Page 16 of Just Like in the Movies
I wiped my eyes and my nose, then leaned back on the bench and let the sun warm my face and dry any remaining dampness on my cheeks. Mrs. Costner gave me a few minutes to collect myself, then patted my thigh and said, "She was a good one, for one of those Hollywood types."
"She was," I said, my eyes still closed. "She left me some money."
"Money doesn't fix everything."
I smiled and shook my head. "No it doesn't, but that wasn't what she was trying to do." I thought about what having this money could mean to me, what it could let me do. I thought about the freedom it gave me. "She wanted me to be independent. And she made sure that it’s mine alone, even if I get married."
"Well, that's giving her credit for more sense than I thought she had," Mrs. Costner said acerbically. "What do you plan to do with this new independence?"
I opened my eyes and sat up. "I have no idea." But the germ of one was glimmering in the corner of my mind, a crazy idea. It was stupid, but then again, I was an omega. What else did anyone expect of an omega? The only ambition we were supposed to have was a marriage above our station.
Did it make me traditional and ordinary that I wanted to give Mike the chance he had asked for? Or was this me just wanting a little revenge, a little sauce for the goose but this time applied to the gander?
And why the hell were the omegas always the geese? Why couldn’t we be the gander?
Shaking my head, I shoved that question away for some other time, when I had less on my mind and more alcohol in my system. Carefully, I folded the letter and put it back into the envelope, then tucked it securely into the pants pocket of my scrubs. “How’s the novel?” I asked. She’d put her bookmark back in it and laid it beside her on the bench.
“Oh, it’s fine. I wouldn’t call the main characters stupid, but they’d do a lot better if they justtalkedto each other.”
“Do you want me to find you a different one?” There was a book bus that came around once a week to let the residents trade out their library books, but there were always a few large text copies of donated novels hanging around.
“Oh, no, dear. It’s a good book. But they’re about to have wild, unbridled sex and I thought I’d save that part for bedtime.”
I choked at her words, or more at the implication that went with them, but I was saved from my imminent death by one of the other care workers coming out the door to relieve me and send me back to escorting more residents around the building.
It was only later, while I was stripping beds and remaking them fresh, that her comment about the characters needing to talk to each other came back to me. Which made me wonder if it could really be that simple. And what would happen if Mike and I just…talked?
