AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Why not?” asked Julia.
Erin sighed and collected her thoughts for a moment, turning her head towards the ill-lit street. “This might be oversharing,” Erin murmured, her gaze dropping to the sidewalk.
“I think I’ve given more than my fair share.” Julia gently nudged Erin’s shoulder, the contact sending a tingle through her numb fingertips.
“At one point I had something I wanted to preserve: pictures of my sister, beach days with my twin niece and nephew, family get-togethers. Then I focused on myself: solo trips, hiking the Appalachian trail, surfing in the Atlantic, foreign places this job takes me to.” She paused, sighing deeply as her breath formed a misty smoke in front of them both.
“That sounds like an incredibly full life.”
“One day I was sitting in my kitchen, ready to start the next page, and I realized I didn’t know what or who I was preserving all those memories for.”
Julia stopped walking, too shocked by how raw and honest the conversation quickly became. How often do strangers talk about things like this? How often do two people who barely know anything about the other fall so closely in step that everything aligns?
She placed one hand on Erin’s arm and she stopped walking, too. “You didn’t share too much,” was all that she could come up with to say, but it was filled with so much more. She knew; it was the too-muchness that they both admitted to that night at the bar. Erin gave a half smile. She knew.
They walked a little further, both going back to casually brushing arms as if the other didn’t notice. More shops before them started to turn their lights off; the tenants rolling up the sidewalks as they locked doors and abruptly pulled blinds.
“What made you want to be a superintendent?” Erin asked. She acted as if she sensed their time together was dwindling and was grasping for any topic to prolong it. Then she added, “Oh, I’m sorry! I meant management.”
“Really funny!” Julia teased. “You have no idea how much of a microscope I am under! It’s bad enough to be the token lesbian of the community, let alone having it get back to a parent or board member that I was drinking in public, on a weekday.”
“It can’t be that bad! Token lesbian has a nice ring to it.”
“But it can.” Julia’s eyebrows arched. “Kleinton is like a mini-Harvard, and they never let you forget it.”
“It sounds like that puts a lot of pressure on you.” Erin’s eyes moved towards their cars, now just feet away. She stopped walking and stood facing Julia.
“Sometimes.” Julia shrugged, pulling her jacket closer to her neck to ward off the breeze. “That’s why you’re here: to push us to strive for even more perfection.”
There was a hint of mockery in her voice, but Erin chose to ignore it. Julia walked a little further and leaned against her dusty, salt-covered car, pausing for a moment.
“That’s why I stretched the truth.”
“I get it,” Erin said with a nod. “I really do.”
It didn’t matter what light Julia looked at her in. It could have been the decade-old dim overhead lighting in that meeting room, the natural light spewing in through her office window, or that streetlight. She was captivating. Gosh, that smile made her smile in a way that she thought was lost a long time ago.
“So, how long?” Erin asked.
“How long?”
“How long have you been at Kleinton?”
Reluctantly, Julia admitted, “this is my twentieth year.” She didn’t want to reveal her age–didn’t want to give Erin the opportunity to focus too much on the tiny wrinkles on her forehead. “How long have you been working for McSellen?”
“Not long, actually. This is only my fifth year with them. They poached me from an internship I had at a non-profit due to some research I published on reform.”
The math rolled through Julia’s head like a shaken gumball machine. If she got her bachelors by 22, and then finished her masters by the age of 24, with her experience, she at least has to be in her early to mid-thirties. Phew.
“That’s pretty impressive,” Julia clicked her tongue.
“Lucky is pretty much it,” Erin argued, a playful undertone swirling between them.
There was a long silence that stretched as they stood there. Neither one wanted to make the move to leave, but what else could they say?
“Do you know that when you get nervous,” Erin spoke quietly, “you rub your ring finger?”
Julia was taken aback. She most certainly did not. To her horror, she looked down at her left hand hung at her side and found her ring finger folded in towards her palm, her thumb firmly on the place where a gold band used to lay.
