Late to the Party ✔

12. 'Till the cows come home

She'd felt it growing this time. The love.

As kids, neither of them had noticed it; it was just a fact they agreed on one day, as if they'd always known. Playing pretend had given them a safe excuse to explore these exhilarating new feelings they harbored for each other. If Jeanie was her husband returning home safe from war, there should be kissing, obviously. If Eddie Myers was going to ask one of them to Winter Formal, they should practice some more, in case he'd lean in during the slow dance at the end of the night.

She remembered Eddie nearing in on her under the swelteringly hot theater lights, wishing she were wrapped around Jeanie back in the storm cellar under her daddy's house, tingling all over with the idea this would one day happen for real, with the boys all the girls at school were drooling over.

She remembered Jeanie waiting for her under the bleachers, as promised. The rattling of a crushed can of Dr. Pepper as she kicked it at the metal fence. "What was it like?" she asked, facing away.

"Don't know," she shrugged, because she didn't.

"Oh," Jeanie said then, finally looking at her, the can, flatter than a pancake, forgotten at her feet. "Maybe he never practiced?"

Funny. Her heart should've been beating this fast ten minutes ago, when Eddie's mouth had been on hers, but there'd been a delay, it seemed. Because this was the moment it had started hammering in her chest, watching Jeanie trying to disguise her relief with a serious frown. Eddie was a fool, asking her out when he could've taken the prettiest girl in the whole of Texas.

They hadn't known much about life at that point, though they believed they knew it all, and better. They didn't know their ride, Mary's mom, had passed out drinking during a card game, burying her own set of regrets. Didn't know they would ever have regrets bigger than kissing a boy at a school dance. Didn't know it was better to be careful, that they shouldn't be so close on school grounds.

All they did know was that Jeanie kissed her again and she kissed her back, and that, for their part, they could keep on doing that until the cows came home.

But the cows did come home, albeit two years later, and there'd been no kissing since.

Mary woke up that Sunday morning on an unfamiliar mattress in a familiar house, enveloped in the scent of sleep and Jeanie and the faint smell of decay that they hadn't been able to defeat yet, and was overcome with jitters of the kind that could destroy a woman to the core.

Nothing had happened — just two friends sleeping in the same bed — but it felt like something had, like she had betrayed George and marriage and everything she thought she believed in. She'd always considered infidelity to be something tangible, a clear line she would never cross. Then why did it feel like she'd jumped over the boundary last night, two feet in the air at the same time?

She dared to open her eyes. The other pillow was empty, a slight indent of a head visible. She reached out to feel if it was warm. It wasn't.

Seemed like one of them still possessed some dignity. And surprisingly, it wasn't her.

She'd been a fool for thinking she could fight it. It wasn't like it'd been Jeanie who'd led her astray in their youth; no, they'd been partners in crime, equally responsible for it all.

The only difference now was that they were both old enough to know better. The abandoned space beside her signified that Jeanie was aware of it too. They both had their lives. They couldn't do this again.

Slowly, she dragged her heavy body out of bed, when she picked up another scent: pancakes. A faint sizzle of a frying pan, clattering of dishes, and, she realized with a shock, voices.