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“I’m ticklish and if you don’t—“
Callie had wedged herself between Arizona’s legs and sat on her left leg so she could hold her right under her arms. “Stop moving and it won’t tickle.”
“Callie” she whined.
It had started as an offer to paint Arizona’s toes. Her best friend was coming into town so Callie could make him cancer free and Arizona had gotten a little too nervous so Callie had decided to pamper her with a foot massage and new nail polish.
Then she’d trucked out the navy blue they usually used on their fingers instead of the sparkly pink Arizona used on her toes and only Callie ever got to see.
There’d been a disagreement which had turned into Callie sitting on her wife.
She ran her hand up Arizona’s calf before poking at the back of Arizona’s knee. “I heard this was an erogenous zone.” She was going for sultry but Arizona was busy eyeing still the navy blue nail polish Callie insisted would match her skin tone. That was find for fingers but she liked sparkly and fun for her toes.
“That was something they made up for Ally McBeal,” she countered grumpily.
Callie didn’t agree and lightly ran her fingers across the skin.
It wasn’t erogenous but it was ticklish and Arizona bucked. Her knee collided with Callie’s face and her wife fell back on the bed clutching her nose.
Something between “argh” and “my nose” escaped between Callie’s hands.
Arizona flipped over and crawled across the bed to her wife. She reached for her face. “I’m so sorry—“ She’d felt her knee collide. It couldn’t be pretty. She carefully pulled Callie’s hands away from her face and found nothing but a nose slightly redder under the dark skin and freckles.
She narrowed her eyes and Callie grinned before leaping on her and wrestling until she somehow ended up sitting on Arizona’s right leg with Arizona’s left looped around her neck.
As her uncle said, “That’ll learn her.”
“I used to wrestle with boys Calliope Torres!”
Callie gasped and reached for the newly discovered ticklish back of Arizona’s knee.
“Get. Your. Sleeper. Hold. Off. Me,” she grunted.
“Say you’ll go with the pink!”
She waited and tensed her leg to maintain her grip. Her wife seemed to relax. Seemed to settle with the idea she’d married a woman who liked pink nail polish but then she rocked to the side and they both tumbled over. She was up again and used her weight to keep Arizona down.
“How about,” she kissed her gently. On the lips and then the corner of her mouth and then just beneath her ear where it always made her pulse pound, “we figure it out later.”
This new plan was better than the pampering.
She tugged at the bottom of Callie’s shirt. “Okay, later. Later is good.”
Callie murmured in agreement but abruptly sat up between Arizona’s legs. She kneaded the muscles of Arizona’s thighs. “I’m more interested in these legs right now.”
Arizona flexed. She didn’t have ropey athlete definition but she when she flexed she could see all the muscles pretty clearly. “I work out.”
“You’re like a little cage fighter.”
Arizona wrapped her legs around her wife and pulled her back down into another kiss. “And you love it.”
“I do.”
####
She covers it up when she’s alone. And with Sofia in daycare and Callie working that’s a lot of the time. She sits on the bed and stares at the wall and tries to put something in her head besides the blankness.
But when she thinks she goes back to the mountain or to Mark or Nick or Timothy. She goes back to the men that always seem to leave her. Or she goes back to that thing beneath the covers.
Sometimes when not thinking is to exhausting and grieving isn’t enough she checks the clock to make sure she’ll have enough time and she pulls the sheets back and she stares.
She wears shorts all the time because they’re easy to get on and the leg doesn’t hang off her stump obscenely. So it’s easy to just pull back the sheets and see what she’s lost.
People leave. Death happens. That’s easy to grasp for Arizona. But her leg? It’s a part of her. It was a part of her.
One thigh is shorter than the other, but it’s thinner too. They bound it during surgery and kept it tightly wrapped for the first few weeks to shape it. She’s amputated limps before and knows a good stump on sight. That team in the OR left her with a good one.
But she’s avoided going to be fitted for a prosthesis and infection at the time of amputation kept her from being fitted with one on the day. So there’s no muscle mass. Mark was probably fitter in a coma for a month then she is. One thigh is weak and comical looking as it twitches and moves and tries to power the rest of a leg that saw the inside of an incinerator a month ago. And one thigh flexes and bulges and leads to a knee that articulates beautifully and to a slender calf and ends at a foot that still has little specks of nail polish on it.
Callie painted her toes before Nick came and now, three months later, there’s just five little chips of pink.