Last night, my foot had barely touched the landing outside when Eden pounced, her hands and mouth all over me. The house behind us had gone completely dark, the caterers and cleaning crew gone, the guests drunk and passed out in bed.
I didn’t ask any questions; we simply made love on the lawn, blades of grass tickling us in the weirdest places on our naked bodies. Afterward I found a discarded beach towel for us to cuddle on. It was risky, even at the late hour, but the whole scene would be perfect for my book. This is what I meant when I said I have to live the love I write.
Eden brought her face up toward mine. She looked like she was going to speak, but she turned her gaze down. Her cheek rested softly against my chest.
“What’s up?” I asked. “I can tell you’re holding back.”
“That astrologer,” Eden started tentatively. “She said some things. That maybe I’d made sacrifices that haven’t proven to be exactly what I expected. Or maybe they were things I thought I wanted at the time, but now they aren’t.”
“I heard something similar in my reading,” I shared. Old choices made by an old Adam.
After months of Eden insisting our current arrangement was fine while I was hungry for more, she and I were finally moving in the same direction.
Eden sat up and slipped on my T-shirt. Her expression turned serious. “I want us to be more than we are right now.”
Right now?
Was there a comma in that sentence? It would change the meaning dramatically. Surely she didn’t mean then and there, at midnight, naked in the grass on vacation. Eden watched me expectantly.
“I want more too,” I said. “Soon.”
I agreed, but I didn’t appreciate her tone of urgency. I pushed her head down onto my shoulder and stroked her hair lovingly.
Big changes cannot be rushed. That’s how mistakes are made.
AIMEE
Freshly showered with Alo leggings and a lightweight cropped hoodie, I meet Farah outside Rini’s study after her reading.
“That’s not what we’re wearing for this,” I say when Farah emerges with Rini behind her.
Farah and I coordinated all our outfits while we packed for Stars Harbor. We agreed that an exercise called Sun Worship at an astrological retreat did not call for swimsuits but for athleisure wear.
“What’s wrong with this?” Farah asks, pulling at her Vuori joggers.
“Maybe change your top?”
“I’ll meet you ladies on the back deck in five,” Rini says.
“Were you listening in on my reading?” Farah asks.
“No, why, were you spilling your darkest secrets?”
Farah ignores me—about the outfit and the reading—and walks toward the back door.
“Oh my God, you were.” I scramble to catch up with her. “You have deep dark secrets?”
She stonewalls me, but I’m confused. I thought she was simple; brilliant but totally straightforward. What could she be hiding?
There is no way she’d have an affair; she would end her marriage before crossing a line of impropriety. She’s got an iron will. She’s definitely not a gambler, and I cannot imagine her hooked on prescription pills. What other secrets are there at our stage of life? What kind of counseling would she want from an astrologer? I get no answers on the short walk from Rini’s study to the back patio, where Margot and Eden wait.
“Rini said she would be right out,” Farah reports.
“Sun Worship, anyone know what this is?” Eden asks. “I doubt it’s about our favorite celebrity couples.”
“Ah! That’s why we say ship? As in worshipping,” I say.
But Margot pipes up instead. “Reviews specifically say to go into this part of the weekend with no preconceived notions. There were a few people who included ‘spoilers’ and other guests had them taken down. I’m so intrigued I can’t stand it.”
Rini appears at the edge of our table, as if out of nowhere. That was quicker than five minutes. It reminds me of when she surprised us at arrival. I don’t know if I’m not paying attention in this house or she’s the stealthiest walker around.
“Follow me,” she says.
I pull the sunglasses down from the top of my head over my eyes. Rini leads us along the edge of the property, which makes a sharp turn one hundred feet to the south. From our suites all we can see is the stunning, unobstructed view of the water. But here, over the beach grass, the steep drop to the beach below is evident.
Rini stops near the edge of a bluff and turns her back to the ocean. We form a semicircle around her.
“Bold. Blunt. Ambitious. Relentless,” Rini says. “If you take these qualities and bestow them upon a man, he is a leader. He’s a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the head of a hedge fund, or a politician. These same exact qualities in a woman make her a bitch, someone to shun and shame. A psycho. A mean girl. A bad mother. No one aspirational or admirable. As a result, most women have learned to repress their masculinity.”
Rini takes a step back, closer to the edge of the bluff. Beach grass wraps around her leg. I scratch my calf, imagining the tickle on my own leg.
“In the Western world, we confuse energetic qualities with gender. Men must be masculine, women must be feminine. We make them polarities and give them bodies to live in. But no man should be without femininity and no woman should be without masculinity. That’s what I’m here to guide you through today.”
Rini raises her hands to the sky—the sun. She then joins her palms together and takes a moment to look each of us in the eye. She begins with Margot, then Eden, Farah, and lastly, me. She doesn’t break eye contact, holding it longer than is comfortable, longer than she did with any of the other women. My body sweats, trying to warn me of something.
As I’m on the verge of understanding her silent communication, Rini disappears over the cliff edge. The other women scream, snapping me out of my trance.
“What did you do, Aimee?” Margot says.
