The Breakaway(81)
Once the bikes were stowed, Abby buckled herself into the front passenger’s seat, and Jasper climbed behind the wheel. In the rearview mirror, she saw Sebastian giving her a puzzled look. Abby did her best to ignore it, wiping her phone’s screen dry and starting to google.
“Okay, there’s an urgent care and an actual emergency room in Seneca Falls. What do you think?” she asked Jasper. “The hospital, right?” She started the directions to the hospital, then looked up signs of concussion, wondering if sudden attraction to unsuitable person would be one of them. “Do you want me to call Lincoln?” she asked Sebastian, without turning around to look at him.
“I’ll do it. Hang on.” He didn’t put the phone on speaker, but the van wasn’t that large, and Abby could hear every word.
“What happened?” Lincoln asked. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I hit something and went flying off the bike. I’m fine. Abby and Jasper are driving me to the hospital so I can get checked out because that’s the company policy.”
Silence. Abby could imagine Lincoln, who’d watched Sebastian fighting with Abby over wearing a reflective pinny, trying to absorb the news that his friend was now willing to go to the hospital with her, without even putting up a fight. “Do you have your insurance card?” Lincoln finally asked.
“Yup.”
“Okay. Text me when you get there. I’ll come meet you.”
“Fine. But there’s nothing wrong with me. My knees got scraped, but Abby bandaged them.”
“Were you bleeding?” Lincoln asked. “Did you pass out?”
“I was, but I didn’t. Abby took care of me.”
Lincoln’s voice turned wary. “I hope you thanked her.”
“Oh, I did.” In the rearview mirror, Abby saw Sebastian wink. She looked away, feeling her cheeks get hot again.
Sebastian ended the call and smiled pleasantly at Abby in the rearview mirror. Abby shook her head. She was starting to wonder if maybe she was concussed, if she’d bonked her head at some point, if she was going to wake up, still in bed in Syracuse, and discover that the whole morning had been a dream. Then, with a stab of guilt, she thought about Morgan, and Andy, and bent over her phone to text Kayla and check in. But even as she typed, part of her was still feeling Sebastian’s warm lips against hers, Sebastian gripping her fingers, Sebastian pulling her into his lap and calling her his little lemon drop.
Lily
2:00 p.m.
The morning in Seneca Falls turned out to be one of the nicest times Lily could remember. Jasper had driven them right to their hotel. She and Eileen had checked in, dropped off their luggage, then borrowed umbrellas and walked out into the rain, past the Wesleyan Chapel, where, a plaque informed them, the first women’s rights convention had been held in 1848. A long span of gray stone, covered in trickling water, ran parallel to the sidewalk, inscribed with the words of the Declaration of Sentiments. The rain tapered off just enough to let Lily and Eileen slow down and read them.
“?‘When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course,’?” Lily read. She walked on, to the section that outlined what the convention’s attendees saw as men’s abuses toward women, and read them in her head:
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position.
“Amazing how far we’ve come,” Lily murmured.
“Amazing how far we still have to go,” Eileen replied.
The spa was just around the corner from the sculpture, decorated in shades of taupe and beige, where the piped-in sound of water trickling over rocks competed with the sound of the actual rain outside. The air smelled like lavender and sage, and the attendants and aestheticians all wore white tunics and soft-soled shoes, and spoke in low, hushed voices, like they were nurses at some very posh hospital. Lily had been assigned a female masseuse, which spared her the awkwardness of having to request one, and if the woman thought it was strange that Lily kept her underwear and brassiere on, she didn’t say so.
Lily had never had a massage before. She thought she’d be uncomfortable and self-conscious, and she had been, at first, feeling a stranger touching her body, but when she was finally able to relax, she couldn’t believe how wonderful it felt, to have the woman’s warm, strong hands working at the stiff muscles of her neck and shoulders. “Lots of tension,” the woman murmured.
“Teenage daughter,” Lily replied, and the woman made a humming noise of understanding.
When the massage was over, Lily and Eileen were led down a candlelit corridor and seated in high, padded chairs, with basins of bubbling water for their feet. Lily felt like a queen as she sat, sipping cucumber-infused water while a young dark-haired woman bent over her, clipping her nails, smoothing her calluses. There were six people getting pedicures, and their matching white robes functioned as something like a uniform, erasing the differences that would have been conferred by shoes and handbags and clothing. Eileen wore a glittering bracelet that Lily assumed was made of real diamonds, along with diamond stud earrings that glittered in the lights, and her cheeks were faintly freckled, the same as Abby’s.