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It’s Lydia who figures it out first, of course. Carly is in the middle of relating a frankly hilarious story about Kate’s latest creative escapade – the woman is an entrepreneurial genius, but you’d never guess it from the way she still doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of “business professionalism” (last week, Carly discovered that she was keeping that massive dog of hers under her desk during the workday) – when Lydia interrupts her.
“Carly, if I have to hear one more story about Kate King, I’m gonna scream. C’mon, what’s up with you? I’d think you were dating the lady from how little I hear about anyone else. I don’t come here to listen to your adorable female bonding stories – I’m here for the parts about the glamour of what it’s like being a C-cup JD. And the money. That, too, but mostly the glamour.”
And Carly screeches to a halt, because Lydia’s right. It’s been a month since she last went out with a man, and even that was just the guy she fucked to try to get herself back in order after Mark. It had been really fun, athletic sex, and then he’d left off to whatever job twenty-somethings were pursuing in New York City these days in the morning and she’d never called the number he’d left. Since then, she’d just been – busy. She had her job, and the fallout after Mark, and her weekly lunches with Kate, and her occasional dinners with Amber and her dad (which, OK, she still isn’t sure how she feels about that, but if it makes Amber happy, power to her), and somehow she just never finds time to go out these days.
“Oh my God,” slips out before she can stop it, and Lydia’s eyes narrow.
“Are you dating Kate?” she demands.
“No, I – oh my God, I think I am,” Carly says, because there’s no help for it. They have a regular lunch date. They’ve been having lunch dates and Carly’s been calling them “business lunches” like a twenty four year-old who doesn’t get that the hot guy who works in the downstairs office wants to sleep with her, not talk shop.
“You never told me you were into the whole bi-curious thing!” Lydia exclaims. “Hey, you go, I mean – I had sex with my roommate in college too.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Carly says. “I mean, is it?”
“Well, do you want to have sex with her?”
Carly’s quiet for a moment, but oh, hell, if she doesn’t tell Lydia, who can she tell? “I mean, a little? Maybe?” She thinks of Kate – Kate in her lovely yellow sundresses, in her stupid floppy-brimmed hats, with her smile and her voice and her hair and her surprisingly tasteful perfume and – “Oh, damn, yes. I do.”
Something in Carly’s face makes Lydia pauses before she says anything quippy. “Is this a moment? Are we having a moment here?”
“A little bit of a moment, yeah,” Carly says, because what do you say when you’re forty-two and having a sexuality crisis over the weird female best friend you somehow developed after you slept with her husband? “What do I do?”
And Lydia springs into action. “You do you! Come on, you’ve had this down since before I was born – no, that’s not an insult, the whole hot forty year-old lawyer deal works for you. You do the – the Carly Whitten thing. What, did Mark steal your mojo?” And if she’d been trying to rev Carly up, she couldn’t have chosen a better question, because Carly bristles at that. “You know how to make this work.”
Then the phone rings and Carly can tell just from looking at the phone ID that they’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon working on Gallagher case, because a call from Wendy Carr is never a good sign. She looks pointedly at Lydia, who sighs, brushes back her long hair with one manicured hand, mutters, “It’s like you think you’re paying me for the job, not the conversation,” and walks on over to her desk to answer it.
They actually end up spending the next two days dealing with the Gallagher crisis, and suddenly it’s Wednesday without Carly planning for it and their “business lunch” is still on. She gets to their usual table (oh God, they have a usual table) a bit late, because she had to spend an extra fifteen minutes on the phone dealing with Wendy Carr’s sister, and Kate is there waiting for her. She waves, a dopey grin on her face, when she sees Carly from the window, and Carly forces a smile on her face and waves right back, even if she feels a bit silly doing so.
Normal. Act normal. But with a hint of – a hint of what Kate had called “the Carly Whitten thing.” OK, she can totally do this.
“Hey, how’ve you been?” Carly asks, as she slides into her seat.
“You’re never going to believe what happened with that app developer deal this week!” Kate says, and she launches into a candid story about the ridiculous demands of her firm’s latest client, complete with those expressive gestures that she’s so free with. Carly tunes her out a little bit – only because she’s pretty sure Kate’s covered at least half this story with her last week – and leans back in her chair a little, just looking at the other woman. Kate looks happy, she realizes, and the thought makes her smile fondly. She’d seen Kate cry a few too many times during their early … acquaintanceship (there’s really no good word for what they had been to each other, at first – once or twice, the two have tried to explain their story to mutual associates, and they’ve always just ended up with weird stares), and it’s nice to see her thriving now.
“Are you even listening to me?” Kate demands abruptly.
“Of course I am – app developer, wanted freegan catering at the board meeting he attended, turned out one of the guys was allergic to the nuts and then everything went down in flames,” Carly said, with the unerring ability of a long-time lawyer to recite back the most important parts of the conversation.
“You have this look on your face.” Kate peers closely at her. “Like – like you’re thinking about something. You know what I mean. Something else. You’re all distracted.”
“No, I’ve been …” Carly begins, and then she shakes her head. “You know, I am a little distracted.”
“Is something wrong?” Kate asks, and god damn, she actually looks concerned. Where the hell did Carly even find someone like this? Most of the guys she’d ever been with had been about as interested in her emotional state as she’d been in theirs.
“No, you know, it’s just that I was thinking,” and here Carly pauses to smile, just a little suggestively, and shift in her seat so that Kate’s attention is maybe drawn to the way her blouse stretches across her chest, “that maybe we should go out some night. These business lunches are fun, but I was thinking maybe something a little more – uninhibited would be good, too.”
Kate frowns. “Are you trying to set me up with someone?” she asks. “Because I’ve told you before, I’m getting in touch with my inner self these days. My inner spirituality. Having some me time, taking a break from guys. There’s this whole blog I’ve been reading about it, and let me tell you, there is some great advice out there on the internet for people who just got divorced.”
“No, not like that,” Carly says, quickly, while a tiny part of her selfishly rejoices in the idea that Kate isn't interested in anyone else. It's Carly, it should be Carly who gets to take her out to meals and make her smile like this. “I just meant – dinner for the two of us or something like that.”
At that, Kate brightens. “You know, I haven’t made dinner for anyone in ages!” she declares, and Carly is about to cut her off and say that she meant dinner out, somewhere that served wine that was as expensive as their whole meal had been here and where she could wear that red dress with the whole back cut out, but Kate looks so excited about the prospect of getting to cook for someone else that she doesn’t have the heart to stop her. “Not since Mark, I mean. Not that I’m thinking about Mark. But anyways, it feels so lonely when I make dinner just for myself!”
“And it’s been years since I’ve had home cooking,” Carly says, with a fast smile. “Let’s say Friday night, seven thirty?”
And Kate agrees, and even if it isn’t exactly what Carly planned, OK, this could go places. Dinner at Kate’s new apartment. Well, at least they’ll start off only a few feet away from the bedroom, she thinks wryly, even if the red dress with the back cut out might be a little too much for an intimate dinner at a “friend’s” house.
On Friday, she takes the time to change after work and shows up in jeans and a low-cut blouse instead, because never let it be said that Carly doesn’t know how to play to her audience. She brings a bottle of wine with her and smiles widely at Kate when the other woman answers the door. Kate looks a little confused – and is that a hint of a blush? – but she accepts it gratefully.
Dinner is fun – it really is nice to have time to talk to Kate without any concern for getting back to work on time or any fear of being overheard. Kate’s cooking really is so great that Carly almost thinks she’s wasting her potential with this CEO deal and ought to go into the restaurant business. Afterwards, they open Carly’s bottle of wine. One glass in and they’re reminiscing on everything they did to Mark – Kate laughs so hard she snorts wine when she remembers that last business meeting – and after two, they’re talking just to talk, the way you do when someone else’s company is just so much fun that you can’t help basking in every word.
“Is the whole thing with Amber and your dad weird to you?” Kate asks, and then she claps her hand over her mouth. “I mean – I mean – not that it’s weird. But OK, it’s a little weird, right?”
Carly laughs. “I’m pretty used to my dad getting envel – involve – getting up to stuff like this.” She frowns. “And I mean, Amber’s a really hot woman, right? She could have any man she want, so I guess she … wants my dad? Right, that sounded wrong, I need another drink.” And she swallows down the dregs of her second glass. “But she’s hot, so – if she wants that, I’m not going to stop her.”
“God, she is hot, isn’t she?” Kate says, and she sighs. “And it’s not just that she’s young. I mean, I never looked like that – even in college I didn’t, well – let’s just say that this,” and here she makes an expansive gesture that encompasses not just her whole body but also at least half the kitchen with it, “this is me after all the yoga. And the running.”
“No, you can’t sell yourself short like that,” Carly says. Suddenly it doesn’t just matter that she thinks Kate’s hot, because Kate needs to know that she’s hot, too, right? “You’ve got – you’ve got really lovely hair. No, I don’t mean that like an insult – it’s long and it’s so wavy and pretty. And if you wanted to, you could wear something a bit lower cut and you could work some good cleavage, you know?” She casts a critical eye at Kate. “Long V-neck, short skirt – or, no, maybe a dress. Blue, maybe. You’d be stunning.” She realizes she’s rhapsodized maybe a little too long on the subject, because Kate’s looking at her a little funny, so she falls silent.
“You really think so?” she asks.
Carly swallows, and instead of the kind of line she’s so good at delivering, the truth comes out. “Yeah. You’re beautiful, Kate.”
Kate leans forward, and Carly thinks she’s going to whisper something to her, in some weird sleepover fashion, but instead, to Carly’s great surprise, she kisses her. After a few stunned seconds, Carly kisses back, because OK, she was not expecting Kate to be this much with the program, but she’s seeing some great potential here. Kate kisses enthusiastically and messily, and it certainly isn’t the most technically skilled kiss of Carly’s life, but it just might be one of the most meaningful.
“Oh, good,” Kate says, when she breaks away. “I’ve been thinking about maybe doing something like that for a little while, and Amber told me to go for it, but I was kind of worrying that you weren’t going to –” and Carly cuts her off and kisses her again.
Ten minutes and several discarded items of clothing later, they make it across Kate’s apartment into her bedroom. Then they have to break apart to kick out Kate’s dog, who has taken up residence on her bed, and Carly collapses into a fit of giggles as Kate tries to herd the dog out of the room and get the door closed. This time, it’s Kate’s turn to shut her up with a well-timed kiss. And then one thing follows another and pretty soon they’re naked and figuring things out, and Kate mumbles something about having read about this on one of her blogs and tries to get them to try scissoring on their first go (which OK, even Carly knew that wasn’t going to happen), but eventually they work out where all the limbs go and how this is going to work. After that, it’s just heat and pleasure and Kate’s gasps and steady stream of words and Carly’s own quiet moans.
Afterwards, when they’re lying in Kate’s bed in the warm darkness and Carly’s still catching her breath, Carly rests her head against Kate’s shoulder and throws an arm over her chest, the way she’d do with any man she slept with – and then the rise and fall of Kate’s breasts gets in the way before she figures out how to do this, how to sleep with a woman. Because they are doing this, and if Carly has any say – and she’s pretty sure she does – they’re going to keep doing this for as long as they can. So it might be a little awkward, a little tough at first, but they can make it work. Her arm settles under Kate’s breasts and her hand curls around her shoulder, and she snuggles in to sleep.
“You know,” Kate says, shifting under her, “you remember when we first met?”
Carly nods and doesn’t say anything, because she’s a big believer in falling asleep in the afterglow.
“And I told you I couldn’t compete with you?”
At that, Carly turns her head just slightly and plants a lazy kiss and Kate’s collarbone. “Mm, no, you don’t have to worry about that,” she mumbles. Kate sounds concerned, and she knows she should listen, but – afterglow. It’s a thing.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” Kate says quickly, and she tousles one hand through Carly’s hair. “What I meant was – it turns out it’s Mark who can’t compete with us.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Kate smiles at her and Carly can just make out the flash of her white teeth in the darkness. So Carly smiles back, and then she really does fall asleep in the afterglow.