Page 29 of Minha Dona

“Isn’t enough.” Helena met her eyes. “Juliana’s one of my favourite people, but she’s not…” She shook her head. “Anyway. Those are the headlines. A few others along the way, dates, nothing that stuck. I’ve been focused on work, mainly.”

Caitlin was watching her with an expression that Helena couldn’t quite read. Relief maybe, or recognition, or something more complicated. “With Juliana. That’s still going?”

“It is. Like I said, friends with benefits, nothing more. We have an understanding… no jealousy, no possessiveness, we’re both free to do what we want.” Helena hesitated, then committed. “We both agreed recently that we need to date other people.”

There it is, she thought, how else can I say I’m available without saying it?

Caitlin was quiet for a long moment, her fingers on the necklace again.

“How about you?” Helena asked, keeping her voice gentle. “Anyone in Houston?”

Caitlin took a breath. Then another. Helena watched her compose herself, getting thoughts that were harder to say than any client pitch aligned in her head.

“Helena, we made a promise to each other when you left Houston. You remember it?”

Helena nodded but said nothing. I’ve thought about it every single day.

“I’ve kept you waiting for far too long. I… that week left me spinning inside. It took me longer than I thought it would to work out what I wanted, and I’m sorry for that.”

“No apology needed.”

“I’m apologising regardless. I shouldn’t have waited until now to get in touch.” Caitlin hesitated. “Helena, I need to tell you something. About the last nine months. About what happened after you left.” She paused. “All of it. I need to tell you all of it, because I think you’re the only person in my life who would really understand.”

Helena put down her glass and gave Caitlin her full attention. “Tell me. Anything. Everything.”

“After your secondment then.” Caitlin’s fingers went to the necklace unconsciously. “After you left.”

“After I left.”

Caitlin took a deep sip of her wine, finishing it. She gestured to the waiter for two more, then turned back to Helena.

“The first few weeks were… strange. I went back to work on the Monday, obviously, and everything was normal. The same office, the same people, the same projects. But I wasn’t the same. I felt like I was walking around with this enormous secret, this whole other version of myself that nobody knew about.” She smiled. “I kept touching the necklace. People must have thought I had a nervous habit.”

Helena smiled too but said nothing, letting Caitlin continue.

“I did what you told me to do. I took time. I thought about what had happened between us, what it meant, what I wanted.” Two new glasses of wine appeared and she took a sip. “I went to see a therapist.”

“A therapist?” Helena hadn’t expected that, though on reflection it made perfect sense. Caitlin was thorough about everything… of course she’d approach self-discovery as if it was a client problem to be overcome.

“Don’t look so surprised. I’m a data-driven person. I wanted to understand what I was feeling, not just feel it.” Caitlin’s tone was dry, completely self-aware. “I found someone who specialised in sexuality and identity. Went every week for about three months.”

“What did you learn?”

“A lot. That what happened between us was real. It wasn’t a reaction to alcohol or adrenaline, which is what I’d been telling myself at first. That my attraction to women was genuine, not situational. That the…” She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “The dynamic we had. My submission. That was genuine too. Not a phase, not a kink I could file away and forget about. It was something fundamental that I’d discovered about myself.”

Helena nodded slowly. She’d known it, had seen that desire to be dominated so clearly in Caitlin, but hearing her articulate it herself, the product of months of reflection, was refreshing.

“How did that feel? Accepting it?”

“Terrifying. Liberating. Both at once.” Caitlin shifted in her chair. “You know what the hardest part was? Not the women thing. Not even the submission thing. It was accepting that the persona I’d built, the dominant force of nature, the woman who never backs down, that she was only part of me. That there was this whole other dimension that I’d been suppressing, or that I’d never known about, and that I couldn’t un-know it after what we’d done.”

“You can be both,” Helena said quietly. “You always could. I told you that.”

“You did. And intellectually I understood it. But living it… that took longer.” Caitlin paused to take another sip of her wine. “So. Once the therapy helped me understand what I was dealing with, I started to explore.”

“Dating?”

“Dating.” Caitlin smiled ruefully. “Which, as it turns out, is just as exhausting with women as it is with men. Maybe more so, because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d never asked a woman out before.”