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Administration decides a faculty meeting is the best way to start off the school year, foster camaraderie and all that, so Therese heads over to the school on Friday.
The high school’s hallways are relatively empty except for the occasional teacher, making beelines for their rooms and setting up before school starts Monday. It takes her more than a few minutes to find her own, finds it tucked next to the ceramics studio.
It’s a small room but an open space, filled with long desks and chairs, and behind the door at the back of the room Therese knows is the darkroom. Of little use anymore, given kids’ propensity for the digital. But Therese wonders if it’s possible to come in on the weekend, test it out and see if it’ll give the makeshift one she’s got at home in her bathroom a fair run.
It’s just past lunch when she leaves, sees someone head down toward something and figures that must be where the meeting is.
Turns out it’s in the gym and it’s interactive—a rally just for them before the students come back, in fact—and so as soon as she overhears that, she bolts.
She’s sitting in the girl’s locker room on a bench, smoking, when the double doors to it open with a creak, the sound of heels on concrete complimented by the rattle of keys and a quiet thank god, and what Therese knows from memory is the rasping click of a lighter.
Therese holds still, knows even if she hides her vape pen that it’s far too late to pretend the scent of tobacco isn’t coming from her. If she’s going to get caught, might as well get caught red handed. Nothing looks worse than a student who didn’t do the homework and has a bullshit excuse over one who fesses up to not even starting it.
But a tall blonde woman rounds the corner of a row of lockers, jerks to a stop as she sees her, and then visibly relaxes at the sight of her smoking, too, a cigarette already held casual between index and middle finger.
“You hate crowds, too?” the woman asks with a lopsided grin before raising the cigarette to her lips and taking a drag, and Therese smiles.
-
She’s always enjoyed the written word. Her minor had been in English and she’d have liked to go into poetry, if she hadn’t been so taken with photography. As it is, her bookshelves at home are overflowing, with books on poetry and photography and biographies, mainly.
There are kids in her classroom, working on things throughout lunch, and Therese keeps half an eye on them, careful, but most of her attention is captured easily by Carol who’s pulled up a chair across her desk to eat lunch with her, despite the lack of leg room. It’s been three weeks since class has started and more often than not they take lunch with each other.
“Steinbeck?” Carol says archly, a look of mock disappointment crossing her face before she shakes her head, and Therese hides a smile in her drink that she raises to her lips, tries not to think about how Carol’s short blonde hair curls just so against the curve of her cheek, a perfect compliment. “You know he stole almost the entirety of The Grapes of Wrath, don’t you?”
“Who’s your favorite then?” Therese asks, and when Carol speaks, looking quite pleased with herself, Therese knows she shouldn’t have expected anything less from Ms. Aird, AP English teacher.
“Margaret Atwood. The Blind Assassin was divine.”
“I would have guessed Stephen King,” Therese teases, and that gets a real look of indignation from Carol that has Therese laughing out loud.
-
It leads smoothly to its conclusion.
There is an invitation to dinner, which flows as easily as their lunches do, and then a kiss goodnight, and the next morning she wakes up in Carol’s bed, Carol’s arm around her waist, and Therese turns over, rests with lips just brushing Carol’s shoulder.
There is a pleasant ache to her muscles, a warm pull to every movement she makes, and wetness still between her thighs—but Therese satisfies herself with feather-light kisses against what she can reach, because Carol sleeps on heavily. It’s only when the blare of cartoons from the living room gets a little too loud that she wakes up, though slowly, pale lashes fluttering as Carol stirs, the arm slipping tighter around her waist.
“Good morning,” Carol says, voice rough as she opens her eyes in a bleary squint against the light, and the fact that her black glasses are still sitting on the top of her bedside drawer.
“’Morning,” Therese replies, lets herself be drawn closer and takes advantage of that and steals a kiss. Carol makes a noise, and there is a thigh slipping between her own, neither of them apparently quite ready to call it quits as Carol lets go of her waist, braces a hand against the mattress instead and shifts over her.
But there is the metallic bang of a pan in the kitchen and Carol breaks away, despite the fact that Therese cups her breast and kneads the way she’d liked so much the night before.
“I have to go see what’s happening before my daughter burns my kitchen down,” Carol says, reaching over to grab her glasses and slipping off and out of bed, and Therese watches, drinks in the sight of Carol as she dresses in sweats and a t-shirt that she pulls from a drawer, follows suit and rises only once Carol leaves things out for her too, kisses her once more quickly before leaving her bedroom.
She joins Carol and Rindy in the kitchen dressed in a pair of Carol’s yoga pants, which might reach Carol’s calves on her but function as pants on her own body, and a college t-shirt with Barnard written in block letters across the chest.
It’s unsurprising that Carol takes only a coffee for breakfast, sits and helps Rindy cut up her pancakes, satisfied that her daughter can feed herself, before turning to Therese and asking, “How are they?”
“Delicious.”
“I make a mean lunch, too,” Carol says with a wink, Rindy leaning up against her shoulder and trying to feed her a piece of pancake from her fork, and Therese nods as Carol finally opens her mouth and takes the proffered bite, feels a happiness flutter through her that she hardly cares to hide.
-
As fall and then winter roll around and a multicultural mixture of paper snowmen and Christmas trees and a few menorahs cover the other teachers’ doors and windows, she prepares herself for her usual Christmas—home with a good book, watching something on television, maybe with some Chinese take-out.
She almost tears up as Carol meets her before class on the last half-day before vacation, sipping her coffee quickly before the bell rings, asks if she’ll pick up some wine on her way home tonight in preparation for Christmas Eve as if it were a given that she were coming over and spending the holiday with her and Rindy.
The only good thing about foster care is that her education hadn’t landed her with too much debt. The downside is, largely, everything else. The holidays don’t sting because she doesn’t let them, hasn’t since she was nine. She has her little groove that she’s just fine in.
But it’s something else to go back to her apartment, pack an overnight bag, stop by the store, get wine, and be greeted with Carol at the door, a heady kiss hello shared before Therese leaves her things in Carol’s room, presents Rindy with her present that Carol tells her to put under the tree until Christmas.
Christmas Eve comes and with it the party, and Carol has her friends over, many Therese is introduced to for the first time except for Abby, who Therese recognizes as the bio teacher, and Dannie who she’d invited, a fellow art teacher. She’s warm with wine, spends a large part of the evening at Carols’ side with Carol’s arm around her shoulders, has a good time but can’t help a certain quiet calm that settles over her as they see the last guest out late that night, a sleepy Rindy long ago put to bed.
Carol walks over and settles on the couch with a sigh, blonde hair catching the warm light of the tree, still lit, and Therese slips off her heels, settles next to her—Carol’s arms reach out, welcome her, and Therese slips into the space between her and the couch, comfortable.
“I thought we could all go skating tomorrow,” Carol says thoughtfully, as her fingers begin to card through Therese’s hair, and Therese closes her eyes, can picture Carol bundled up and showing Rindy how to skate. Black and white film, she thinks. For a classic look. But color might work too, the tree at Rockefeller Center a bright splash of light.
“I’m going to take a selfie,” Therese says in lieu of an answer, slips her hand into the back pocket of her skinny jeans and taking out her phone. Her Instagram account’s on private, a necessity when teaching, and it makes it easier to post pictures of them together—at brunch, in the park, with Rindy.
“You and cameras,” Carol grumbles good-naturedly, and Therese pauses and lets Carol make her little adjustments, a curl tucked behind an ear and touching up her lipstick, and Therese leans in, kisses her cheek as she takes the picture.
They take a bite of the cookies Rindy’s left out for Santa, lest they forget, before moving to the bedroom.
-
(She gets Rindy a train set because she’s not quite sure what else to buy a seven year old, and when Rindy opens it Christmas morning Carol laughs but Rindy’s face radiates pure awe.
She and Rindy spend the rest of the morning setting it up, the track running around the tree and the television and under the coffee table, and when they finally get ready to go out and skate Rindy insists on bringing the bright red tank engine with them, cradled in the crook of her arm.
“She didn’t even care about the damn doll she me asked for,” Carol mutters bemusedly as they make their way out the door.)
-
Spring sprints by, and before she knows it she’s helping kids get portfolios ready and grading finals, sitting with her laptop at the big dinning table.
Luckily or unluckily, most of the students choose to work with digital media. She’s got one kid in third period who she’s taught to use the darkroom and three in fifth, but that’s it. It makes it easy to take work home, all of it fitting on a USB stick and final grades submitted digitally.
Carol sitting across from her, meanwhile, Therese can see, flicks through essays slowly, pen darting here and there and leaving marks and grades, a pile still of work to complete on the table that Therese doesn’t envy her. An ashtray sits in the middle of the table between them, one butt already snubbed out and another cigarette languishing half-smoked, Therese's empty vape pen along with it.
She closes her laptop and gets up, gets her camera case from its place high on a cabinet where she’d left it yesterday for safekeeping and brings it back to the table simply to be in Carol’s presence. Once they’ve turned in their final grades, once class has ended, there is their vacation, a week in California.
She’d planned to do nothing, a long time ago, except teach summer school for the extra paycheck. Now Therese opens the case and checks her camera in preparation, sees she’s almost out of film and frowns. A thorough search of her case tells her she’s out of luck, no spare rolls to be found.
“I’m going to have to run home tomorrow morning,” Therese says offhandedly, hears the scratch of Carol’s pen stop. It’s the sort of thing she doesn’t keep extras of at Carol’s, her own hobby and no one else’s.
Carol makes a noise, puts down her pen and takes off her glasses, cleans the lens on the hem of her shirt before putting them back on. When she speaks it’s guardedly casual.
“Move in,” Carol asks, with us, with me, and then because it is their apartment and their bed and their home now really but Therese still clings to her lease out of some reason she’s not sure of herself, adds, “For real.”
Therese looks up from her camera, wonders if she’s heard that right but knows she has from the look on Carol’s face—hopeful like she’s never seen her before, breath bated.
They had talked about the vacation last month and she’d suggested Texas just because she’d never been, and eventually California won out because of Los Angeles and San Francisco and Big Sur and Disneyland. Rindy had shouted in delight at the last selection, and through the noise Carol had slid a hand along her jaw, urged her closer and kissed the side of her head, murmured, “Better luck next summer, darling,” and then it had only been a matter of saying it out loud, really.
“I’d like that,” Therese says finally, and Carol smiles.