My Favorite Half-Night Stand(60)

Her scar.

My heart shoves against my breastbone in warning, and then lurches: a heavy, meaningful pulse. I mentally file back to one of Cat’s messages: managed to make tit halfway through the attraction without peeing my pants or otherwise embarrassing myself The same stupid tit typo that Millie always makes.

The same scar.

I step back, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes. No way can this be right.

“Reid?”

I try to be objective, to take the data in front of me at face value.

Millie’s mom died when she was young.

That friend of hers, Avery, mentioned that Millie’s dad was sick.

And now, Millie’s scar. Millie’s typo. The Monopoly joke. Girls Trip. And Cat is moving just when I tell her I want to meet.

The last line echoes in my memory: Sometimes, the thing we want is right in front of us, and we’re the last ones to see it.

What the fuck?

“Reid?” Millie’s hand comes over my forearm, gently squeezing.

“Sorry, just—light-headed.”

I stare at her, into her mossy green eyes, and try to puzzle this out. I want to turn her jaw just so, ask her, Look down a bit, to the side, just like that. I need to see if you’re her.

Am I crazy? Is this connection absurd? But I know it’s not. I know in an instant that Catherine is Millie. I know it in the way that Dad knows when it’s going to rain, and the way that Mom knows exactly when her bread is baked without setting a timer.

And I know it because it’s been there in front of me this whole time.

The information is almost too new for me to know what to do with it. I’m standing with her on her porch—with Millie, with Catherine—realizing that she’s not only my best friend and the woman I’ve been having sex with, she’s also the woman I’ve been spilling my heart to online.

Amid the chaos of my reaction—embarrassment, relief, hope, thrill, confusion—I can’t find my grounding.

Is this why she asked me to come here?

I blink tightly to clear my thoughts, and then look down at her.

She’s worried; the little line on her forehead has deepened, her lips arc downward. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, taking a deep breath and then letting it out slowly. I’ve been falling for two women, and they’re both her. “Just got dizzy for a second.”

“Come inside,” she says, “get some water.”

Through this fresh lens, everything in here feels new. The couch is where she probably wrote to me as Cat. The kitchen where we first kissed—I was kissing Cat, too. Down the hall, there’s her bedroom, and about half as far is the wall against which we had sex only last night. I left her, and immediately wrote another woman—also her—and told her everything.

Oh my God, I want to remember verbatim what I said in that last message. How much did I tell Cat about my feelings? I said Millie made me feel terrible! And Millie responded as Catherine by telling me she was leaving.

My stomach drops.

“Reid, you look sort of . . . green.”

“No, I’m good.” I take the water she offers, and down half of it before coming up for air. “What did you want to talk about?”

She laughs shakily and motions that we should go sit on the couch. Slapping her hands on her thighs, she says, “Right. That. Okay, so last night, after we”—she waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the hallway—“over there . . . and you left . . . I thought maybe I did something wrong.”

“You mean like shutting me down when I tried to talk about what the sex means to us and then suggesting I could make myself at home while you went back to work?” The words surprise even me a little bit.

Millie laughs uncomfortably again and runs shaking fingers through her hair. “Yes. That. I guess . . . I guess I was freaking out a little. I mean, I did have to run in for a few minutes, and I thought maybe it’d be nice to have you here when I got home, but I realize the way I said it just sounded really . . . wrong.”

I lean back against the couch, closing my eyes. There are two ways this is going: Millie realizes I’m falling for her and is ending all aspects of our romantic relationship, including as Catherine. Or, Millie realizes I’m falling for her and wants to get Cat out in the open so we can be together for real. It worries me that I don’t have the faintest idea which route she’s taking.

It all makes me feel really tired. “It’s okay, Mills.”

“It isn’t okay,” she says quietly. “I want to be better about those things. Talking, I mean. I think . . .” She pauses, glancing at me and then rolling her eyes at herself. “I think—I mean I know—that I want to . . .”

“Spit it out.” I laugh a little, trying to be gentle about her fumbling.

“I want to try to be with you. Like . . . that.”

“Like that?” I tease.

She reaches over and tries to tweak my nipple. “Romantically, okay?”

I weasel out of her reach. “What’s more romantic than a nipple twist?”

“Right?” She breaks out into an enormous smile. Flowers push up through the dirt to see that smile. Relief is like light hitting my retina, illuminating everything. “So, is that a yes?”

She leans forward, I lean a little, too, and her mouth meets mine for a single, sweet kiss.