely she wasn’t even affected.
When I finally stepped out of my underwear and looked up, her gaze was directed in the general vicinity of my head.
“Is it okay if I look at you?” she asked, as if there was any way to avoid the matter. Still, I appreciated the attempt at protecting my modesty. No turning back now.
“Go for it.”
She nodded and gave me a once-over, a favor that I meekly returned. Her body sparked several reactions in me: admiration, appreciation, a vague feeling of smugness. Lust still didn’t factor into anything, but this time I didn’t try to force it.
The shower had turned warm and beckoning. Bravery was once again hers, and she grabbed my hand and pulled the curtain aside with her other hand before dragging me in. Ashlinn gasped when the water first hit her skin and released me, heading to the dryer end of the small shower.
“Oh no,” I said before switching our positions and holding her directly under the spray of water. It ran in rivulets down her cheeks, and her mouth was an O of shock.
“It’s so wet,” she gasped, as if the idea personally offended her.
“I don’t know what you expected.”
She moved her head out of the water, revealing that her hair was suitably drenched.
I beckoned her a few inches forward, so that the water still pattered against her skin to keep the cold away, but her head was out of it.
“Close your eyes.”
She wasn’t looking when I almost dropped the shampoo bottle twice. I squeezed out far too much, used to washing my own longer locks.
“This shampoo probably isn’t the best for curls,” I apologized, running it over her scalp, “but it’s all I’ve got.”
I massaged the excessive amounts through her hair, piling the suds on her head as the shower filled with steam and the scent of cherry blossoms. Whenever the shampoo slipped toward her eyes, I rubbed the bubbles away with my thumb, and occasionally she’d give a contented sigh at my movements. I could focus on her hair only so long, though, and I was definitely prolonging the situation.
With a slight warning, I maneuvered her head under the water yet again and began rinsing. This was certainly on its way to becoming the longest shower ever taken, so I gave a silent prayer as the shampoo swirled down the drain that the hot water would last.
“You can open your eyes now.”
She blinked and reached up to touch her hair.
“Does it feel any different?” I asked, amused.
“Not really. Just a bit soggy. Do you want me to return the favor?”
I had proposed the adventure to start with, so it was only fair that I let her do the same to me as I did to her, but the idea wasn’t fitting in right in my head. Not unpleasant, but out of my still-growing comfort zone.
“Why don’t you let me finish you up first?” I asked, and she nodded understandingly at my hesitance.
With bodywash in one hand, I grabbed her arm, which went limp in my grasp, and drew spirals on her with the soap. I repeated this with the other arm, then twirled my finger in front of her to indicate she should turn before I began working on her back and shoulders. With my front to her back I couldn’t help wrapping my arms over her shoulders and just holding on.
For a few moments, it was just us in a perfect little tiled universe and endless summer rain. This nearness was something to build a life from. Eventually I pried myself away and spun her back around. Her expression was unbelievably calm, almost verging on comatose. Without really thinking, I fell to my knees before her and she lifted an eyebrow at me. I blushed, staring at the bottom of the tub.
“Don’t get any ideas. I just wanted to do your legs.”
Not daring to look up more than a foot above her ankles, I kept my head down and lathered her calves. When it was time to stand, my feet slipped, sending me sprawling backward. An expletive or two may have been shouted as I grappled with the edges of the tub to get up.
Well, that wasn’t graceful. I really must have been a sight, awkwardly positioned in the corner of the tub with legs going in every direction. So much for intimacy.
“Are you okay?” Ashlinn asked with an edge of worry.
“Yeah. Just feel like an idiot.”
She reached down to pull me up, and I graciously accepted her help as she dragged me to an upright position.
“That’s the grace of a dancer,” I joked, embarrassed. She squeezed my hands, and the water poured down on our connection.
“Hey there, dearie. Look at me.”
My heart stuttered at the pet name, as did my lungs. So much care was pouring out of her expression.
“This has been absolutely wonderful,” she assured me. “Thank you so much. No one has ever done anything like that for me before. I was doubtful they ever would.”
“You don’t have to doubt anymore.”
She released my hands and quirked a smile. “No, I don’t think I will.”
And thus our adventure in the shower ended, with gratitude and a bruised elbow. I kicked the knob to turn the water off and reached out to grab a towel. After stepping onto the bath mat and unnecessarily helping her over the edge of the tub, I carefully patted her arms and ruffled the towel over her hair, something she pretended to be annoyed by. I might have believed her if it weren’t for the giggling. I handed her the towel so she could finish the task and began drying off my own slightly less damp body.
She tied it around herself as a dress, then grabbed my towel. With one hand she threw it around my back to catch on the other side and used it to draw me forward before kissing each of my cheeks. Flashbulbs went off in my heart.
“You’re too wonderful,” I assured her, not knowing how I came to earn such affection.
“Well, I am a wet dream,” she responded with a wink, and I groaned at the bad joke. She had obviously been waiting to say that.
“Not that I don’t absolutely love standing here naked and soggy with you, but if we don’t put clothes on soon, you’ll end up getting sick, and I doubt I’d make the best nurse.”
“You sell yourself short I’m sure, but I can see the point. Lead on.”
After raiding my closet and making an even bigger mess of the house, she ended up in a sky blue sundress that went a bit long, and I donned a similarly cut floral print one. While she began trying to match together the shoes that were strewn about the bottom of my closet, she asked, “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“Normally I’d say dance practice, but I think I can take a break now.”
“Sounds fair enough.”
She pulled out a pair of cloth flats that were scrunchy in the middle and tried them on. They fit well.
“Why don’t we visit your father’s resting place? I don’t want my being here to interfere with your usual visits.”
I couldn’t tell whether or not she was testing me. This was a study in trust, on how much I’d let her in. My first impulse was to lock her out of this section of my life, but there was no way I could go on in such a manner. She was already acquainted with Reeves. It was only fair she should know of the man responsible for us both. There were parts of me I didn’t want to share with her, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to.
My personality was hewn from unpleasant experiences, the car crash being one of them, and understanding them would be one way to understand me.
“Okay, let’s go. First we have to cut some flowers for him from the garden. I’ll get the shears; you can go pick what kind.”
Maybe planning this trip to the graveyard was me testing her as much as the reverse. It was one way of seeing how true her feelings were.
She walked out the back door, trying to be discreet about her pleasure at my agreement as I headed to the garage. Shears were lying on top of the gardening gloves and seeds. They were used the most out of everything and rarely got buried beneath other gardening supplies. I grabbed them and jogged back through the house and out into the garden, disregarding everything I’d ever heard against running with sharp objects.
Ashlinn was standing among the gardenias and impatiens, looking very much like a mythical creature. Actually, she might just be a mythical creature.
She saw me on the pathetic trio of steps Mother wrongly called the porch and waved me over, then walked to another area of the garden. White carnations were blossoming at her feet.
“Let’s bring these.”
The carnations growing behind my house seemed plain in comparison to the one Reeves had gifted to me through her. I wondered if she had picked them because of that connection as I bent over and snipped the stems of a few flowers, making sure not to kneel to avoid getting dirt all over my knees. When I had four carnations to show for the effort, she took them and we walked through the house to the front sidewalk, grabbing my bag on the way. If some money just happened to vanish from Mother’s emergency fund, that could be dealt with later. I had become determined to enjoy every second with Ashlinn as much as I could and spoil her if at all possible.
It was late enough in the morning that a fair number of people were dotting the sidewalks, although in comparison to New York they were hardly noticeable. If my town was a city, it was acoustic where Manhattan was electric with speakers. The dog walkers and joggers shot a few peculiar looks in our direction as they sluggishly completed their tasks, perhaps because of the mere fact I wasn’t alone, but more likely because of Ashlinn’s stunning and perhaps vaguely familiar appearance. You could almost see the déjà vu, but they all appeared to be too sleepy to acknowledge it. With how slowly everyone was moving, it was almost as if we had turned into a quaint little Southern town overnight.
Blaming the early morning for their slowness, we continued around two corners and across one street to the graveyard’s underwhelming gate. I walked ahead of her, navigating us through the familiar turf, until we were standing only a bit away from my father’s name. The sun shone warmly on my back and cast our shadows across his stone.
Without speaking she placed all of the carnations in a little stack at the foot of the grave, then stood behind me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. The wind blew my hair to the side and away from her as it failed at cooling the nearly intolerable summer heat.
“What happened, exactly?” she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “Reeves can’t remember any details of the accident. He didn’t even know your father had died. I’ve always been a bit curious.”
I didn’t answer for a few seconds, so she tacked a “You don’t have to tell me now if you don’t want to” on the end.
Bringing her here was difficult enough. No one ever came to the graveyard with me. It felt peculiar, like the memory of this visit would poke out roughly among the others. I almost felt as if I should be introducing my father to her. He probably would have liked Ashlinn, with her eccentricities and quirks, and now she wanted a play-by-play of the worst possible day. How do I go about describing my painful memories, especially when I wasn’t even eyewitness to the actual event? No words could do such a thing justice, and it’s unfair to tell the story and risk having it be misinterpreted. Still, I attempted to spin thoughts into syllables that meant more than any I had ever told a therapist.
“It really was a nasty crash. They went right into the side of a drugstore. We don’t drive much here, as you’ve probably seen. The town’s just so small, but Reeves played baseball and the fields are too far away.” My throat clenched, and I could feel the sting of fresh tears building up in my eyes, burning like the breeze. “He always wanted to sit in the front seat. He said everyone else his age was allowed, and he was probably right, but Dad still made him sit in the back. That’s why he ended up living. Well, if you can call it that.”
My voice had gone crackly at the end and I couldn’t continue. Couldn’t describe how the EMTs had pried him from the mangled car, which was little more than a clump of red painted metal by the time they arrived. How they must have realized my father was a lost cause. No one ever intended me to see the state of the car, the prison that held my family in their last moments, but it was hard to avoid when the next day it was on the front page of the local newspaper. My tears fell freely, streaking my cheeks, but there were no sobs. I was composed, used to this pain.
Ashlinn wrapped her other arm around me and placed her chin on my shoulder. We stood there, breathing shakily for what felt like an age, until she eventually unwrapped herself and looked me in the eyes. I nodded with finality and blurry vision. We walked away from my father and out the gate, our shadows shrinking against the stone until it was left completely in the light.
“LET’S GET
some food,” I said, and she perked up at the mention of it. “There’s a diner down the road that shouldn’t be packed with too many old people.”
There were several reasons to bring her out to eat, some of which were my intense lack of cooking abilities, something she was not yet privy to; pancakes; and her reaction to said pancakes. Now I just had to hope there was enough money in my bag.
The diner was a small building with metallic walls and one red stripe wrapping around the top. When we entered, a little bell above the door jangled and some patrons lazily turned their heads toward us from where they sat in worn chairs at disgustingly patterned tables. There was a single television that must have been on some sort of rest mode because it was just showing a looping video of fish in a plasticized tank.
A woman with dyed red hair piled high on her head walked out of the kitchen’s swinging doors. She was heavyset, yet could navigate between the tight booths flawlessly.
“Victoria!” she exclaimed. “Haven’t seen you here for ages.”
I couldn’t recall ever having known this woman, but that’s life when your town’s a single square mile of nosy neighbors and the elderly.
“Yeah, I’ve been busy.” Sometimes even true excuses are lame.