Chapter Text
Clay learned early on that love was something she would choose every day.
From loving music, to rats, to hair dye, to drawing, to her girlfriend, Clay woke up and chose love everyday. She thought that love would just be something that happened, something that waltzed into your life and stood there watching like a ghost that was emotionally attached. Permanent and simple and sweet and automatic. Instead, Clay found love to be sweet and quiet like rain and steam and that every “I love you” was personal and chosen and purposeful.
Audrey never thought that love could be so heartbreaking.
Everyday was a new adventure. Like thunder and lightning bolts it was exciting and brilliant and soft like roses and poetry and Spotify playlists full of silly songs that dripped with hopeless romance. And her love was quiet and hushed and pushed to dark alleyways and hidden inside shoe boxes and the back of her closet. Every question had to be dodged like it was Mission Impossible and the Matrix shoved into one and every day was a new challenge of “Who can I fool today?”
Together they made the perfect team. Historians would call them best friends but Sappho would call them her muses and the ones who stood on the face of The Lovers card that a fortune teller pulled for them at a dinghy local carnival at the age of 12. They would be rain and snow, the sun and moon, they would be electricity, they would be love.
However, if they were love, then their families were hate.
Clay's grandmother would be a storm cloud that birthed tornados and hurricanes. Pesticide to dandelions. Audreys parents would be rain that ruined a perfect afternoon and soaked books that sat outside, forgotten for a slim moment. Their families would be loud and angry and frightful. They would rip at the threads of the comfortable sweater that was their love until there was nothing but fabric scraps and thread in a miserable pile on the floor.
It was hard sometimes. Actually it was hard a lot of the time. However they forced themselves to make it work. Even if it meant being “just friends”
Maybe soon, it would all be okay.