Long Time Gone by Hannah Martian

Author:Hannah Martian [Martian, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Adult
ISBN: 9781639109692
Amazon: 1639109692
Goodreads: 205438874
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Published: 2024-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

13

Dancing With Our Hands Tied (Then—May 1981)

WHEN JESSICA SUGGESTED that they go camping over Memorial Day weekend, Holly thought she’d lost her mind.

Jessica Coldwater, in her pressed pink skirts and freshly curled hair. Jessica Coldwater, who screamed the last time she saw a spider, making Holly take it outside rather than kill it.

That Jessica Coldwater. She wanted to go camping with Holly. For three days, just the two of them.

Jessica had mentioned it one day after school, the girls studying up in Jessica’s room, Holly on the bed, Jessica at her desk, textbooks sprawled out in front of them. It had been a little over a month since that night in Jessica’s bed. The kiss. Their sleepovers were a lot more frequent now. Holly was practically a permanent fixture in the Coldwater house, neither Mrs. Coldwater or the mayor knowing why the door was always closed, why Jessica’s hair was always tousled in the back, why Holly’s cheeks were so red when they came down for dinner.

“Camping?” Holly had asked, looking up from her math textbook, the numbers all swirling in front of her. That was another thing they had in common: an extreme distaste for anything related to the study of arithmetic. “Have you even ever gone camping, Jess?”

Jessica turned in her chair, eyes narrowing. “Of course I have,” she replied. “When I was little.”

“How little?”

“Maybe … five?”

Holly couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her. “Do you even remember it?”

“Well, no,” Jessica allowed. “But this is something I want to do. Flaming Gorge is beautiful this time of year, and we’d be by ourselves, so we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone … seeing us or anything.”

Camping suddenly seemed like a wonderful idea to Holly. While there had been plenty of kissing behind Jessica’s closed door the past few weeks, there hadn’t been much more than that. A hand daring to venture under a shirt but resting carefully on a stomach; pressing against, but not into. The threat of Mrs. Coldwater neglecting to knock and barging in or one of the girls making a sound she shouldn’t was too great.

There was no label on what this was, the time that they spent together, lips locked on lips, hands in each other’s hair, rolling around on Jessica’s bed. Holly had known the truth about herself for a while, but it had truly cemented two years back, when she’d read about the ten-year anniversary of Stonewall in the paper. She’d been so overcome with emotion that she’d rushed to the library, breathless, reading everything about the riots she could get her hands on. That’s me, she’d thought, her fingers on a black-and-white photograph printed in one of the national papers. There were two women, each with a brick in one hand and their other hands entwined together. Their bravery, their love on full display for everyone to see. New York had never felt as far away as it did in that moment.

She remembered walking into the women’s restroom at the library,

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