Anne would get Sadie the sun using only her bare hands. “What?”
“Go tell our families to clear out, would you?” She rubbed her nose against Anne’s, a gesture that managed to be both absurd and delightful at the same time. “I need to be alone with you.”
“Couldn’t I just yell at them from right here?” Anne was only partially joking. Pulling away from Sadie felt near impossible. “Believe me, I can be loud enough.”
“Oh,” Sadie said, “I believe you completely,” and kissed her again, little kisses. And again and again. “I’ll give you a chance to prove it later.”
With the heat of that promise, Anne used her less-than-steady legs to get herself from the table to the French doors. She opened them, stepping out.
Every adult on that deck was staring at her. At some point, clearly, they’d turned around.
“Great job, Mom?” Brooke said brightly, and her voice scaled up at the end of her sentence, as though asking a question. She bounced Kaisley in her arms a little too hard. “It’s so great? That we just saw our mothers make out with each other? On Mother’s Day?”
“We’re very happy for you,” Hal added, his eyes extremely wide. “That, uh, absolutely wasn’t incredibly weird to see. At all. For any of us.”
Maverick and Colton appeared temporarily distracted by the garden hose, but everyone else seemed to be in various stages of processing. The one exception was James, who had a silly grin on his face. He elbowed Arthur in the ribs, hard, not even doing Anne the courtesy of trying to hide it.
“Stop,” Arthur said in a stage whisper, and smacked at James’s arm. “Okay, okay, okay. Fine. You were right! You were right. I owe you a pomegranate margarita.”
“And a California burrito,” James informed him.
Anne wouldnotbe embarrassed. Not when she felt this proud of herself.
“That’s right,” she said. The floor beneath her feet was solid, but it didn’t feel quite real. “I’m in love with Sadie. And she’s in love with me. I take it everyone’s on board with that?”
Still looking like he’d stood up too fast, Hal nodded. So did Brooke and Dan. Talisha’s smile was nearly as large as James’s.
Claire lifted her drink in the air and said, “To Mom One and Mom Two officially making the Rosenthal-Clark-Emmerman-Lowells the gayest family on record. May your cars always be Subarus, may your Girls always be Indigo, and may your season tickets for women’s soccer be heavily discounted.”
Anne didn’t like soccer or Subarus, and she had no idea why girls would ever be indigo. But she smiled appreciatively at Claire.
“Congratulations, Anne.” It was James’s turn to lift his glass. “Tell you what. Name the day, and Arthur and I’ll take you and Sadie out to that new bistro near Point Dume to celebrate properly. A date, just like old times. Except there’s one obvious difference.”
“We’ll be happy,” Anne said, surprising herself.
The grin on James’s face faltered, faded. And then, just when she’d started to worry he hadn’t understood her after all, a different smile replaced it, this one very tender and just a little bit melancholy.
“That’s right, kid,” he said gently. “We’ll both be happy.”
Chapter 23
“Let’s stay here,” Sadie said early that evening, her mouth against the curve where Anne’s neck met her shoulder.
Anne pulled back just enough to look at her. They were cuddling lying down on her bed, on top of the covers, and although anticipation hummed between them, they hadn’t done more for the past twenty minutes than hold each other. For the moment, though, it felt like gluttony.
“You mean Barnard?” Anne needed to make sure Sadie hadn’t meant staying in bed, which would be a reasonable interpretation. “You don’t want to take the job?”
Sadie shook her head against the pillow. “It’s not that. I want the job, believe you me. It’s that I want our lives in LA more. I could give you any number of excellent reasons for why I want to stay. But what you said last night about Claire, that you finally had an easy moment with her—it made me think about Hal, and that’s what decided it. It’s time for me to make things a littlelesseasy with him, if you get me. We need to stand up to some hard history together, he and I, starting with a strong dose of accountability from yours truly.”
Anne remembered the anxious expression on Hal’s face when he’d asked her if she’d treat Sadie right. “And you can’t do that from New York.”
“Not the right way.”
“With multiple face-to-face conversations plus at least one private consultation with Rabbi Aviva?”
“Exactly.” Sadie wore the smile of someone who was known.
“Then we’ll stay here.” Anne squeezed Sadie’s forearm. “What about the rest of it? You and me? Our next steps?” Yes, she’d fantasized about the two of them merging householdsimmediately, finding some way to make Sadie’s wild decor work with Anne’s staid designs. But they didn’t have to rush right into living together, did they? Now that Anne had what she needed—Sadie in her arms, going nowhere—her frantic urgency had faded. She felt less like a woman who’d lost her oxygen and more like a woman who’d found it. After all, Sadie’s house was just a hundred feet away, practically an extension of her own.