Chapter Text
Katya heard Trixie gasp behind her in the dressing room.
“I didn’t know you had that one!”
Trixie came up behind her as she was bending down, and all of the sudden, Trixie’s hands were on her; grabbing Katya’s hip, pulling the band of her nylons down, gently—because nothing Trixie did could ever be rough—stretching the skin taut where the tattoo sat near the base of Katya’s lumbar vertebrae, not quite a tramp stamp. Katya wanted to tense. But she was good at overriding that urge, at acting casual.
“You like my tramp stamp?” Katya mused. Because who was she shitting. That’s basically what it was. What it would be perceived as, anyway.
“I really do,” Trixie said, running her thumb over it. It was a complex-looking scientific equation, and unlike the rest of Katya’s tattoos, was done in a delicate script. She’d had it done that way on purpose, so when it faded, she could decide whether she wanted it enough to get it redone. A few lines had fallen out so far, but otherwise, it was still legible.
Katya wasn’t surprised Trixie had missed it—even if she was the only person in her life that consistently saw Katya half naked or more in the dressing rooms before and after their shows. She’d probably only noticed because Katya had been bending over, with the brightness of these godawful fluorescents above them highlighting it against her very pale skin.
Trixie removed her hands as Katya straightened, finger-combing her blonde wig before attempting to shove it into her duffel bag again. The hairs had all been sticking out the first time. She’d zipper over them if she didn’t get it tamed.
“When did you get it?” Trixie asked, voice fading behind Katya as she returned to her own station.
Katya thought carefully. The truth—that she’d gotten it recently, stone-cold sober—felt too revealing.
Just like she had to be careful with this wig, because they still had two shows left in this leg of their Fall tour it had to last throu—you know what? Fuck it. This shitty thing cost 60 dollars. And God knew, the fans liked it a little musty. It reminded them of the old Katya.
Katya stuffed it in her already overflowing duffel, then stripped off her tights, the padding at her thighs sticking to her tacky skin. She tossed those in the bag meant for smelly things and turned around, throwing Trixie a glance. All of this gave her a few seconds to come up with a vague but believable lie, which she was also good at. Not flinching around Trixie and deflecting in conversations were things she’d practiced around her.
“Hm? Can’t remember,” Katya said, as if distracted. “This spring I think?”
Trixie was running a makeup removing wipe in a rough circle on her face, adding it to a pile of several on the counter. Well, not rough. Thorough.
“Wasn’t Brandon’s pool party like, the end of May? I didn’t see it then,” Trixie said, words slurred as she scrubbed at the pink still surrounding her lips.
Fuck. She should have said early summer.
Katya veered the conversation. “Were you looking at my ass?” She began tossing makeup supplies in the duffel on top of everything, risky and haphazard. Her feet were aching, she needed a smoke, and for once, the place had too good an AC in their back dressing rooms. It was a fucking icebox. Katya’s sweat-slick skin was picking up on every draft of air that passed her.
“I was, actually,” Trixie said with a laugh. “You’ve been working out! I noticed you clappin’ them cheeks to LOBODA earlier.” Trixie did a nonexistent-hair twirl, which Katya smiled at. “You get a BML, a Brazilian Muscle Lift? They suck all the meat off your bones and inject it back there?”
Katya scoffed. “Yeah. All four pounds of it.”
“It’s gotta be more than four,” Trixie said half-seriously. When Katya didn’t pick it up, she said, “It looks beautiful.”
Katya felt a pang. Trixie wanted to know more about it, but she wasn’t going to ask. She was good to her like that. Gentle.
And the tattoo wasn’t even a big deal; its symbolism, ironically, would only be significant in the context of her and Trixie, and even then, it would have to be explained. To anyone else, even a mathematician, it would be a bunch of gibberish scrawled in an odd place by an inexperienced artist who’d gotten the equation wrong and used too light a hand.
Well, it was a big deal, and it wasn’t, because Trixie was Trixie. And hearing the explanation wouldn’t change how she treated Katya. Because Trixie was never rough with her.
“I remember—got it July 22nd,” Katya said, zipping her last two bags closed. Only a few strands got cinched. Whatever.
“Oh. So it is new.” Trixie turned to watch her. Her face was an irritated, rosy shade of pink that would die down after a few hours, but for now, she was the picture of The Pink One So Terrify. “And it's like, an equation?”
“It’s several. I had the artist combine some into a Frankenstein’s monster type thing.”
Trixie’s thick, boy eyebrows ticked down a bit. “What are they for? Just aesthetics?” She gathered all the towelettes and tossed them in a trash bin they’d placed between their stations, and had filled halfway between the two of them alone. Katya grabbed a couple from the open sleeve before Trixie put them away to scrub over her body. Predictably, Trixie was behind Katya in packing up, only because she had to care more about things like her perfectly-coifed, Jaymes Mansfield-commissioned wigs not getting kinked.
“No, they all mean something.” Katya put on a pair of black sweatpants to match her T-shirt and came to sit on the vanity counter beside Trixie while she finished. “Together, they don’t mean shit, obviously.” Trixie smiled. “But I picked each one for a different reason.”
“Do you want to share?”
The question held no pressure or obligation, like they usually didn't with Trixie, and she emphasized that point by cleaning negligible specks of makeup off her face in the mirror. She had other things to pack. But she wanted to stay close. She knew it was an intimate conversation. Katya could always count on her for that.
“First one is E=MC2. That’s my basic bitch equation, because General Relativity was too long. Reminds me even something as powerful as gravity can change.”
“Very basic bitch.”
Katya nodded. “Then distance from Earth to the Moon. Some of the numbers are important dates to me instead of the actual numbers, or I’d have a bunch of x's and zeroes back there.”
Trixie shrugged. “Could look kinda cool, I guess.” She finished messing with her face and turned to Katya, propping herself up with an arm on the counter. They were comfortably close. “You could say it was your body count or something. Play tic-tac-toe.”
“Next equation is how to calculate my body count, of people I’ve choked to death in an alley based on whether Mercury’s in retrograde—joking.” Trixie smirked. “Fibonacci sequence.”
“Because you like pasta?”
“Exactly. And it’s the Golden Ratio, which is found everywhere. In nature and music and—you know—” Katya said, waving her hand.
“Your face,” Trixie said.
“No. Not that. I wish.”
“Bitch, you kidding me? You'd nail that mask thing. You’re so symmetrical.”
“I don’t know . . . no, my face is too big.”
“You want to submit a picture right now?” Trixie threatened, pulling out her phone. “I’ll do it! I bet someone’s already tried, hold on—”
“No, stop,” Katya said, laughing, shoving her phone down. Trixie’s nails felt rough, because she’d been wearing and removing so many fake acrylics lately. Her skin was soft. “Next one is my favorite Starbucks order, spelled out in—”
“You don’t have a Starbucks order.”
“Girl! I might! You don’t know me.” Trixie fell into her, laughing, and Katya kept her faux-offended expression trained on her. “Are you done interrupting me, bitch?”
“Sorry,” Trixie said, with that throaty laugh of hers that Katya couldn’t mistake with anyone’s. “Keep going.”
“The next one is 1=.999, which is—long story—it’s basically about how people can be delusional, even when reality is staring them in the face.” Trixie gave her a look, and Katya called her read before she could say it. “Which, yes, includes me, by the way.”
Trixie pulled up a chair and rested her head on her knuckles, looking up at Katya with an amused, endeared expression. Like she was enjoying this. Katya was too, surprisingly. Nowadays, she usually had to force herself to open up about stuff that actually meant something between them, at least when cameras weren’t around. It’s like they’d formed a friendship so deep, half of it could sit there between them, unspoken, and the other half they’d both decided was too intimate to explore. Katya hated it and cherished it at the same time.
“The last one’s my favorite. It ties it all together.” Trixie blinked up at her slowly, still smiling, genuine and open. Waiting for her to continue, whether Katya actually chose this moment to be vulnerable, or bullshit her way out of it with an entertaining quip. Katya couldn’t help that the smile faded from her lips at that expression. She didn’t deserve her. “Einstein again. Special Relativity.”
“What’s that one?” Trixie asked, unfamiliar.
“It’s about how time and space aren’t absolute. They’re relative to the one observing it.” Trixie’s eyes flitted to the side, thinking. Katya could leave it there. No explanation. Trixie would let her. Katya’s tone was serious now. “It’s the only one with a t in it.”
Trixie met her gaze. Katya let it sink in, the silence creating a special sort of closeness.
“Do you remember that night I was yelling at you about math, and music, half-naked in the moonlight? And I scared the shit out of you?”
Several emotions crossed Trixie’s face, but she settled on a matter-of-fact, “Yeah?”
Katya was referencing a time during a brief but harrowing psychic break with reality, when she’d shown Trixie, one of the few people she’d come to fully care about and let close to her, a side of her that was darker than any dark side of any moon when she’d intentionally and effectively cut Trixie hard and deep at a time when she’d needed her most—and Trixie had in turn shown Katya one of the lightest sides of herself, accepting and forgiving and consistent as gravity, or the moon that was ever-changing but always there in the sky, and just as bright in Katya’s sea of black.
“That one’s about you,” Katya swallowed. “All of it is, sort of. About us.”
They were a long way from that period, and Katya was a much different person, in a different place. So was Trixie. But everything was relative. It meant more to Katya now that Trixie had stayed by her side and supported her than she could have ever comprehended in those moments. And she figured perspectives would keep shifting like that, ebbing and flowing like the moon’s pull on the tides, simultaneously meaning everything to Katya and meaning nothing to the universe in the grand scheme of things. Trixie’s kindness and loyalty had knitted itself to the fiber of Katya’s being and the fabric of her current reality, while simultaneously being just an abstract concept conjured by her psyche.
“I know that sounds crazy. I can’t explain it all, exactly, but just . . . don’t take it the wrong way.”
“No.” Trixie reached her hand out and touched Katya’s thigh. “It’s sweet. I understand.”
Katya smiled. She knew she would. Katya would hug her, but Trixie wasn’t a hugger. Trixie’s warm eyes resting on her and her hand touching her leg were basically the same thing, coming from Trixie.
“Except—why the tramp stamp?”
Because the lower spine is one of the most static parts of the body, yet is the center of all movement. Because you’ve carved a permanent place at my center. Because you ground me.
Katya gave a short shrug. “Why not?”
Trixie snorted softly, standing up to gather the rest of her things. “Do you want to get food after we drop our stuff off? I think Beto’s is still open.”
“Yes, God, please, get me a burrito.”
Katya rubbed her arms, and Trixie threw her her jacket. “I’ll pay if you call the Uber.”