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It is spring when things begin to change, and the future begins to blossom like a fragile bud reaching for the sun.
Kitty does her best to keep the liquor in the house scarce, tucked away on high shelves where she believes Blanche won’t think to look, perhaps wouldn’t bother to look, but sometimes there is no denying that the woman has a singularly focused mind and an unreasonable ability to balance atop a wooden stool in heels that Kitty wouldn’t dare to wear. The first few months had been the worst, tears and tantrums befitting a child who’d had their blanket snatched from their grasp. But now Blanche is patient, or at least, a little more patient than she used to be, and Kitty has found ways of diverting her attention. After all, there are reports to file for the school, forms to read, papers that need writing, and oh Blanche you have such a way with pretty words can’t you come help me?
And truly the woman does have a way with them, flowering and beautiful in a manner that Kitty compares to cool air in hot weather. Blanche will slip on her glasses and flutter her eyes, gesturing her petite hands and verbally refusing the compliments while visibly relishing them at the same time.
But now it is spring, and the magnolia tree has bloomed, and the students have gone home for holiday so Kitty brings home a bottle of something fierce to celebrate their brief reprieve. Blanche drinks fast, and loses count far too easily, and is thankful that tonight Kitty doesn’t reprimand her but rather laughs as she stands in the middle of the living room to re-enact a rather colorful tale of a night she spent at a show. Kitty is sweet and attentive, and never asks her about Allan, never asks her about Stanley or Stella or anything that happened at Elysian Fields at all, and it is almost enough to forget the whole affair had ever happened. But oddly enough, the less Kitty inquires the more Blanche feels. She remembers, and some nights there is no polka song or rhinestone tiara to haunt her. Those nights, she’ll talk. Tonight, as it happens, ends up as one of those nights.
“Kitty you should have seen the way he kissed her, as if it wasn’t even kissing at all but rather a war, some ferocious battle of war that he had to win.” Blanche sighs loudly, one hand clasped around the tumbler of amber liquid, the other pressing up into the air before coming to rest over her heart. “It was something terrible to behold and I never, I never thought my sweet sister would ever engage in such a thing but Stella, oh, Stella my star, she would. She would, and she did, and she had a baby…” Blanche trails off, her voice high and airy and full of naught but sorrow.
Kitty sits opposite her on the sofa, lounged in a manner befitting a woman who has three stiff drinks of whiskey warming her belly. “You make him sound positively frightful Blanche.”
“Oh but he was, he was! You should have seen it, not that I would ever want you to, for fear of how scared you might become, but I-” Blanche halts, a memory surfacing in her mind that she wishes wasn’t there, wishes she could drown but knows she can’t. Not truly. “-I remember when Stella met a boy in Laurel, and he took her dancing. They danced until the moon was full in the sky and she told me he took her outside to the gardens and kissed her so sweetly, just on the corner of the lips, just once and how it made her heart flutter so fast she thought it would burst. That…that is a kiss. Not this horrid display of power and strength. A proper kiss, a gentle one, presented and pinned like violet flowers over your breast. A kiss is meant to be a delicate thing, a gift, given out of love and affection and when that person who gives you that gift pulls away you should feel as light as a petal on a breeze. I spent so many years of teaching trying to tell the young ladies of my class that maybe there was a thing or two in those books I assigned them that wasn’t gone from the world, that what they deserved was maybe a caress on the lips in the way that Miss Austen would have written,” Blanche hesitates to brush her own fingers once across her lower lip, crooning quietly, “that made the whole world stand still around them. That made them vibrate to the very core and their entire body feel as if it could outshine the sun itself, and to accept absolutely no substitutes.”
Blanche takes another sip from her glass, breathing in heavily as she closes her eyes and shakes her head once. Kitty takes the opportunity to set her own drink aside, crossing her ankles and tilting her head towards Blanche. “You talk about it so romantically, you make a girl positively filled with envy,” she teases.
“Envy?” Blanche furrows her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Why, Blanche, I have never been kissed in such a fashion that ever made me tremble in the way I did just hearing you describe it alone. I mean that, darling,” she smiles as Blanche preens at the praise, “you make a girl want to melt, and in this heat too, you just might succeed.”
They both laugh then, melodious and drunk. It is hot, and their dresses are sticking to their skin but they couldn’t care less.
Blanche drains the last of her liquor, and places the empty tumbler on the table with a faint, echoing sound. When she speaks again her voice is serious, slurred only at the edges but still with that utter determination Kitty adores. “Is that true? You’ve never had someone give you a kiss that just makes you feel like you could fly through the air your head is so light?”
“Have you?” Kitty retorts.
“I have,” Blanche says quietly, “just once.”
Kitty does not need to be told that the lips who gave that kiss belong to a boy who is long dead, and she does not pry. She has seen Blanche come utterly undone, and it broke her heart in such a way that even now it feels bruised. She can only imagine how Blanche’s own must feel.
Blanche slaps her hands on the arms of the chair, making Kitty jump. She rises to her feet, teetering only a little as she takes a step, and then another, and another until she is standing before Kitty, their legs pressed together. “Now,” she begins, her eyes alight, “Miss Fontaine I am on the verge of being well and truly drunk so you’ll forgive me if my mouth begins to fail, but I have a proposal I’d like to make to you and I’d like to make it while I still can. I will not claim to know your heart because such a thing would be a lie, and I am not in the habit of lying to you. You are perhaps the only such person with that distinction and perhaps you should call that an achievement of yours and you can put that down in your books. But I know that you are kind to me when I have done nothing to deserve your kindness, and that you have helped me in a way that no one else has and no one else wanted to. I have always depended on the generosity of other people, but you have shown me a sort that I thought did not exist in anything outside of fairytales and make-believe. And now I stand here having received a sweetness you yourself have never had and that simply will not do, not when there is something I can do about it and should.”
“Blanche,” Kitty whispers, her heart pounding. There is something she hopes for, something she wants more than anything but she dares not ask for out of fear. “What on earth are you getting at?”
Blanche hums, a smile dimpling her cheeks. The drawl of her voice deepens, her hips swaying. “Some nights…some nights I hear you whisper things to me. When I’m crying, when you hug me and I fall asleep, except I’m not asleep yet and only have my eyes closed. You say things, soft things, like how you love me.”
Kitty’s entire body freezes.
“And I know you mean it,” Blanche continues, toying with the skirt of her dress, “I know because I have my ear pressed against your chest and your heart beats in this steady, slow rhythm…and it makes me feel safe, so I can rest. No one has told me they love me in a long time and meant it in the way you do.”
“Does that…is that bad?” Kitty offers. “Do you want me to…” stop is the silent word she can’t quite manage.
Blanche reaches out her left hand, presenting it to Kitty along with hooded eyes. “It made me feel afraid at first. But only because I once had an inclination, if you will, that frightened me and that I tried to bury. And I did succeed, I buried it with all sorts of things that maybe…maybe I shouldn’t have buried it with, but now I’m finding myself faced with digging it all back up again and for some reason that does not trouble me. Not with you.” She pauses. “Kitty, I was given a proper kiss once, long ago, and now I would like to give one to you so that you might have it to hold on to. So that we may both. Would you like for me to do this sweet thing?”
Kitty looks at Blanche’s outstretched hand, up at her eyes, and back to her hand again. The line between reality and pretend seems to have blurred entirely along with spots of her vision, but she has known Blanche for quite some time and knows that that line is precisely where Blanche’s life exists. The structure is not perhaps a solid one, but it is one Kitty herself will never label ‘unsound,’ or ‘immoral.’ Such words are like careless daggers thrown at bared, beating nerves, and she has had her own struck enough times to know that what Blanche is doing now, in this moment, is so terribly vulnerable precisely because it is genuine. Trembling, she reaches up and places her fingers in Blanche’s palm, praying that this isn’t some cruel trick of fate but also afraid that what she so much wants to happen will. Blanche said she had never lied to her, and Kitty believes she isn’t lying now. And so at the edge of the leap of faith, she jumps. “I would very much like for you to kiss me, Blanche.”
The woman standing before her giggles, girlish and merry, and tugs Kitty upright. Blanche stumbles, they both stumble, pressing close and fighting gravity for a balance their bodies eventually manage together. Kitty is holding her breath, utterly entranced by the flicker of Blanche’s lashes as her gaze moves purposefully to Kitty’s mouth and her hands come up to hold her cheeks so that she might steady herself. Then Blanche leans forward, tilts her head just a little, and their lips connect.
Kitty closes her eyes and she’ll be damned if Blanche didn’t deliver exactly what she described, exactly what Kitty longed for. Their movements are slow, exploratory, the tentative first steps of a new path. Blanche parts her mouth by a fraction and kisses her, kisses her, soft presses that make such wonderful noises when Kitty mimics the same motion. The tips of their noses meet when Blanche shifts to kiss her more firmly, locking their lips together for a long, blissful moment during which Kitty is positive she might die from sheer joy. They both smell of sweat and whiskey and perfume, and somehow that combination is now imprinted in a way Kitty knows she’ll never be rid of, along with the knowledge that Blanche’s small lips are not only pink, but soft as butterfly wings. Befitting, Kitty thinks, for a woman she sometimes wonders if had fallen from the pages of a book, a fairy queen of some distant kingdom. There is the promised flutter of her heart, the feeling of weightlessness, but neither of those compare to the rush of sweet intoxicating happiness that blooms inside her breast and blossoms inside every part of her being.
Blanche pulls away, giggling again in such a becoming way that Kitty can’t help but giggle too. “I quite like kissing you, Miss Fontaine,” Blanche hums, balancing herself as she moves her hands to Kitty’s shoulders. “Do you like kissing me? And do tell me the truth for I am terribly uncertain at reading people when my defenses are weak.”
The question is at once everything and nothing at all, something unplanned and somehow inevitable. “Yes,” Kitty breathes as their foreheads come to rest against one another, familiar with Blanche’s need for reassurance. “I think I like kissing you a lot, Blanche.”
Blanche beams. “You say such nice things that make a girl feel more drunk than two drinks-”
“Three,” Kitty can’t help but correct, the jest in her voice genuine.
“Fine,” Blanche proclaims with a roll of her eyes, “three drinks with no soda, although your needless score-keeping threatens to tarnish the moment and bring me tumbling back to Earth.”
Good, Kitty very nearly says, because she is on the Earth and has no desire now to let Blanche float away, not after that. “Then I shall delay our return a little while longer and say that maybe it was two and I was mistaken.”
“Miss Kitty,” Blanche beams, very nearly glowing in her relief, “sweet as that may be I cannot deny that perhaps I am at my limit, and have no desire to spoil the rest of the evening with anything that might make me forget. So how about you put away the rest of that bottle for another day, I’ll fetch us some cool water, and us girls go get some sleep. And in the morning, if you ask me to, I’ll kiss you again just so you can be sure about how much you like kissing me.”
Kitty exhales, content in a way she’s never felt before. “I would love that.”
Blanche steps away and moves towards the kitchen. “Then so it shall be!” she declares, throwing her hand up into the air, and Kitty laughs brightly, making Blanche feel comfortable and warm from the tip of her fingers down to her toes.
And even though Kitty feared it might not have been so, the next morning when she rises, bleary-eyed and with a pounding in her head, she finds Blanche already awake and still right there with her. She is sitting up in bed, her glasses on, eyes narrowed as she reads the folded book in her hands. The strap of her pink silk nightgown has fallen down her shoulder, and Kitty smiles as she pulls herself up to sit next to her. Blanche grins as she does, letting the book come to rest in her lap as she regards Kitty’s lazy movement and telltale groans of a truly fabulous hangover.
“Good morning, mon minou,” Blanche chirps, nursing her own, albeit much smaller, headache with a practiced grace of complete familiarity. “You should drink some more water.”
“I will,” Kitty promises, rubbing her eyes, knowing that Blanche is parroting back words Kitty has told her on several rough mornings, “but first, I need to be sure of something.”
Blanche fixes her with a quirk of her brow and a knowing smirk. “Ask me what you wish, and I will grant it.”
“Will you kiss me Blanche Dubois?” The question is hardly a whisper but both of them hear it.
Blanche throws back her head and nearly laughs, before turning on her side and bringing her fingers to brush along Kitty’s jaw. “Of course,” she says simply, “I promised you I would.” And then she does.