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They swear that nothing big is going to come from that night. They were a little drunk, the bull session went too far. But Sue can’t stop thinking about that kiss or the embrace; really, about everything related to Jenny. She’s there in the back of her head when she’s working at the bakery; she’s there in her mind when there was something pink on the counter, sweet and lovely.
Jenny calls Sue first when she breaks up with Brad. “He was nice but so insecure,” Jenny says. “But he left most of his stuff when he moved out and I have no idea what the heck to do with it.”
Sue knows just what to say. “Garage sale!”
“Wouldn’t that be mean?” Jenny worries.
“If he wanted his stuff, he would’ve taken it,” Sue points out.
It’s a fair assessment. “Can you help me set it up?” Jenny asks.
Sue wouldn’t want to spend her Saturday anywhere else.
Jenny’s lawn sale is a rousing success. Who knew the neighborhood was in need of so much protein powder? It’s a fascinating revelation for Sue as she handles the till. Jenny, sweet thing she is, wants to keep half the money aside for Brad, in case he ever comes looking for his things.
That is fair, Sue thinks, as Jenny brings her lemonade and they squint into the late afternoon sunlight. Most of the stuff is gone now, the rest can be held in the garage or managed in a dumpster. After all of those weight training belts and the hundreds of bodybuilding magazines, Sue is roundly glad to be done and over with the whole situation. Too many pecs, too much oil.
Sue has decided over the course of the past few weeks that she’s not going to marry Larry, that all of her instincts about him are right. I mean he’s a sweet guy, but is he her ideal? Nope. Nuts to that. Nuts to the expectation she marry him, too. I mean, it’s a modern world, who says girls can’t go on being single?
Who says she can’t have some pearls along with her oysters? Anything could happen over the next few weeks, right?
Anything could happen at all, but not everyone could turn Sue’s head. No, that privilege was solely Jenny provenance. And she was slowly coming to realize that there was something incredibly important about that kiss. It might not have changed the world, but it changed Sue’s world, and that was just as important.
The next time Sue kisses Jenny, three weeks have passed. They're standing in the doorway of Jenny's pristine cottage. She's sun-warmed and silky; they have spent the whole day on her front lawn, selling off the last of Brad's possessions after he's made the final move to Club Med. Sue has brought over some tunafish sandwiches, and they were just supposed to have an ordinary dinner but. Well.
It lasts a long time, and Sue packs everything she can into the moment. When Jenny pulls away, she's innocently wide-eyed.
"Wow. I ought to invite you over to lunch more often!” Jenny pipes. Sue laughs, and wraps an arm around Jenny’s neck, right there in public.
That one big kiss leads to two, which leads to a long, happy afternoon in Jenny’s bedroom. It was different from their first indiscretion. It was just as warm and sweet as ever, and the mutual caring between them carried her through on a floating island of happiness.
She moves into Jenny’s house a few years later. She starts growing orchids in the window boxes, and she begins making Jenny pancakes every morning. Sue starts studying for her cosmetologist’s license. She thinks she might have a real talent in her. Someday she might be doing makeup for the B-52s. Who knew?
Jenny’s thinking of law school, but for right now she’s sticking with her teaching track. It’s so different than the future she’d had planned – being a housewife, a mother, living in this little cottage while Brad brought home the bacon and grilled on the weekend. Maybe someday she’ll have that with Sue. But right now they’re just really enjoying life.
They go around town in their motor scooters, hitting up the shops, making sure their new puppy’s fed. Sue still works at the bakery when she’s not at cosmology school, and Jenny picks her up after classes or from the bakery most afternoons. They loll in the park, kiss in the rain, spend hours in a bookshop. There’s coffee and kisses. The town smiles on them benevolently. It’s nice to see a nice couple in love, the reasoning went, and they never heard an unkind word slung at them.
It’s a new, kinder world, one that Jenny and Sue never knew existed. And would never have known, had they not been brave enough to kiss each other.
A few decades later and Sue has her ow beauty parlor. She and Jenny have been married for ten years now, and they’ve raised a little family of birds and dogs and cats. Jenny taches art classes to elementary school teachers, lugging her cart from one class to the other. Everyone knew about her and Sue, and people here loved and trusted them.
They did burst into the wild world for a few years, renting the cottages they had down from the boys who had fled them so many years ago. A month in Paris, a night in Canada – little bites of joy and variety. The spice of joy and the spice of life.
Eventually, they moved into Jenny’s house together, selling off Sue’s home to a polite young butch couple with tattoos and a schnauzer named Barney. At night, Sue and Jenny could hear laughter from the neighboring yard as they toasted their toes by a roaring fire and silently basked in the joy they shared. With Jenny cuddled up in her arms, Sue decided that it had been worth the danger and infidelity of their first encounter. It had been worth rejecting Larry, worth doing the unthinkable to grab happiness.
Worth learning how to kiss a girl, so a girl would kiss her back.