Jordan 1921
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE END of everything, I felt like fire.
My body was hot, emotion coursing through my veins, explosive. I could feel it in my skin and on my lips and in the pounding of my heart. It was the adrenaline rush of a real paying tournament the next morning. But it was more than that too. It was a confidence, a sheer, bright, stupid confidence that I could have it all. I could have everything I ever wanted. That I, too, could be happy.
The whole team was staying a few blocks away from the tournament. It was a quaint little southern inn, with only a few rooms, and we took up all of them. In spite of that, Mrs. Pearce warned us all upon arrival not to disturb any other guests. At which point Mary Margaret had turned to me, rolled her eyes. I suppressed a giggle, and Jerralyn shot me a dirty look. Mrs. Pearce didn’t notice any of it, and she kept on talking. “… Breakfast downstairs, promptly at eight,” she was saying. “The tournament will begin at ten…” We’d already received a schedule and I already knew all this, so I tuned her out. It was late, nearly eleven. The train ride had felt interminably long, and my body was already jittery with the fire in my veins. I shuffled my feet while she continued to drone on and on and on.
At last, she was finished with her diatribe, and we all carried our bags upstairs to our rooms. Mary Margaret and I were sharing, just like we always did back in Charleston. But instead of bunk beds, here we would share the room’s one double bed. We stood in the doorway for a moment, both just staring at it. Then Mary Margaret put her bags down first, sat on the bed to test it, bounced a little. “Which side would you like?” she asked me, her voice sounding cool and polite. She refused to meet my eyes.
We’d kept a careful distance from each other since my return from France, her rescinded middle-of-the-night invitation to Nashville still an unspoken weight between us. She hadn’t climbed down into my bunk bed even once back in Charleston, and now I eyed the double bed and my cheeks flushed. “I don’t care,” I told her. “It’s up to you, Ems.”
“I suppose I could sleep on the floor,” she said. Her voice came out so husky now that I had to resist the urge to go to her, to run my hand across her throat, her chin, up to her lips, to trace the origin of that voice.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, my own voice raspy in my throat. “You won’t ever get a good night’s sleep on the hard wood. You stay on that side. I’ll sleep on the other one.”
I took my nightgown from my bag, turned my back, and changed quickly. When I turned around, she was staring at me, but when she noticed that I noticed, she quickly averted her eyes. And then, I felt it, coursing through me: heat and bravery and stupidity. It burned too hot, out of control.
I got into the bed, slipped under the covers, and pulled the lamp. Only then did Mary Margaret get up and change. I watched the shadow of her, then closed my eyes until I felt her slip back into bed. We both lay there silently, breathing heavily. From the sounds of her breath, I was certain she was still awake.
I slowly moved my arm across the bed and reached for her hand. I’d done the same with Daisy a thousand times lying in her bed in Louisville. There was nothing wrong with holding her hand. But Mary Margaret pulled her hand away so quickly when I touched her, it was like she knew she was touching fire, and she didn’t want to get burned. “What are you afraid of, Ems?” I whispered into the darkness.
She didn’t say anything for a few moments, and tears stung hot in my eyes. I felt hurt by her pulling away from me, her silence. The hurt turned a little angry. The fire started to simmer into rage.
But then she spoke, just one tiny, enormous word: “Everything,” she said softly. And my fire turned from rage into something else, desire.
I rolled over on my side and stroked her arm. Her skin was soft, but her muscles were toned from golf. I ran my fingers slowly from her wrist to her shoulder and back.
And then she rolled on her side, too, and we were shoulder to shoulder, face to face. Her mouth was inches from mine. Her breath hit my lips. “I’m so afraid, Jordan. Afraid of people finding out what I feel,” she whispered. “And I’m afraid of leaving this room and never feeling the way I feel right now, ever again in my whole entire life.”
“Shh.” I put my forefinger to her lips. She stopped talking, and I traced her lips lightly with my finger. We had kissed only once before, that one night on the golf course. It was so long ago now that sometimes I wondered if it had really happened at all or if it had been a dream. And aside from that, there were nights when Mary Margaret had crawled into my bunk bed, and we’d held each other in the middle of the night. But the next morning, in the light of day, we pretended it had never happened at all. And really, nothing had happened. We were roommates, friends. Every touch between us could be explained away as chaste.