Winter Jacket (21 page)

"I'll tex
t Troi. They'll be fine delaying coming over.  Nikole always takes forever to primp, anyway.”

“Wait.
” Her features looked more panicked than before. “They’re meeting us
here
?”

“Yeah, the restaurant’s within walking distance from my house, s
o they’re going to stop here first, we’ll have a drink, and then we’ll go to the restaurant.”

As if on cue, there was a knock at the front door.

Hunter hopped off the countertop and snatched her discarded top from the kitchen floor.  “Oh my God.  I’m not ready to meet your friends.”              She scampered away, as fast as her long legs could take her and disappeared up the stairs.

I still felt lightheaded and disoriented, but I couldn’t let Troian and Nikole hang outside on my porch all night.  I left the kitchen and its disarray for the front door.
             

“Hey guys. Come on in
,” I greeted when I opened the door and discovered that it was my friends who had, for probably the first time in the entirety of our friendship, shown up on time.  “Hunter’s just finishing getting ready upstairs.”

Troian eyeballed me suspi
ciously as she stepped inside. "You have sex hair."

I
touched my hand to my head. "I do not," I protested self-consciously. My normally tame, spiraled curls felt a little more unruly than usual, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“Whatever,” Troian said, making a face. “I hope you washed your hands.”

When I welcomed both of my friends inside, I heard a surprised noise from the top of the staircase.  “Nikole?”

“
Hunter,” Nikole grinned, seemingly unperturbed. I don’t think I’d ever seen that woman look confused or unsettled.  "Huh. Small world.  I kind of wondered if Elle’s Hunter was you.  It’s not a very common name."

“You two know each other?” I felt a rumbling of
petty jealousy in the pit of my stomach.  Nikole was not an ugly girl by any stretch of the imagination.

Hunter descended the second floor stairs and stopped next to me. I quickly appraised her; I don’t know how she’d managed to put herself back together so quickly, but she looked as perfect as usual, if not a little flushed in her normally alabaster cheeks.

“Nikole was my boss last summer.”  She smiled at me. “It’s how I got to be so good with my hands.”

“What?!” Troian squawked.

Hunter’s already pale features blanched even more.  “Oh my God.  I didn’t mean it like
that. 
It’s an inside joke between Elle and me.  We were planting bulbs in her backyard last week and there was dirt and digging, and she made a comment about my fingers and…” She snapped her mouth shut and blushed to the tips of her ears.

“It’s oka
y,” Nikole reassured. “Troi’s just the insanely jealous type.”

“Can you blame me?” Troian pulled herself to her full height – all 5 feet
of her. “You’re insanely hot.  I’ve gotta protect my interests.”

“Oh God.” I ran my hand over my face.  “This can’t end well.”

“So now I’m your property?” Nikole scoffed. “And do you really think I’d cheat on you with one of my student employees?”

“Well, Elle sleeps with her student
s,” Troian countered. “Maybe she’s a bad influence on you.”

“
Student
. Singular,” I corrected, raising my voice and jumping into the fray.  “It’s not like I do this kind of thing all the time.  Just Hunter.” I could feel the heat of Hunter’s pointed stare.  I had never even given a student a second-glance until her.  Troian was going to ruin everything if she didn’t get her mouth under control.  “And she’s not even my student anymore, so that really shouldn’t count.”

“I need a drink,” Nikole muttered.

I wanted to second that motion, but I kept my mouth shut for fear of getting myself into more trouble.

“Oh my god
,” Troian blurted out.  “You
both
have sex hair.”

Hunter
blushed furiously while I scowled at my friend.

"So now that we got
that
out of the way, when are we going to dinner?” Troian asked, stomping her foot a little. I'm hungry."
 

+++++

After a rocky start, d
inner with my friends had gone much better than I had expected.  Conversation had been effortless among the four of us as if we'd been going on double dates together forever. After dinner, we'd all returned to my house. Nikole and I each had one more beer while Troian and Hunter bonded over their mutual lack of drinking. Hunter still had about a month to go before she was 21 while Troian's allergies kept her the permanent Designated Driver.

I grabbed Nikole and Troian's jackets from the front coat closet as they prepared to go home. "So what do you
think of her?" I asked in a hushed tone. 

"I've always liked
Hunter; she was very mature and hardworking when she worked for me last summer," Nikole pragmatically stated. It wasn't exactly the review I'd hoped for. "Plus, she clearly adores you."

I lifted an eyebrow. 
I'd noticed no such thing. "How can you tell?"

Nikole shrugged into her jacket. "I have eyes
,” she smirked. “The way she looked at you during dinner – every time you talked, she looked at you like there were hearts in her eyes."

"It was honestly gross," Troian said in her usual dour tone.
 She hated anything cute that didn't involve her.

"Serves you right," I deflected. "Now you know what the rest of us suffer through
seeing the two of you dote on each other." I paused and worried my bottom lip. "You think she really likes me?"

They both laughed at what they perceived as
naivety.  Nikole clapped me on the shoulder. "Trust us on this one, Bookie."

I walked my friends to the fro
nt door. "Hang out again soon?"

Troian rolled her eyes. "Sure. If we can drag you two out of bed long enough for brunch.
Because from the way you looked when we first showed up," she snorted, "I'd guess you guys gave up on taking things slow."

I cleared my throat, but didn't confirm
nor deny her assumption.

"Lea
ve Elle alone, hun," Nikole chastised. "She looks happy."

"I do?"

Nikole chuckled as they walked out onto the front porch. "Hunter wasn't the only one at dinner tonight with hearts in her eyes."

I watched Troian and Nikole walk down the concrete path to the curb in front of my house and waited at the front door until they had made it safely into Nikole's Jeep.
 I waved once more before shutting the door and returned my attention to the last woman left in my house.
 

I grabbed myself another beer from the kitchen and found Hunter
sitting in the living room on the couch. She had poured herself a glass of water and now fiddled with the cup in her hands.  She looked up when I walked into the room.  "Did I do alright tonight?" she worried. "Do your friends approve?"

"It was touch and go for a while," I teased
, taking a quick pull from my bottle, "but we officially have their stamp of approval." I actually hadn't been worried at all. I knew they'd think she was charming and thoughtful and beautiful, inside and out.  "They want to go out again soon, if you'd be into that."

The tension seemed to leave her face, and her body language became less rigid.
I knew she'd been worried about meeting my best friends, but she'd been so natural at dinner with them, I hadn't realized it had weighed so heavily on her.

I sat down on the couch beside her
and set my beer down on the coffee table. "Did you like
them
? This wasn't just about them liking you, you know."

She nodded. "They're nice," she confirmed. "Knowing Nikole from before made things easier.
And Troian seems fun, but she scares me a little."

Hunter was at least 5 foot, 7 inches tall,
and Troian barely broke 5 feet.  I knew what she meant though; Troian could be pretty intense. "Her bark is worse than her bite," I assured her. "She's just protective of the people in her life."

"They're a g
ood couple," Hunter said with a thoughtful look. "How long have they been together?”

"
Forever.  At least eight years."

She made a noise. "Wow. I think my longest relationship
was 8 months. What about you?"

Uh oh.
I really didn't want to talk about my exes. If there was a prize for worst girlfriend ever, I'd win it year after year. My relationships seemed to have a limited shelf life before they inevitably imploded.

"Um, not that much longer," I confes
sed. "Maybe a year and a half?"

She drank the rest of her water and set the empty glass on the coffee table
next to my beer. I smiled fondly when she was purposeful about putting the glass on a coaster. I didn't care about things like that, but the fact that she did was endearing. I wondered what her life had been like growing up to have produced such a careful, meticulous person. One moment she could be rigid and careful, but I knew how quickly she could shrug off that cautious persona and say something so explicit and teasing she'd have me blushing from the tips of my ears down to my toes.  It was like she was at war with herself, trying to break free from whomever she'd been earlier in life.  We had that in common.

She twisted to face me. "How lo
ng have you been dating girls?"

"Exclusively, since I was 21
,” I said. “But I went back and forth between guys and girls for about a year before then." I thought back to my first official girlfriend. Growing up in a tiny, isolated Midwestern town, I hadn't even realized being gay was an option.

"Have you ever been in love?"

I sucked in a breath. I wondered if she'd had these questions on her mind for a while now or if this was spontaneous.  Maybe she was just now feeling comfortable enough to ask since I'd introduced her to my friends, and in doing so, had opened up my world a little more to her.

"At the time, I know I
thought it was love," I started slowly. "Looking back at it now, though...I'm not sure."

She silently nodded. I thought she'd continue asking questions, but when no more came, I posed one of my own: "I have to ask
– why did you never take off your jacket in class?"

Her pale eye
brows rose. "You noticed that?"

I nodded. I was tempted to reveal my fixation on her because of that jacket, but for now I kept th
at to myself.

"It was a cramped classroom," she explained simply, "and I didn't want to take up too much space.
It was just as easy to keep on my jacket instead of hitting someone with my elbows when I took it off."

Her reasoning baffled me. "But th
e room was like a total sauna."

Hunter
looked unperturbed. "It was just a little heat. Better that than embarrassing myself."

The grandfather clock in my
study chimed loudly, echoing through the rest of the house, indicating how late it was. We'd been at dinner for several hours between appetizers at the beginning and coffee at the end of the meal. I didn't have a reason to wake up early the next day, but I didn't want to assume Hunter didn't have any plans.

"Do you need to be gettin
g home?” I asked. “I can give you a ride."

A frown twisted her face. "Am
I wearing out my welcome?"

"No, no, no. I didn't mean it like that," I appeased. For being a writing teacher, I was a klutz when it came to words. "It's just that it's getting late; I don't
want to monopolize your time if you have to get up early tomorrow."

"I'm fine." Her head lolled to one side and
rested against my shoulder.  She reached for my hand and settled it on her lap. It felt so familiar, like she’d done it a million times before. "I just have some homework tomorrow, but it won't take too long."

I don't know why I felt compelled to ask, but I did.
Perhaps it was because we’d started opening up to each other.  Perhaps it was because most of the women I'd dated had a habit of hiding me.  "Does your roommate know about me?"

"No," she revealed, not lifti
ng her head from my shoulder. "But we don't really share things like that."

"Why not? You live together
."

"It's complicated." She sat up straight and I instantly missed the weight of her body gen
tly pressed against mine. "Sara..." She paused and scrunched up her nose. "We were close friends in high school. Now though, we don't have much in common. We don't have classes together, we hang out with different people, and we have different schedules."

I could understand that.
I had few friends from high school with whom I was still close. I had lost touch with most of them during college when I'd gone to school out-of-state and most of them had attended the local state university. Plus, after word spread that I was gay, few reached out to me.  I was okay with that though.  Mostly.