Missed Connections (67 page)

"Why not?" she pressed.

I gave her a shrug and found my own tree to lean against. "I didn't have the guts to."

She smiled and looked up at a squirrel above us. "I was fifteen when I first kissed a girl. You?"

I pressed my lips together, not knowing if I should give her another half lie or if I should try to tell her the truth. The truth would be better, I was sure of it. But it was far too embarrassing. Still, I wanted her to like me and didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with my future daughter-in-law's mother.

"I haven't," I answered her honestly.

Her face showed shock for a moment. "Haven't what?" she asked.

I licked my lips. They were suddenly far too dry. "Kissed a woman."

Georgia frowned. "Why on earth not?"

I didn't have an answer for her but I'd try anyway. "Embarrassment, perhaps. I never had any friends like me and through most of the years that people were falling in love and finding people I was with my husband, the rat bastard that he was. After the marriage ended I suppose I didn't try."

She raised her brows as she tilted her chin toward me as if considering my answer. "But you're sure you're a lesbian then? Really sure?"

I gave her a tight smile. "Yes. Very much so."

"George Clooney or Meryl Streep?" she asked, her gray eyes watching me intently as if this was some sort of a test.

"Julianne Moore," I countered easily. "I like redheads." I couldn't say the last without blushing and I didn't try to.

Her serious face fell away and what was left was an easy grin. "Don't we all. Did you see Scarlett Johansson in her last movie? I'd have made a deal with the devil for curves like that when I was her age."

"Or now," I said, sharing her smile.

She laughed and gave me a little nod. "This is true. I suppose we should focus on the wedding of our daughters though and get down to business. What kind of cake do you prefer? I know we're supposed to get to taste some soon."

I shrugged and turned to look back toward the building behind us. "I don't quite know. Vanilla is the classic choice I suppose."

"True. But if it was your wedding?" Georgia asked, coming up beside me and looking out of the trees as well.

"But it's not," I reminded her.

I saw her smile at me from the corner of my eye. "Humor me anyway. What if it was?"

My mouth tightened as I considered her question. I could have just as easily said vanilla, after all it's what I'd had at my wedding to he-who-shall-remain-nameless-until-he-dies-horribly, but I wanted to put some thought behind my answer. "Caramel, if I'd gone with a fluffy type of cake. Though I think I would have much preferred just a simple cheesecake."

She made a noise low in her throat and I felt heat rising into my cheeks. "I had a pumpkin cheesecake the other day at a little bakery near me. Have you ever tried one?" I shook my head, instantly liking the sound of it but having never tried it myself. "Then I'll have to take you out. We're only about a half hour apart according to my daughter. What do you say?"

I nodded. "Yes. I'd like that."

I agreed easily, much more so than I normally would have and I was left surprised with my reaction as she casually said, "Great, it's a date."

She said it so simply that I was left staring after her, feeling somewhere halfway between numb and dumb as I waited for her to take it back, laugh it off, and say that she was only joking. But she didn't and soon she was walking away and back up the hill. "Beth?" she called once she was clear of the trees. "Are you coming? We need to go try the cakes. Though I can promise none of them are as good as the one I plan to take you out for."

"Coming!" I called to her and forced my legs to hurry up there to catch up as we went in through the back door. After quickly washing our hands, we were treated to plates of different cakes. They were all made in-house, I knew, and I was appreciative of the little place cards that told me which kinds they were. I went for the vanilla with the cherry cream frosting first as I saw Georgia go for a peaches and cream one.

"Our baker, Margaret, makes everything from scratch," the little man that hadn't spoken to me before told me now as he brought us glasses of water and little mints. "To clean your palettes when you're done," he explained, likely catching my questioning gaze.

I nodded at him. "Thank you," I said before turning to Georgia. "How's that one?"

"Decent. Not my favorite." She reached for a German chocolate slice and I tried the cherry one in front of me. It was okay but I quickly shook my head, deciding right off the bat that it wasn't the right one.

"Cherry any good?" Georgia asked me.

I shook my head but she stuck her fork into the cake anyway to try it for herself. She squinted as she chewed on it for a moment or two before shaking her head as well. "Nope. That's not the right one either."

I took a bite of the chocolate cake she was eating, much as she'd done to the cherry one, and quickly decided against it. Besides, Annalee didn't like coconut.

There were six choices left, largely vanilla with different frostings, one orange cream, and one chocolate. I went for the chocolate first and took a big bite, already smelling the peanut butter frosting on it. I was halfway through when Georgia tried to take a bite of it. I stabbed her fork away. "Mine," I said, pulling it toward me and taking another bite, despite my mouth already being full.

She laughed. "Now, Beth, you have to share."

I shook my head. No I didn't.

"But what if that's the cake we end up picking?" Georgia sounded perfectly reasonable, but I knew what would happen in that case.

I swallowed down the mouthful that I hadn't yet gorged myself on and remembered to neatly blot my lips before answering. "It can't be. Because if it was I wouldn't let it get to the table."

She looked surprised. "It can't be all that good."

Georgia didn't know because she hadn't tried it yet. I was debating whether I wanted to prove her wrong by giving her a taste or if I was perfectly content just to finish it off myself when she stole a bite off my plate. She moaned loudly the moment the bite—my bite that she stole from me–went into her mouth.

I was ready when she came back for another try and pulled the few bites that were left toward me. "That's delicious," she said, trying to sneak another bite while I played keep away with the plate.

I nodded. "Yes it is. We cannot have it at the wedding."

"But we must." She sounded so disappointed that I nearly reconsidered.

"Could you have it there, waiting to be eaten, while our girls took their time cutting it and hanging out the pieces only to get a little one at the end?" I asked her.

Her determined expression faltered. "We could have a separate mothers of the brides cake just for us." She turned to him. "Could your Margaret do that for us?"

The little man looked surprised by her inquiry. "It hasn't been done before that I know of but I suppose so. It's your money so I think you could have whatever you wanted as long as you gave her enough of a heads-up."

Georgia looked smug. "Good. That'll be perfect. Do you agree Beth?"

I nodded. That was an excellent solution. I decided to be generous because she'd come up with a fantastic solution, I passed the plate to her with the last bite of the best cake I'd ever had before. "Aw, for me?" she played.

I gave her a smile and drank my water as she finished off the bite. "Now that we have our cake picked out, I suppose that we need to come up with one for our daughters," I said, not all that enthused about it. After all, I doubted that any of them would be as good as the one we'd picked out for ourselves. The man quietly excused himself, promising he'd be back soon.

Georgia sighed and stuck her finger in the nearest frosting before sucking it off her finger. "Hmm. Beth, try this." She swiped her finger through the frosting again and offered it to me.

I looked at the tip of her finger as it hovered in front of my face with a bit of disdain. "I'll have a bite of it with the cake. And off my fork."

Georgia laughed and shook her head. Her finger stayed in front of me. "Right. My finger is clean. I washed it when we came in. Same as you did."

I knew this but I was still hesitant to eat something off her finger. But I reconsidered as her bright smile slowly started to slip into the dangerous territory that was a frown. "I don't often do this," I told her as I slowly, hesitantly, leaned forward toward her finger.

Her smile came back nearly as bright as before. "Beth, I'm guessing there are quite a few things you haven't done recently that you'll end up doing on this little weekend with me." I heard the teasing light in her voice, almost knew it as the threat it could easily be taken as, but closed my lips over her finger anyway.

I looked up as I trailed my tongue over the pad of her finger and was surprised to see a blush on her cheeks just the same as I knew there probably was on mine. I hadn't expected the warmth that flared in my chest at the sight of the redness on her cheeks but as I pulled away, barely tasting the frosting on my tongue, there was a smile on my lips.

"Maybe I'll even be able to teach you something as well," I said, not taking my eyes from Georgia's.

It took her a good moment to recover but when she did her smile was even brighter than before. "I'm looking forward to that," she said, leaning toward me for what would be the first of many slow, sensuous kisses we shared that weekend.

An hour later we were dancing. The tables in the dining room had been pushed back and I had my hands at the small of her back. Research, we called it, as we went through the different songs that our girls had chosen to decide which would be the best fit for the wedding. There were some I recognized though most I didn't. But I focused on the beat and the feeling of Georgia in my arms as we softly swayed. Her arms hung loosely around my shoulders and I tried not to think because if I did I knew that I would start analyzing this as more than just a happy accident that had somehow led to this beautiful woman being in my arms and neither one of us needed me thinking that much.

"The girls are lucky we were willing to plan their wedding for them," Georgia said, her mouth against my shoulder as she leaned into me. The slow song ended and some light poppy little thing took over. We didn't pull apart.

I smiled. "If we hadn't agreed they would have had to cancel their trip to Asia."

Georgia stepped back but only enough to let me slowly spin her. The fringe of her white top flew around her and when they landed back against her tanned skin they swayed over her stomach. "Did you know that your daughter would end up being some world traveler when she grew up?" Georgia asked me as she came back against me.

I smirked. "Grew up? Our kids are in their forties. I think they're pretty much grown. And no, I didn't. When Annalee was a child she wanted to be a ballet dancer. I wanted her to be a doctor."

"And now she's an archeologist. Same thing. Clearly," Georgia teased me.

I smiled and my hands found their place at the small of her back again, my fingertips trailing over the waist of her white linen pants. "And Lynne? What did she want to be?"

"A marine biologist. Or a dolphin. When her class studied genes in middle school and started talking about DNA she was convinced for a full year that she could figure out how to splice genes and become a dolphin whenever she wanted to." Georgia let out a long suffering sigh but there was a lightness in her eyes that shown with love for her only child.

"Poor kid," I remarked, grateful that my daughter's dreams had been much less in the world of illegal medical practices. But I often wished that she'd chosen something that would keep her more at home.

Georgia winked and I stepped back just long enough to skip whatever awful song had popped onto the player. "That is one for the no box."

She pouted but wrote it down on the list that we were keeping anyway. "I actually chose that one."

I looked at her for a long time, unable to tell if she was telling the truth or not. "Well, it was... " I struggled for a way to positively describe what amounted to screaming in the background with an out of tune duck that was being strangled. "Unique." There, that could be good. Or horrible. I hoped she took it well.

She smirked and shook her head. "I'm just playing. There's no way I would have chosen that. I prefer Pink. Now that is one lady that knows how to sing. Have you heard her stuff?"

I was instantly relieved that I hadn't just upset whatever fragile bond we'd created in the past few hours. "I think I might have. I do have younger children after all."

With a little sway of her hips she turned back to the MP3 player and, after touching a few buttons on the complicated little machine, had it switched over to something that was pop but wasn't completely awful as the woman sang about a guy that was hitting on her but had no chance of getting her to go home with him.

Georgia held her arms out and bounced a bit before she put her arms over her head and closed her eyes. Her head went back and she started dancing. I hadn't danced like that since I was a child but in that moment, with the only person in the room that might be able to make fun of me while keeping her eyes closed, I chose to do just that.

I didn't know the song and couldn't have picked it out of a handful of others, but I liked the message in it and the beat, so I went with it, losing myself to the music. I wasn't one to simply let go and certainly not with someone that I barely knew, but this felt good and by the time the next song came onto the mix, something harder with a lot more guitar in it, I had my foot up on a nearby chair and was playing the air guitar as Georgia slammed away on imaginary drums.

She started singing, clearly not knowing the words, and I joined in with her. I didn't know them either but I could pick out every third one or so and faked my way through the rest.  Two more songs went on like this until the man at the front desk came back from whatever errand he'd run off to. Halfway through the song, with our bodies paused in mid-motion, we stared at him for a long moment, the shock clearly registering on his face, until Georgia and I broke out laughing. He laughed too though honestly it sounded a bit forced.