Quick Study by Gretchen Galway

Lorraine’s frail shoulders, and pushed her back down into her chair.
    “Still too dangerous.” Marilyn pedaled the portable stepping-machine at her feet. “This lovesick dude is the first man you’ve been excited about since—well, since your parents passed. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Now, get me a Fresca out of the ice box, will you Bon, and we’ll talk about this.” 
    Bonnie went to get the soda and wondered how they could be encouraging her to pursue a relationship. If she did get serious about anybody, she’d have to leave—and then what would they do? They had been lucky enough to find each other young, and so had no failed marriages behind them. But no children, either. Without Bonnie they’d have to fend for themselves, and even if she kept paying the rent, they were just too old and vulnerable to be alone.
    She handed Marilyn her favorite soda but didn’t linger. “Don’t wait up for me,” she said, knowing it was pointless, and they’d camp out in the living room, trying to stay awake watching cable reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess .
    “Oh, no,” Lorraine said. “Mary-bellie, don’t let her go.”
    Marilyn kicked aside her As-Seen-On-TV pedaling machine and shoved her feet into her diabetic loafers. “I’ll go with her.”
    Bonnie laughed, horrified. “You can’t!” She hurried over to guide Marilyn back into her chair. “No guy is going to talk to me about sex with you there.”
    “She’s got a point, Mary-bellie.” Lorraine smiled at her wife with love. “You can be quite intimidating.” 
    Marilyn scowled. “Bullshit. I’m just an old lady now.”
    Pained she had distressed her best friends, Bonnie put on a confident smile and headed for the door, hoping they’d calm down once she’d left. Sometimes they put on a performance just to show her they cared. “It’s only Starbucks. Not like the scary dives you two used to hit.”
    Marilyn flashed a grin, then scowled. “I thought you were dropping out of that stupid school.”
    “I need to do this first,” Bonnie said. “Just to be sure it’s wrong. I need to feel that it’s the wrong career for me.”
    “You’ve been feeling it every day for two years,” Marilyn said. “And us with you. Isn’t that enough?”
    Bonnie opened the door and stepped outside. “I’ll bring you each a spice cookie if you just settle down and act like the radical feminists you really are and let me live my own damn life.”
    They laughed and she closed the door behind her, loving them but wishing sometimes she didn’t live with them.
    She went out to her car and immediately regretted what she was wearing. Too exposed, too feminine, too cold. January in the Bay Area was not the tropics, sadly, and her bare legs were immediately whipped into goose bumps by the cold blast from the northwest. In spite of herself, she scanned the street for a parked Prius and fought off the intense disappointment that she couldn’t find one. 
    His card was in the pocket of her skirt, a stiff rectangle that poked her in the thigh when she got behind the wheel of her VW. The thought of him tickled at the back of her mind, along her chilled skin, between her legs. 
    Ruthlessly, she shoved aside the fantasy and tore out into the road. One thing was certain—all she really wanted to research was him. Paul. A guy she barely knew but craved with a passion she’d never had for school. Her dreams were filled with him, some hot and naked, some cool and quiet and frighteningly sweet. 
    At a stop light, she noticed a patch of ferny foliage growing through the rocks of an undeveloped hillside and felt the long-lost desire to paint again. Soon the vivid orange California poppies would be breaking through the gloom of wet, overcast days. Her first serious painting, when she had been twelve years old, had been of a poppy, impossibly bright and tough and beautiful.
    “Just like you,” her father had said.
    Instead of crying at the memory like she might have done a