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She doesn’t know what to do when Ayda finds the Polaroid, if anything she’s surprised they even have it. None of that helps when she sees it and all of the grief she thought she’d escaped comes pressing into her. A tsunami she’s hopelessly unprepared to face, even at twenty eight and ten years of life and a country away.
The colours in it are faded and she doesn’t recognise the version of herself it depicted, fresh faced and clean. A grin splitting her face alongside five of her friends, friends Ayda had never got to meet because the world of that photo had been burned down until all that was left of it was Fig and her bloodied knuckles. She knows she left them all in Elmville, but when she blinks she sees their bloody bodies dripping dark stains into the threadbare grey fabric of their couch. Standing behind Ayda are the ghosts of the people she had loved most in the world at eighteen, and that version of herself there with them, blood rushing down her arm from the plunging wound in her shoulder and dripping off of her fingertips.
It had been a house party, sort of. Just the six of them and Fabian’s empty house and his parents at some ridiculous gala. It had been Adaine first, a knife bursting through her chest in a spray of blood so red it looked fake and a look across her face that was only confusion. Fabian next, his throat slit in the middle of some smart ass remark. She wasn’t sure if it was Kristen or Riz next. She and Gorgug had lost them, and it was a decision that made her sick. Riz had gone off the balcony. They weren’t sure what had happened to Kristen but it left a bloody hole in her chest, bigger than one of Gorgug’s fists.
He’d been last. They thought they were hidden. They weren’t. They weren’t. They weren’t and she watched as the figure had beaten him again and again with fists and a knife and they’d hit her too but that wasn’t really important. She got one of the knives and she’d stabbed again and again in return and the figure had fallen to the floor and it didn’t matter anyway because she was too late and Gorgug died in wet breaths beside her and so where was the point in saving herself anyway.
The girl in the picture held in her wife's hands had never gotten up off of that floor, the woman she was now was just a poor copy of her. One with a smile that never quite reached the edges. She had buried the knife after washing the blood from it. It probably still lay in the earth alongside the dirt that had come to meet Gorgug. She probably still lay in the earth beside him too, what was left of her body decomposing into component elements.
Ayda, the second great love of her life, knows her in fragments. She has seen pictures of her as a kid, a chunky little baby leaving a patch of drool on Gilear’s shirt. And she met the ghost of her at twenty one and slowly they built a life where she could breathe again. But her teenage years are a black hole, a sucking wound. Ayda has seen the puckered scar on her shoulder, has seen her retching through a panic attack. But Fig has done everything she possibly can to not let herself get sucked in the tangled mass of that night, and that means snipping it out of her own history like film from a reel.
There aren’t the words for what happened to them all that night. For the way that blood clung to her skin and under her nails or the look of sinking horror on Gorgug’s face as he stopped being able to feel his fingers first and then the rest of him. It feels like a betrayal to say she thinks of him the most, but they were, once upon a time, Fig-and-Gorgug. They went around their hometown in his van that always smelt like ozone and where one of them was the other was close behind. Then he left her anyway and her world shifted into colours she’d never seen before.
She isn’t sure she gets any of this into something Ayda can understand before the panic swallows her whole and the whole world blurs into smeared light and not enough air into her lungs.
Her wife's hands are burning hot as they’re pressed gently to her, one to her side and one to her neck and she hates that she flinches from her anyway. No amount of gentleness can pull her from the way her world is splitting all over again, moving through memories she tries not to think about like she’s just another flickering ghost in a haunted house. Every day she carries her dead friends with her but normally it’s just Adaine’s laugh on the breeze or the smell of the ink Riz used to fill his pens with but here kneeling on the floor of her apartment they are stood with her bleeding and unblinking.
It’s just so fucking unfair. She knows she manages to form those words as she starts to sob. They’re easy to say and she’s said them a million times.
“I’m so sorry, Figueroth.” Her wife’s voice is the one steady thing in a room that’s melting into a nightmare and she can’t stop herself from tipping forward into where Ayda has joined her kneeling on the floor. Her face lands against her chest and in an instant Ayda’s arms are there to meet her and she thinks maybe it’s not the room that’s melting but her. Her body decaying, putrefying, turning into the mess of liquified fat and food for the worms that it has should have been for ten years and that’s the thought that turns into the first of a slew of sobs.
The noises she makes are tight with the burden of it all. High and reedy and close enough to screaming that she distantly hopes that none of their neighbours are home, so none of them call the cops. That thought doesn’t help because it’s replaced by the image of the insides of her phone laying gutted on the ground. Picking up the landline, sending silent thanks that the Seacaster’s never thought to get rid of it, only to find the line cut and frayed as the muscles of Fabian’s neck.
She doesn’t want to close her eyes, images of her friends' last moments flickering behind them like one of those vacation slideshows they’d sat through at the Applebee’s house, before Kristen had left.
She wants to wash her hand, sure when she looks at them they’ll be coated in flecks of dried blood.
She wants to press her fingers to Ayda’s wrists and to her throat, press her palm to her heart, to check that her heart is still there and moving blood.
There are no words for it. The all encompassing split in her life. The day that rewrote her. When she went from one of six, to standing alone with blood under her nails that took a month to wash all the way out. She’s trying to get the words out anyway, to tell Ayda one event after the next until they make a story they can both understand.
She’s never been able to understand it.
Ayda lifts her from the ground like she weighs nothing, like she’s a child pretending to be asleep after a car ride out of the city. It’s all she can do to cling to her arms and let herself be moved and try not to think of paramedics lifting her onto a stretcher and her own broken voice asking why they weren’t taking anyone else with her.
Ayda places her carefully into the centre of the bed, into their rumpled sheets and piles of pillows. The sheets are made of worn yellow flannel. She thinks the Thistlesprings sent her them for Christmas one year and she’d sent back a Christmas card and a spare set of Gorgug’s drumsticks she’d found tucked in a box under her bed even though parting with something of his had made her feel like she was splintering further. Like she was tiny shards of crystal, fine enough to almost be dust, something to be cleared away without the possibility of reassembly.
“I can get rid of the photo. I’m sorry I upset you.”
“No-” Her own voice is hoarse, it sounds like it hasn’t been used enough but hurts like she’s spent ten years screaming. She grips the sheets. “You didn’t- It wasn’t you that upset me. I just didn’t- it’s a lot to remember them.”
“I found it in one of the boxes your mother sent us. It was tucked into a copy of the Magic Treehouse.”
Her mother is moving out of her childhood home, likely just as sick of the ghosts of six slain teenagers as any of them. And that means she’s rebuilding Fig’s childhood bedroom in the two bedroom apartment halfway across the world one unopened and dusty box at a time. She’s been getting Ayda to open the boxes, so she doesn’t have to risk smelling Elmville air trapped in any of them and so she can know that when she looks into them she won’t see any faces other than her own. It makes sense that that could only work for so long, the world has never been that kind to her.
She can’t even blame her mom, she’s sure if she went back to the little house in the suburbs she’d see them in every corner. Her, Riz, and Fabian with their feet dangling off the edge of the roof. Or all of them in a cluster sticking Band aids to Kristen’s scraped knees and trying not to get blood on the kitchen tiles.
Fig swallows before she tries to speak again, hoping her voice will sound even enough to wipe some worry from Ayda’s face. “If you bring me the picture, I could tell you about them? I mean if you’d want me to?”
Ayda nods in a movement that looks like ruffling feathers, never taking her eyes off of Fig as she pulls the Polaroid from a pocket of her trousers. She moves towards her so slowly and perches on the edge of the mattress, legs crossed like a kid in class about to be told a story. She places her hand close to Fig’s, but not quite touching lest she flinch away again. Fig closes the distance between them but only just, their fingertips skimming each other as she leans forward to take the photo.
The colours of the photo are warm and faded and she recognises the Thistlespring kitchen looking back at her, taken three days before the last day she thinks. She’s sat on the kitchen table, in denim shorts and a button down, her bare feet swinging over the edge. In the seats next to her Adaine and Fabian lean into each other. The photo is too small to render the scene in full, but she knows Adaine was painting his nails the blood red of the Elmville’s college football team. Riz is sat on the other side of the table, an encyclopaedias worth of papers spread around him bleeding into everyone else's space. Gorgug is making tea at the counter behind them, smoke rising around his hands. Kristen is slightly blurry at the very edge, making herself into a tye dyed smear as she had tried to duck out of the photo
She remembered Wilma Thistlespring’s laugh as she took the picture for them. The way the kitchen always smelt like cookies and if they opened the fridge there was always the fancy type of orange juice that Fabian liked the best. Fig always loved the summers where they became a single unit, without the responsibility of driving lessons and class schedules and extracurriculars. She thinks in the photo they all look so happy they’re glowing with it and the thought makes her heart stutter in her chest.
She prefers fall now, the melting away of the heat into cool air.
Fig hates herself a little for thinking she would trade all of this life, trade the ability to become a person who liked the fall, a person with a wife looking at her with nothing but love, to give each of the rest of them another year. She can’t tell Ayda that, doesn’t want to break her wife’s heart. She wouldn’t trade her life now for anything in the world. She would give it all up for the bad kids to have had just another day. Give it all up for each of them to have a peaceful death, eyes closed in their beds rather than glassy eyed and bleeding out and in so much pain.
She looks at the photo again. She looks at Ayda again, who’s wide eyed and leaning towards her like a sunflower to the sun.
She wants to tell her that bones make a noise when they break, one that can be heard from across the room but she swallows down the words like broken teeth.
Says instead “I think I want to make some tea, and then,”
“I can make the tea.”
“No, I want to.”
She heaves her body from the bed like pushing out from the dirt of a grave. Her mouth tastes like soil and copper and the cheap wine they’d been drinking that night and she thinks tea might be a reprieve. At least it will be something to do with her hands. She moves down the corridor silently, one hand trailing along the soft texture of the wallpaper and Ayda following behind her.
Their apartment is small but comfortable. Two bedrooms, a dining room and a kitchen. Windows big enough they could climb out of them, a camera on the door and the best alarm system money could buy. She has always felt safe in the fortress she’s built, hidden as its protections are amongst soft furnishings and houseplants that Ayda keeps alive.
The kitchen is a little smaller than either of them would like, only room for one of them to cook at a time. She keeps the knives in a cabinet with a lock. Ayda sits at the little table they managed to fit in, her newspaper still folded on it and the mugs they drank their morning coffees from still in the sink. Fig brings down two boxes of tea from the top shelf, Ayda’s normal English breakfast blend that she drinks black and as strong as she can make it before the leaves get too bitter and a rarely used box of green tea. The green tea is one her mom sends her every six months and she goes through it slowly. It’s a blend they all used to drink, Sklonda wanted Riz to drink less coffee and this was one of the only other things he could stomach.
Green tea or a blend that Adaine deemed noxious that used three tea bags, one peppermint and two ginger. Sometimes with an additional berry one, if he could pinch it from Gorgug’s bag in time before Gorgug drank it after second period. She feels a little sad that that isn’t what she’s making as she fills the kettle. She thinks maybe presenting Ayda with that tea would help her see them as people. See her friends in all their strangeness and specificities rather than as just a single bloody pulp that she carries with her all the time.
The kettle is loud as it boils and it takes everything in her not to flinch from the sound. She hates the flinching the most, shaking and wrung out already. She knows when she flinches people look at her with pity or sympathy and she wants to yell and scream that they would flinch too, if they’d seen even half of what she had.
She measures tea leaves into strainers and pours the water over them, and only then does she turn back to face Ayda, not knowing what she expects to see in her wife’s face. The patience and love that meet her almost make her stagger. She isn’t sure she’s real enough to be worthy of the love that Ayda shows her, when her whole life has a puncture wound in it that she could never quite heal.
She turns back to the tea when it’s time, still not quite sure how to find the words to describe her friends. The first true love of her life, messy and teenage and fractured at eighteen. Fig puts a dash of honey in Ayda’s tea and thinks maybe that’s where she should start as she adds three and a half heaped sugars to her own before taking her own seat at the table, the Polaroid placed carefully between them.
“That summer Riz had to stop drinking coffee, so we all started drinking this green tea with him.” She pauses to point him out in the photo, a look of intense concentration on his face in a creased white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, even in the summer heat. “Adaine and Gorgug drank it already. Fabian would only drink it over ice with lemon. But Kristen and I thought it was just the grossest thing. I would just switch mugs with Adaine and pretend I was drinking it but Kristen was committed. She said that she wasn’t a coward.”
She blinks, sees Kristen screaming for them to run, all of them scattering through the corridors of Seacaster manor away from the mess of Adaine’s body.
She blinks, sees her mug of tea, knows she has to keep going or all of it will stay trapped in the empty hollow of her chest.
“Kristen normally only drank lemon water, she carried a bottle of it all the time. It was a habit she picked up from Fabian. But she was determined to drink this tea so every time someone made Riz a cup she would have one too and she would put three and a half sugars in it. When she took the first sip she would always scrunch her face up, like she had no idea what it was going to taste like even though we’d been drinking it for two months.”
Fig takes a sip of her tea, poisonously sweet and hot enough that she feels it burning slightly all the way down her throat. She knows she winces because concern flashes across Ayda’s face in a routine so mundane it makes her laugh just a little. She always takes a sip that’s too hot and fails to hide it. Ayda always looks concerned, and she fails to hide that too. She wonders if they were still here would she have met Ayda, she thinks if she hadn’t there would be a vicious hole in even a happier version of herself.
“Adaine would have loved you, she always wanted to be a librarian.” Tears bead up in the corners of Ayda’s eyes and Fig wants to snatch the words back. The last thing she wants is for her to hurt too, for all that lost time to press into Ayda’s life as it does in her own. “Sorry, that was. I shouldn’t have said it.”
Ayda places her hands over hers and the gentle press of her palm grounds her just enough that for a second she doesn’t hear screaming or the rush of her own blood in her ears.
“You can say what you would like to Figueroth. I’m not upset at you, but at the fact that something happened to you.” She pauses, breathes. “And to them.”
The last part is a question that answers itself. Ayda squeezes her hand before moving her own back to cradle her mug of tea. Fig is filled with the urge to make Ayda a cup of the green tea, with its heavy earthy smell.
“Um, we were eighteen and it was the summer before college. We were all going to Elmville Community, at least for a bit. Adaine had planned to go somewhere else but her sister was sick so she stayed. We were at Fabian’s.” She points at him in the photo, thinks of how much blood had poured from his throat in the second his smile dropped. “They still aren’t quite sure why it happened. Riz’s dad had been killed in the middle of a case a few years ago and Kristen’s church had been tied into some stuff.
“Aelwyn, that was Adaine’s older sister, the one she stayed for, had been in touch with the woman that did it but she said she didn’t know. That Kalina had just been looking for her own answers and she had no idea.”
Fig breathes out.
“I wish I could blame Aelwyn more. But she’d been sick. And their parents really were terrible.”
She stares at the chipped black nail polish on her own fingertips, and is surprised by how steady her hands are against her mug. She takes another sip of her tea, relaxing into the familiar taste even if she still doesn’t like it.
“I love you and I love our life. I loved them too and I think you would have as well. Adaine used to snort when she laughed and it would make Kristen laugh so hard her face went bright red and she’d start crying with it. And Gorgug and I were in a band, I played the bass and he played the drums. We were terrible but also the best.
“Fabian’s dad died at the end of our freshman year and he had this whole masculinity crisis thing so I took cheer up again so he had someone to go to practice with. And he and Riz always wore best friend necklaces we all pretended not to notice. And we all wore friendship bracelets, at least three of them, because Kristen made them compulsively. I have all mine in my jewellery box because I can’t wear them anymore, in case something happens to them.”
It’s then another sob chooses to rip itself free from her body. This one is heavy, she feels the aftershock of it in her throat. She pushes her mug forward so the flood of tears she doesn’t know how to control don’t fall straight into her tea.
“Something happened to them.”
She’s crying again and she doesn’t know how to stop it, but she’s thankful that this time at least the noises she’s making sound like they’re coming from a person and not the desperate cry of a wounded animal. She hears Ayda make a small alarmed chirp, so through the haze of her tears reaches out for her hand. It feels good to talk about them. They’re with her all the time. She is built in the image of their memory. But that doesn’t change the fact that talking about them means thinking about them. Talking about them means thinking about cold bodies and blood on the floor and a pain so great she didn’t think it would be possible for even a shimmer of her to survive.
With the hand not held by Ayda she rubs at the tight line of scar tissue that runs through her shoulder and into the top of her chest. It’s almost funny that it’s the only physical reminder she got from that night, the only hit she really even took. One plunging stab in between her bones, through one side and out the other. Stars exploding in her vision as she reached around for anything she could use to fight as Gorgug took hit after hit beside her. Three surgeries and months of physical therapy that she’d resented but gone to anyway, because was there any choice other than continuing. Putting one tired foot in front of the other because if after all of it she died anyway where was the goddamn point.
All of that for one hit. A wound she wouldn’t have even gotten if she hadn’t run out behind Kalina screaming Gorgug’s name as he was wrenched away from her. The hit that killed him had probably already landed. She had never had a chance.
But she couldn’t let him go alone and all she had to show for it was a mess of a scar.
Everything else had been surface level. A split in her hair line from the butt of a blade connecting with her and scattered razer thin scars spread across her hands and forearms from showers of glass. They’d healed in a fortnight. By the time she met Ayda three years later they could have been anything. When they started dating they would lie in her college dorm bed and Ayda would take her hand between her own and kiss every scar she saw in quiet reverence. She’d never asked how Fig got them. They’ve all faded now.
It had taken two years for her to start college, after it all happened and she had travelled half the world away to do it. Her home was Leviathan now, with its winding streets and ever present salt sea smell and Ayda, beautiful patient Ayda. She hadn’t been a person when they met. But, she thinks, she is now a person part built in Ayda’s image in her kindness and her meticulousness and that counts for something. Even if before her world ended she never could have imagined a life without the bad kids in it. After meeting Ayda she can’t imagine a life without her either, but she forces herself to, like mouthfuls of salt water. So that this time if it comes she isn’t so shocked it cracks her with the force of it.
It’s like once she starts talking about it she can’t stop, the words spilling out of her like blood from a wound. Scars she hadn’t thought about ripping open into giant ugly fissures and the feeling that the only thing stopping her from shaking out of her skin is Ayda. Through it all Ayda is there every day, with tea and comfort and patience. She is glad to be even a sliver of a reflection of her wife.
But the person she calls is Aelwyn, it has to be Aelwyn first. And as compulsive as it feels to talk about them now, like she’s splitting at her seams, it still takes her three days to make that call. She thinks Aelwyn probably hates her and maybe she’s right to. Even though she doesn’t hate Aelwyn. Even though she’d be right to.
It takes four calls and three more days before Aelwyn picks up. Time sliding by like just another divine punishment she can’t escape from.
She picks up on a Tuesday afternoon, on an autumn day that’s the unsettling sort of warm. Fig has the window open just a little, safety guard still firmly in place. Aelwyn picks up. For a second Fig has no earthly clue what to say, as it hits her again, the magnitude of the horror of it all.
“Figueroth.”
“Abernant.” They say each other's names like curses, concentrated with something not quite approaching hatred and soaked in disrespect.
“Why are you calling me?”
“I-” She trails off. Some part of her was never sure Aelwyn would pick up, that she would spend the rest of her life calling into a void and never hear a response. But now she has one. Aelwyn is right there. And she has no idea what to say.
“I think I just wanted to see how you were holding up.”
“Oh.” There’s a softness in Aelwyn’s voice that Fig only ever heard when she talked to Adaine and immediately tears are burning up into the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t think Aelwyn hated any of them, not really. But it was always easy to forget that she was a child too, two years older felt infinite when they were freshly eighteen. Like she’d been grown up forever. Aelwyn was twenty when it all happened, and with sudden sickening clarity she knows that she was just a baby too. All of them were too young. Even her.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have called. I think maybe this was a mistake.” Pauses. Breathes. “Thank you for picking up though.”
“No, I- It’s good to hear your voice Figueroth. Sometimes I forget what all of you sounded like.”
Aelwyn is probably the only person in the world that still carries some of the same shattered pieces of her youth. Pieces that probably look a lot like Adaine’s study playlists, classical music at ear splitting volume. Or the way she would close her eyes and breathe in for a count when she was feeling overwhelmed. Or how when she was tired she would collapse face first into your shoulder, like her body had lost all of its integrity. Aelwyn doesn’t hold the way that Adaine’s body slumped the last time, and for a fleeting second Fig is glad that she’s the only keeper of the spray of blood and the way her eyes went dull. The way all their eyes went dull.
“I told my wife about it. And I was thinking about it all I guess.”
Aelwyn lets out a breath Fig could hear she had been holding. “I heard you got married a few years ago, congratulations.”
“I think it suits me. Being married, I mean.” She leans into her phone receiver and whispers the sentence like a prayer. Some days it still feels so much like betraying their memory to still be a person. She gets to be married. Gets to have a life in a city none of them had ever seen. It’s a betrayal she’ll never forgive herself for. It’s something she’s thankful for every day, that she gets to live on in their images.
“I’m glad you found someone.”
“And you? Have you found someone?”
She laughs. It’s a short sharp sound.“You sound like your mother.”
“You’ve been talking to my mom?”
There’s silence on the other end of the line and she feels a flash of guilt. Like she’s walked straight into a room holding a private meeting. The feeling itches at her.
“Sometimes. We get coffee sometimes.”
She was there and that’s something no one else can comprehend so it stings to think that the rest of them, other people left behind, have built rituals out of her absence. She’d be more upset but then she thinks of the blocks of ice that were Adaine’s parents. The frozen feel of them and the way that afterwards, when she was still reeling and bloodied, they didn’t seem to even react. She hasn’t been much of a daughter in the years that have passed, so she thinks maybe her mom was reaching for something in Aelwyn. Something she couldn’t give anymore, but that maybe Aelwyn needed. She can picture them drinking coffee at the kitchen table of her childhood home so solidly it feels almost like a memory.
“I didn’t know that.”
“You haven’t been back.”
“It never seemed like the right time.” The words melt into the space between them.
They both know that there would never be a right time. How could there be? This time the silence is less sharp, not quite comfortable but reaching towards it with bloody hands.
“You should. Come back, I mean. They’re tearing down the mall next year, it’s barely the same place we grew up.”
“I don’t think I know how.”
She laughs again, it might be a glitch in the phone line but it sounds warmer this time. And slightly bitter around the edges. “The same way you do anything else since, well, you know.”
There must be some sort of compulsion in the suggestion, because once the words fill the air between them she knows she needs to make them come true. She thinks of summers in Elmville, the sticky feel of the air against her skin and the way she used to be able to traverse it with her eyes closed. She used to feel like it could never surprise her, she knew every street, each tree and bench and stop sign, as well as she knew the feeling of her blood rushing under her skin or the steady thump of her own heartbeat.
But then it happened. It surprised her. And once that surprise was paid for with the lives of five people she never thought she'd be without she had never wanted to see what the streets she had grown up in were capable of again.
But she thinks maybe she has to go back. Feel the specific breeze of the Elmville city limits and hear children laughing in the suburban streets. Maybe that will clear the vision she has of her hometown, the image of it soaked in blood. So much blood that it obscures everything underneath, until she can barely remember what it felt like to be happy in her childhood home.
“Will you get a coffee with me if I do?” She doesn’t know why she asks, it’s just another thing she has to do. It’s unfair to think of Aelwyn as a mirror image of herself but it’s almost impossible for her not to. Aelwyn who could have known what was going to happen to them if only she had pushed a little deeper. Sunk talons a little further into Kalina until something that looked like her friend's blood poured out. And Aelwyn who now occupies a daughter-like space in her mother’s life, a space that she’s always been incapable of filling.
“Of course, Figueroth.” And then Aelwyn hangs up and she’s left holding onto just another dead line.
That night, a bloody picture of Elmville still scratching at the edges of her vision, she lets another piece of it rip itself from her while she’s curled into Ayda, the two of them forming a single mass on their couch. Ayda is talking about a new crate of books the library has acquired and she hates that she interrupts her. She could live forever in the sound of her wife talking about ISBN numbers and new subject matter and the condition of the pages of used books. Still she knows she has to because if she doesn’t she never will. And she thinks maybe keeping this all tightly coiled around her has been killing her. It’s been wrapped around her for so long and so densely that it’s been cutting off her blood supply and she’s learning to cut herself free from it strand by strand.
“My mom and I fought that morning.”
Ayda trails off. For a second Fig can see the pieces moving in her head as she puts together which morning Fig means. Of course she picks up quickly the only morning it could be. The morning of the day that created the shadow that Fig now lives inside of.
She can’t help but laugh a little when she remembers it. “We fought and I can’t even remember what it was about but I remember telling her to get fucked as I left for Fabian’s house
“I left early to get to Fabian’s because of it. If I’d- If I’d gone-” The laugh turns into a sniffle and she can’t help but feel like a kid. Like she’s fifteen years old when her mom and Gilear divorced and she stopped being the person either of them wanted her to be.
“If I’d been- Like the rest of them. Her enduring memory of me would always have been me telling her that. And that I hated her and was glad to be leaving for college and my only regret was that I couldn’t go earlier. I had every intent of couch surfing between my friends for the rest of the summer.”
Ayda pulls her closer, merging the outlines of their bodies until Fig can feel both of their hearts beating together in time, easier than hers beating alone. Their bones and their nerves, the meat that makes up their bodies twists itself together as it always does. Like it’s been doing since they met. She thinks that’s one of the reasons they work, they’re made of the same stuff. Their bodies knew each other before they even knew that was true. It’s a once in a lifetime feeling and it’s the second time she’s known it. Some would say that that’s a type of lucky few people get to be.
She lets herself get lost in the rhythm of their single heart instead of thinking about the confession she’s just made.
Gilear’s mom had died when she was twelve, right before her family split apart like overripe fruit. But she’d made her go to confession once before that. She remembered sitting in the little booth with its low, red light and thinking she would never do it again. That she was sure no solace could be found in spilling the things that troubled her to a man behind a screen. She almost gets it now as she whispers secrets into the spaces between Ayda’s ribs. A release as easy as breathing out.
Ayda speaks her response into her hair, like she can’t bear to separate their bodies either. “I’m so sorry my love.”
She laughs and it comes out soggy, paper splitting under too much ink. Fig scrunches up her face against her wife’s chest trying for the hundredth time to stop a flow of tears she has no control over.
“Well, you know, what can you do?” The growing damp patch on the front of Ayda’s soft cotton shirt tells her that she wasn’t successful in stemming the flow and from the single heartbeat impulse of their body she worries that maybe she’s made Ayda cry too.
Ayda lets out one of the birdlike noises she makes, a sound Fig knows means she’s been asked a question she can’t know the answer to. She presses deeper into the embrace of her arms to press a small kiss to the space between her collar bones, uncovered by her open collar. Begging forgiveness for laying such a question at her feet. Ayda replies in turn with a kiss to the crown of head, an absolution she doesn’t think she could ever deserve but one that she takes anyway because it’s all her rotten body can do.