“So you’re not sending these selfies to someone?”
“No. And they’re on a memory card, not in the cloud.” Kia stepped into her pants and tucked her underwear in her pocket. “I love being an influencer. It’s fun. I meet great people. And everything I put online is at least half-true. But it’s a job, and it means all the pictures I have of myself are half-staged. Except these. I want a way to remember my life without a filter.”
Sullivan looked pensive. “I think I get it.” She turned around. “And now I’m going to go, and we’re going to pretend this didn’t happen. I never saw you. I was never here.” She headed for the door.
That was the most intimate moment she’d ever have with Sullivan, naked, talking about locker rooms.
“Hey, Sullivan,” Kia called after her. “You could just sub in marjoram.”
Sullivan waved a bunch of sage over her shoulder without turning around.
“I have standards, Jackson.”
Sullivan was so cute and so untouchable. Kia felt a pang of sadness.
Sullivan stopped before she opened the front door.
“Just for the record,” she said with her back to Kia, “your ninety-year-old self will be impressed.”
“Blake, wash and chiffonade that sage from Chef Sullivan,” Opal said as Sullivan burst through the back door of Mirepoix. To Sullivan she added, “Don’t act like Mirepoix was going to fall apart because you left for thirty minutes.”
Blake was in the corner, earbuds in, surreptitiously looking at his phone.
“Blake!” Sullivan yelled.
She never yelled in the kitchen. She raised her voice over the sound of cooking, but she didn’t yell in frustration. Opal raised an eyebrow. Blake hurried over.
“Sorry, Chef. Sorry. It wasn’t for me. It was for Mickey.”
“Do not tell me you were updating your pit bull’s social media page,” Sullivan said. “We need a mountain of Parmigiano-Reggiano grated, garlic minced, and mushrooms sliced.”
“Why are you rushing in like there’s some kind of situation?” Opal asked.
Sullivan dropped her voice. “She was naked! In my living room taking pictures in front of my Janice Domingos.”
“How did she know you’d be coming home?” Opal asked.
“She didn’t.”
“Oh.” Opal sounded disappointed.
Sullivan knew it was good that Kia hadn’t stripped in the living room to surprise her. Kia was just doing her weird thing.
“She was taking pictures.”
Sullivan needed to marinade the Osceola wild turkey, or it’d be tough, and start fermenting the cabbage. All she could think about was Kia’s look of shock at Sullivan’s presence, Kia’s embarrassment, and then the moment when Kia seemed to think,Ah fuck it. I’m here now, and strolled over looking like a goddess. Like the kind of woman one of Sullivan’s legacy relatives—a woman maybe—would have fallen in love with and painted and hidden the paintings because the world wouldn’t let her love that body. So beautiful. A port-wine stain birthmark on her hip and the requisite chef’s scars on her forearms. A spattering of faded tattoos decorated her body like stickers applied by someone who thought it was fun to stick them on but didn’t care about the overall effect. A fried egg on her thigh. A rose on her breast. The interlaced women’s symbols above her short, dark pubic hair. Her neck and arms were tanned a beautiful, toasted coconut brown, and her belly was almost as pale as Sullivan’s. Some worthless AI filter would have erased her birthmark, made her skin a uniform color, lengthened her waist and slimmed her hips. It’d be terrible to erase so much beauty. Kia walked with the grace of a river, and she glowed like sunrise. And Sullivan had wanted to take in every detail.
“Not for her social media?” Opal drew closer, a look of concern crossing her face.
“No. She had an old digital camera. She said she saves the pictures on a memory card. She wants to have something to look back on when she’s ninety. Pictures that weren’t staged. It was kind of sweet really.”
“She gets that that social media stuff is fake,” Opal said. “That’s way better than Aubrey. I swear she always thought shewasmakingher life, not living it.”
“Kia is smart as hell. But she can be smart with clothes on.”
“Was she pretty?” Opal said conspiratorially.
“No.” Sullivan couldn’t let the lie stand for a minute. She could see the look of hurt that would cross Kia’s face if she heard Sullivan say it. Kia had been brash and young in school. She’d never shown Sullivan the human side, the side that stress cooked and slipped in the rain.
