Natasha pats Sawyer’s sweaty back and says, "Clean my leg up for me, then."
Sawyer slithers down beneath the sheets and her burning tongue licks long stripes up Natasha's thigh. When she's licked all her wetness up she moves back up the bed. She turns Natasha on her side, then shifts herself around so Natasha can hold her. Natasha closes her eyes. Sawyer’s body is solid and warm under their thin Summer blanket. Natasha can faintly hear someone walking around in the apartment upstairs. She imagines a map of the world, illuminated by tiny white dots tracking planes moving safely to their destinations. A dot flashes rhythmically as it moves over the ocean between Paris and Boston, another as it tracks over Asia between Moscow and Seoul. She imagines more and more, until the map is covered in the little white pulses. She falls asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
✤✤✤
It’s a hot day in August, and Natasha sits on the edge of the new countertop. She built it with her own hands. She reclaimed the wood, sanded it down, painted it and installed it at the side of the large room at the centre of their new premises. Natasha has been involved with the centre for three years now, since the start of her most recent and most successful attempt at sobriety. It started out as just a few dingy rooms, a gallery of paintings and sweaty room used for support groups, yoga and interpretive dance classes. Now they’ve got a larger home on the outskirts of Cambridge. They’ve developed a small black-box theatre, a café, and Lucia has a mad idea of adding a cinema. Gillian, Lucia and Natasha are a good team of three. Gillian cares most about community outreach, Lucia is mostly concerned with supporting challenging new artists and Natasha, a natural mediator, easily moves between their two points of view.
Natasha’s wearing a short dress that rides up the side of her thigh. She crosses one leg over the other and sits on her hip so her rounded ass is pretty much on show. Natasha doesn’t care. She’s 30, a fact that thrills and appals her in equal measure. On one hand, she can no longer answer with “I’m in my twenties” when a girl asks for her age. But on the other hand, she never expected to be alive to see thirty, so there’s that.
Her mother told her that her early thirties were the most sensual years of her life and maybe it’s hormones or some shit like that but Natasha’s feeling comfortable in her skin for once today. She likes her legs; she likes the planes of muscle that stand out beneath her skin. She’s waxed and fake-tanned them, and she leans forward to run her hands down them to enjoy the feel of the soft skin.
“Can you please stop masturbating on my counter please?” Lucia’s voice is acidic. She’s trying to hook up their fancy new coffee machine, instruction booklet in one hand and a piece of unidentified metal tubing in the other.
“I’m so sorry you can’t handle my raw sexual power,” Natasha offers, putting on a stupid voice and pulling a grimace.
“What are you even doing here?” says Lucia, “You’ve only got one yoga class today. You should go and enjoy the sunshine while we’ve still fucking got some.”
Natasha knows Lucia still misses the sticky Atlanta heat. She moved here two years ago for college, dropped out after just one term because she didn’t agree with her crits. Lucia had turned up to a sad little exhibition of work created by the homeless women Natasha knows, and had never left. Tall, beautiful and preternaturally self-possessed, Natasha has often wondered what it would be like to fuck Lucia. Whether Natasha wants to fuck Lucia, mentor Lucia or, be Lucia, Natasha is never quite sure. In reality, Lucia is 10 years younger and, perhaps more inconveniently, at least as dominant in bed as Natasha is.
“My European genes can’t handle the sun. I might go home, open all the windows and just lie naked on the bed for a while,” Natasha says.
It’s so warm that Natasha’s dabbed talcum powder all up the insides of her thighs so they don’t chafe. Two years ago, the temperature had been over 100 for almost a solid week. At the moment, it’s in the low 90s and the local papers are just beginning to work themselves up into a frenzy about the possibility of another heat wave.
“Yeah, you probably should. I mean, at thirty your skin is going to start deteriorating fast. You don’t want to add sun damage to the party,” Lucia teases. Her eyes are heavy lidded in the warmth of the café.
Natasha cringes, drags her hands down the sides of her face.
“You want to go out tonight?” Lucia asks.
“Midway?”
“Again? Really?” Lucia rolls her eyes and huffs, “It’s a dismal place full of ancient people. I heard about a great pop-up down by the river. You need a code to get in, but my friend is the mixologist there… “
Natasha tunes Lucia out. She knows the crowd Lucia runs with. They’re nice enough, but too free with the drugs and the drink for Natasha’s taste. Natasha knows The Midway; the music is decent, and the bar-staff appreciate a friendly chat with Natasha as everyone else around them gets drunker and more insufferable.
“- Fine, we’ll go to The Midway for the thousandth time. I wanted to hook up and there’s never anyone new there. But I suppose there’s always Sharon
