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You won’t tell Tai this for years, until lifetimes have passed, but you used to watch her in high school. Her and Van at parties, on the soccer pitch, in the locker room, squeezed thigh-to-thigh, always next to each other at every post-game celebratory pizza run.
You’d track the way Van would tuck Tai’s hair behind her ear when they thought no one was watching, the way Van’s face was the first one Tai would seek out every afternoon before practice, the way that when Van broke her nose in a game against Piscataway, Tai practically flew to her side.
That once, you had gotten in a screaming fight with Jackie at a party, and had stormed outside, fuming and drunker than you wanted to be. That you saw them, pressed up against the side of the house, Tai’s mouth on Van’s neck, Van’s hands gripping Tai’s hips like her life fucking depended on it. Tai’s hands pinning Van in place, unbuttoning her jeans.
You had told yourself to turn away, to go back inside, to forget you ever saw them, but you didn’t. You watched, something like shame and envy and a sharp prick of desire mixing in your stomach. It wasn’t until then that you really figured it out—that Tai’s kissing Van like you imagine Jeff kisses Jackie, open mouthed and absolutely nothing like the spin-the-bottle kiss Tai had given you in eighth grade. You’re still drunk when you get home, and you lock the door to your attic bedroom and touch yourself until you’re not sure if you’re imagining the three-year-old half-kiss Tai had pressed to the corner of your mouth in someone’s dark basement, or the way Tai had curled her fingers in Van’s hair and pulled, or the breathless noise Van had made into Tai’s neck, or all of it, together at the same time.
Taissa will laugh when you tell her all of this, curled up next to you in your daughter’s bed.
“Jesus, Shipman,” she says. “I didn’t realize we had a fucking audience,” and if you were someone else, you probably would have blushed.
“It’s Sadecki,” you say instead, and Tai rolls her eyes.
“Now you’re concerned about him,” she says, and you want to snipe back at her, something about how maybe she’s not cheating on her wife, but whose fucking bed is she in, but you don’t.
“Why’d you watch?” Tai finally asks. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
You shrug, but she keeps looking at you, completely unreadable. You don’t like it—you’ve always been able to read her.
“I guess,” you start. “I guess I couldn’t even begin to face it,” and Tai nods a little.
“There’s this movie,” she says, “with like Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, and in ninth grade I stole the only copy from that sketchy video rental place off Route 9. And I would watch them kiss over and over and over on my family’s VCR player after everyone went to bed,” and she smiles a little, before fake-glaring at you. “That’s what normal teenage dykes do, Shauna, not fucking watch your friends have sex.” She can’t really keep up the glare, and huffs something that might be a laugh. She’s done worse things to you; you’ve done worse things to her. In the grand scheme of things, this probably doesn’t even count.
“Van would think that was fucking hilarious,” she says after a moment. “I probably would have tried to drop out of school, so it’s probably good you never said anything,” and she sounds almost sad for a moment. You’re not sure what for—for Van, for what she became, for the girls you were, are, can never be again.
You’re not good at comfort anymore. When Jeff lost his job years and years ago, when he practically begged you to touch him softly, to pitch your voice in a way it can’t, you had called his mom and gotten her to take him for the weekend. When Callie broke her arm playing field hockey in seventh grade, when Jeff’s dad died, when your sister-in-law had a miscarriage—all you could do was freeze and stare. You think that part of you was torn out, roasted like the sweet, fat thing it was over a fire, devoured by your half-starving friends. But this is Tai, more solid than anyone you know, your softness cradled in the corners of her that time can’t touch, haunted by herself and a probably-dead girl.
Callie’s bed is objectively too small for two fully grown adults, and Tai’s elbow digs into your side ever time she moves.
“You’ll figure it out,” you try. “The sleepwalking, I mean,” and she laughs for a second.
“You don’t have to do that, Shauna,” she says. “This is enough,” and she gestures to Callie’s bedroom, the quilt that makes her seem younger than seventeen.
It’s not though. It probably never can be, and without thinking, you turn your head and kiss her. She doesn’t kiss you back, but her lips are soft and sweet, like dirt after rain.
After a half-moment, she pushes your shoulder back gently.
“You don’t want this, not really,” she says. “You don’t want to complicate things.”
You don’t reply—it wouldn’t complicate things, not for you, not anymore, but maybe you’re just so fucked-up you can’t help but let something more slide into empathy, that even when you want to with your whole heart, there isn’t anything you can do to get that bit of you back.
You try to remember what you said that first night, the night after Van was torn to shreds, dying on the first floor with Akilah’s AP Studio Art stitches in her face while upstairs, Tai cried in your arms. This isn’t your fault, maybe, or she’ll be okay. Both seem like lies now, and time has smoothed over whatever words you could have maybe once said.
“Okay,” you say, and Tai slides down until she’s resting her head on the matching sheet set you bought Callie last year on sale at K-Mart.
“I’ll wake you up if …” and you don’t have to finish the sentence. Tai just nods, and buried her face into the pillow.
“Thank you,” she says, muffled and quiet. Maybe this is comfort.
Maybe all it ever was was Tai next to you, her breathing deep and even, and the hurtling, nauseating knowledge that nothing you do can fix anything, that the world will keep turning and horrible, horrible things will never, ever stop.