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Savannah stopped by when she could. Technically she was the chairman of the board, a job she took seriously, though often in absentia, chiming in on conference calls from Barcelona or from Sydney. She snuck into the center a couple of times the year it opened, quietly meeting a couple of the kids and dispensing kindness wherever she could. Her checkbook was always open for anything the center needed.
Rosalie’s girlfriend dumped her in the center’s first months, claiming that Rosalie loved her job more than she loved her. Rosalie found she couldn’t convincingly argue against that assessment. Work was all consuming; it gave her a purpose and a sense of meaning she’d been searching for her whole life. Her colleagues were her friends, the kids in their care her community. It felt like vocation and family and love all in one. Who needed a partner when you had that?
She met Ali through her work at the center. She was an ER doctor, gray-eyed, honey-haired, passionate. Wild in bed. For a red hot minute Rosalie fell head over heels. Ali did too. Three months in she got a miniature tattoo of a rosebud just below her left breast, the name Rosalie inked in perfect exquisitely tiny letters. Rosalie smiled as wide as she could at the surprise and kissed the fresh ink. Right after she’d made Ali come she escaped to hyperventilate in the bathroom, staring at herself naked in the mirror in wide-eyed panic. They broke up two days later.
Three weeks after that, she called Ali to come and see a young kid who’d been assaulted. They were fresh off the streets, terrified, and flat out refused to go anywhere, but considering the hits they’d taken to the head, Rosalie was desperate to get them checked out. Ali was gentle and sympathetic with them, but when Rosalie tried to thank her as she exited the room, her face flushed red with emotion.
“Don’t,” she said tightly, her voice cracking. “Just don’t. And no more favors, Rosalie. I can’t see you again, it hurts too damn much.”
She walked out. Rosalie stared after her.
“Shit,” said a small voice from across the room. “You really fucked that one up, huh?”
She looked at the kid sitting on the bed. Despite their swollen eyes they observed her with interest. It was the first time she’d seen anything other than fear in their expression.
“Can you… pretend you didn’t hear that maybe?” Rosalie scrunched up her face with faint embarrassment. She might be new at this but she was pretty sure letting teenage clients witness your romantic failures was probably not ideal.
“Nope,” said Lane. They gave her a small grin. Despite everything,Rosalie found herself smiling back.
She went on. Work was all consuming. Relationships were off the cards. Sex was on the back burner. Months went by.
She broke her previously unbroken femme streak when she met Asia, a dark-eyed stud with trouble written all over them. They fucked her so hard she saw stars, then a month later introduced her to their partner, Leah, a lithesome brunette with long legs and a heartbreaking smile. Sparks flew all round. Rosalie decided ethical non-monogamy was a thousand percent the way to go. God, why had she persisted so long with serial monogamy, when it really just amounted to one disappointed woman after another?
The three of them dated each other and Rosalie fell into bed with one and then the other, then the both of them at once, leaving her a delighted wreck of a human three nights a week. The other nights belonged to the couple alone, which Rosalie didn’t begrudge them for, until the two of them came to her and announced they wanted to have a baby. With Rosalie. Perhaps even with Rosalie as the carrier.
“You’ll literally never be so pampered in your entire life,” promised Asia as Leah slipped behind her to rub her shoulders enticingly. Rosalie looked at them both in horror. She swore off relationships altogether for a full year after that.
For a while she had one night stands whenever she felt the urge. She and Coral would go out on the town together, pick their targets and flirt like hell. Then came a solid dry spell. Honestly sex was such a complication. Rosalie could take things into her own hands perfectly well and spare herself the drama. She stopped sleeping with pretty strangers. She stopped kissing women in bars, or in her bed, or at all. She went to sleep alone and she woke up alone.
She bought herself a house the year she turned twenty-eight. It felt like an acknowledgement of something, that she knew what she wanted and didn’t have to wait for someone else. Rosalie wanted her home to be hers and hers alone. Just like her life.
She’d gotten so caught up - in the center, in her dramatic romantic life, in just getting through her long exhausting days - that in the years following the wedding she hardly saw Savannah at all. It was an intense effort to be friends with a superstar. Savannah was on a world tour. Savannah was busy that week because it was the Grammys. Savannah had Saturday Night Live to host, American Idol to judge, sexy music videos to star in, designer perfume brands to be the face of. Savannah couldn’t come out and meet her for a damn drink because they’d have to book a private room in advance, unless they wanted to be interrupted every six seconds by breathless fans who thought they were the only one to tell Savannah that day what a special connection they had with her. At one point, Rosalie realized a whole year had gone by without the two of them ever being in the same room.
They talked on the phone whenever they could, but it felt stilted somehow. Savannah’s news, her life and stories all seemed to come from another planet. Rosalie still lived on earth.
Finally, Savannah invited her to a party she and Cole were throwing.
“What’s it for?” Rosalie asked her on the phone.
“Does a party need to be for something?” Savannah asked, nonplussed. “Can’t it just be a party?”
“I guess.” Rosalie frowned.
Coral was on tour with a side project, having told her in a hushed whisper about how much she secretly missed being a rock star, so Rosalie made her way inside the glowing mansion the next Friday night alone. She wasn’t sure if she was under or over-dressed in a tight black slinky top that enhanced her boobs and pants that clung, but as she arrived into the crowded party she realized it didn’t matter. She was practically the only person who wasn’t either a size zero or famous. This would have made her feel awkward and out of place except that everyone was wasted.
Half the eyes she met had pupils the size of dinner plates, everyone talking too loud and fast, their speech pressured, full of bravado and in love with their own wit. Others were drunk and raucous. Three different men leered and tried to grab her ass as she walked through the house as if she was just casually public property by virtue of being there and being no one.
“Fuck off,” she said, swatting at the last of them. Who were all these assholes and where the fuck was her friend? She made her way outside to where hoards of people were laughing and dancing around the pool, a swathe of intoxicated swimmers half-clothed in the blue lit water. She caught sight of Cole. He was leaning in close to a coltish and very young brunette who was absolutely not Savannah. Rosalie stopped still, staring. The woman was nibbling her lip, practically pressed against him and he was smiling into her eyes like a man about to get laid. Rosalie was storming towards him when someone called her name.
She whirled around and there was Savannah, looking gorgeous and starry-eyed in a tiny silver dress and heels like ice picks.
“You made it,” she breathed, pulling Rosalie into her arms to hug her tight. “God, it’s been so long.”
“Savannah,” Rosalie started, unsure whether Savannah had seen her husband or not. Then she paused. There seemed to be a fine tremor in Savannah’s limbs as she hugged her. Rosalie pulled back and stared at her. Savannah’s pupils were ginormous, her jaw slightly clenched. “Oh, you are just high as fuck,” Rosalie observed.
Savannah giggled.
“I am,” she admitted. “You want?” She gestured around, like she could make cocaine rain from the sky, which in all likelihood, she probably could.