Taste & Release

"What's it about, then?"

"You're the one who dated Louise for half a year," Rachel said.

Touché. Louise was acer than I, if that's a thing. Or maybe she just had a lower sex drive. I didn't really understand this on a scientific level. But so many of our nights of passion had been nights of beating hearts and frenzied nuzzlings. We'd get worked up romantically, and maybe one of us would get off (typically me) but that was far from a given. We had just exulted in the intimacy of knowing we were each other's, and sharing that closeness.

Though. For months now there had been that sick question in the back of my head. Would we have lasted if I'd given her more pleasure? What if we just never found the thing that was right for her? Would she have asked me to come to Cauldron with her, after graduating? Would she have maybe stayed? I felt the warmth flee me, my hand grow heavy and buzzy in Rachel's. I slipped from her grasp and clasped my hands together in my lap.

"Oh, no, oh, love," Rachel said, wrapping me in a big hug, one that felt safe, and warm, and undemanding.

"I loved her so much," I found myself saying, my voice catching between words, tears threatening to pour out.

"Yeah, we know. It was beautiful."

I didn't even notice the moment when gravity goes all funny temporarily, when the plane takes off. The hooking feeling and the rush and all that. When I'd calmed down, we were cruising. Rachel was still holding me.

I was exhausted. We had more than ten hours ahead of us.

"I think I'd like to sleep."

"I have a great thing for this," she said, pulling a big blanket out of her carry-on and spreading it over both of us. "Actually, I did it on my way to you from Springlet, at the Greyhound station—"

"Is it orgasm?" I asked flatly.

"Well. Yeah. That obvious?"

"This is you we're talking about." I smiled, and the smile actually made me feel a bit better.

"There's more to me than sex stuff."

"Maybe."

"That's mean."

"But it was a sex thing, right?"

She pouted, then withdrew from me and leaned her seat back. "Advantage of my travel dress," she sighed, closing her eyes.

"Oh my god," I said, "are you—"

She just sighed again as the thick blanket shifted ever so slightly with her hand motions.

"Right in front of me," I chided her.

"Look away," she hummed. "Close your eyes. I'm being discreet."

"It's not discreet if you tell me you're doing it!"

"I didn't say shit."

I didn't look away. I didn't close my eyes. I didn't mind—and I think Rachel knew that, because she'd always been pretty good about not doing things people actually minded (she had an overdeveloped sense for these things). But I also couldn't really make out any details of what Rachel was doing, and my eyelids started to droop, and at some point my attention started to flicker between the airplane and that falling sensation you get when you're not quite asleep yet.

#

We were awake for the second half of the flight, and we watched the in-flight programming without discussion. There were some five-year-old movies I hadn't seen, and we watched one and a half of those before it was time to put our tray tables in position and get ready for the descent. Then the landing, the airport, the luggage claim, the taxi. With the time zone difference it was about midnight when we caught our cab.

As the city lights of Cauldron came into view, we oohed and aahed. Despite my inconsistent need for Rachel, the atmosphere no longer felt charged. We were just Province girls ready to be dazzled by a city known worldwide for its fashion, gastronomy, architecture, museums.

"Is this your first time in Paris?" our cabbie asked.

"Bien sûr," replied Rachel, who had bought a phrasebook in the airport. She had said it completed the "tourist experience."

"Ah, parlez-vous français?"

At this Rachel giggled and said "non, pas vraiment," but I could tell, from having been around Louise, that it was not our cabbie's native tongue either.

"Better to just stick to English." His voice was warm. "The locals eat you alive if you mess up. I've lived here twenty years and they still turn their noses up at me."

Rachel thumbed through her phrasebook. "Tant pis." She said it like "tent piss." I smacked her shoulder, but our cabbie laughed heartily.

"Are all Cauldronites really so stuck-up about their language?" I asked.

"Depends on who you think qualifies as a Cauldronite," he laughed. "Me, I have better things to do than care how people say things."

We talked about linguistic snobbery the rest of the way into town. I was interested in the topic. Louise had talked about it a lot; she'd come to Georgeville in the first place to study linguistics and political science, hoping to find some intersection that might serve as an angle for reforming—or better yet, abolishing—the Academy of Freedom. By the time she finished her dual major, she was disillusioned and doubting her odds of reforming anything, but that didn't mean she couldn't rant about the Academy with the best of them. ("It's not how language works," she'd whine, "you can't just have a bunch of old men decide what is or isn't a word!")

Rachel was much less engaged in the discussion, but she seemed happy that I had something to distract me. I caught her smiling at me a few times in the reflection in the car door window, and I smiled back, and everything felt okay.

Then we were spilling out of the cab, and the cabbie was helping us with our luggage, and we were climbing a narrow stairwell to the fourth floor of an apartment building that looked very old and decrepit on the outside. When you hear about the glamor of Cauldron they don't tell you about the impassable cobblestone streets or the medieval accessibility standards.

"This is us." Rachel grinned, entering the code for the lockbox.

"Let's hope it's nicer inside than out," I said.

"Hey, if it's no good, all the more incentive to get out and enjoy the city."

"True that."

There was a fumbling, and then Rachel went, "huh."

"What's wrong?"

"No key in the lockbox," she said.

"Oh, fuck us," I sighed.

"Stop doing that," said Rachel. Her voice was short. She rarely got stressed, but it was often like this when she did.

"Doing what?"

"Saying 'fuck' like it's a bad thing."

"Are you seriously getting on my ass about this now?"

"I don't know," she grumbled. "What the hell do we do?"

"My succubus friends over in Fortune would chide you for saying 'hell' like it's a bad thing," I said darkly. They weren't actually my friends—I'd met them once, through a mutual friend—and I had no idea if they found the use of "hell" as an expletive offensive. I just wanted to needle Rachel. I was super tired, and I really needed the bathroom.

"Shit!" she kicked the door.

"One second," came a musical voice from inside. A light Freedom accent. My scalp prickled.

Time froze. Rachel and I stared at each other. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

The bolt slid clear and the knob began to turn.

Rachel grabbed my hand as if I might dash. "It's okay!"

"How is it remotely okay?" I hissed.

The knob clicked. The door began to swing inward. I was out of time to process. I hadn't even begun considering whether or not to flee.

A vision stood on the other side of the threshold, pale arms outstretched. Adorned in golden jewelry, dressed in a simple but expensive-looking white and black striped shirt and a pair of skinny jeans, sharp face split with a giddy grin, brown hair longer than I remembered: Louise.

"Come in!"

I think Rachel pulled me through the doorway. I don't know how else I got inside. I definitely didn't walk. Louise fell on me, squeezing me tight. Before I could return the hug, before I could do anything, she had moved on to Rachel. She was bubbling, and so was the sparkling wine on the living room table.

"I know you're tired," she was saying, mostly to Rachel. She was talking a mile a minute. I couldn't catch all the words. Something about how we had to catch up. We could sleep later. I felt frozen. Why was she here?

"Why are you here?" I asked, when my tongue thawed, maybe a minute later, maybe five. I was still standing by my luggage, shoes on.

"What do you mean?" she asked. "I never cancelled."

No. She never did. But... but Rachel—Rachel had made it sound so obvious that the whole plan was off, and it would just be the two of us. Not that I wanted it to be just the two of us. But I also didn't want it to not be the two of us. I kicked myself for saying anything. Now I'd drawn attention to my confusion.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm... really tired."

"Maybe Shirby should head to bed," Rachel said. "I'll drink with you a bit, Louise, but the plane ride really did a number on her."

A minute (five minutes?) ago I'd been unreasonably mad at Rachel. Now I looked at her as my savior. I made eyes at her over Louise's shoulder, and she mouthed, "I got you."

"Oh," Louise said, putting down one of the glasses she'd procured from the cupboard. "That's okay, I guess! Take any bedroom you like." There were six of them. Deedoss had really splurged. As if we couldn't double bunk? I thought back to the previous night, sharing a bed with Rachel, and I felt my ears warm. Six rooms had probably been right, before the cancellations. "Sleep well, Shirby," Louise said, as I began rolling my luggage past her. "I can't wait to see you tomorrow!"

I could wait, it turned out. I lay in bed in the dark for hours, long past when Louise and Rachel retired to their own rooms. It's not that I wasn't tired. Maybe it was a time zone thing, but I think I was mostly dreading the morning.

#

I woke to an empty apartment. It was almost 10 a.m.. My phone was full of texts in the group chat, mostly Rachel sharing photos of the apartment and the city nightscape from the cab ride. Lots of jealous messages from Vivian and Fumine bemoaning their inability to join us. Deedoss sent only one message, a winking kissy face and the words "have fun girls!"

I also had a private text from Rachel:

"We're grabbing pastries. Put yourself together. Shower's nice."

I texted back. "Morning."

She didn't see it immediately, so I sighed and took a shower. As advertised, it was very nice. The whole apartment was extravagant. (Thanks, Dee. Thanks, Mr. President.) When I got back to my room, dressed in a fresh tank top and shorts and running a towel through my damaged hair—feeling wholly inadequate, I should note, after seeing Louise's outfit—Rachel had replied. "Hey sleepy head. Back in five."

Once again, I considered bolting. But five minutes wasn't many, and it would be so much worse to run into them in that cramped stairwell. I paced the apartment, wringing my hands and trying to breathe.

It was okay? It would be okay. It could be okay. The original plan was to see Louise. This was just a surprise. She wasn't being weird about it. I needed to not be weird about it. We were friends. Best friends, all six of us. That included Louise. Louise, whose name still sent chills down my back. Louise, who had held me and made me okay for six magical months.

I think I'd come to rely on her control. That must have been the change Rachel noticed. I'd found a backstop, and I'd leaned on it, hard.

The door clicked. I put on a smile.

"Morning," I said as they came in.

Louise rushed in ahead of Rachel and gave me a big hug. Rachel put a bakery box down on the kitchen counter, opened it, pulled out a croissant, and started eating it standing.

"Shirby," Louise said, drawing back and taking my hands in hers. "We are going to have such a blast this week. I have so much to show you!"

Rachel raised an eyebrow at me.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm looking forward to it."

"No more looking forward," Louise said. She always did care about precision. "We've already started."

I wasn't going to argue with her. The line between argument and flirtation was thinner than her almost translucent chiffon blouse, and anyway, I was just glad that one of the three of us had a plan. Rachel passed me a croissant, which was an excellent excuse to slip my hands from Louise's.

All my anxieties took a brief backseat as I bit into the pastry. This might sound obvious, but the croissants we have back in the Provinces are a pale parody of what Louise insisted was "run of the mill" in Cauldron.

"The good places have lines around the block," she huffed.

"I expect we will be standing in a lot of lines this week," Rachel said. "What's one more?"

"We have to be strategic. Even in November, many tourist traps are swamped... we need to prioritize a bit. The cathedrals and museums first, or the slightly-better pastry?"

"I'd be fine with the pastry," I said. It was Deedoss who'd really wanted to see the cathedrals.

"I'm fine with whatever," Rachel said. "Honestly, seeing the two of you is all I need from this trip."

"That's sweet, Rach, but we're not going to sit here playing drinking games and jacking off for a week." Louise chuckled. "This might be your one trip to Cauldron. Don't leave with regrets."

I'd finished my croissant too quickly, and I found myself chewing on Louise's every word. Drink, jack off, no regrets. Got it.

"Well, it's too late to try the Louvre today," Louise said. "But it's a rare sunny day, and we're less than a block from several boat tour companies' ticket windows, and they tend not to be booked up this time of year. Does that sound good?"

"Uh, fuck yes," said Rachel.

I nodded.

"Wonderful!" Louise clapped her hands.

Half an hour later, we were boarding a near-empty double-decker tour boat. Louise had us sit down near the front on the top level. We could have used most of the space, but she pointed to three adjacent seats and I allowed her to direct us. In short order she was holding our hands, squeezing in sync with new sights coming into view.

"You know, I've never done one of these," she said, gleefully. "One of those things, right? Like Shirby, you said you'd never gone out on the Lady Solitude Pier."

"I know what you mean," said Rachel. "I love a good excuse to be a tourist in your own city."

I was having a hard time taking in the landmarks. I didn't know if it was conscious, but Louise had laced her fingers through mine and was rubbing the back of my hand with her thumb. She kept up a narrative about the Seine and tall the cool things we could see, but I couldn't focus. I checked, at one point, and saw she wasn't doing the same with Rachel. She was holding her hand, yes, but much less intimately.

Louise caught me looking, toward the end of the tour, and pulled her hand back as if she'd been burned. After a second, she decided to let go of Rachel's hand, too.

"Sorry," she mouthed to me.

So it was just a reflex. I understood. I had a strong reflex to grab her and breathe her in, nibble at her ears, run my fingers around the base of her skull—but I fought mine. It was wildly unfair that I had to be the strong one. I was the weak one. I had always been the weak one.

The worst thing was that my hand burned where she had been rubbing it. It screamed for a salve, and no amount of self-soothing would cool the fire.

We walked to get lunch at a waterfront place the tour had recommended. I'm sure the food was good, but I barely tasted it. Rachel and Louise chatted animatedly. I'm sure my distraction was evident. So much for "it would be okay." I managed to mask my discomfort for a selfie we sent to the group chat, but otherwise remained disengaged, grappling with wretched parts of my brain that wanted to know why I had to be strong. If Louise could slip up and hold my hand like that, couldn't I slip up too?

"Louise," I said, as we waited for the check.

"Shirby?" Her face betrayed no apprehension as she put her elbows on the table and faced me.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

"Are you seeing anyone?"

Rachel coughed. Louise squinted.

"No," she said. "Why do you ask?"

Rachel took the check nonchalantly while I locked eyes with my ex. "You know why."

She regarded me keenly. Then she sat back and laughed. "Yeah. Of course. I was wondering the same about you."

"Pfft."

"Hey, you're a catch."

I turned away, feigning interest in a passing boat.

"Shirby."

"Mhm?"

"Face me."

I did.

"I didn't think it was a secret I still love you."

Rachel drummed her fingers on the table. "Sky's turning gray," she said, after a moment. I think I was in shock. "It's gonna rain, and that shirt's gonna just disintegrate, Louise, which would be a great service to the people of Cauldron..."

Neither of us moved. Rachel stood.

"C'mon, you can sort this out back at the apartment. I'll make myself scarce."

"Don't do that," Louise said, standing. "Stay with us." Her breath was steady, but there was a hint of a question mark at the end of her sentence.

"Oh." Rachel nodded. "Right, sure. C'mon, Shirb."

I slowly staggered to my feet. It began drizzling before we made it back, but we missed the worst of it, jogging the last couple blocks. We took the tiny steps two at a time, then poured into the apartment. We collapsed on the living room's couches, one apiece, panting from the exertion.

"Rach was right," I said, glancing Louise's way. "That top isn't worth much anymore."

Louise sat up straight and looked down. She wasn't wearing a bra. Her rosy nipples were in very obvious evidence. "Heh."

"Just, heh?"

"I'm sorry, do you need me to change?" she asked. She glanced my way, then Rachel's.

"You know I love your nipples," Rachel said, shrugging. "If you felt uncomfortable, that'd be one thing."

I felt my lips parching as I tried to decide how to respond to the situation. Louise sat defiant, unmoving opposite me. I just shrugged and pulled my hair back. It wasn't like I wouldn't be bothered if she changed. I couldn't stop hearing her words.

I didn't think it was a secret I still love you.

We'd ended so messily, and we'd never revisited the topic. Was I supposed to read her mind from five thousand, six hundred and fifty-two miles away? I barely knew my own, and it lived in my body. Did I still love her, or did I just miss the things she did for me? Did I just miss her body, her touch, her support, her control? I'd gazed into the abyss of fooling around with Rachel several times in the last thirty-six hours; did that mean anything?

"Anyone want something to drink?" Rachel asked.

"Just water for me," Louise said. There was an intensity in her eyes.

I think Rachel noticed it. "Waters all around, then."

"You realize," Louise said slowly, leaning toward me slightly, "that I am not going to let you not respond to the last thing I said at lunch."

"'Stay with us?'" I asked.

She flushed, maybe with anger.

"Don't bullshit me, Shirby."

I cast my gaze down, toward the expensive-looking rug. There were so many patterns within patterns to lose myself in. My hands bore down on my knees. I really wished I was wearing something nicer to look at than my Lady Solitude getup, but it was all I'd brought for my friend trip with Rachel.

Waters were placed in front of each of us on the coffee table in the middle of the room, and Rachel took a seat next to me. She wrapped an arm over my shoulder.

"Would it help you," she asked, speaking softly, but not so quietly that Louise wouldn't hear, "if I were to tell Louise how you dissociated for an hour on the plane when I brought up your relationship?"

Louise's jaw set at that.

"Are the memories that bad?" she asked.

"I don't think it's that," said Rachel. "But Shirby—"