For Better Or Worse (3 page)

Julie looked distraught, but she wasn’t crying. “I’m sorry, Gail, this was a stupid idea. I thought maybe Mother had changed or maybe she was trying to change and, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Julie.” I handed over her glass of wine.

“We’re leaving tomorrow. I’ll tell Mother in the morning and then we’ll go.”

“Julie.”

“Don’t ‘Julie’ me!” She snapped and swallowed back the remaining contents of the wine glass. I blinked at her. She lowered it again and held the empty glass out to me.

“Would you rather I call you ‘Ralph’?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood a little. Julie burst into tears. I have an uncanny knack for saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, and I have never learned. It’s remarkable really. At least this time she didn’t say ‘you don’t love me’ like she has in her more hormonal moments, or told me to sleep on the couch. It occurs to me now that perhaps Kathleen was right. Julie was a little moody, but in a good way.

I sat beside her on the edge of the tub and put my arm around her shoulders. “You know, I’ve never met your mother before, Jules, but I think, in her own very _odd _ way, she _is _ trying.”

Julie sniffled, but her shoulders stopped shaking so I could tell I had her attention. I babbled on, hoping to say something right for a change. “I mean, to talk about your cousin, and to seem…

sort of happy that it’s… you know,” I sighed.

“No longer taboo to have gays in the family?” Julie asked, with a hint of the sarcasm more often attributable to me in her voice.

Good point. “Well, okay, that was sort of…”

“Ignorant?”

I almost laughed, but I didn’t think Julie would appreciate it, so I stayed the course. “Are you even _trying _ to give her the benefit of the doubt?”

“No.”

I could tell this line of conversation was going to get us nowhere. Julie didn’t want to forgive her mother yet. The tub was filling quickly and I leaned over to shut the taps off. When I stood and tugged off my boots, Julie stood as well. “Can I have the rest of your wine?” she asked, and I nodded.

“Yeah.”

We began to undress in that matter of fact, comfortable way that couples do, but I watched her all the same. I love to watch her. It doesn’t matter what she’s doing, she just does everything with a polished gracefulness that makes me look like a bull in a china shop. I admired the way she

stepped out of her jeans with pointed toes as the denim slid to the floor, and the way her delicate fingers, always neatly manicured, unbuttoned her blouse. She smiled at me then, as we bared ourselves for each other, knowing that I was watching her and liking it, I think.

The water in the tub was hot. I hissed as I dipped my toes into it, but managed to ease myself in slowly. Julie did the same, but had to tell me how hot it was five times in the process, all the while refusing every offer I made to cool it off a little.

I pulled her back against me and we sat in silence for a while, Julie clearly lost in her own thoughts. I enjoyed just holding her, and scooping the warm water up over her shoulders with a washcloth to keep her warm.

It isn’t easy being Julie McHugh, especially not in Vail. My Julie, the stable, well-educated, thoughtful schoolteacher and one-drink-wonder, is actually the fuck-up in her family.

Her younger brother, Robert (and don’t you dare call him ‘Bobby’), recently earned a graduate degree in business from Stanford University and is working as an investment banker. He makes upwards of a hundred and twenty thousand a year and he has no life, no time, and no significant other to spend it on.

Peter, Julie’s older brother and darling of the McHugh household, is a surgeon who got his pre-med undergrad degree from Harvard and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins. This guy doesn’t just _have _ brains, he actually operates on them. You know how people say things like

‘this isn’t brain surgery’? Well Peter doesn’t find that saying funny at all. To him, everything is brain surgery. Including marriage. He very carefully dissected the dating scene, tossed aside prospective wives like he was selecting a tie, and finally plucked from the bowels of the female race a frighteningly perfect woman. Perfect
looking
, that is; the woman is a mannequin. After seeing a picture of her I had to ask Julie if she was actually smiling or if the perpetually stretched corners of her mouth were some kind of face-lift gone bad.

As for Julie, well, her mother had expected her to go to college, find a nice boy (preferably Catholic) who was majoring in business or medicine or law, and marry him. Then she was supposed to have a few kids named after various family members and maybe a Mercedes and a summer house in Palm Beach.

Instead of Norman Rockwell, Kathleen got Gloria Steinem. Julie shacked up with a woman who (even worse) was a bartender, and instead of being a rich man’s wife she followed her life long dream and became a schoolteacher. Her mother had such heart failure when Julie told her I was a bartender that Julie wasn’t able to get to the part about me being a woman in the same conversation. Julie sat on that for another two weeks until her mother’s Xanax had taken very, very firm hold.

I suppose that all of that sounds funny in retrospect, but at the time it sent Julie into quite a tailspin. She had moved fifteen hundred miles away from her family because she felt that she would never be able to be who she needed to be, a lesbian and a school teacher, if she remained in the shadow of the McHugh estate. So that phone call, the one that sent her mother crying hysterically to a psychiatrist about how wronged she was and how she wanted to kill herself, was the most difficult moment of Julie’s life.

For a solid week she and I argued about whether or not I should just back off. I’d never seen Julie so emotional.

“Don’t make any fucking self-righteous sacrifices on my account!” Julie shouted at me when I suggested that maybe we should slow down a little.

“Baby, I just don’t want to make things harder on you.”

“So you think walking out on me is going to make me feel better?!”

The tears were running down Julie’s face in
sheets
. I hadn’t ever seen anyone cry like that.

Angry, hurt, confused tears that made me want to run to her and run away at the same time. I’d never had anyone put that kind of emotion on me, and here was Julie, saying here I am, for better or worse, and _this _ is the ‘worse’ part so you better damn well fucking be there for me.

Right.

I tried, I really did. I think, looking back on it now, that Julie knew I was trying, but I was such a wreck about it. I’m just not equipped for tears and all the emotional drama. I’d only had a couple of girlfriends that I had dated for any length of time before Julie, and everyone else had been either weekend flings or pick-ups. And the fact is that, at the time, I had no respect for her family. I didn’t like their politics, I didn’t like their snobbery and I really did not like their money. So consoling Julie about her mother’s narrow-mindedness wasn’t easy. I’d say things like ‘Fuck your mother, who needs her?’ and, of course, Julie would cry. I’d say ‘I love you’ and she’d cry even more. I even tried ‘Would it make you feel better to hit me?’ which was also met with tears, although she punched me in the arm for good measure.

What made it all even more difficult was that we couldn’t even have sex after a couple of weeks.

Julie grew self-conscious and self-doubting and it became increasingly difficult for me to touch her. Damn that Catholic guilt. One night I got so angry about it I got up out of bed and slept in the living room. Well, I didn’t sleep, I lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling and worked out what to do. Something had to give and by dawn I had a plan.

“Take off your clothes.”

The next night, after taking her out to dinner and plying her with a bottle of wine (of which she had her usual one glass and I finished the rest), I took her home with very specific intentions. She looked at me with an indulgent smile and shook her head.

“I’m tired,” she replied and maybe she was, but I had no intention of letting her get away with it anymore.

“Take your clothes off, Julie.”

“Gail, I appreciate what you’re doing, but…”

I narrowed my eyes and moved close to her. “No, no, you don’t.”

“What?” Her eyes told me she was taken aback by my comment. Good, I thought, keep her off guard.

“You don’t appreciate what I’m doing. If you did you’d be begging me not to stop.”

Julie gave me an exasperated look. “Gail, no games tonight, please?”

“I’m not playing games.” I told her, making sure there was a seductive tone in my voice as I leaned close to her ear.

I watched the goose bumps spread from her neck to her shoulders. I cupped her breasts through her clothes and I kissed her hard, pulling our bodies together. She protested some, putting her hands on my shoulders, but I knew if I pushed her just a little, if I could just get her out of her own skin for a few minutes, she’d feel better. This was the one thing I knew I could do for her, the one thing I was confident about when it came to relationships. I knew I could help her remember all the good things about being a woman in love with a woman. I knew I could make her scream.

“I’m getting pruny.”

“Wha…huh?” I stuttered. Julie shifted in my arms and mentally I was suddenly back in the reality of the tepid bath water with her.

“Wrinkly, you know?” Julie wiggled her fingers at me. “From the water.”

Oh yeah, Vail. I liked where I’d gone better. I made a half-hearted attempt to actually bathe us both, using a fragrant soap that had been left for us, but after I dropped the soap somewhere between Julie’s legs, I gave up looking for it and let my fingers search her body instead.

I lowered my lips to her neck as my fingers caressed her inner thigh. If she still had any reservations about fucking in this house, she didn’t let on at all. She raised her knee and let her head fall back on my shoulder with a sigh.

“You really think that maybe that was her way of making an effort?”

That was my Julie, intellectualizing when she should be turning her mind off. “You want to talk about this now?”

“Gail.”

I smiled and sighed. “Well, listen Jules, you know me, ‘Eat the Rich’ right?”

Julie chuckled. “Right. You wouldn’t give her the benefit of the doubt lightly.”

“She’s so obviously clueless about what it is to be gay, and I think in a way she was trying to speak from her own experience, maybe trying to show you she’d been thinking about you? I mean she did invite us here. Not just you, but
us
. Right?”

“She did. She did expressly invite you.” Julie conceded.

“I’m just saying think about it, I could be wrong, but your father seems fine and, I don’t know, I can see a lot of you in your mother. It’s possible.” It’s really not like me to be diplomatic, but I’ve always tried to be observant and I wouldn’t tell Julie something that I didn’t believe was true just to smooth things over.

“So you think I should give her a chance?”

“I think she’s giving us one.” I nodded.

“Kiss me?”

I’m not one to say no to the free and full offer of Julie’s mouth. She turned her head to face me and I pressed my lips to hers tightly before sliding my fingers over her clit. She moaned into my mouth and opened hers inviting my tongue in.

We made out for a while, making splashing sounds as we shifted and moaned until the water got cold. I pulled Julie from the bath and wrapped us each in a soft towel while I drained the tub.

Julie reached into her toiletry bag on the bathroom counter and pulled out a toy with a coy smile.

“I thought you said you couldn’t ‘do it’ in your parents’ house!” I teased, relieving her of the towel and tugging her into the bedroom.

“I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold out all week,” she laughed.

I backed her up to the bed and she pulled herself up onto it. I crawled after her, my eyes on hers until she brandished her vibrator between our noses. I grinned and took it, turning it on. There’s another old joke about lesbians being able to come at the mere sound of a vibrator, and sometimes I wonder if it’s not true. There is something hot, though whether it’s a conditioned response or a natural one I don’t know, about the growl and hum of a favorite vibe that can make one wet of its own accord.

I held the instrument between my palms for a bit to warm it and favored Julie with a smile. Then I slipped the humming handful of silicone between us and gently pressed it flat against her clit.

Gently at first, and then slowly adding pressure. She gasped and shivered, like she always does at the first touch of a vibe.

I left it there and pressed my hips to hers, pinning the narrow, flexible toy between our bodies.

An experimental downward thrust of my hips caused the vibe to press firmly to my clit as well, making me gasp and moan. After a moment I tried an upward thrust and rubbed the now-slick vibe against Julie’s clit. She sighed softly and started moving her hips in a circular motion, lifting them slightly from the bed. Any need for thrusting on my part was forgotten as the vibe rolled effectively between us with little effort on my part at all.

My eyes were on Julie’s grimace, her brow was furrowed and her eyes closed tightly. Her wet lips formed varying shapes of nearly silent O’s through which the barest hint of breath escaped as she worked the vibe with her hips and dug her fingers into my ass. I arched my shoulders upward, pressing my body more firmly against Julie’s and groaned as the vibe was pinned in just the right spot.

Julie was panting under me and I lowered my shoulders again and kissed her, claiming her mouth with a decisive thrust of my tongue. She tasted like merlot and smelled like soap and her own dizzying musk and I rocked my clit against the vibe, my hips now moving in opposition to hers.

She tore her mouth from mine and cupped one of my breasts in both her hands, bathing my stiff nipple with her tongue. It set off lightening strikes deep inside my body and I clenched practiced muscles around nothing but it still made me shiver. Julie opened her legs wider and wrapped them around my thighs with a straining groan and I knew she was close. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my own climax, which I knew was right there for me, if I could reach far enough. Then Julie shuddered and bucked, her gasps more like screams. I opened my eyes and watched as her pale skin blushed pink. She continued to move even after she’d had her fill locking those stubborn, Irish, hazel eyes on me. She arched her hips and I gasped.