Read Online Maxine by Claire Wilkshire - Free Book Online Page A

out of garbage bags, spangled flip-flops and black jeans, a royal blue shirt with a bleach stain the size of a nickel. Some eggnog has been drunk. They’ve hauled pieces of clothing out of the bags one at a time and held them up, announced sizes, and flapped out pairs of pants. They’ve paraded and minced and bumped hips and they end up wearing some of the clothes, a skirt over a pair of jeans, a dress over the skirt, so they look like mummers. Theresa pulls on a lacy purple bra over her shirt and helps Maxine into a cream camisole. She stands behind Maxine and slips it down over her head; she tugs the camisole into place and wraps her arms around Maxine’s ribs and slides her palms under Maxine’s breasts and down to her waist to show the smoothness of the fabric, and Maxine makes a kissy-face. They’re laughing and half-dancing. Someone turns up the music. Someone else is saying No one gets the navy coat, I’m taking that navy coat home so just get over yourselves. They’ve tossed one piece of clothing after another into a pile on the floor in the middle of the room, a Mount Everest of discarded wearables.
    Maxine and Theresa show and shake and flourish fabric until the last bag is empty, Everest a teetering multicoloured knoll. Then all the women set their glasses aside and dive. They snatch up what they’ve observed and noted—the blazer with the brass buttons, the red linen blouse—they paddle ankle-deep in rock-pools of textile, stripping, trying on as they go, and flinging things back and forth overhead—These would look good on you. Are you keeping the dress pants? —and finally they collapse with their dragon-hoards, flop back in chairs and couches. More eggnog appears and Gail brandishes her glass and says OK everyone, most erotic moment without touching... Karen! Host goes first.
    Karen tells the story of how she and Theresamet, in a hot spring in Iceland, Karen on a trade mission and Theresa there on holiday, for no good reason other than a deal on a charter. It’s a favourite story and Karen tells it well.
    With out touching! Gail interrupts.
    I didn’t touch her , just the corner of her towel.
    Around the time Karen had touched the corner of Theresa’s towel in Iceland a few years back, Maxine had been standing on the rooftop deck of a downtown house. It was getting cooler and everyone else had gone inside and somehow Toma and Maxine had stayed at the top. It was as if they’d paused there by accident.
    I hear it’s your birthday, he said.
    That’s right.
    He assessed her. That’s what it looked like. He was older than Maxine, ten or fifteen years older, with Middle-European confidence, a friend of a friend. She kept running into him at parties. Toma was no taller than Maxine, with Mediterranean colouring and a lack of self-doubt so compelling she could swoon. She felt like a door on a spring-loaded hinge, pulled inexorably toward him.
    I should kiss you, but—and here Toma shrugged, raised a hand to his face and ran two fingers along the line of his jaw to show he hadn’t shaved. He was bristly, the fingers implied, and perhaps unfit for kissing. It was this gesture, the unhurried movement of fingertips along his darkened jaw line, that made Maxine draw a breath. He watched her openly, defiantly—he was married; he knew she was with Andrew. He was inviting. He was saying: contradict me. A birthday kiss. It would not of course be just a kiss—there had been too many looks exchanged. Once they kissed there would be no stopping. His fingers rubbed slowly from earlobe to chin and in that space Maxine saw the proposition and weighed it—she and Andrew were pretty much through, staggering with clumsy ambivalence toward their private finish line. His wife was not her problem (Maxine had never slept with a married man but nor did she feel responsible for their wives—she’d never made any commitments to anyone’s