Siobhan Sadler's old rectangular dinner table was supported at the corners by plain, functional, hand-turned legs. The three wide planks of oak that formed the tabletop had been dove tailed together expertly and the dark patina on the wood had all but hidden the joints. It was a sturdy table, a modest table and made no pretense about being other than what it was; a few shallow rings at the center and bottom of each leg felt less decorative and more like an abandoned capitulation to style. Delphine smiled as she looked around the family house, which was attached to, but largely separate from, the guesthouse, noticing that all of the furnishing evidenced a similar confident humility.
She was unsure why but she had expected hyperbole in the décor; cowhide chairs, longhorns mounted above doorways, a wagon wheel coffee table at least, but a simple low profile couch sat on one long side of a coffee table, which was a set piece with the one in the dining area. Two chairs sat akimbo to the ends of the coffee table; their upholstered seats matching the couch; their backs and arms formed by unembellished spindle wood. A cylindrical vase of clear galss sat in the center of the table; wildflowers drew the outdoors in. The end table held a pot-bellied lamp whose flat beige shade diffused its soft warm light.
The walls were covered in framed snap shots. In some of them Delphine could recognize her hostess or the three siblings through the ages, but there were other characters, who seemed to belong, but whom she had not met. A tall man wearing an apron appeared in two of the pictures, and upon studying, Delphine noticed that he was apron-less in three others. She also noticed a picture of Cosima's mother, bundled up against a chill, leaning against the corral fence and kissing a tall man with dark features; her hands pulled him to her by the lapels of his barn jacket. The image felt like love and inspired in the blonde melancholy and hope simultaneously. She enjoyed looking at the photos, especially the ones of Cosima. Her favorite, and the one in front of which she had paused to ruminate, showed Cosima atop Darwin, the horse's posture contorted in a way Delphine had never seen; his front feet were spread out far to the sides as it seemed a cow was about to barrel into his chest. Cosima, tall and calm in the saddle, looked down; her body implied that it was about the break to the right.
'That's my favorite, too." the voice coming over her left shoulder made her start slightly. IT was Siobhan come to visit with her as Cosima and her brothers finished setting the table. "You can see what she's thinking."
"She's going to move right." Delphine stated immediately, as though it was the obvious answer to a question that hadn't been asked. Siobhan's eye lit at the comment.
"Mmmmmmm." The older woman nodded appreciatively. "You should see them in person; Cosima and that horse…." her voice trailed off, savoring a memory for which words could do no justice, things she wasn't saying revealing the deep affection Mrs. S felt for her daughter, "Quite a sight, the two of them."
"I would like to see that, very much." Delphine stated, simply. Sincerely.
"I'm sure that can be arranged." The older woman whispered, nudging Delphine's shoulder with her own. Delphine smiled broadly at the casual gesture; the tiniest of laughs rolled through her chest.
Remembering Cosima's reserve, Delphine added, "If Cosima wishes to share with me." Delphine's smile tightened then; Siobhan noticed.
"You care for my daughter." It was a statement, not a question.
"I do," Delphine's answer came without hesitation. She wondered if they were talking about the same sort of care, the kind Delphine could never have intended but felt nonetheless.
"It's written all over your face, kitten," Mrs. S put an arm around Delphine's shoulder and gave her a squeeze, "and I'm happy for you both."
Delphine wanted to protest, but she could not manufacture an objection in the face of such sincerity, even if Cosima might have wanted her too. Nothing in Siobhan Sadler's home brooked pretense.
"You two done havin' your kumbaya over there?" Cosima interrupted, "Dinner's on the table!" Both women smiled in the direction of the table and broke from their postures toward the table.
Dinner was a whirlwind of stories, laughter and questions. Delphine, through relentless inquiry, discovered that Siobhan had bought the Double S thirty years earlier, from the bank. The previous owner had lost everything in a rather protracted descent into gambling addiction, so she took what she had saved working double shifts as a maid at the Riverside and moonlighting as a dealer at Harrah's and sunk it into a dream of self sufficiency. She had learned fast about ranching, getting a break neck education from the hands, who were grateful not only to have employment, but also to find that their new boss had no aversion to hard work and never asked more of them than she was willing to do herself.
Paul and Donnie had grown up idolizing the ranch hands and had never considered leaving. Cosima loved the ranch, the animals, and was obviously deeply connected to her family, and they supported her desire to study neurobiology. Cosima had ambitions of being the first female professor at the University of Nevada when she finished graduate school, hoping that pursuing her dreams would not preclude her from settling close to home.
"They'd be idiots not to create an entire department just for you, sis!" Paul said, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. "I'm so proud of you!"
"Thanks P." she almost blushed under his affectionate gaze. Delphine was enamored with this family. Not a blood relation at the table, though technically Paul was distantly related to Siobhan and had come to her as an infant after his parents were killed in a car accident, and yet there was more genuine sense of belonging here than she had ever felt in her biological family.
The pause in Delphine's inquiries opened the door for Siobhan. "Tell us about you, Delphine. Please, we'd love to know you better."
Cosima interjected, "S, it's none of our business. You don't have to say anything you don't want to Delphine." Cosima assured her.
"Merci, Cosima," Delphine was grateful for the thought, but dismissed it. "It's OK. What would you like to know?"
It was Donnie who spoke, "Anything you feel comfortable telling us. What do you do for fun? What do you study? What brought you to Reno?" he added ironically
The table chuckled, and Delphine engaged in a spirit of levity. "Well, I think we all know what brought me to Reno…" she offered in a faux whisper, pausing intentionally, "a train." And though she cherished the laughter her wit had inspired, she followed up with a more sincere confession, "Non, obviously I am here to get a divorce; when we were engaged my husband celebrated my studies; he even seemed interested occasionally in my work with genetic disorders and syndromes. I was surprised to find as the wedding drew closer that it seemed he did not expect me to continue in lieu of becoming his wife."
Cosima nodded her head. "Like with a capital W…"
"Exactly!" Delphine affirmed; she intentionally locked eyes on Cosima.
"What do you mean a capital W?" Paul inquired.
"It's a poem, by Emily Dickinson," Delphine elaborated, not breaking her gaze across the table.
"A great poem. It's about understanding your potential and not being allowed to realize it." Cosima elaborated. Delphine's eyes closed for a moment, savoring Cosima's succinct interpretation.
"That sounds depressing," Paul interjected.
"Or empowering." Cosima countered, talking to Paul, but connecting with Delphine.
"It's so nice to meet someone who gets it." The blonde added, almost forgetting that they were not alone, but remembering in time to elaborate for the benefit of the others, "The hardest part was that no one seemed to think his assumptions were unusual. My girlfriends were so envious that I was marrying at all, let alone into such an affluent and influential family. My mother assured me I would not feel the loss of my own dreams once I became a mother, and my father simply kissed my forehead and called me princess. Which is what Phillip called me also, ironically."
"You must have felt very alone," Siobhan offered gently.
"It is interesting you should say so." Delphine countered, "but, in actuality, I felt quite crowded, like there was no room for me, the real me, the whole me, in my own life. With my friends I felt like a fraud, pretending to me enamored by my future as much as they were. Around my father and Phillip in my life I felt like an object, a quaint thing, waiting to become what they wanted me to be. Around my mother I felt like a disappointment; I did not want for myself what she wanted for me. It was maddening, truly, feeling the weight of everyone else's expectations… eventually something just broke inside, and I realized with absolute certainty that I would rather be alone than caught in the middle of everyone else's ideas of who I should be. I needed to listen to one voice, my own voice. So here I am."
For a long moment no one spoke. Concerned she had imposed on their polite compassion, Delphine apologized, "Je suis desolée. That was perhaps more than you wanted to hear from me."
"How courageous you are, my dear." Siobhan affirmed, "and not just for leaving your marriage, but for your honesty with us, as well."
"Well, it is very easy to be honest where there is kindness." Delphine observed.
"Can I just say, I'm pretty damn impressed, Delphine." Donnie added. "Most folks who roll in here have just about no clue how they ended up here. It seems life just sort of happened to them, and they spend six weeks trying to understand what went wrong. I tip my hat to you darlin'. " His observation made her blush.
"Merci, Gordo," Delphine grinned, hoping her use of the familial nickname would help restore the sense of ease at the table and not be seen as presumptuous.
"You know," he added, "I have never liked that nickname, but I could get used to hearing it from your lips Delphine!" he winked playfully.
Cosima had yet to speak in light of Delphine's revelations; in fact a quiet sort of shock had settled over her brain. She had meant to know these things about Delphine sooner, to have asked these questions before she had invented their answers, before deciding that Delphine couldn't understand her.
Hearing her brother's flirtatious comment brought her back to the table and the conversation. She couldn't resist the urge to knock Donnie down a peg, since he had been so bold as to flirt with her woman.
"Don't pay him any attention, Delphine." she looked mischievously at her brother, "He's just excited because you're the first woman who has ever said his name besides me and S!"
"Ooooooooooohweeee." Paul howled, enthusiastically supporting his sister's harassment of their brother.
Cosima laughed out loud, clapping her hands. She ducked her head quickly to the left as a dinner rolls whizzed by her ear!
"That's it monkey! You are gonna pay!" Donnie jumped up from the table, his chair legs screeching across the polished wood floor; Cosima's chair flew back, tipping over as she made to flee out the side door with Donnie hot on her heels. Paul blazed through the door behind them to watch the chase.
Siobhan and Delphine remained seated at the table, laughing at the hijinks of the siblings; Delphine in slack-jawed, wide-eyed amusement. "Sometimes I wonder when they will stop acting like children," Siobhan exhaled, bemused, "but more often than not, I thank God they are just as they are."
"They are charming " Delphine countered; her laughter subsided and her face settled into a wistful smile. Siobhan wondered at the sadness she saw in Delphine's expression, but before she could ask about it, the sounds of the chase outside shifted in Donnie's favor. Cosima's tone became pleading; she demanded to be put down. Upon hearing the change, Delphine's attention flew to the door and she rocketed toward the exit to observe, but before she got there the sound of a large volume of water being displaced silenced Cosima's cries, which were quickly replaced by peals of raucous laughter in three distinct voices.
Siobhan who had seen this drama play out numerous times before had left the room briefly only to return with a towel. She laughed at her daughter who appeared at the side door in hysterics, water dripping from her drenched hair and clothes, having been deposited in the horses water trough in retribution for her affront to Donnie's intimate prowess. Delphine, completely smitten with the wet cat of a girl in front of her and overwhelmed by the desire to wrap Cosima in a tender embrace, took the towel from Siobhan and wrapped it around Cosima shoulders, rubbing her upper arms to warm her.
When she slid her hand between her legs that night, Delphine's mind was dizzy with questions and focused on answers. Scenes from her evening with Cosima's family swirled through her mind. Siobhan was happy for them; Cosima wanted her; she had kissed a woman; no, she had kissed Cosima. Cosima was a woman; she was attracted to Cosima. Logically, that meant she was attracted to women, yet the syllogism fell apart in the testing.
She could not reconcile the two thoughts in her mind. She could not generalize the feeling Cosima inspired in her to thoughts of other women. If her attempt to sway the direction of her current imaginings was any indication, she could not generalize those feelings to men either. The feelings it seemed, for now, were wholly unique to Cosima. So she gave herself over to the sensations in an attempt to understand it, to understand herself, to find the answers she and Cosima both seemed to need.
She started by remembering her lips pressed to Cosima's… no… it had started sooner than that… it had happened so many times: with each affected "darlin';" with the promises of Pleasure Domes; with the weaving together of fingers; with the lingering of embraces; with the flight of horses; with countless stolen glances; and with radiance of the setting of the sun. It had happened so many times already, and it had only been a matter of days, hours really since she had first felt it at all.
She pinpointed the moment just prior to kissing Cosima as the moment when she felt the most delicious draw of longing. The memory of the ache triggered it again: the wonderful, all-encompassing need she felt to taste Cosima's lips, to make Cosima hers. Behind veiled eyes she was again sliding the silk of Cosima's hair between her fingers, feeling the moisture leave her mouth, and pulling Cosima to her.
The pressure attempting to explode through the walls of her chest, that radiated in a painful arc across the median of her cranium, that throbbed above each of her ears, that pressed against the back of her eyes, she recognized as arousal, desire, connected deeply to the mammalian brain, the part of the brain, Delphine noted, ironically, responsible for the drive to reproduce.
She supposed that the sweet stretch of her sunken stomach and the familiar ache of arousal she felt when she kissed Cosima would bring the physiological responses associated with typical sexual function. Having conjured a connection to those strong psychosexual impulses, she was prepared to find evidence of her body preparing for intercourse. What she found, however, as her fingers approached her sex was a sensitivity she had never experienced; a radiant heat and intense wetness that shocked her, making her gasp at the lightest brush of her fingers across oh-so-swollen flesh.
At this finding, her neo-cortex buzzed. Electric currents zipped though her neurons, which sizzled in reaction, a physiological echo of learning, of her brain rewiring itself to make room for the wanting of Cosima. She yearned to push the limits of this learning, to increase the connections and associations between her existing synapses and her new desire, to increase the number and strength of those bridges that she might easily access them should she be allowed to cross them again. She wanted to test the limits of this learning.
Delphine explored, without urgency and in full bloom, allowing her body and mind to uncover what truths they could find together, her hips, her fingers, and her mouth helping her mind to form new synaptic connections; reordering and redefining possibility.