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“That’s my fault,” Rosalie admitted, tucking her hair back behind her ear. “I’ve been kind of weird about the age gap.”
“Ugh,” said Cassidy, “you’re like ten minutes older, calm down. That’s such a non-excuse for putting her through all of that.”
“Cass,” Kinsey stopped her. Her fingers curled around Rosalie’s hip almost protectively, “I love that you’re pissed for me, but maybe let me do the reckoning?”
“Oh please,” Cassidy scoffed. “It’s so obvious you’re just going to go have a ton of sex and forget all about the reckoning part.”
“If I’m lucky,” Rosalie agreed and Kinsey rolled her eyes. Cassidy gave a short surprised laugh but pulled out her phone and ordered them all a ride.
Rosalie found herself in the back seat, sandwiched between Lane and Kinsey, something she would have always thought would be desperately awkward, except that Lane appeared entirely relaxed and Kinsey was holding her hand.
“Oh my god, all that time in Vermont!” Cassidy suddenly squeaked from the front seat.
“Mm-hm,” Kinsey acknowledged, with a small smile.
“It was before that though,” Lane added their two cents. “Kinsey was all in knots over someone, months before we went to Vermont.” They paused. “Shit, I hope that was Rosalie or I just made things weird.”
Rosalie huffed out a laugh. Kinsey shrugged.
“Just some other girl,” she lied, her dark eyes sparkling and her fingers warm against Rosalie’s.
They went their separate ways in the little hotel lobby, pausing for one awkward minute to say goodnight.
“Guess we’ll see you in the morning, Rosalie,” Cassidy said pointedly, somewhere between teasing and aggravated. Lane only shrugged at Kinsey, gesturing their head towards Rosalie and offering Kinsey a sneaky congratulatory high-five, which she smirked at and accepted. Cassidy squeaked in fake outrage and Rosalie went red but also warm. This was weird. But it was also okay.
When they got back to Kinsey’s hotel room, Kinsey closed the door and bit her lip. Rosalie’s heart began pounding in anticipation. Any second now someone would be pushed up against the door, their clothes shed to the floor.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” Kinsey asked.
Rosalie wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly but Kinsey proceeded to literally make her peppermint tea. She led her straight past the big soft white bed and the invitingly cushy sofa and all the way to the small circular dining table in the corner by the window. There they sat, at a slight angle to each other and sipped from their tea cups.
“Is this my reckoning?” Rosalie asked her. “Death by lesbian processing?”
Kinsey smiled. She looked devastatingly lovely in the low light of the room, her skin glowing and her lips bitten pink.
“You wanted to talk further,” Kinsey said, hands curling around the steaming cup, “and I want to hear you.”
Rosalie took a second and fought down her usual panic. If Kinsey had offered to poke her in the eye with a rusty fork instead of having her talk about her feelings she would have gratefully accepted that option. She breathed in, looked at the woman across from her, and thought about what kind of person Kinsey deserved to be with. She thought about what kind of relationship she too had always, secretly, deep down wanted. And then, she made herself talk.
She told Kinsey about therapy. How she’d resisted it forever and how uncomfortable it was. She told her about her therapist, Jean, older, unflappable, empathetic but unfazed, like Rosalie wasn’t fucked up beyond repair, but just a regular person who’d developed perfectly understandable coping mechanisms that no longer served her. She told her some of the basic things Jean had observed.
“Turns out,” she said, “that it’s not normal to have parents who wouldn’t even notice that you hid a literal entire teenage human in your bedroom for four months,” she said wryly. “That actually, you can be fed and housed and still kind of neglected. And that being a child who has to manage your parents’ emotional responses for them isn’t ideal either.”
She told her about the impact of Rachel’s loss, preceded by Travis’s and followed by Savannah’s. Of being cut off adrift and alone, just as she was discovering who she was and how to be in the world. She explained all the things her therapist told her, about avoidant attachment, of fearing abandonment and engulfment all at once - concepts Rosalie understood in a professional capacity but had never allowed herself the space to apply to her own life. And then she talked about how she was changing it.
“I’m not ever going to be perfect at this stuff,” Rosalie said as her story trailed off. “But I can at least see it now, the things that trigger me, the ways to work through it. It’s going to be a lot of practice,” she said, her heart rate speeding up again, “and I’m not always going to get it right, but I wouldn’t be here, I swear, Kinsey, if I didn’t think I could do it.”
Kinsey sat for a while, unmoving, her fingers fiddling with the delicate handle of her teacup. Her gaze never left Rosalie’s face and Rosalie tried hard to meet it. A trace of anxiety made her fight off a shiver. Would this be enough, for Kinsey? To know that Rosalie wanted to try?
“Listen,” Kinsey said. “You’ve just said like… a whole lot of stuff that I really care about understanding. But can we just focus on the most important point for a second? You lost your virginity with Savannah Grace?”
Rosalie burst out laughing.
“That’s your take-home message?”
“I mean, yeah,“ Kinsey breathed. “You and Savannah had sex. I’m going to need to take a whole big minute about that.” Her face looked dreamy.
“Are you done?” Rosalie asked, her eyebrows raised, after giving her said minute.