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Day 25, somewhere in the Swiss Alps
**
Ava is rapidly losing hope the further Beatrice leads her from their usual route. She looks behind them, despairing, in the general direction of the town, of the pool – her vision for the day slipping from her grasp: plans of submerging in blue water until her skin stings with chlorine, Beatrice consenting to sit at the edge, feet dangling, pants cuffed to her calves.
Sometimes, if Ava is very good and if Bea is feeling particularly playful, she’ll swim, too. In a borrowed pair of Ava’s bathing suit bottoms, too tight on her, and a long-sleeve shirt slicked to her stomach with water. Always, there’s the muscled cut of her thigh, and the pale strip of her wrists where the sleeves slip up, and her face – dripping wet and half-smiling.
It’s been almost a month now. Ava has long since stopped questioning the closeness with which she examines Beatrice. It’s become a part of the routine, as much as her shifts at the bar or cooking dinner in the cramped kitchen, hip to hip.
They are coming up on the spur of the trailhead and Ava grasps weakly for Bea’s wrist.
“You said we would take it easy today,” she whines. Scrabbles at Beatrice’s sleeve. “This isn’t easy, this is rapidly approaching wilderness.”
Beatrice shakes her loose without turning around.
“You’re fine,” is all she says, making a turn after a brief examination of the signs. She’s leading Ava down a chalky meandering path that slews through the foothills, switchbacks teasing at the base of the low mountain slopes.
“How is this an off day?” Ava asks. She puppy-dogs at Beatrice’s back, but not even the most imploring of her noises gets her to turn around. “Is this your master plan?” She kicks at a hump of gravel. “You’re going to get us lost in the Swiss Alps. We’ll wander for days. You’ll have to eat me to survive.”
At this, the tips of Beatrice’s ears flush red.
“It’s a short hike,” Beatrice says. She does turn now and Ava can see amusement lingering behind her façade of flat annoyance. “I said we would take it easy, not that we wouldn’t train at all. Anyway,” she casts her dark eyes around them, “It’s a beautiful walk.”
It is. Ascending from the village, sub-alpine grassland crests before them, a pastoral swell studded with silver fir and spruce. Alongside the trail, tall grasses have been beaten flat, but wildflowers bloom in ready clusters, rising like ocean froth from scrubby green.
Pale lavender bellflowers supplicate soft throats. Forget-me-nots with centers like gold coins, wishing-well offerings submerged among taller sprigs of dry grass. The trail ahead winds higher into the foothills, disappearing around rocky bends. It’s 9 km to the summit according to the trailhead signage, a low tier peak preceding the step-stair climb to the higher elevations.
Ava lengthens her strides to match step with Beatrice. Easy day or no, Bea sets a brutal pace, chin up and shoulders relaxed, long lines of muscle tensing and flexing with each step. Her hair is knotted at the base of her neck, but a few stray curls tendril free, sticking to the side of her neck with sweat.
Several minutes pass before Ava realizes they forgot to take out their earpieces. Breathing hard, their breath is feeding back to them in a loop. The sound of Beatrice’s breaths layered over her own, the rasp of it, a susurrus of blending exhalations, makes her feel an exaltation that she can’t place.
When Beatrice realizes and switches them off, Ava blames her pang of loss on the sudden silence.
The sky above is a carefree, easy blue, but a storm cloud bulks near the horizon. From here, she can see the grey smear of rainfall, several kilometers distant but growing closer.
The trail curves, narrows, forcing Ava to take a side step closer to Beatrice. Between them, their knuckles brush, and Beatrice doesn’t pull away like she used to.
She’s wearing one of her too-large sweaters, the kind Ava steals back at the apartment, rolling up the sleeves around her wrists, smelling like Beatrice’s cheap corner store shampoo and the detergent the two of them share.
While Ava gravitates toward tight-tanks and soft cardigans, colorful button-downs and acid-washed dungarees, Beatrice skews toward more somber colors, blocky shape that makes her broad shoulders more broad, her straight back even straighter.
Of late, Beatrice has become quite taken with thick woolen sweaters, and some days, the good days, she deigns to unbutton the top fastening of her shirt, leaving a triangle of skin bare at her throat.
Their hands brush again. When Ava stumbles, hardly noticing the path, too busy taking in views, head on a swivel, Beatrice catches her fast around the wrist.
Bea doesn’t look over, but her voice, when it comes, is low. “Easy,” she says. Her pointer and thumb form a warm ring over Ava’s pulse. “Pay attention, Ava.”
They’re almost jogging, their pace is so fast, and Ava’s chest is tight with exertion, lungs heaving.
“Yes, coach.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Yes, master.”
“Ava.” No amount of well-rehearsed exhaustion can hide her amusement. She does look over now, and Ava finds the small dimple creasing her right cheek, skin flushed, freckles standing out high on her cheeks.
Ill-hidden affection thrills through her, makes her brave. She wants to say: I love it when you smile or, remember last night, when we woke up the way we did or, what do I mean to you or, worse, do you want to know what you mean to me?
Instead she says, “can we watch a movie tonight?”
Those are good nights, apartment swimming in candlelight and television glow, the pixels on their curbside-salvaged television set shot through with static. Sometimes, Beatrice pulls the throw blanket from the back of the couch over the both of them. Sometimes, she acquiesces to pillow Ava’s head in the curve of her neck. Looks at her with that wide, slightly stunned expression when she thinks Ava can’t see.
Beatrice, whose hand is still encircling her wrist says, “yes.”
They don’t talk again until they reach the summit, and Beatrice never remembers to let go.
***
Ava helps Beatrice up and over boulders that bound the path, patched with a quilt work of lichen and moss. From here, they can see down across the valley that houses the village. Ava pretends she can pick out the street the bar is on, but from such a distance, the town itself is barely a brown bruise in rolling green.
Beatrice’s palm is rough with calluses, and there’s a lump under her sweater Ava is nearly certain is a knife -- or three knives, realistically – but she seems grateful to have Ava’s help scaling the rockface.
They steady each other in turn, and Beatrice catches absently for her waist, her shoulder, her arm, as they pick their way toward an outcrop, doesn’t seem to notice she’s doing it, not even when the halo pulses, once, and Ava hunches her shoulders to hide it.
It was warm enough in the valley, but at the peak the wind is enough to pink cheeks and elbows and knee-caps, and Ava nestles deeper into the collar of her thin jacket. They settle at the crest of a boulder, veins of rock shot through with weeds and stagnant water. Look out across the landscape.
Beatrice hums. Squints her eyes to block the wind, habitually downturned lips relaxed. Her face, when Ava turns to study it, is soft with contentment. Sweat dries in salt-licked tracks at her temples. Fingers curls up into the cuffs of her sleeves, and they watch as the storm brews nearer, a writhe of swollen clouds and distant rain.
Ava shivers. Bea, noticing, slips an arm around her, chafes at her shoulder absently, laughs when Ava wriggles closer, turning a cold nose against her cheek.
“Worth it?” Bea asks. She hasn’t shoved her off, so Ava keeps her whole face pressed to Beatrice’s, huffing humid breaths against her jaw, feeling the crinkle of Bea’s smile against her skin.
Ava answers with a deep sigh. The reverberations of it make Bea giggle, sound unfamiliar in its girlishness. “If you like frostbite. And big rocks. Yeah, it’s a real treat.”
“Ava,” chiding again.
Ava pulls away enough to smile, but stays pressed in close, pleased when Beatrice doesn’t turn away from her gaze. “No, you’re right. It’s amazing. Thank you, benevolent leader, for saving my ass-kicking for another day.”
Amused, Beatrice wrinkles her nose. “You’re welcome.”
“How does it compare?” Ava asks. She leans back on her palms, levels her chin at the wind hurling its way across the peaks. “Like, top views, where does it rank?”
Beatrice takes her question seriously, something Ava has always been grateful for. She leans forward and studies the valley – sparse trees and shorn rockface, the meadows that tumble until concealed by low cloud cover, the verdant landscape jeweled with watery sunlight.
“High,” she says, finally. She crosses her legs. Their knees bump. “It’s softer here, kinder. The flowers, the quiet, the – company.”
“The company?” Ava holds the pleasure of Bea’s confession on her tongue. Watches Bea’s cheeks color, a muscle in her jaw tic.
“My parents and I were always traveling. For their work, for vacation, I mean – the chapels alone were beautiful.” Beatrice fixes her eyes on the impending storm. “But I’ve never – shared it with anyone before. With you, it’s different.”
“Different?”
“Better.”
“I like doing things with you,” Ava says. It’s not a huge statement, but it feels bigger under such sweeping skies. Beatrice’s eyes turn soft and dark. She wets her bottom lip. Her voice, when it comes, is low.
“I like doing things with you, too.”
Bea does not tease Ava when she scrabbles for her hand. Cold fingers find each other on the rock, and Ava almost cries with relief when Bea’s nails dig into her palm – a reminder, just hard enough to feel it.
**
Despite its slow stalk toward them, the storm arrives with little warning – a crack of thunder and smelt of lightning, nearly layered, like kicking down the door and ringing the bell at once. Rain unleashes, a bucket overturned.
For a moment, they sit in shock. The storm devours the pale rock around them, darkening everything in rainwater, air electric with ozone.
“Fuck,” Ava yells. She springs to her feet, blinking water out of her eyes, even as she tips her face upward. Bangs plastered back from her forehead, she’s shivering and soaked through in seconds.
Wearing a grimace, Beatrice sputters an affronted laugh and rolls to stand. Less inclined to look upward, she shakes her head abruptly, like she’s trying to clear her ears of water.
It gives her the affect of a sodden cat – bedraggled and a little ornery, like the alley cats that prowl sometimes below their apartment window.
Ava has seen Beatrice covered in blood – her own and others – seen her sweat soaked, injured and disheveled, but never quite this put out.
“Well,” she says. She snaps the syllable at the downpour like another four-letter word. “Hm.”
Ava slicks her hair back with wet palms, a pointless endeavor as rainwater sluices down into her eyes.
“Should we get off the mountain before we get, like, struck by lightning or something?” Ava asks. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the storm. “The last thing I need is another sign from God.”
“Why risk it?” Beatrice says, dryly, which is about as close to blasphemy as she gets.
All told, the ascent was pleasant. The walk back promises to be anything but. The boulder scramble is slick with water, the gaps that were fun to clamber over earlier now threaten a rolled ankle or worse. If Ava hadn’t foregone any faith that there was life after death, she’d be worried a slip down one of the crevices would lead her straight to hell.
They make it back to the path in the giggling stumble of girls on their way home from the bar. Ava makes a grab for Beatrice to keep herself steady, and ends up with her hands tangled in sodden fabric, tripping Beatrice up. The sweater slips off her shoulder in the tussle, revealing bare, freckled skin, pearling with rain.
Lightning sparks in ecstatic flickers, like shoddy wiring in a haunted house, like waning candlelight or morse code – spelling danger in proximity, in reflections of light on beaded water. There’s a raindrop in the divot above Beatrice’s perfect, bowed top lip. Ava watches it drip down into her mouth. Wonders how hot Beatrice’s skin would feel against the coolness of rain.
“Whoops,” says Ava. She releases her grip and pats the fabric back into place. Where she pulled, it’s stretched askew – revealing a hint of collarbone, the hollow of throat.
She feels a chiding coming on, but Bea’s impending scolding is interrupted by another crack of thunder, even closer this time, a whip-crack lashing of white fire, and Beatrice, to the surprise of Ava, and even moreso herself, lets out an abrupt and startled shriek.
Her face, after, is priceless. Red-cheeked embarrassment warring with haughty indifference – all packaged in a wet, dismal expression. It puckers her face in the way Ava loves, brow furrowed and pretty mournful eyes in a pinch.
“Bea,” Ava laughs. They’ve more or less stopped in the middle of the trail, but there’s no one around to mind. Even in high tourist season, everyone else seemed to have known better than walk directly into an oncoming storm. Wrath of God, and all that.
“What?” Beatrice snaps. Her nostrils flare. With the flat of both palms, she smooths her updo back into place. The result is even further mussed.
“You screamed,” Ava says. A snort, then a giggle. “I didn’t even know that was one of your settings.”
“I did not,” Beatrice says. Then, even more unexpected, reaches out to shove at Ava’s shoulder.
Ava, delighted, shoves back. Beatrice rarely consents to a controlled spar, let alone a true tussle.
Beatrice’s mouth is an o of shock. Under it, amusement. A competitive thrill.
“Oh, you’ll wish you didn’t,” she says. Her voice is an icy low.
A heartbeat starts somewhere low in Ava’s stomach. She bounces on the balls of her feet. “Doubt it.”
What follows isn’t good form – it’s hardly form at all – but even rain-slicked and mud-spattered, Beatrice is still something to behold.
She catches Ava immediately into a headlock, earns an elbow to her stomach for her efforts. Ava, seal-slick, slips free, lashes a foot at Bea’s leg. It connects, but Bea catches her ankle. Twists.
The resulting tumble sends them both to the ground. Ava’s jacket immediately soaks through with cold mud, there’s grit in her teeth and rain in her eyes. The resulting wrestle is the slap-push-pull of schoolyard play, artless, frenetic and choked with laughter.
They roll, Beatrice landing squarely on top, her forearm digging into Ava’s windpipe. Ava blinks hard, trying to will her hair out of her eyes. It’s plastered to her cheeks and temples, and adrenaline fizzes like golden bubbles in her veins, champagne tart and heady. Beatrice bears down, gasping her victory, eyes alight.
There’s about a million pieces of gravel embedded in Ava’s skin, dirt under her fingernails and icy water soaking her down to her underwear, but she’d take divinium shrapnel to the gut before asking Beatrice to get off of her.
Lightning cracks, the murmur of thunder more distant now, like a concerto playing two rooms away. Ava lets her head drop back into the mud. The cool of it is a welcome respite from the hot flush climbing the nape of her neck, blush staining her cheeks.
Beatrice smiles – an expression like a clearing storm. She leans down, easing the pressure of her forearm as she goes. She only stops when their noses touch, faces so close they both go cross-eyed trying to look at each other, vision fuzzing for their efforts.
“Do you yield?” she whispers.
Ava squirms. Curious if she can get enough leverage to buck her off. Experimental, she shifts her hips up into Bea’s. Both of their gasps are swallowed by the rain. Ava closes her eyes, shakes her head. “I yield.”
Beatrice’s small smile is loud as a war cry.
“That was better,” she said her voice the husky-low of exertion, breath catching. “You got out of your head.”
“Yeah, well,” Ava is tongue-tied, for once. “You’re a good distraction.”
Beatrice laughs. Catches herself. Chokes her smile back like bile.
“Don’t,” Ava says. Their faces are still so close. She can see the soft lines at the corner of Beatrice’s eyes, the worried crease that threads the seam of her mouth. “I wanna see.”
“See what?” Beatrice says. She’s still astride Ava’s hips.
“Just you,” Ava says. “Your smile.”
“Ava –” Beatrice says, like a sigh, though she can’t seem to find the words to finish the thought. She’s still pinning Ava, pressed close, the unconscious rut of fabric between their bodies a startling distraction. Jaw tightening, Beatrice moves to dismount, but Ava tightens her knees around her hips.
“No, wait.” This, choked. “You feel nice, you’re – anchoring me.”
“The mud,” Beatrice says, strangled. “We’ll never get it out of your hair.”
“Guess you’ll have to help me wash it then.”
The storm has receded to the valley. Already, their downpour has transformed to a steady drip. Light shifts, molten, and wrenches free from the clouds, sunlight piercing the blanket of soft earth below. Rain becomes a fine mist and then – Beatrice grinning, a flash of teeth, her lovely tongue – it dissipates altogether.
**
When they get back to the apartment, Beatrice can’t seem to stop fussing. She oscillates between concern for Ava’s health, soaked through as she is, to chiding her for even looking at the furniture in her muddy state.
Dusk fell while they were gone, and dark softens the room, drapes them in grey-blue-purple as the storm bellies its way toward another town, towards other mountains.
Beatrice makes Ava stand in the middle of the living, dripping onto the hardwood, and pats her roughly down with a towel. Laughing, Ava grabs for it and they tussle briefly. Beatrice wins. Thinks better of it. Tosses the towel in Ava’s direction and goes to start the shower.
The showerhead is a shaky fixture suspended over a rust-stained clawfoot tub. The dripping faucet is finnicky, emits a piercing, metallic shriek when displeased. It takes a steady hand to coax the shower safely away from either scalding hot or freezing cold. Needless to say, it typically falls to Beatrice to draw the water.
Under the towel, Ava wriggles her pants free from her legs. Then her shirt. Her underwear follow, left on the floor in an undignified heap. She smells like sod and summer, and mud tracks watercolor streaks down her bare calves.
Steam perfumes the air of the apartment and Beatrice, almost certain Ava can’t hear her, lets out an un-nunlike curse.
“Don’t sit on the couch,” she calls from the bathroom. The shriek of the tap. Another murmur of expletives. "And don't lean against the counter, I just washed the kitchen floor.”
“Copy that.” Ava is shivering, now. The curtains are twitched open a few inches and the streetlight slants inside, yellow light painting her jaw in soft brushstrokes, immortalizing the dust motes in the air. Music filters up from the street – some American pop song that’s been topping Swiss charts for weeks – and she hums along softly. Looks down at the warn hardwood floor, wiggles her toes.
Beatrice emerges in a halo of heat. Her sleeves, wet, are rolled above her elbows. She notices Ava’s shivering first, and then her nakedness.
Pausing in the doorway, her expression unspools, like someone has pulled too hard at a stray thread, left her undone. Like this, Ava wants to collect her into her hands, wend her between her fingers. With Beatrice’s expression so soft, satin-like and careful, Ava wants to pull and pull and pull.
Goosebumps prickle along her arms.
Beatrice says, “erm.” And, “well, I suppose.” And then, “oh Ava, the floor,” at the sodden mess of clothes already soaking through into the floorboards.
“I was all wet,” Ava says. Then, “I still am.” And then, “wait no, I mean—”
“Okay,” Beatrice says. “The shower is ready for you.” She turns her back to Ava, but not before red flush climbs the shell of her ear. “I’ll fetch you clean clothes and leave them by the door.”
Ava thinks to call after her, to tease about the earlier mention of a hair wash, but Bea is gone before she can think of a punchline.
**
The clothes that are waiting for her are some of her favorites – the soft, terrycloth shorts that ride high on her thighs and one of Bea’s own shirts, a loose-fitting Henley that Ava’s taken to stealing anyhow. There are underwear folded and tucked among the stack and Ava amuses herself thinking of Beatrice picking them out.
Pulling the clothes on, her skin feels raw from the too-hot water, refreshed, but tingly across her whole body. Over stimulated. Or under, maybe.
She has that feeling she gets – achy and craving, like she wants to rub against Beatrice all over, like a big cat, wants to be scratched and petted and rubbed. Wants the full weight of Beatrice’s body on top of her own, the satisfaction of a weighted blanket, the press of a vice. She wants Beatrice’s hands everywhere, and the thought alone is enough to pulse between her legs, thinking about Bea’s hands tucking under her shirt, holding her, fingers stroking low over her belly, under the waistband of her shorts. Of what they might find, of how wet she would be for her, of how good –
“Everything alright?” This is Bea returning, the patter of her footsteps. “I left you my shirt, yours are all dirty.”
She rounds the corner, finds Ava standing on the threshold of the bathroom – red-faced and shy, like she broke a prized vase while Bea wasn’t looking and hid the shards about the apartment.
Ava catches her eyes and looks immediately away, studies the watermark on the ceiling, the one that consumes the plaster like kudzu.
Beatrice looks at Ava suspiciously. “What?” she says. Squints. “Is this about me touching your – underclothes? Because I’ve been folding your laundry for weeks, no use getting coy now.”
“It’s nothing,” Ava says. She clears her throat and tucks her lips into her mouth. It’s hard to ignore the warm rush that clings to her fingertips, her cheeks, between her legs. Hard to chalk it off to closeness, to her first best friend, to the nights spent curled closely together, like cupped palms, like prayer.
“If you say so,” Beatrice says. She looks unsure, but equally unwilling to pry. Beatrice, more than anyone, knows what it’s like to hold secrets like pearls at the back of her tongue. Knows what it’s like to choke on them.
Still cautious, Beatrice attempts to mend it all with the magic words. “I still need to shower. But after, do you want to watch that movie?”
Ava beams.
**
Later, on the couch, they’re only halfway through the opening credits when Ava begins to doze. Ten minutes in, she’s wilting sideways. Not even through the first act, and her head is pillowed on Beatrice’s shoulder.
If Ava was looking – which she isn’t – she’d see the expression that warms Beatrice’s face like the amber melt of candlelight.
If Ava was looking – though she’s not, absently rubbing her cheek into the skin-warm cloth of Beatrice’s shirtsleeves, tipping over into dream – she would see enough to know where Beatrice’s fractured faith has fallen, and to worry about what that means.
It’s difficult to become the subject of someone’s adulation, the risk of being reduced to a translucent stained-glass scene, to statue, to myth. To scripture even, to the wet roll of repetitive words on a lovely, lovely tongue she knows so well.
But sometimes, the best times, when Beatrice is mud-drenched and smiling that sharp, cautious smile, Ava thinks worship wouldn’t be so bad. Or not worship – just her softness, her touch, the devotion of her pretty mouth.
Once Ava is asleep, Beatrice, who is scared of nothing, will find herself too afraid to set her hands on Ava’s body and lift her against her chest. To carry her to the bed, to curl in beside her. So she will sit there, the movie a sluggish credit scroll against the backdrop of their dark apartment, and she will watch the window. And she will wait for it all to end.
But first, she will reach behind her to the flannel throw on the back of the couch, and pull it over them both.