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Vic is erasing the remnants of Candice’s makeover from their face with short, unsteady wipes of a cotton pad when there comes a sharp rap at the door. Bianca enters their dressing room without waiting for permission, her fingertips white where they press against the doorframe.
“Get your things. We’re leaving in five.”
Vic had meant to sleep in the studio, frowns slightly at the disruption of that. “Why?”
“Hurry up,” Bianca says instead of answering before walking away, leaving the doorway an echo of empty space.
When Vic steps outside, the sky is a bruised indigo, the parking lot mostly empty. The twin eyes that are the taillights of Bianca’s car glint red in the dark. They slide into the passenger seat carefully. Bianca doesn’t look at them, barely waits for them to close the door before she’s reversing, swerving out of the parking lot onto the streets.
Vic taps their fingers against the leather armrest. They feel restless, the air in the car stale and too still. They could really use a cigarette. They could use something stronger, probably. They’ve already been using— months of pills for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bianca would be disappointed if she knew the extent of it. But chances are Bianca already knows, has just learned to conceal her fleshier emotions after years of practice.
They wish she’d look at them. They wish she’d say something.
“I can get home myself, you know,” they say. When Bianca doesn’t answer, they raise their voice slightly. “You know that, right?”
Bianca changes lanes a bit too abruptly. Vic, digging nails into the armrest: “Bianca. I know you can hear me.”
“You weren’t going to go home,” Bianca mutters.
Vic privately delights at having gotten a response, shiver down their spine in anticipation of the argument. “What does that mean?”
“Four nights this week.” Bianca’s voice is bone-dry, verges on breaking. “Four nights you stayed at the studio. Did you want to make tonight the fifth?”
“I don’t understand why it upsets you so much.”
They watch Bianca open her mouth. C’mon, do it Jocasta, say something that’ll hurt. But Bianca swallows whatever words waited on the tip of her tongue, leaving Vic’s eyes to trace the squeeze and slackening of her throat. “It doesn’t,” she mutters.
Vic sinks back into their seat, deprived of even this, the car returning to silence.
Outside, Los Angeles passes them by in streaks of streetlight. Bianca is usually a good driver, always has been, steady and reliable. But tonight the steering wheel moves jerkily, her knuckles ghost-white against it.
A piece of hair continues to fall into her eyes as she drives. She blows at it at first, tosses her head back impatiently when that doesn’t suffice, huffs in frustration at her own failure. Vic doesn’t quite realize that they’re raising a hand to brush it away, only realizes what they’ve done when Bianca slams the brakes a hundred feet out from the traffic light ahead, sending them both lurching toward the windshield.
Braced against the car door, Bianca stares at them, pupils trembling, prey-animal eyes— the longest second of Vic’s life. Slowly, Vic retracts their hand. Bianca tears her eyes away.
The car eases forward, pulls to a stop at the light as it turns yellow, then red. “Don’t fucking scare me like that,” Bianca says lowly.
Vic swallows. “I didn’t know you would freak out.”
“You don’t touch people while they’re driving, Vic, that’s common sense.”
They scoff. “Well, I still think that reaction was a little extreme.”
“Sorry for being on edge around you,” Bianca spits.
“This is ‘on edge’? This is what ‘on edge’ looks like? You’re acting crazy.”
“Don’t lecture me about what crazy looks like.”
“I’ll lecture you all I want,” Vic snaps, drawing themself taller in their seat, “I am your—”
“My what?” The light turns green. Bianca floors the gas harder than necessary, throwing Vic back in their seat. “My stepparent ? Or did you forget?”
Vic goes silent. A muscle in Bianca’s jaw tics. The passing streetlights strobe across the planes of her face, creating the impression that she’s flickering in and out of Vic’s field of vision, could disappear at any moment. Like she’d be gone if Vic dared blink.
“Is that really what you’re so worked up about?” they warily ask. “The divorce?”
Bianca scoffs. “‘Worked up’. Jesus Christ.”
“That isn’t what you are?”
Bianca exhales hard through her nostrils. “I just want to know what the plan was. Were you going to tell me eventually? Or was I always going to find out with the rest of the world?”
“I didn’t think it mattered that much.”
Bianca’s lips pinch. “Of course you didn’t.”
Vic crosses their arms, feeling defensive. “Why are you even mad at me? David should’ve told you. You’re his daughter.”
“I’m his daughter,” Bianca repeats incredulously, then barks a laugh, hands flexing against the wheel. “Sure, yeah, but I’m your—” She cuts herself off. Continues sharply, “I haven’t seen him in months. I see you every fucking day, Vic. You could’ve at least mentioned it.”
Vic stares out the window, pretending the darkness outside will afford them an answer.
Bianca maneuvers the car onto the on-ramp, begins to accelerate. “You need to tell me,” she quietly says, “if you’re serious about it.”
“Of course I am,” Vic bristles. “I just announced it on TV. That’s like— that’s basically like I did it already.” They fix her with baleful eyes. “Do you think I can’t do it? That I can’t divorce him?”
“It’s a big change,” Bianca replies. The for us goes unsaid.
“It isn’t that big,” Vic hedges. Chooses their next words like weapons, a knife slipped cruelly between the ribs. “I mean, this will be his third divorce, right? And this time you’re all grown up, so—”
“Don’t,” Bianca warns, a serrated edge to her voice. A pause. “And you know what I mean, Vic.”
Of course they do. David, the shackle and root and collateral damage, proxy love, deadfall trap; the gaping sore between them, the parasitic abscess. Divorcing him isn’t so much a surgical removal as it is a violent tearing apart. But Vic has to do it. They can’t continue on like this much longer. They want more, more than what David and his cold absence can offer, want so much and so deeply that it makes their hands shake and seize. And what’s more, they know how to tell that their time’s running out.
But divorcing him also means, in a way, setting Bianca free. Vic doesn’t know if they could stand to do that.
They exhale. “Nothing has to change. We can still—”
“Still what?” Bianca asks, voice ironclad.
“Still be the same,” they finish lamely.
Bianca laughs harshly. “Do you seriously think that’s what I want?”
“I don’t know what you want,” they say, and it feels like asking for something, something Bianca can’t give them.
Bianca looks back at them, her eyes hunted, haunting. Then she blinks, and it’s as if something’s shuttered within her gaze, a door clicking shut and locking before them. “Forget it,” she mutters.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” Vic feebly reminds her, but Bianca’s already turned her eyes back to the asphalt, grey swallowed by black, miles and miles of it before them through the windshield. Neither of them utter another word for the remainder of the drive home.