Micky’s brain was already going into overdrive. Robin had just called her a lesbian. How politically incorrect was that? Surely, after having told her about being married to Darren for eighteen years, someone like Robin, someone who had to deal with insensitivity and prejudice in her job all the time, would at least assume Micky was bisexual.
“I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?” Robin asked.
Micky tried to rearrange her features and look less vexed, but she figured it wasn’t really working. “That’s the first time I’ve been referred to as a lesbian. A bit of a leap seeing as I’ve only slept with a woman once.” Thankfully, Micky kept her voice from wavering.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I was more speaking in general. I wouldn’t want to presume anything about you. Though I am curious as to how you see yourself?”
The question was bound to come at Micky—hard and fast—at some point. If she’d allowed herself more time to think this through, instead of being carried away by images of Robin’s hand on her breast and her face disappearing between her legs, perhaps Micky would have an answer. But who was she kidding? Micky had had an entire lifetime to think this through. More time was not what she needed. She just needed to stop being so afraid.
Micky shook her head. Amber had, in many different ways, tried to coax an answer to this question from her, but this was not Amber sitting across from her. This was Robin.
“I don’t consider myself a lesbian.” Micky remembered the word latebian she had picked up in that magazine. “I guess I’m… questioning.”
Robin made a guttural sound in the back of her throat and just nodded. Perhaps she was expecting more of an actual answer. Micky felt compelled to fill the silence caused by Robin’s lack of reply.
“Sleeping with a woman once at the age of forty-four hardly makes me a lesbian.” There was the defensiveness again. Amber had called her out on it many a time. Micky didn’t know why she just couldn’t have a relaxed conversation about this. This was her life, after all. One of the most important aspects of it. It was, whether she openly admitted to it or not, one of the reasons she had left Darren.
“I’m not asking you to label yourself,” Robin said. “I’m just curious, just trying to find out what makes you tick.”
You, Micky wanted to shout. Your lips on mine, your hands on my skin. How could she be overflowing with this kind of lust, yet, at the same time, unable to admit what was so obvious. Because it was complicated. That had always been Micky’s go-to answer when questioned by Amber.
“I’m gay, Micky,” Amber used to say. “Nothing you tell me will even remotely shock me.”
It was the word shock that got to Micky the most. Because she had shocked herself. And if she did at some point come out, tell someone using actual words and her voice, say it out loud, what would that make her and the life she had lived so far? Micky remembered the spectrum Amber had talked about. How things can change over time. She might have been besotted with Darren when they married, but there was one thing she could state with clear certainty: not even at the height of their happiness, had sex with Darren come close to that one night with Robin.
Though, of course, Micky could come up with all sorts of logical explanations for that as well. When she and Darren first got together, she was in her early twenties and nowhere near the peak of her sexuality. Robin had just caught her at the right time: sex-deprived and at an age when, if women’s magazines were to be believed, her sexuality was blossoming like never before.
“All I can tell you at this point is that I sure wouldn’t mind repeating what happened last Tuesday.” Wow. Had Micky actually just said that? She guessed it was a case of her lips overflowing with what her heart was full of—or at least a slew of other body parts.
“This is exactly what makes you so intriguing to me.” Robin pinned her gaze on Micky, stared at her for a long while without so much as blinking. “To me, it’s so clear that you do know what you want, but you have all this inner turmoil going on, which I understand.” She leaned over the table. “I was in bed with you, Micky. I know. You didn’t lie when we were between the sheets, when you were kissing me, when you slipped your hand… there.”
Micky was terrified and aroused at the same time. But Robin wasn’t finished analyzing Micky just yet.
“When I say I usually don’t come across women like you, I mean in my personal life. Having worked in severely repressed regions in Asia, I have, of course, met many women and men so deep in the closet, just meeting me, an openly gay woman, made them break out into a cold sweat. It’s confrontational. It made them face the one thing about themselves they couldn’t come to grips with. I think I have the same effect on you. And of course there’s the tiny matter of us sleeping together.”