The Other Side of Ruth

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“Mrs. Galloway!”

Ruth’s spirits soared on the scent of peppermint hot chocolate...

“Mrs. Galloway, wait up!”

...until she heard her name called across the café.

“Mrs. Galloway, over here!”

Her guidance-counsellor name.

Couldn’t she make it home from school once, just once, without another “What are you up to these days?” conversation with students she barely remembered?

Maybe Ruth could escape the crowded coffee shop without acknowledging whoever had called her name. The door was right there. Definitely do-able, and seriously tempting, but it would be rude, wouldn’t it? Mustn’t be rude.

“Mrs. Galloway?”

Setting her cup down, Ruth turned to see who’d hollered. At one time, a former student would necessarily have been a young person, but after thirty years doing this job, a former student could be forty plus.

God, that made her feel old.

Ruth scanned the café, but she still wasn’t sure who’d said her name—not until a girl in a bright orange hoodie bustled through the crowd. “Hey! I thought it was you. How’s it going?”

“Fine... yes... thanks.”

Ruth searched the girl’s face for identity clues. More and more, these days, she drew a blank. Many young people had passed through her office, over the years.

“And yourself?” Ruth asked, still groping for a name. “What are you up to?”

“f**k-all right now.”

Cursing. Okay. This is new.

“Why?” the girl asked. “Wanna do something?”

“Ohhh...” Ruth didn’t quite know what to say. “I was just heading home, actually.”

“Awesome. I’ll walk with you.”

What?

Ruth watched the girl tear open packet after little brown packet of natural sugar and dump each one into her black coffee. Then stir, stir, stir, and top it off with as much cream as the cup would hold.

Who are you?

The girl’s features seemed vaguely familiar: full face, strong jaw, hair an explosion of black curls with orange highlights nearly the same colour as her vibrant hoodie. Those deep, dark eyes flickered with impish heat that tied Ruth’s stomach in knots. Beautiful, wide smile, and not too much makeup. Skin as smooth and fragrant as coffee with cream. Mid-twenties, maybe? Ruth had never been any good at guessing women’s ages. Men were easier to peg, easier to pinpoint. Women mystified her.

“You still live on Estate Street, yeah?”

“Yes...”

How do you know where I live?

Ruth placed a lid on her hot chocolate, but it was too big. Other customers were edging toward the counter now, and she felt strangely anxious as she struggled to figure out which lid would fit her cup. She wasn’t normally so stupid, or so easily frazzled.

“Tricky little fuckers, aren’t they?” the unnamed girl asked as she picked out a lid and snapped it on Ruth’s drink. “I worked at a coffee shop in university. Now I can spot a medium lid at a hundred paces.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.”

The girl opened the café door and Ruth followed her into the brisk autumn afternoon. “I worked a lot of s**t jobs in university,” she said. “I guess everyone does, if they’re paying their own way.”

“Indeed,” Ruth agreed, thought she’d never been concerned about money, even in her youth.

“If I’d gone into engineering like Mom and Dad wanted, they’d have paid for everything. But f**k that, right? I’d rather serve up a billion non-fat decaf vanilla soy lattes and go to art school than take money from Daddy Dearest and spend the rest of my life as some douchebag engineer.”

“Chasing a treasured dream is enviable, certainly.” Ruth’s throat tightened, and she took a long sip of hot chocolate in hopes that the peppermint would soothe it. “Mind you, I always tell my kids to keep their options open.”

The girl looked surprised, as if Ruth had unleashed some sort of Jerry Springer revelation on her. “You’ve got kids?”

“My kids... at school.” Ruth waited for recognition to spark, but the girl’s face remained a puzzled mask. “I’m a guidance counsellor.”

The girl tilted her head, slowing her pace, squinting. “Oh yeah. I knew that, I think.”

Now Ruth was really confused.

If this girl hadn’t been a student, who on earth was she?

“So... you went to art school, then?”

“Yeppers.” She passed her coffee cup from one hand to the other and stuck out her wrist. The bulky bracelet she had on was made of bottle caps pasted over with images of 1950s housewives. “Now I make jewellery.”

“I see.” Ruth tried to smile, but that was really quite an unsightly trinket.

They moved off the sidewalk while a neighbour pushed an enormous stroller past.

“Ugly kid,” the mystery girl said, loudly enough to embarrass Ruth by association.

In truth, Ruth hadn’t looked. She’d found it easier to move children off her radar. If she didn’t see them, they didn’t exist. Simple enough.

“Shitballs.” The girl pointed up the street. “My dad’s home early. Damn it! I thought I’d have a few more hours of not being nagged.”

Ruth followed her finger to a car parked in the neighbour’s drive.

“The second I walk through that door he’s gonna be all, ‘What time did you wake up, Agnes? Did you look for a job today, Agnes? Well, what did you do all day?’ Bugs the f**k out of me, you know? It’s my life. I work on my own schedule.”

“Agnes!”

The girl looked both startled and puzzled in light of Ruth’s exclamation. “Yes...?”

It was Agnes!

Not a former student at all! This was neighbour-girl Agnes. Ruth had never been terribly close with her parents, but they’d lived down the block for... oh, had to be thirty years. Nevina, Agnes’s mother, had once offered to teach her a few Guyanese cooking techniques, but that was years ago. Agnes’s father, Maurice, was more the old money country club type. He met Nevina on vacation, married her and brought her home to Canada.

That was the story, at least. Ruth only ever heard neighbourhood gossip second-hand, so God only knew how true it was. The street-wide zeitgeist presumed Maurice a passport for Nevina, who was sure to run off given the slightest opportunity. But here they were, thirty years and three kids later, still together.

Goes to show what neighbourhood gossip was worth.

“If you’d rather, you could hide at my house,” Ruth said, though she wasn’t sure why she was extending this offer. “If you’d like to duck your father for a few extra minutes, that is.”

“Sweet! Thanks, Mrs. Galloway.” Agnes put an arm around Ruth’s shoulder and squeezed.

Ruth’s knees buckled, but she recovered without dropping her hot chocolate. “Please, you must call me Ruth. We’re both adults, after all.”

Both adults. Hard to believe. Seemed like just the other day this girl was running through sprinkler in her bathing suit. Then, in her teenaged years, the rumour mill had pegged Agnes as a ‘bad influence.’ Ruth recalled hearing through the grapevine that Agnes’s favourite sport was shoplifting, and she’d encouraged other girls to try their hands at the game.

Then again, such rumours could have related more to the colour of Agnes’s skin than her actual actions or behaviours. People around here pretended not to exert racial prejudices, but this had always been an overwhelmingly white neighbourhood.

Ruth led Agnes to the house, feeling exceedingly tense as she unlocked the door. The girl’s arm around her shoulder was a gesture of affection, she realized, but affection had become a lost art for Ruth.

She managed to slip away by sitting on the stairs and easing off her shoes.

“Make yourself at home, Agnes. My only request is that you remove your sneakers.”

Leaning against the wall, Agnes pulled her laces from under the tongue of her hightops. Goodness, Ruth clearly remembered the first time those shoes had been in fashion. Agnes would have been a baby, then.

The neighbour girl had been gangly, growing up, but she’d filled out nicely. Ruth couldn’t help watching as she set her coffee cup on the front hall table and peeled off her hideous hoodie. Underneath, she wore a threadbare Iggy Pop concert T-shirt. Her breasts stretched the white fabric, which was so thin her bright pink b*a glowed through like a beacon.

Ruth realized she was staring, and quickly looked down at her dowdy orthopaedics. When she dared to glance back, Agnes picked up her coffee and chewed the plastic lid, contemplating Ruth with a look so seductive it felt almost threatening.

Scarlet heat tore up Ruth’s neck, blazing in her cheeks.

Agnes swept across the hardwood in stocking feet. Her socks were black with little white ghosts. “You still live with that bald guy?” she asked.

“Lawrence? Yes.” Ruth watched Agnes slip into the front room. She ached to follow, but couldn’t bring herself to move. “That bald guy is my husband.”

A sour sensation rolled through Ruth’s stomach.

My husband.

She took a sip of peppermint hot chocolate, and that helped.

Agnes tilted her head to read the titles on the built-in bookshelf. “I always thought you were too good for that dude.”

Ruth watched through the stair railings, not knowing quite how to respond. Too good for him? Was that a compliment?

“You always looked so young and beautiful, out there working in your garden. He looked old. Way too old for you.”

Ruth laughed without meaning to. “Lawrence looks younger today than he did ten years ago. Men are lucky that way.”

Agnes looked Ruth straight in the eye. “Bet you could still get lucky if you really wanted to.”

Was that... a come-on?

Ruth’s brain sizzled.

The heat in Agnes’s gaze travelled the hallway, unhindered by distance. This situation was strange. Simply too strange.

Rumour pegged Agnes as a girl who liked girls, even in high school. But why on earth would a beautiful, buxom young woman be interested in Ruth? She wouldn’t.

Agnes hadn’t moved, and yet Ruth felt the girl’s hot breath all over her skin, making her prickle inside and out.

“Well?” Agnes asked.

Ruth’s tongue felt too thick for her mouth. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Agnes approached slowly. Her hips surged side to side. She had on a black belt, though her tight grey jeans would surely have stayed up on their own. The buckle read ‘Pet My’ and it was set against the retro image of a snarling Halloween cat. Another Agnes original, no doubt.

What must her father think of this so-called art?

“If you ever wanted to...” Standing at the base of the stairs, Agnes leaned in, leaned close. “I mean... do you want to?”

That’s when Ruth realized she was about to get kissed.

She focused on Agnes’s pink lips because, goodness, they were so full and beautiful even without cosmetic enhancement. She found herself drawn to that mouth, moth to flame.

Ruth’s chocolate-mint breath bounced from Agnes’s lips back to hers when she said, “Sure I want to.”

When Agnes’s hands landed at Ruth’s sides, attraction transformed to fear. Ruth tried to escape, but Agnes insisted. The back of Ruth’s head met a stair. Nowhere to hide. Their chests touched with every breath, and Ruth found herself hoping the girl would press those gorgeous breasts fully against hers. She could feel that sensation on the horizon, like a blast of hot anticipation.

Yes, she wanted it.

Agnes kissed her, softly, on the lips, and Ruth’s whole body turned liquid. She would have dripped down the stairs if Agnes hadn’t been there to hold her in place. When that youthful tongue infiltrated her mouth, she moaned. The heat was unbearable. She felt itchy on the inside, where nothing but a kiss could scratch—a cause and cure wrapped into one.

How long since she’d been kissed this way?

Since she’d kissed her husband, even?

In all the years they’d known each other Ruth had never kissed Lawrence like this. He’d appealed to her intellect, not her body. Not her mouth. Not even her heart, perhaps.

Theirs was a marriage of minds.

She pressed forward and felt the pressure she’d hoped for, the beautiful bliss of Agnes’s breasts. She wanted desperately to touch, but she resisted because, of course, it wouldn’t be proper. It wouldn’t be at all proper to grasp those gorgeous mounds of flesh, to squeeze them like ripe melons, feel them yielding to her palms. It wouldn’t be right to strip Agnes bare and suck her n*****s, or to reach down and find the girl’s wetness.

Oh, yes!

What Ruth wouldn’t give to plant her face between Agnes’ thighs, lick that girl languidly, luxuriously. Take those lovely lips in her mouth and suck. Ruth would have her screaming to the rafters, crying out for more and then begging for mercy.

Agnes eased away. Her lips glowed bright red and glistened with wetness.

Ruth’s heart pounded in her ears, but astonishment kept her from moving or speaking. In any case, what would she say? Thank you?

Smiling distantly, Agnes backed away.

This was a dream. A good dream. A fantasy dream.

Ruth could feel her body throbbing, pulsing right between the legs.

Agnes grabbed her hoodie, tossed it over her arm, and picked up her shoes.

“You know where I live,” the girl whispered in a voice that struck Ruth as both gritty and dark.

She slipped out of the house in stocking feet.

Ruth watched through the window as Agnes stepped down the garden path. Her large breasts bounced when she turned onto the sidewalk.

Returning to the stairs, Ruth sat sipping her cold hot chocolate until the sun cast orange streaks across the far wall. She ought to start dinner, but she wasn’t very hungry. She’d long ago given up playing the good wife, cooking for her husband. They lived as roommates. Housemates. She’d come to the realization long ago, but staying together this way seemed preferable to anything else she could think of.

Now a new alternative presented itself. A strange, curvaceous, kissable alternative. And Ruth found herself undeniably curious.