Winter's Spell, page 13
The only thing she couldn’t forget about, no matter how hard she worked, was Tessa. As she sanded some rough corners of the wood, focusing with all her intensity, she found her mind wandering back to Tessa, her smile, the way she crinkled up her nose when Roxy made a joke, the happiness in her eyes when she saw Roxy at the door. There was a kind of serene happiness that came over Roxy when she was with Tessa. Of course, there was attraction, too, but there was something more. She wanted to make Tessa happy, to please her.
“That’s looking great,” came a voice from behind Roxy, just as she was standing up from sanding part of the bottom of the throne.
She turned around, and there was Tessa, as though her own thoughts had manifested her out of thin air. Chayo had stepped out for a minute, and Roxy hadn’t even noticed because she’d been so focused on her task—and her thoughts.
“It’s wonderful,” said Tessa. “It almost feels like a shame to paint it.”
“You really like it?” said Roxy. Pride filled her from within.
Tessa nodded. “It looks more regal and elegant than I could have imagined.”
“I’m glad I can help.”
“I meant to tell you, I really enjoyed Saturday,” said Tessa. She stepped a bit closer to Roxy—so close that Roxy could smell her lotion and breath mints and something else. Just Tessa, she supposed. It was a heady mix. Her gaze met Roxy’s, and Roxy was pleasantly surprised to see desire there. Her stomach dropped and she felt hot all over. Instinctively, she stepped back, away from Tessa.
“Me too,” she said, her voice wavering a little bit.
Tessa looked a little disappointed that Roxy had stepped away, making her feel that she was sending the wrong message. Because she was attracted to her, wasn’t she?
Remember your resolution. She couldn’t break her resolution just one week into the New Year? Could she?
Resolutions were dumb. Wasn’t that what Jazz always said?
On impulse, she took a step back toward Tessa and, taking her smaller hand in her larger one, she guided their hands together over the smoothened edges of the armrests on the throne, the wood sanded down so there wasn’t a single rough patch on it.
“Wow, and it’s so smooth,” marveled Tessa, her body now dangerously close to Roxy’s.
“Hard to believe it just takes some sandpaper and elbow grease, huh?” Roxy’s voice was low and husky, her body thrumming with the electricity of their joined hands.
Tessa lifted her head to meet Roxy’s gaze, lips parted.
The door banged open and in walked Chayo with a large box that had just been delivered.
Roxy and Tessa jumped apart, Tessa’s cheeks reddening visibly. Roxy’s heart was pounding so hard she could barely manage a smile.
“Hi, guys.” Chayo gave them a look. Like she knew exactly what was going on and she didn’t quite like it.
Tessa coughed to clear her throat. “Hi, um, again.” She pulled self-consciously on her dress and smoothened an invisible wrinkle on it. “Oh, did the stains arrive all right?” She gestured to the box that Chayo had just brought in and set on a worktable.
Chayo nodded. “Yep. And it all looks in order so we can start staining the throne this afternoon.”
“Great,” said Roxy weakly.
“Bad news, though,” Chayo gave Roxy a funny look. “There’s a police officer out there looking for you.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Anything we should know about?”
Roxy’s eyes widened. A police officer? Could they be looking for Mo? Was that possible? Then she remembered the break-in at the museum.
“It’s probably to do with the break-in at the museum, right?” Tessa gave Roxy an encouraging smile.
“Yep, that’s probably it. Can’t be anything else.” Roxy nodded.
It was with mixed emotions that Roxy left Tessa and Chayo behind to go find the police officer in the lobby of the theater. She didn’t trust police overly, having had some unpleasant run-ins with police when she was a teenager pulling pranks, but on the other hand, if they could find the thief, then maybe Mo’s problems would be solved as well.
She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved that Chayo had interrupted her and Tessa, either. As she walked up to the lobby through the theater, though, one thing she felt certain of—there was something between Roxy and Tessa, something good. Even if her mind and her heart were at war on how fast to proceed, there was a thrill just knowing that Tessa was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent into her.
Chapter Twelve—Tessa
“What exactly did I just walk in on?”
Tessa swallowed hard. Her throat went dry, and she couldn’t help playing with one of the rings she was wearing, twirling it round and round her finger in a nervous habit she’d never been able to break.
“Well?” said Chayo. She closed the door of the wood shop and sat down comfortably on a folding chair. She crossed one leg over the other, took a sip from her coffee cup, and gave Tessa a meaningful look. “Spill it.”
Tessa’s mind was a swirl of emotion. Her body hadn’t yet recovered from being so close to Roxy’s, from their hands touching, from their lips almost touching. A hunger deep inside her had surged to the surface and now she was fighting to keep it down again. She began pacing nervously between the throne and one of the saws.
Finally, she stopped and looked at Chayo again. She was her best friend, the one who got her through the whole ordeal with Lisa. The one who knew everything about her. Why was she afraid to tell Chayo the truth?
Because she does know everything.
Tessa pinched the top of her nose with her fingers and closed her eyes, her thoughts racing to the past, to the very day that she and Lisa had returned from London after Lisa’s successful West End debut, an engaged couple, no less. Lisa had proposed to her on the night of her final performance at a bustling crowded restaurant, where they’d been sitting with a crowd of people from the show. How could Tessa say no to Lisa in that moment? The thought didn’t even cross Tessa’s mind. She’d said yes and put the ring on her finger, a rising sense of panic and claustrophobia in her chest that she quashed by telling herself it was nerves. Being in a foreign country. Being far from friends and family. Being in a crowded restaurant.
But she couldn’t shake the sense of having the world closing in on her.
After a transatlantic flight next to Lisa, the feeling of claustrophobia was even more intense, and Tessa felt keenly the need for a stretch. She’d walked all the way from their Meat Packing District apartment to Central Park, to one of her favorite spots in the Ramble. It was the perfect June day, sunny, warm, but not hot, with a little breeze on her face. There was one spot in particular where she liked to sit and think and look out through the branches onto the Upper West Side but, as she neared it, she realized there was someone already there.
Two women, more or less her age, had been sitting there, chatting animatedly. One of the voices actually sounded familiar to Tessa, and she’d been about to approach the women and say hello, as she felt sure that at least one of them was a friend, when that woman turned her face enough that Tessa could see who it was.
And that’s when she realized it was her old college roommate, her old crush, Roxy.
Tessa had done something that day that she always felt embarrassed by later, but it had been automatic, something she did without thinking.
She’d hidden herself nearby and eavesdropped on their conversation.
Even in the Ramble, which was meant to mimic a wilder, more forest-like landscape than a manicured park, it wasn’t exactly easy to be inconspicuous, but she did it anyway. And she’d been lucky, she realized later, that no other park visitors had walked by her that day in that small, tucked away corner of the Ramble.
She didn’t remember what Roxy and her friend—Hazel, she realized now—had been talking about. She simply couldn’t take her eyes off Roxy.
Things had already started falling apart with Lisa by then. Their relationship had suffered from their London trip, rather than bringing them together as she’d hoped. She’d felt lonely in London, like a mere addition to Lisa, her “plus-one.” She’d given up a major career opportunity in New York in order to accompany Lisa to London, at Lisa’s insistence of course. Being in a foreign city hadn’t helped, even if Tessa had, eventually, found a way to network in London’s theater scene in a way that was good for her too.
The unplanned, unexpected run-in with Roxy had been the true beginning of the end of her and Lisa. Not that she had talked to Roxy then. She’d been far too nervous to do anything like that. But Tessa had gone home that day feeling completely changed. Lisa had already gone to bed by the time she got back to the apartment they shared, but Tessa was amped up, unable to sleep. Instead, she’d arranged to meet up with Chayo that night in the West Village, at their favorite little hole-in-the-wall that always had Charlie Chaplin movies playing on a screen next to the bar.
She’d poured her heart out to her best friend, about how truly lonely she’d been in London. About how much she’d missed New York while over there. About how distant she’d been feeling with Lisa for a long time.
And she’d told Chayo about Roxy. About how she’d seen her old crush. And a flame of desire that she’d thought she’d forgotten had been fanned that day.
Chayo had listened and been there for her, reassuring her about her career and validating her feelings about Lisa.
“Hey, if seeing an old crush is making you have doubts about your relationship, then yeah, maybe your relationship needs reconsidering,” Chayo had said at the time. “Maybe you should talk to Lisa about how you feel?”
But Tessa had been too chicken to do that. Instead, she’d done everything wrong. She’d let her crush on Roxy and her unhappiness in her relationship with Lisa take her down a dark road.
She became obsessed with Roxy. She started looking her up on social media. She downloaded her pictures online to her phone to look at, surreptitiously, at work or when Lisa had a late rehearsal in the evenings. She started fantasizing about Roxy.
The unhappier she got with Lisa, the more time she spent thinking about Roxy, writing about her in her journal, looking for more and more photos of her, even going home for a weekend to see if she could find any prints of pictures taken in college, back when she’d still been using a cute little silver digital camera and ordering prints at the pharmacy off campus.
There had been one picture of her and Roxy, from the start of their time in the dorm. Someone had snapped a photo of them in front of their dorm room door with their names on it. They were arm in arm, cheesing it up, looking like babies, for crying out loud, but Tessa hadn’t cared. She’d tucked the photo carefully into the pocket of her purse, like a talisman.
Then, one day, she got an offer to direct an off-off-Broadway play with a script by a friend she admired. Chayo would also be working on the production. It was going to be the Three Musketeers, they’d joked. And even as Tessa was slowly realizing that she had to end it with Lisa, she put it off. She let herself fall into the wild and relentless pace of working on a show.
And it was easy enough to have long hours when directing a show. She avoided Lisa by making her schedule exactly opposite to hers while still making sure to spend a few hours together each week so Lisa wouldn’t get suspicious.
The show helped Tessa forget her obsession with Roxy as well. She was too busy with rehearsals, meetings with producers, costumers, the tech director, the theater manager and the box office, reading and rereading the script until she knew everyone’s parts by heart, and on and on. It was what she loved, even as she felt herself teetering on the brink of burnout.
Some days she was so tired, she was stammering by the end of the day. She would go home and fall into bed, bone-tired, and then find herself unable to fall asleep, her body still humming with the nervous energy and strain of working sixteen-hour days in order to avoid her girlfriend. Fiancée. She started having migraines, which she’d never had before.
The show was a success, in the end, but Tessa was a wreck by the end of opening weekend. Lisa insisted that she take a day off once the Monday after rolled around, and for once, she put her foot down when Tessa tried to beg off.
They’d actually had a really nice day together. Lisa had treated them to a morning at her favorite and very pricey spa, with a couples massage and a champagne brunch afterward. In the afternoon, they went down to the Strand bookstore and browsed before heading back to their apartment.
It was on the steps to their building that Tessa, still exhausted from the build-up to the show and opening weekend, tripped going up the stairs, and, losing her balance, grabbed onto Lisa’s arm, in the process dropping her bulging bag of books from the Strand and her pocketbook. The wallet hadn’t been closed correctly after paying at the bookstore and its contents spilled all over the stairs.
The two of them gathered up everything just as the rain started. Tessa hadn’t noticed in the hubbub that Lisa had picked up the picture of her and Roxy from college.
Instead, they went upstairs and Lisa cooked an early dinner for them. She insisted that Tessa take one of her sleeping pills that night and go to bed early. For once, Tessa fell asleep quickly and slept long and sound.
She went to bed so early that night that the next day, she was wide awake at six in the morning. Oddly enough, Lisa was not next to her in bed. Instead, she found her sitting at their breakfast bar, still wearing the clothes from the day before.
Lisa was holding something in her hands, knuckles white with tension.
Tessa felt, then and there, that it was all over.
After Lisa found the photo, her suspicions had been raised. She’d gotten Tessa’s phone while she slept and, horrified, had looked through her photos and found the stash of social media pictures Tessa had downloaded of Roxy. There were only fifteen or twenty, but it was enough. She even found an old text thread between Tessa and Chayo where Tessa mentioned her crush on Roxy—and she didn’t have even a shred of humility for violating Tessa’s privacy in such a way.
Instead, all Lisa could focus on was Roxy. It didn’t matter that there was no communication between Tessa and Roxy. It didn’t matter that she’d stopped mooning over Roxy when she started working on the show.
To Lisa, it was as good as cheating.
“When you’re not cheating on me with her, then you’re cheating on me with the show,” said Lisa, her words like arrows. They hit Tessa right in the heart. Because she wasn’t wrong. Tessa had simply been too scared to tell Lisa the truth.
But then, Lisa turned nasty. And she said those words: “Who are you without me?”
The implication being: nobody.
When Tessa finally stumbled into Chayo’s apartment a few hours later, early enough still that Chayo was in her pajamas sipping her café con leche, Tessa told her everything. Everything. Including her short-lived but highly embarrassing online stalking of Roxy.
Finally, Tessa’s eyes refocused into the present. Chayo was still sitting there, in the folding chair, but her gaze was softer now. She got up and gave Tessa a big hug.
“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to relive the past all the time. It’s in the past.”
Tessa nodded, her eyes pooled with tears. She wasn’t sure why she was crying. No, she did know. Her relationship with Lisa had meant something to her. And when it came time to end it, she’d done it in the most passive of ways. She’d been a coward. And she wasn’t proud of what she’d done to Roxy either.
Chayo squeezed her hands gently. “Let’s make you a tea, all right?”
Tessa nodded and mutely followed her to the greenroom, where there was a small kitchenette area set up with an electric kettle. Chayo knew her well enough to know that in times of difficulty, Tessa needed hot tea. She’d often joked that for Polish people it was a cure-all for all hurts, whether physical or emotional.
Hands wrapped around a mug of lemon green tea, sitting on one of the comfy couches in the greenroom, Tessa felt better already, even if she also felt a little silly for getting so emotional.
“I’m sorry,” said Tessa. She took a sip of tea that immediately soothed some of her frayed nerves.
“No, I’m sorry.” Chayo made herself another coffee with the pour-over funnel she’d contributed to the kitchenette. She wasn’t much of a tea drinker. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like I was judging you. That’s not what this is about.” She sat down opposite Tessa while the coffee dripped through. “I’m just worried about you. First you tell me you’re gonna see your old crush at a wedding here in Ptown. Then you invite her to work on the show. Now I walk in on the two of you and see you making googly eyes at each other. It all seems, I dunno, kind of fast.”
Tessa couldn’t help smiling at Chayo’s characterization. “You’re absolutely right,” said Tessa, nodding. “It does seem fast.”
“I don’t want to see you get your heart broken.” Chayo paused, looking down at the floor before meeting Tessa’s gaze again, her eyes full of sadness and concern. “I’ve already seen that once. And once was enough.”
Tessa felt a stab of guilt. She’d leaned on Chayo so much in their friendship already. She didn’t want her to feel like she had to be her emotional support animal.
“It’s not like that,” she said finally. “I really do want to have a relationship with Roxy. And I’m willing to take the risk of getting hurt.”
