Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ruth’s early memories of L.A. are hazy and choked with smog.

There’s a few that stick out, of course, clear and vivid and much, much more real than she’d like. The big ones, the milestones, the roll-credits moments that even she can’t easily forget. Her first night in her first apartment, her first scene study class. Her first major audition, her second major audition, the first time she woke up facedown in a back alley, the hangover-blurry morning after a night spent trying to drown the memory of her third major audition.

The first time she called her parents to help her make rent, the first time she called them to help her pay for her utilities, for gas or electricity, her phone bill, her car insurance, a pair of shoes without holes in the soles, a pair of pants without holes in the pockets. The first time she called them to help her buy food. The first time she called them in tears, blackout drunk at three in the morning, absolutely and unshakeably convinced that her whole damn life was a terrible, horrible, awful mistake.

In hindsight, most of the big ones are the ones she wishes were hazy and choked with smog.

She doesn’t remember her first paycheck, only that it came from waitressing, not from acting.

She doesn’t remember the thrill of her first callback, only the agony of its subsequent failure.

She doesn’t remember the triumph of having her own apartment, only how cold and empty and lonely it felt, the cracks on the wall, the mould and the mildew and the cockroaches skittering across the ceiling when she tried to sleep. She doesn’t remember the freedom of hard-won independence, only the humiliation of having to beg for handouts and the gnawing pangs of a days-empty stomach.

She remembers Debbie buying her lunch, Debbie helping her run lines, Debbie lending her a scarf.

She remembers, choked with smog and crystal clear all at once, Debbie climbing into bed with her.

The first time it happened, only a couple of months into their fledgling friendship, she remembers only in pieces and fragments.

She’d caught some shitty virus from somewhere or another, and was so dizzy with fever she could barely see straight. It happened a lot in those early days, the home-grown Nebraska farm girl unaccustomed to the filth and grime of the City of Angels, the cold and damp of her crappy roach-infested apartment, overworked and underpaid and half-starved, exhausted and burned out and stressed all the fucking time. It happened so often, her first couple of years as a hopeful, hapless would-be actress, she felt like she was sick more often than she was healthy.

Small wonder, then, that her memories of that time are hazy; she was delirious for half of them.

Debbie was a constant presence in those days, a faint, haloed vision that seemed only half-real.

She’d driven Ruth home from scene study class that day. Ruth remembers this part better than the rest, partly because she was still at least thirty per cent coherent and partly because Debbie spent the entire journey chiding her for her recklessness and stupidity, muttering and grumbling about how she should have stayed home, how she’d probably infected everyone in a thirty-mile radius, how she’d embarrassed herself at least three separate times during the class, how the drive was half an hour out of her way so she’d better be fucking grateful, and so on and so on and so on.

She was always trying to make Ruth feel better by making her feel worse.

Somehow, and Ruth still doesn’t fully understand how, it usually worked.

“Next time,” Debbie sighed, yanking the wheel, “just fucking stay in bed.”

Ruth had tried to smile. She doesn’t recall if she succeeded. “I might have missed something important,” she thinks she said. “And I definitely would have missed you.”

She remembers, after the car juddered to a stop, Debbie helping her climb the two-dozen stairs up to her stupid crappy apartment. She remembers leaning heavily against the cracked, mildewy wall, vertigo coming on as sudden as a flash-flood. She remembers Debbie helping her out of her clothes, helping her into bed, covering her with a thin, moth-eaten blanket. She remembers—

She remembers Debbie leaving, but she doesn’t remember her coming back.

She remembers dreaming. Dark, swirly half-nightmares twisting in her guts.

She remembers her razed throat, her flayed lungs, her whole body shivering.

She remembers—

She remembers waking once or twice to Debbie’s voice on the other side of the room. Something about soup in the fridge, something about a spare blanket, something about something something something.

She remembers waking up drenched with sweat, what felt like a million hours later, to Debbie’s arms wrapped around her, Debbie’s lips pressed to her temple, Debbie’s breath ghosting across her cheek, Debbie’s hair tickling her neck.

She remembers razorblades in her throat, a headache pulsing behind her eyes, as she groaned, “Wha...?”

Debbie’s nose brushed her hairline. Her arm was strong and tight around her middle. “Shh, Ruthie.”

Ruth remembers the sheets sticking to her soaked skin, remembers sweat pouring off her in sick waves.

“Yr in m’bed.” It came out thick, slurry. “Why?”

Debbie chuckled, deep and rich and musical.

“You asked me to hold you.” Her voice was warm; her lips, sticky on Ruth’s blazing skin, were deliciously cool. “You begged me to.”

Ruth had no memory of this. She still has no memory of it. She only recalls Debbie’s lips, her voice.

Her arm around her waist. Her palm kneading at her stomach, fingers splayed, rubbing soft circles.

“I thnk yr lyin’,” she’s pretty sure she mumbled. “I thnk you wnted t’ hold me.”

She felt Debbie smile, soft against her temple. This, she remembers with pure, diamond-cut clarity.

“Idiot,” Debbie snorted, fond in a way that felt vividly new. “Go back to sleep.”

Ruth can’t say for certain — the next few minutes-seconds-hours-centuries were a delirious, black-swirling blur — but she guesses she must have done what she was told because the next thing she recalls it was the following morning and she was sweating awake to a shaft of sunlight, a broken fever, and an empty apartment.

That was the first time.

The second, third, fourth, fifth times all kind of blended into each other in a never-ending cycle of misery, but it was pretty much just more of the same. Ruth with a fever, a cold, a stomach bug; Ruth with the flu, with bronchitis, with god only knew what. Ruth, one time, in the hospital with pneumonia, and Debbie somehow finding space in that tiny little bed to crawl in and hold her until visiting hours were over.

Debbie insisted every time that Ruth had begged her to do it. Ruth never, ever remembered doing so.

It’s the last thing in the world that she wants to think about right now, for more reasons than she’ll ever be able to count, but here she is just the same, smog-choked and hazy and fucking drowning in it.

She’s been drowning in a lot of things lately.

Two months ago, she was drowning in self-pity, treading so much murky water that she willingly, soberly made the worst mistake of her life for a second time.

One month ago, she was drowning in unused character ideas, drowning in the fear of being left behind in a gym full of women more talented and more put together than she could ever be; one month ago, she was drowning in the chaos and confusion of a new job — her first real acting job ever, after a decade of failure — and with it a new living space, a new environment, and a new feral roommate.

Two weeks ago, she was drowning in vodka, flailing for her life in the wrestling ring, desperately trying to convince her former best friend that they should work together.

One week ago, she was drowning in bruises, in muscle spasms, in aches and pains and four straight days of hardcore training, of Debbie’s elbow in her ribs, Debbie’s knee in her gut, Debbie’s fist in her face, Debbie’s body slamming into her again and again and again, Debbie’s frown when one or both of them fucked it all up, and Debbie’s smile, brighter than the sun, in the blinding, beautiful, brilliant moment when it all finally came together.

Four days ago, she was drowning in the ring, alone and afraid in front of a live audience, as Debbie stormed out just before the big finale they’d worked so fucking hard on, leaving her ex-best-friend, her villain, her heel, her partner, to fend for herself against a crowd they’d riled up to want her dead.

Four days ago, and four agonising minutes after that, she was drowning in a crush of swarming bodies, the whole GLOW team all crowding into the ring together, saving her and shielding her, singing and dancing and laughing, so loud and so light and so full of life that she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything at all but laugh along with them and drown, drown, drown in love.

Twenty-four hours ago, yesterday, she was drowning in a positive pregnancy test.

Today, after quietly making that pregnancy go away, she’s apparently drowning in memories of Debbie in her bed.

And not just in her bed. In the ring, two weeks ago, one week ago, four days ago.

It’s Debbie she’s thinking of when Sam, generous and patient in a way she really, really doesn’t deserve, drops her off outside the motel after the abortion.

It’s Debbie she’s thinking of when he helps her out of his smoke-reeking car, hands over a bag of doughnuts that she asked for but no longer wants, and tells her, “Take the rest of the week off.”

It’s Debbie she’s thinking of when she shakes her head, never mind that the rest of her body is shaking too, and says, “I’m okay, Sam, I can keep working.”

“It’s adorable,” he says flatly, “that you think I was making a suggestion.”

Ruth feels the fight go out of her like she’s just been punched in the gut.

He’s right, is the thing, and she knows it. It’s exactly what the doctor told her less than half an hour ago: normal activities, Mrs Wilder, not full-contact sports.

She understands the necessity for rest and recuperation and all that other bullshit, she really does. She knows that it’s sensible, knows that staying out of the ring for a few days is probably the difference between healing properly and landing herself in the hospital with a ruptured everything, but it still hurts like hell, the burn of humiliation and shame so much worse than the dull cramps clawing their way to the surface as the anaesthesia wears off.

It makes her feel useless, worthless. It makes her feel like a waste of space, a burden not just to Sam and Debbie, the director and the shining star who both put their trust in her to not fuck up their vision, but to the show as a whole, to the rest of the girls, who all stepped up to save her skin on Friday after Debbie bailed on her, and to herself as well, to everything she’s worked for ten long and miserable years to achieve, everything she finally, finally has in her hands.

Will she ever stop screwing up, she wonders, and hates herself so fucking much.

She says to Sam, truthful and submissive at once, “You’re being overprotective.”

“Like hell I am.” He looks her dead in the eye, not really soft but definitely not as tough and surly as he wants her to believe. “Take the rest of the week off. That’s an order. Rest up, take it easy. Listen to your body, assuming you ever fucking listen to anyone. I want you back at the top of your game by Monday, so do what you have to do to make that happen. Capisce?”

She sighs. “You’re the boss.”

“Damn right.” He’s not smiling, hasn’t really smiled in all the time she’s worked for him, but there’s something almost gentle in the way he pats her shoulder as he turns back to the car, something almost kind in the way he lets the contact linger a fraction of a second longer than necessary. “Take care of yourself.”

She almost laughs. Would laugh, if her body were a fraction more under her control.

That ship has long since sailed, she doesn’t say, because Jesus Christ, after everything he’s done for her today, he deserves better than that.

“I’ll do my best,” she does say, and thinks of Debbie as she watches him drive away.

For the first time in the six weeks she’s been living with Sheila the self-proclaimed She-Wolf, Ruth puts a sock on the door.

She feels kind of bad about it. She’s supposed to be the accommodating one, the hospitable one, the one who nods and smiles and spends the night shivering outside, watching the moon reflect off the swimming pool, failing to fall asleep. Sheila is the one who needs space, the one who needs privacy, who needs to be able to lock the door and have the room to herself two or three times a week. Sheila’s the one who’s struggling to adjust, not just to GLOW and life at the Dusty Spur, but to being surrounded by so many other people all the time; it’s hard for her, Ruth gets that, and she prides herself on trying her hardest to be the kind of roommate who doesn’t make it even harder.

So, yeah, she feels bad about the sock. Feels bad for being the one to ask for that hospitality. Feels bad in general, really, for a whole spectrum of reasons... but not bad enough to keep from doing it.

Ruth doesn’t have it in her to be accommodating or hospitable right now.

She doesn’t have it in her to nod and smile, or do much of anything at all.

She feels—

Fuck, she doesn’t know what she feels.

She’s shaking. Like, really, really shaking. Like, shaking so hard she can feel her bones rattle. She’s shaking the way she does when she’s burning up with fever, like her body is trying to drive the sickness out of itself by brute sheer force, except there is no sickness, no fever, nothing wrong with her body at all.

She’s cramping in earnest now. Her groin and her guts feel like they’re devouring each other, like her intestines are trying to strangle her uterus and more or less succeeding. It’s bad, but it’s not excruciating, unpleasant and uncomfortable and unapologetically shitty but definitely nothing worse than what she was told to expect.

She’s sore, sort of raw. Her insides feel stretched and scraped, her whole abdomen is tender and sensitive, but that’s okay, that’s normal too. It’s normal, it’s completely normal, everything is so fucking normal.

So why the hell can’t she stop shaking?

She sets the bag of doughnuts down on the television, lets it settle and hopes that the rest of her will take the hint and do the same. She’ll leave it there for now, worry about what to do with it later. A peace offering for Sheila, maybe, when the sock comes off the door, or a treat for herself when she’s pulled herself together and gotten her appetite back.

Or, hell, maybe she’ll just throw them into the trash and pretend they never existed at all. God knows, she wishes she could do that with the rest of her day.

It makes her insides churn, for some reason, looking at that crumpled little bag. It makes her feel a little bit queasy, thinking about the way Sam’s eyes crinkled when he handed them over, the way he lowered his voice to a murmur when she stumbled out after the procedure, legs like water and ears ringing, like he somehow knew the world was just a little bit too loud and too bright and too much, the way he squeezed her shoulder, guiding and supporting and so, so careful.

The way he knew, every step of the way, exactly what to do, exactly what to say, exactly what she needed, like it was no big deal at all.

“You think you’re the first actress I’ve ever directed who got herself in trouble?” he laughed, when she asked how the hell he was so good at it. “Jesus Christ, it’s practically a rite of passage.”

She can’t think about that right now. She can’t think about Sam and his uncharacteristic gentleness, or about the way he made the whole damn nightmare so much easier than it had any right to be.

If she lets herself think about it, Sam’s gentleness and his experience and his crinkling eyes and his doughnuts, she’ll start to think about Debbie again, and all the ways it should have been her instead.

She can’t do that. She can’t, she—

God, why can’t she stop shaking?

She stumbles into the bathroom, shuts the door behind her even though she’s entirely alone and the sock on the door will — hopefully — ensure she stays that way. She puts the toilet seat down, wincing at the excessively loud clang, then sits on the cold porcelain and puts her head between her knees.

She closes her eyes, lays one hand on the wall for balance and lays the other over her too-tight ribs, her too-thin lungs, her too-weak heart. She breathes in, breathes out, breathes and breathes and breathes, as slow and steady as she can, letting the tiny room fill up with the sound and the rhythm of it.

It doesn’t help.

It doesn’t help at all, not even a little bit, but she keeps doing it for a few minutes anyway, because it’s better than nothing, and she’s not sure her legs would take her weight anyway if she tried to get back up.

You’re fine, she tells herself again, and again, and again. You’re totally, totally fine.

There’s nothing wrong with her body. The only thing that was wrong with it is gone now.

She’s fine. She’s cramping but she’s fine. She’s sore but she’s fine. She’s shaking but—

She’s just being dramatic, that’s all. She’s just being stupid and crazy, like she always is.

Isn’t that what Debbie would tell her?

No.

Debbie would tell her, that was my husband’s baby, you bitch.

Debbie would tell her, you deserve fucking sepsis, you traitor.

Debbie would tell her, I hope it tears you to shreds, you cunt.

Debbie would tell her—

No.

No, no, no, no. That’s not helping. That’s only making it worse.

She needs to stop thinking, she needs to stop feeling, she needs to stop shaking.

She needs to take a deep breath, needs to pull herself together.

She needs—

A shower.

A shower, hot enough to scald the tremors clean out of her. A shower, long enough to stop her mind from racing, her lungs from stalling, her body from shaking, her heart from breaking.

A shower, long enough and hot enough to scrub and scour the dregs of the day off her skin, and then she’ll crawl into bed and take a desperately-needed nap, and then she’ll wake up feeling a million times better, just like she did back in those early, hazy, smog-choked days when she was always sick and Debbie was always there.

She nods, forehead knocking against her knees.

She breathes in, breathes out. The sound echoes, bouncing off the tile. She feels like she’s underwater.

She lifts her head, looks up at the shower stall, barely three paces away, then slowly climbs to her feet.

Her legs feel trembly, but they take her weight.

See, she tells herself. You’re good. You’re fine.

The cramping in her guts, painful but familiar, painful but surprisingly comforting, throbs its agreement.

She showers for more than half an hour.

She runs the water as hot as it will go, stands under the scorching stream until her skin is lobster-red, then she keeps standing there until the pipes start groaning, until all the heat and most of the pressure have abandoned her, until there’s nothing left but a cold, pitiful trickle that tests even her impressive tolerance for self-inflicted suffering. Even then, it’s only when she starts to shiver again that she finally calls it a day and forces herself to get out.

It’s cold. It’s really, really fucking cold.

She’s not shaking; she’s shivering. She’s shivering because it’s cold, because it’s really, really fucking cold, and that’s totally, completely normal. She’s shivering, not shaking, because she stayed in the shower for so long the water ran cold, and she’s shivering because she’s completely naked, standing in the middle of the bathroom, dripping half-frozen water onto the floor, staring down at her hollowed-out body when she should be getting dressed.

She touches the jutting bones of her ribs, the hard angles of her hips, her pelvis.

She touches the flat plane of her stomach, the dark hair between her thighs.

She’s still cramping, still tender and sensitive. Her fingertips feel like lit matches.

She cups herself, thinks of slipping inside, wonders how badly it would hurt.

She thinks about Sam helping her out of the car. Rest up. Listen to your body.

She thinks about Debbie in her bed, lips brushing her temples. Shh, Ruthie.

She thinks—

She grabs a towel off the nearest rail — hers or Sheila’s, she doesn’t even bother to check — and wraps it around herself. It’s short, barely covering the tops of her thighs, but it does its job well enough; she can feel the rough fabric soaking up the drops of water, can feel her prickling skin slowly start to warm up.

She waits for the shivering to subside.

She waits for her body to unclench.

She waits for the cramps to ease off.

None of those things happen.

She shoulders the bathroom door open, stands in the doorway, leaning all of her weight against the jamb. She feels exhausted all the way down to her bones, drained of strength, drained of energy, drained of everything that once made her feel close to human. Her bed is just three or four steps away, but she doesn’t know if she can make it that far without toppling over.

She doesn’t trust herself to walk in a straight line, barely trusts herself to move at all, even as she knows that’s stupid, knows it’s ridiculous, knows that it makes no goddamned sense. Her body is fine, it’s completely fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s fucking fine.

She breathes. Her lungs don’t hurt, but they feel very, very weak. Too long in the shower, she thinks.

She closes her eyes. She feels the start of a headache thumping at her temples, loud and surprisingly rhythmic.

She thinks about Debbie’s lips pressed there, thinks about the ghostly wisp of her breath, her voice.

The thumping gets louder, less rhythmic and much more painful.

She feels sick, feels feverish, feels like she’s burning up and freezing all at once. She knows she’s not really any of those things, knows that she’s not really anything at all, but her body still won’t stop shaking and her innards still won’t stop cramping and the pounding in her head is relentless, thump thump thump, like a jackhammer inside her skull, like a pneumatic drill shrieking inside her brain, like a fist knocking on a—

“Ruth fucking Wilder, open this fucking door right the fuck now!”

Oh.

Oh, then straight on its heels, sick with horror, Oh, shit, it’s her.

Her legs, both of which have been doing such a great job of taking and holding her weight until this point, buckle. She hits the floor, towel pooling around her, bare skin exposed once again to the cold, unforgiving air.

Her vision is white. Her heart feels like it’s trying to break out of her chest.

She hears herself croak, disoriented and just a little bit delirious, “Debbie?”

“Ruth!”

It’s definitely her. Ruth can barely make out the sound through the barrier of the door and the blood thundering in her ears, but she knows Debbie’s voice as intimately as she knows her own heartbeat. It sends a rush of panic flooding through her, makes her feel like she’s falling out of her body, or like it’s turning itself inside out; it makes her want to scream, makes her want to cry, makes her want to curl up right here on the floor and disintegrate into nothing.

Masochist that she is, she doesn’t allow herself to do any of that.

She wets her lips. Draws a shuddering breath that doesn’t quite make it into her lungs. Tries to call Debbie’s name again, and fails spectacularly.

“Ruth!” Debbie shouts again, like she heard it anyway. “Open up!”

I can’t, Ruth thinks brokenly. I can’t open the door. I can’t stand up, I can’t move, I can’t even breathe. I can’t let you in, I can’t let you see me like this, I can’t let you find out what I did, I can’t—

She’s shaking again. Her ribs are clattering against her lungs, her heart, the clenching muscles trying in vain to hold her insides inside. Her teeth are chattering, jaw aching with a tension she can’t loosen. Her skin feels like it’s sloughing off, like there’s nothing left of her but a skeleton, a broken pile of rattling bones that might have once, many, many years ago, housed the flesh and muscle and organs of a human woman.

I can’t, she thinks again, and she hears the choking rasp of her voice, speaking out against her will, desperately trying to say those things out loud. “Debbie, I...”

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I—

“Jesus fucking Christ, Ruth!” Debbie’s voice is louder now, hard and authoritative; it carries through the door, through the slow disintegration of Ruth’s body, through every last barrier between them, carving a path straight into her brain. “If you’re going to rip me a new one or whatever, at least have the guts to do it to my fucking face!”

Ruth’s stomach drops, then immediately bungees all the way up into her mouth. The world around her does a full three-sixty degree barrel roll, turning completely upside down and then immediately righting itself again, back and forth and back and forth, until she’s half-convinced she’s going to fall off the edge of the universe and drift away into oblivion.

She feels—

She doesn’t understand what Debbie is saying. She doesn’t—

She feels—

“What?” she thinks she manages to croak. “You... I... what?”

Debbie makes an irritable noise, impatience mixed with something Ruth can’t quite place, then begins hammering again on the wood. “We’re not having this conversation through a fucking door, Ruth!”

Ruth draws a weak breath, holds it in her lungs for as long as they can stand it, then crawls back into the shaking, shivering wreck of her body.

“Okay,” she makes herself say. Her voice trembles just slightly. “Okay, but, um... can you wait, like, just one minute? I, uh... I’m not decent.”

It’s such a ridiculous understatement, she almost laughs. She doesn’t, but it helps loosen some of the knots inside her to feel the urge anyway.

Debbie does laugh. It’s ugly, if not precisely vicious, and it immediately ties those knots back up again.

“Fuck you, Ruth,” she says, without any real heat. “You’ve never been decent a day in your fucking life.”

Ruth ignores that. She has to, if she wants to make it through the next five or ten minutes in one piece.

She has no idea how she picks herself up off the floor. She has no idea how she convinces her watery legs to take her weight again. She has no idea how she convinces her innards to stay where they’re supposed to be, or her skeleton to knit itself back together and hold them there. She has no idea how she manages to stumble the three or four steps to her bed, has no idea how she manages to still the shaking of her body for long enough to struggle into her sleepwear, to push her shower-wet hair out of her eyes, to make herself look almost like a normal human being.

She leaves the towel where it is, puddled pitifully in the doorway to the bathroom. She leaves the bathroom door half-open, the mirror visible through the little gap, dripping with condensation, reflecting her pale face, the sodden strands of her hair.

She looks sick, feverish. She looks like everything she imagined she was feeling before, everything she used to feel all the time, back in those early, hazy days. She looks halfway dead, which is only slightly worse than she actually feels.

Does she look like a woman who just aborted her best friend’s husband’s baby? She has no fucking clue.

The best she can hope for, she supposes, is that she looks awful enough for Debbie to be gentle with her.

She sits on the bed, tries and fails and tries again to catch her breath.

She runs her hands over the rough, heavy fabric of the blanket. It’s a bigger bed than the one in her old apartment, and considerably more comfortable too, but it doesn’t really feel like home.

She tries to picture herself curled up on her side, sick with fever, shivering under that rough, heavy blanket, sweating through the thin motel pillow, trying not to make too much noise and upset Sheila. She tries to picture Debbie lying there with her, holding her tight, lips cool against her temples, arm slung like a leaden weight over her middle, and it feels wrong. There’s too much space, the mattress is too solid, and even on a good day the blanket feels like it weighs a thousand pounds.

It feels wrong. The bed, the space, everything.

She feels wrong, all the way down to her bones.

Her fingers tremble. Her shoulders are heaving.

She’s shaking again, so hard she can’t breathe.

She’s not feeling sick any more, or feverish or light-headed or whatever.

All of a sudden, from nowhere, she just feels deeply, desperately lonely.

There’s another knock on the door. Softer now, almost hesitant.

Debbie sounds hesitant too, when she calls, for the dozenth time, “Ruth?”

Ruth swallows. Breathes. Neither one comes particularly easily.

“Yeah,” she whispers to the dead, lonely space. “Yeah, Debbie, I’m here.”

The second she unhooks the latch, the door flies open.

It happens so fast she has to scramble backwards to avoid being smacked in the face, and even then she doesn’t move fast enough to avoid a jarring blow to the elbow.

Oblivious to the discomfort she’s caused, Debbie storms into the room like a hurricane. She’s ravishing, dazzling, and even through the shock of impact juddering up and down her arm Ruth is thrown by how effortless she makes it all look. She’s clearly come straight from the gym — underneath the high cut of her perfectly pressed white pants she’s still wearing her leotard — but somehow she still manages to look like she’s just stepped off a catwalk: completely put together, completely in control, and completely, totally, absolutely ready to fuck someone up.

“What the hell, Ruth?” she explodes, once the crack of the door hitting the far wall dies down.

Ruth rubs her still-stinging elbow. She slinks back to the bed, sits down heavily. “What?”

She’s at least eighty-five per cent sure she doesn’t want to know the answer to that question.

Can Debbie see it, she wonders faintly. Are there scars on her abdomen from a procedure that never even required an incision? Are they visible through her shirt? Has Debbie somehow developed x-ray vision in the day and a half since they last saw each other? Is she staring through her clothes, through her skin and bones and muscles, straight through to her newly emptied womb?

She’s shaking again. Not as hard as before, but still noticeable.

She wonders if Debbie can hear the rattling of her bones.

She wonders if Debbie can hear her breath shiver in her chest.

She wonders if Debbie can see—

“Look,” Debbie says, sharp but not quite as wild as before. “You’re mad at me for leaving you hanging during the match on Friday. I get it. I’d be pissed as hell too, if you pulled a stunt like that.” She closes her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opens them again they’re blazing with righteous flame. “But playing hooky like a goddamned teenager is not the way to communicate that.”

Ruth blinks.

She does not understand a single word Debbie just said.

She can’t—

She tries to speak. Tries to think. Tries to breathe.

She can’t—

Something clicks in her throat. She says, again, “What?”

Debbie sighs.

“Oh, please,” she mutters, rolling her eyes with all the drama expected of a former soap star. “We both know that’s what this—” She gestures vaguely at Ruth, at her rumpled sleepwear, her damp hair, her general sorry state “—is really about. I bailed on you during the match, so now you’re bailing on me. Real fucking mature, Ruth.”

Ruth is still blinking, still trying to make some kind of sense of what she’s hearing, what she’s seeing. The world is twisting and turning around her, refusing to stay still long enough for her to even try to piece it together. Her vision is blurring, her ears are ringing, her internal organs are throwing themselves against the walls of her body.

She still doesn’t understand.

The match — Friday’s match, their match, GLOW’s first show in front of a real live audience — seems so long ago now. It felt like such a big, huge, important thing at the time, she recalls, and her stomach pools warm and soft with the memory of a week’s worth of training, her and Debbie, at Carmen’s house with her brothers and then later in the empty gym, just the two of them going through the moves again and again and again, working their asses off to make a show into a spectacle, a match into a marvel.

They did it, too. Through a week’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears, they did all that and more.

She remembers the match, sluggish and stuttering, like she’s watching it through an old, broken film projector. She remembers the audience cheering, remembers feeding off their anger and hate in a way she couldn’t have imagined even a month ago. She remembers Debbie climbing up onto the second rope, remembers the way she glittered at the crowd, riling them up, building their anticipation into a maddening, half-crazed frenzy.

She remembers the way she froze. She remembers feeling the whole world freeze as well, like even the air had been feeding off Debbie’s energy, like all of a sudden it had vanished as well.

She remembers watching all the power and life bleed out of Debbie’s once-strong body, remembers the sick horror churning in her own gut as Debbie climbed down from the rope, climbed out of the ring, and ran away. She remembers the terror, almost blinding in its sudden intensity, as she found herself suddenly and completely alone, the hated villain left to fend for herself against the baying of the bloodthirsty crowd.

She remembers watching the arc of Debbie’s retreat, vision fuzzing at the edges like the start of a panic attack, remembers seeing Mark standing there waiting, jaw white, eyes dark.

She remembers—

“I’m not...” The words come out wobbly; her voice is shaking almost as hard as the rest of her body. She clears her throat, drives the worst of the tremors back down, then tries again. “I’m not... bailing on you.”

It’s weak, pitiful, barely even audible.

Little wonder Debbie isn’t convinced.

“Then what the hell are you doing?” she demands, and there’s a hint of a tremor in her voice too, like she’s only pretending to be angry because it’s easier than admitting she feels hurt. “Because Sam just pulled me aside and told me to pack up my shit and go home because my fucking villain is taking the rest of the week off for — direct quote — ‘women’s problems’.”

Ruth hears a low whine gurgle out of her. “Oh.”

Debbie crosses her arms, glares at her. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not bullshit.”

Ruth doesn’t look her in the eye. She can’t. But she does say, very quietly, “It’s not bullshit.”

Debbie barks a laugh, sharp and bitterly cold.

“Ruth,” she snaps, like the name is an insult, the quick, keen lash of a bullwhip against her bare back. “You showed up to scene study class with the stomach flu, with the actual flu, and with a hundred-and-three-degree fever. You made me drive you to an audition when you had that godawful lung inflammation because it was — again, direct fucking quote — ‘on the way to the hospital anyway’.”

Ruth flinches. Her spine is prickled with goosebumps.

She says, sullen and stupidly defensive, “Well, it was.”

Debbie ignores that. “You’ve gone to callbacks with laryngitis,” she presses. “You’ve run lines with your head in the toilet. You did a full twenty-minute improv skit that you couldn’t even remember because you were so far out of it.” She throws up her hands, then jabs an accusatory finger at Ruth’s newly emptied womb. “Do you really, seriously expect me to believe that you, of all people, would take half a week off from the only real job you’ve ever had... because you got your fucking period?”

Ruth is shaking again, cramping again.

She feels like she did that day she came to scene study class with a hundred-and-three-degree fever, like she did the day she crawled back into Debbie’s car after that disastrous audition and mumbled, flayed and raw in a way that had nothing at all to do with her disintegrating respiratory system, “We can go to the hospital now, I guess.”

Her breath feels solid inside her lungs.

She says, sounding just as hoarse and wretched as she did all those times she went to callbacks after losing her voice, “Sam insisted.”

Debbie huffs a dry, derisive laugh. “Right. Because our asshole director famously gives a shit about the well-being of his actresses.”

Ruth doesn’t have the strength to lie or deny. She feels like she’s going to black out at any moment.

“Debbie,” she sighs. “I’m not bailing on you. I’m not pissed at you for bailing on me. I know it was—”

She breaks off, stomach lurching hard.

I know it was because Mark was there. I know it was because Mark showed up. I know it was because Mark—

Mark, Debbie’s husband. Mark, the man Ruth slept with twice. Mark, the man whose baby she just aborted.

She closes her eyes, tries to breathe.

“I know you had a good reason,” she finishes weakly. “I know you would never have bailed on our match if you didn’t. I know that, Debbie, I swear I do, and I swear I’m not angry with you. I’m just...” Her throat burns with acid; she swallows it down, lets it seethe in her stomach instead. “I’m just cramping.”

It’s true. It’s completely, totally true. That should make it believable.

Whether Debbie does believe it, of course, is a whole other question.

It takes her a long, long time to find the courage to open her eyes and see for herself, and when she does, she finds Debbie staring at her.

It’s a powerful stare, intense and piercing. Hard, but not in the way Ruth expects. Hard, not like when they’re in the ring together, elbows in faces and full-body blows shaking their bones, but like when they’re reading sides or running lines, like when Debbie starts digging deep, deep down into the soul of her character. Hard, like penetrating, not fumbling and inept like Mark but practised and precise like the doctor at the clinic, sliding effortlessly into the guts of her, making her numb and sucking out her worst mistakes.

Debbie has always been able to do that to her, penetrate her with little more than a look, and this time is no different. If anything, it’s even easier this time, because Ruth’s defences are lower now than they’ve ever been in her life.

Even when she had the flu — either kind — and humiliated herself in scene study class. Even when she had a hundred-and-three-degree fever, even when she had laryngitis, even when she had fucking pneumonia and insisted on putting off a much-needed trip to the ER so she could attend an audition that she immediately screwed up anyway.

She feels weaker now than she did in all those awful moments, and smaller, and more helpless. The weight of guilt, maybe, or else the painful mix of suspicion and genuine concern crinkling Debbie’s forehead.

Finally, in a voice Ruth can’t quite interpret, Debbie asks, “You’re really just....?”

She stops, lets the question hang. Protecting Ruth’s female modesty, perhaps.

That should help, Ruth thinks dizzily. Debbie didn’t say the word, didn’t say any word at all; she can interpret the question any way she wants, and her answer wouldn’t be a lie. It should feel like a gift.

It doesn’t, though.

She tries to nod, tries to run with some imaginary version of what she can pretend to think Debbie’s asking, but it doesn’t work. Her body won’t allow the movement, won’t allow itself to be an enabler in this awful, wicked deceit.

She gives up. She lets her head hang uselessly over her heart. She hopes Debbie won’t recognise it as the surrender it is.

“Sam’s just being overprotective,” she says at last, because that’s easy, it’s nothing less than what she told the man himself less than an hour ago. “I think he’s... you know, I think he just doesn’t want me to over-exert myself or whatever, and fuck it all up for you.”

Debbie blinks a few times, like she’s been struck a blow. Her eyelashes are very long; Ruth wonders, not for the first time since they started working together on GLOW, why she wears so much makeup just to sweat it all off at the gym.

“For me,” Debbie echoes after a long moment, very, very softly.

It’s not a question. Ruth thinks it was meant to be, but it’s not.

All of a sudden, for no reason at all, she finds herself fighting back tears. All of a sudden, completely out of nowhere, she’s shaking even harder, the same violent, uncontrollable shudders that ripped through her before, the kind that rattle her bones and chatter her teeth, the kind that feels like a fever but isn’t, the kind that feels like sickness but isn’t, the kind that feels like years upon years of Debbie climbing into her bed and holding her but definitely, definitely, definitely isn’t.

Debbie is looking at her curiously, head tilted to one side, eyes narrowed. She’s not staring like she did a moment ago, hard and penetrating and right on the edge of threatening; she’s just looking. Her expression is strange, uncertain, like maybe she’s not entirely sure how she’s supposed to feel. It makes her look oddly vulnerable, or as close to it as Ruth has ever seen, like those two little words really were a question, like both of their lives depend on Ruth giving the right answer.

Ruth doesn’t know if she has the right answer, or if there even is one.

She only has one to give, though, so she does, and hopes for the best.

“You’re the star,” she says, and hates the way her voice breaks on that last word, like it’s another one of her countless failures thrown into shadow by Debbie’s brilliance. “You’re the one who matters. You’re the important one, you’re the one people are going to pay to see. You’re the talented one, the one with all the success... and, you know, you’re the hero. You’re—”

Everything, she doesn’t say.

Debbie says, quietly, “Ruth.”

Ruth nods, swallows thickly. Her hands grow still in her lap; slowly but surely, the rest of her body follows its example, until she’s barely even shaking at all.

“You’re the star,” she says again, and this time she makes sure her stupid voice stays steady. “Sam and I don’t always see eye to eye, but we do agree on that.”

Debbie is still looking at her. That strange, half-unreadable expression hasn’t left her face. She looks like Ruth’s memories of her from those early, smog-choked, delirium-addled days, back when they were both young, both hopeful and idealistic, both throwing themselves headfirst into a life neither one of them were prepared for.

Debbie wasn’t new or green like Ruth was, even way back then, but she was treading water in her own way too, learning how to bare her teeth at a world full of men and monsters who wanted to eat her alive.

Debbie has always been better at keeping herself afloat than Ruth, who always ends up with water in her lungs, but there’s something unexpectedly reassuring about the look on her face now: she’s not drowning, she never does, but she’s not as confident as usual either. Her balance isn’t as steady as it was a moment ago; she’s keeping her head up, just like she always does, always has, for as long as Ruth has known her and probably even longer, but it’s obvious that she’s becoming slowly but surely aware of the fact that her feet aren’t quite touching the bottom.

Ruth knows that feeling. Usually, for her, it precedes drowning.

Debbie wets her lips. Ruth stares at the flick of her tongue.

Her groin cramps, scooped out and empty, painful but calming.

She watches Debbie’s eyes sharpen, watches them narrow.

Debbie says, in a strange, unfamiliar voice, “You got tampons?”

Ruth’s innards seize up; her muscles clench and spasm, like they’re bracing for an attack. Her lungs feel shrunken, all shrivelled up, like they really are full of water, like they so often were back in those early days, feverish and coughing herself sick. Her stomach is rolling, twisting itself up into knots, a vivid, unpleasant reminder of the mess that was briefly in there.

“What?” she hears herself whisper, panicky, and thinks of the clinic, herself lying on her back, the doctor’s voice whispering in her head, avoid using tampons for a week or so.

It’s a trick question. It has to be a trick question. It has to be—

“Tampons,” Debbie repeats, sounding impatient now, a hair’s breadth away from tipping over into anger. “Or pads, or... you know, whatever. You got enough?”

Ruth swallows. Breathes out. Tells herself she’s being paranoid.

How many times, after all, has Debbie asked her that question?

Hell, didn’t Stacey ask her the very same one just yesterday, in the locker room? “Do you have a tampon,” she asked, just as natural and casual as anything, and Ruth’s apologetic “no” came so easily she didn’t even think about it until everyone else started chiming in too, until she realised, suddenly desperately nauseous, that she was the only one who didn’t need one.

It’s no different from Debbie now. In fact, it’s even simpler.

Do you have tampons, or pads, or whatever, she’s asking, just like she’s asked her a million times before, because a lifetime of friendship has taught her that Ruth is never, ever prepared for anything.

Even the most obvious thing.

It wouldn’t be first time she’d come up short. It wouldn’t be the fifth, or the fifteenth.

It’s normal. It’s simple. It’s—

God, how much of her life in this city has she spent depending on Debbie to help her?

How much of Debbie’s time has she wasted over the long years of their friendship? How many times has Debbie put her own life on hold, coming to Ruth’s rescue, making sure she had tampons or pads or whatever, driving her home from classes she was too sick to attend, stocking her fridge with soup she couldn’t eat, climbing into bed with her and and holding her because Ruth — apparently — begged her to do it in the throes of fever-addled delirium?

Not this time. It hurts worse than the cramps, worse than anything, but not this time.

She whispers, “I’m good, Deb.”

Debbie’s jaw goes white. She looks angry for a second, and then she looks wounded.

“Okay,” she says. “Painkillers?”

Ruth tries to smile. It tugs at her mouth, pulls it down instead of up. She feels suddenly terrible, not in her body but in her heart, hammering against her ribcage like a fist.

“I’m good,” she says again, softer, smaller, sadder. “I promise you, Debbie: the only reason I’m not at work right now is because Sam insisted, and he refused to take no for an answer.” It isn’t a lie, not completely, but god, it feels like one. “You don’t need to worry about—”

Me.

She doesn’t say it. She can’t, she won’t, she can’t.

Debbie’s whole face is white now, not just her jaw. She mouths Ruth’s name, but no sound comes out.

Ruth swallows. She’s shaking so hard she has to cling to the edge of the bed to keep from falling over.

“You don’t need to worry about the match,” she finishes helplessly, and that word shreds her insides more efficiently than any medical procedure she’s ever endured in her life. “I won’t let you down.”

Not again, she doesn’t add. Never again, please, god, never again.

Debbie turns away, back towards the door. She nods once, tightly.

“Fine,” she says, and it sounds so hollowed out, so unlike her, that for a fraction of a second Ruth is worried she did, in fact, say that last part aloud.

She thinks of Debbie in her bed, holding her. She thinks of the clinic, the sharp pressure of a needle inside her, the way she fell out of her body, trying not to cry.

She doesn’t think of Mark. She doesn’t think of Sam. She doesn’t—

From a million miles away, she hears herself whisper, “Debbie?”

Debbie doesn’t turn back. Her hand hovers over the door handle, suspended, like she’s paralysed. The air thickens between them; her shoulders move in rhythm with her breath, slow but not steady.

Ruth counts three breaths, four, five, six. She counts seven, eight, nine. She watches as Debbie’s thumb brushes the grain of the door, watches as her shoulders droop and then pull whipcord-tight.

“For what it’s worth,” Debbie says at last, in a voice Ruth doesn’t know. “I, uh... you know, I’m sorry.”

For bailing on you, Ruth knows she means, but she thinks it says something that she doesn’t say so.

Ruth looks down at her lap, at the creased fabric of her clothes. She tastes metal at the back of her mouth. She feels dizzy, not like sickness but like vertigo, like she could drift off into oblivion if she just closed her eyes for long enough.

She thinks back to Friday, to the match and the moves they worked so damn hard to get right, to Debbie’s dazzling figure straddling the second rope. She thinks of the moment it all fell apart, the very different shape of Debbie’s body as she fled the ring, leaving Ruth to the mercy of the bloodthirsty crowd.

She remembers watching her go, vision fuzzing out with panic and hurt, remembers seeing Mark and feeling the world crash down around her ears. She remembers the tight coil of Debbie’s back as she stormed out the door, remembers Mark’s tight, white, angry jaw, remembers feeling sick with shame.

She says, very softly, “You don’t need to apologise, Debbie. I understand.”

Debbie doesn’t move. “I would’ve ripped you apart if you did that to me.”

“I know,” Ruth says, and thinks, privately, secretly, I would’ve deserved it.

She looks down at her hands, cupping her empty stomach. She watches her fingers tremble, watches her knuckles blanch pale. She tightens the muscles in her abdomen, feels her uterus contract sharply in retaliation, presses down gently with her palms until the pain subsides.

By the time she lifts her head, blinking salt off her lashes, Debbie is gone.

Chapter Text

She doesn’t bother to lock or latch the door this time.

The distance from the bed feels like a million miles, and she’s too weary and wrung out to pick herself up and try to walk. Talking to Debbie is always exhausting these days: the fire of her ire, her righteous fury, the guilt and the shame and the messy, complicated tangle of feelings churning up her gut every time they see each other,, gnawing on her bones, pressing down on her head and shoulders like a dead weight, a roiling, rolling cataclysm that never, ever slows down.

It’s a new thing, that feeling, but not quite as new as she’d like to believe. Back in the old days, hazy and smog-choked and all the rest of it, spending time with Debbie was the easiest, simplest, least complicated thing in the whole wide world. Back then it felt like floating, like being alive, like maybe she didn’t need to drown after all, so long as Debbie was there too.

If she’s honest, she hasn’t felt like that in a long time. Even before she screwed it all up by sleeping with Mark, even before her self-pity and self-loathing swallowed them all down and spat them back up in half-chewed pieces, even before she started drowning for real, the distance between them was already growing wider and harder to swim across.

Debbie got married, Debbie got Paradise Cove, Debbie got successful.

Debbie moved to Pasadena. Debbie stopped working. Debbie had a baby.

Debbie kept smiling. She stopped working, but she didn’t stop acting.

Ruth kept auditioning, kept trying, kept failing, kept failing, kept failing.

Ruth kept treading water until she was too tired to hold her head up.

By the time she realised she was drowning — like, really, really drowning, not like the countless times she might have been almost-possibly-sort-of-maybe been drowning, but the real, genuine, terrifying, water-in-her-lungs, vision-going-black kind of drowning, the kind where she couldn’t see the shore any more, the kind where she couldn’t see much of anything at all — Debbie was too far away to help.

That was no-one’s fault. Just the trajectories of their lives.

What happened with Mark, twice... that was Ruth’s fault.

If she’s drowning again now? That’s her own fault as well.

She clings to that thought, the acrid, sour-tasting truth of it, as she drags her weary body up the length of her bed, fumbling her way blindly to the pillow. She’s too tired to wrestle with the blanket, and she’s not sure she could bear the rough, heavy weight of it anyway. Her whole body feels sensitive and tender, sore like she’s been dragged along a brick wall, her skin all scraped off, like it wasn’t just her insides that got sucked out but all of her, organs and muscle and bones and everything.

She feels like she’s been set on fire and then stamped out, still smouldering but dying slowly by degrees, ready to crumble to ash and dust at the slightest touch.

She feels—

Exhausted.

Sensitive and tender and sore.

The cramps are still there, maddeningly persistent, throbbing between her hipbones. The discomfort is a weird kind of comforting, like her innards are checking and double-checking that the unwanted intruder really has left the building.

You see, they’re saying, with each dull blade carving through her guts. You see, this little pain means there’s no baby. You see, that bigger pain means you’re okay, we’re okay, everything’s okay. Sure, it hurts, sure, it sucks, but it’s better than the alternative, right?

She can’t argue with that.

She tucks her arm under the pillow, buries her face in its cool, flat surface.

She thinks about Debbie.

She thinks about the feeling of water in her lungs, the pain of trying to breathe. She thinks about the delirious heat of fever pulsing out in waves from underneath her skin; she thinks about sweat and shivers and sickness, thinks about her weak, miserable body. She thinks about Debbie’s strong arms wrapped around her, Debbie’s cool lips pressed to her temple; she thinks about Debbie’s voice and Debbie’s breath, Debbie’s presence all around her, buoying her, helping her to hold her head up, and the way she made even drowning feel like floating.

She thinks—

The pillow is damp, heating up too quickly under her cheek.

She turns it over, blinks the salt out of her eyes, tries again.

She thinks about Debbie stalking out of the ring during their match. She thinks about Mark, stone-faced, glowering up at them both. She thinks about Sam’s hand on her shoulder at the clinic, Sam’s eyes crinkling afterwards, when he handed over the bag of doughnuts she didn’t even want any more. She thinks about the sickly smell of disinfectant, the sting of a needle pressing into her, the hollowed-out numbness that came right on its heels. She thinks about guilt, about shame, about playing the villain in the ring, about playing the villain in her own life.

She thinks about Debbie, her hand on the door, whispering, I’m sorry.

The pillow is warming again, but this time it stays dry.

Her insides are still cramping, but her outsides are no longer shaking.

She closes her eyes. Just like the pillow, they stay dry.

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she definitely remembers dreaming.

She’s in the ring, curled up on her side, face pressed to the canvas. She’s wearing her leotard, the brown one, the one she wore that day in the ring, after hours, when Debbie landed her move perfectly for the first time. It’s been less than a week since that day, she’s sure, but it doesn’t fit like it did back then. It’s too tight, the fabric all stretched out, distending uncomfortably over the swell of a belly nine months pregnant.

Her insides are seizing, sharp bursts of tissue-tearing pain machine-gunning through her, not cramps but contractions.

She thinks, dream-dazed and disoriented, sick with pain and shaking with panic, I can’t give birth in the ring, I can’t give birth in front of a live audience, I can’t give birth in a leotard, I can’t give birth, I can’t have a baby, I can’t—

But that’s out of her hands now.

The crowd is screaming, howling, baying for her blood. The rest of the GLOW team, a dozen blurry-edged faces, hang off the ropes, cheering and jeering and laughing. There’s no last-minute reprieve from Rhonda this time, no cheery after-school-special sing-along to smooth out the jagged edges of the audience’s bloodlust. Their voices are cruel, their laughter cutting; they’re vicious, violent, and when she looks up into their eyes, all she sees is hate.

You deserve this, she hears in the mocking lash of their voices, and really, what else can she do but agree?

High above her, haloed by the garish strobes, Debbie straddles the top rope.

She’s in the same leotard she wore during the live match, the vibrant reds, whites and blues of Miss America, and she has her arms stretched high above her head just like she did then, in the glorious, triumphant, breath-held moment before she caught her husband’s eye and fled the scene. She’s a vision, just like always, radiant and dazzling and heart-stealing, and even through the haze of pain and humiliation, Ruth can’t take her eyes off her.

She tries to say her name. Debbie, begging for forgiveness or begging her to hold her, or maybe both.

She tries to say her name, Debbie, Debbie, Debbie, but all that comes out is a loud, shattered scream.

Debbie doesn’t even blink.

She’s not facing the crowd, not this time. She isn’t basking in their cheers and cries and chants, isn’t feeding off their roaring patriotic adulation, their shared hatred for the twisted villain lying prone in the middle of the ring. She’s staring down at Ruth, gaze hard and unyielding, like the angel of death.

Worse: like the angel of new life.

She points down at her, first with one hand and then with the other, and fire rips through Ruth’s torso like Debbie just called it down from on high. She hears herself scream again, the tortured wail of the nearly dying, but it’s a distant and discordant thing, drowned by the howls of the crowd, the jeering from her teammates, the clang of the bell as Sam announces her defeat.

She thinks, foolishly, I never even got a chance to defend myself.

“You brought this on yourself,” Debbie tells her, in a voice that cuts through the clamour like a knife.

Ruth tries to scream again, but there’s nothing left inside of her.

Well, Nothing except the swelling of her stomach, the contractions tearing through her like penance.

Nothing except the newborn cries of Debbie’s husband’s baby.

I’m sorry, she tries to say. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—

“I’m sorry,” Debbie says, in the high, husky drawl of Liberty Belle, and hurls herself off the top rope.

Ruth wakes, gasping, choking, a real scream strangled in the back of her throat, a fraction of a second before dream-Debbie’s elbow slams into her swollen stomach.

She wakes, sweating and shaking and cramping, and oh god it hurts like hell, but at least it’s not that.

She wakes, and her first instinct is to sit up, to shake the nightmare out of her bones, but she can’t.

She can’t move at all.

There’s a dead weight slung over her middle, heavy but without pressure, pinning her to the mattress. The foggy, half-dreaming part of her, the part that’s still trapped in that endless nightmare of childbirth and crossbodies, feels the rising panic gurgle in her chest, a strap pulled tight across her lungs, holding her down, keeping her trapped in the swirling grey between dream and reality.

The rest of her...

The rest of her, the part that’s breaking to the surface and forcing the water out of her lungs, thinks, wait, stop, I know this.

The rest of her, the part that recognises this feeling, the part that has been held down — no, not down, just held — exactly like this a million times before, thinks, Debbie?

And then the first part, the part that’s still in the ring with a baby clawing its way out of her, thinks, oh, this is a dream too.

A high keening sound wrenches out of her, like a whimper desperately trying to become a wail, like the strangled screams dream-Debbie tore out of her with her hands.

The weight pressing down on her middle intensifies, then shifts slightly lower. There’s a puff of cool, sweet breath against the shell of her ear, and then, hushed and low, like an echo from a hundred years ago—

“Shh, Ruthie.”

Ruth shivers. The whimper in her throat folds in on itself, becomes something softer and smaller.

The half-awake part of her thinks it might burst into tears.

The half-asleep part of her thinks, if this really is just another dream, it never wants to wake up.

The half-drowning part of her manages to whisper, “Deb?”

All those parts of her, every single one, knows the answer.

She can feel her presence more fully now, solid and heavy and very, very real. She’s stretched out behind her, tucked in against her back, holding her close and tight, just like she has a million times before. The familiar weight of her arm draped over her waist becomes more tangible, more present; Ruth basks like a needy child in the cool press of her nose against her hairline, her lips brushing her temple.

They’ve been in this position so many times it hurts.

It feels like a lifetime since the last time it happened.

Ruth feels—

“Go back to sleep,” Debbie’s voice hums, cool and ticklish against Ruth’s ear, like she really believes there’s any chance of that happening now.

Ruth exhales. Her ribs creak as they expand, pushing up against the walls of her chest. She wonders if Debbie feels it, if their bodies are close enough for that.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. Her voice is hoarse, quivering just a little, like it’s still trying to break the surface of the dream, like it’s trying to remind itself it’s still alive. “You left. You yelled at me for bailing on you, then you asked me if I had tampons and painkillers, then you apologised for bailing on me, and then you left. I don’t...” She swallows. For some unfathomable reason, her throat hurts even more than her uterus. “Why did you come back?”

Why are you in my bed, is what she really wants to know. Why are you holding me like you used to? You can’t pretend I begged you to do it this time.

She doesn’t say any of that, of course. If she did, Debbie might remember all the reasons why she shouldn’t be doing it, all the reasons why she shouldn’t be here at all, all the horrible, awful reasons why Ruth is a horrible, awful person, a terrible friend unworthy of forgiveness or comfort or being held; she’ll remember all of that, every fucked up part and then she’ll get out of her bed and walk out the door again and leave her all alone.

That’s what Ruth deserves. Pain and loneliness. Grief, guilt, shame.

Not this. Not Debbie’s arms around her. Not her lips at her temple.

Ruth doesn’t deserve any of this. The last thing in the world she wants is for Debbie to remember that too.

Debbie doesn’t say anything for a long time. Ruth’s heart feels like it’s having an existential crisis, pounding like a hurricane in one second and then stalling into total stillness in the next; she feels like she’s having a heart attack, like she’ll stop breathing next, like she’ll need Debbie to bring her back from the dead, breathe the life back into her from her own lungs, mouth to mouth and spirit to spirit, then shrug it off like it meant nothing at all, like she only did it for the good of the show.

Finally, quietly, Debbie husks, “It’s not a big deal, Ruth.”

Ruth swallows again. Her throat softens a bit. “It’s not?”

“It’s really, really not.” Debbie’s breath dances across Ruth’s skin, soothing and sort of shivery. “I just don’t have anything better to do with my time right now. You know, since my heel is a lazy little shit who’d sooner lie in bed for a week than show up to work.”

“I’m not...” Her voice breaks. She wills her body not to start shaking again and give her away. “I’m not...”

Debbie’s lips drift down from her temple to her ear, blissfully cool. “Go back to sleep,” she hums again, like that’s the end of the whole conversation.

Maybe it is, at that. Ruth doesn’t have the strength to keep talking, doesn’t have the strength to say all the things she knows she should. She definitely doesn’t have the strength to sabotage this brief, undeserved moment of comfort with the awful, horrible, unspeakable truth.

Debbie has walked out on her so many times over the last two or three months. There’s not enough pieces left of Ruth’s heart to survive if she did it again.

Stay with me, she wants to say. Don’t bail on me again, don’t run away again, don’t leave me alone again. If you want me to beg for it, just so you can say ‘I told you so’, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you ask. Just please, please, please don’t go away again.

Don’t stay with me, she wants to say, at the same time. I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve you, I don’t deserve anything at all. You don’t know the truth, you don’t know why we’re really here, so please, please, please go away before I can hurt you again.

She can’t say any of those things. She couldn’t bear to make them real.

She can’t voice the yearnings of her heart, can’t confess to the shame filling her head. She can’t say anything, can’t reconcile what she wants with what she knows she doesn’t deserve; she can barely even breathe, much less form words, and so she does the only thing her weak, shaking body will allow: she rolls over, as best she can with Debbie’s arm like a lead weight on top of her, and tucks her face into the crook of her neck.

“Please,” she whispers, and it’s none of the things she wants to say, none of the things she needs to say, but it’s the only word she has.

Debbie rests her chin on the crown of her head. Ruth feels, against the jutting bones of her own ribs, the lulling motion of her chest as she breathes in and out, slow and steady, slow and even, slow and rhythmic. It’s calming, lulling, so much Ruth feels her own stuttery, shuddery lungs try, in spite of themselves, in spite of all of her, to catch its gentle rhythm.

“Ruth,” Debbie sighs, and her voice doesn’t match her breathing at all. “My whole life is a shitshow right now. The only thing that makes sense is...”

She doesn’t finish. Ruth thinks she wants to say ‘wrestling’, thinks maybe she also wants to say ‘this’, thinks, or maybe just hopes, there’s a tiny little part of her that secretly wants to say ‘you’ and ‘us’.

She holds her breath for a beat, just long enough to shake off the shackles of Debbie’s, then says, with a self-loathing that seizes her guts like cramps, “I’m the reason why your life is a shitshow.”

Debbie swallows. Ruth feels it against her cheek.

“Yeah,” Debbie says softly. “You really are.”

Ruth blinks rapidly, damp against Debbie’s neck.

“I don’t deserve...” she starts, then falters.

“No, you don’t.” Debbie’s voice is muffled, lost to the tangles of Ruth’s hair. “But you’re my villain. You’re my heel, you’re my... my fucking partner. And we work too damn well together to let your bullshit get in the way of that.” She exhales sharply, hard, with real anger. It raises the hair on the back of Ruth’s neck, raises goosebumps down her arms. “So shut the fuck up, for once in your life, and let me do this.”

You don’t understand, Ruth wants to scream. It’s worse than you think, it’s so much worse than you think.

She should say that. She needs to say it. Debbie needs to know the truth. She needs to understand why they’re really here, what this is really all about. She needs to know what Ruth did, what she’s done. She needs to know, she needs to understand, she needs to know... and Ruth needs to tell her.

But oh, the strength of Debbie’s arms around her, the warm press of her body, the cool press of her lips.

“Debbie,” she manages, and she wishes she had the strength to say all the things she knows she should, but she doesn’t, she can’t, she can’t, she—

“Ruthie.” The name slams into her like a sledgehammer, rips through her like a bullet. It makes her shudder, makes her cramp in places much, much higher than the ones she’s slowly growing used to. “Go back to sleep, okay?”

Ruth buries her face in Debbie’s neck, tucks herself away in the shelter of her skin and her sweat and her beautiful, impossible strength. She breathes her in, breathes them in, the two of them together, and lets the comforting familiarity of it prick her eyes with tears.

“Okay,” she whispers, just like she has a thousand times before. “Okay, Deb.”

And just like a million times before, Debbie’s arms tighten around her waist, and Debbie’s lips brush across her temple, and Debbie holds her and holds her and holds her, until there’s nothing she can do but obey.

This time, she doesn’t dream.

She drifts, suspended in the thick, endless void of sleep, but she doesn’t dream and she does not drown.

She drifts, disoriented and directionless, outside of her body but still vividly and unpleasantly aware of it.

She drifts, buoyed by the distant throb of cramps, and wakes to the firm, unexpected pressure of Debbie’s hand on her groin.

She—

What?

She thinks she tries to ask that question out loud, as best she can while still muzzy with sleep. It’s not quite a word, more like a dull, barely-audible mumble, confusion set to sound, the kind of noises she used to make all the time when she was sick, when she was delirious or incoherent or had simply lost her voice, when she couldn’t make full sentences or even full words, but still, somehow, even at her most incoherent, Debbie always seemed to understand.

She understands now too, or so it seems.

She hums softly, murmurs something unintelligible against her skin. Ruth can’t make out the words, but she can tell by the cadence of the sound that it’s supposed to be comforting; Debbie’s breath is warm now, tickling her jaw, and her nose is nuzzling her cheekbone. Her hand is solid and strong, palm kneading careful circles over her pubic bone, easing the cramps and loosening the tight, clenching muscles.

It feels like heaven, and it feels a little bit like hell as well. Ruth’s poor confused body can’t figure out which sensation is the more immediate, and her still-groggy brain can’t figure out which one she’s supposed to listen to.

She tries to roll over, tries to sit up. She tries to pull herself together, but that’s more than she can hope for at the moment.

Debbie makes another soft, soothing noise, lips shifting up to Ruth’s ear. “You okay?” she asks, and she sounds sleepy too.

Ruth breathes in, breathes out. Debbie’s elbow is wedged into the space between two of her ribs, the sharp point of it sticking into her lung. It feels almost more personal, in a strange, surreal sort of way, than the palm pressing down on her groin, the fingers kneading her pubic bone, the devastating proximity of Debbie’s hand to her—

She feels a small whine trickle out of her, and doesn’t have the strength to try and stop it.

Her mouth feels sticky. Her throat is dry, crackling with gravel and sand; every sound she tries to make comes out like a cry for help. How the hell is she supposed to answer that question, are you okay, without sounding like a wounded animal, the kind that needs to be put out of its misery?

She swallows a couple of times, unglues her tongue from the roof of her mouth, then clears her throat a handful of times, until she can trust herself to sound at least moderately close to human.

“I’m...” She swallows again. “You’re, um...”

Her voice falters. She shifts her hips, letting her body make the point her tongue is too tangled to.

Debbie’s hand does not stop moving. Ruth feels her mouth twitch up against the curve of her ear.

“Is it helping?” she asks, plain and simple.

She sounds sincere. Kind of husky, maybe, like she was dozing a little too, but genuine enough. It’s a simple question, so far as she’s concerned — Jesus, Ruth, use your words: either it’s helping or it’s not — and Ruth knows that the answer should be simple too: yes or no, and she’ll have that answer ready just as soon as her body wakes up enough to figure it out.

She knows, objectively, that there’s nothing particularly intimate about this. She knows, objectively — and, if she’s really, totally honest, subjectively too — that they’ve been in far more intimate positions than this, more often than either of them would care to recall. Their entire friendship, more or less, has just been one intimate moment after another, so this should really just be one more drop in a bucket already halfway to overflowing.

Debbie, stripping her naked and helping her crawl into the shower after four days in bed with the flu.

Debbie, stripping her naked, washing her with a damp cloth when she couldn’t get out of bed at all.

Debbie, stripping her naked again and again, hands lingering in unexpected places without a thought.

Debbie, stripping herself naked, drunk and loose and carefree, laughing at the look on Ruth’s face.

Debbie, naked and unashamed in Ruth’s bathroom, using her shower, borrowing her soap, her towel.

Debbie, naked and dripping in front of Ruth’s fogged-up mirror, borrowing her fucking toothbrush.

Debbie, stripping down to her panties, climbing into Ruth’s bed, holding her close, holding her tight.

Debbie has seen every part of her, touched every part of her, known every part of her, and she’s shown off every part of herself too, in her turn. She’s seen Ruth at her most vulnerable, her most helpless, her most pathetic and miserable and wretched; she’s seen her in every sad and sorry state a person could possibly be in, the worst of the worst, and her only response was to climb out of her clothes, climb into her bed, and wrap her arms around her.

The lips at her temple feel more intimate, objectively, than the hand massaging her cramping groin.

And yet...

It’s the guilt, Ruth decides. It’s the deception, the dishonesty, the truth that she’s too much of a coward to confess. It’s Debbie laying aside all of her hurt and grief and anger, all the betrayal and the heartbreak, laying aside every broken, furious part of herself to bring comfort to the woman who destroyed her life, to climb into bed with her, just like she has a thousand times before, and hold her and touch her and try to ease her pain.

It’s Debbie, casually and carelessly putting her hand on the exact same place where Ruth blew their friendship apart, not in hatred or violence or revenge, not in any of the ways they both know Ruth would deserve, but in compassion, in tenderness, in—

God, it hurts so much.

Debbie should be using her knuckles instead of her palm. She should be leaving bruises with her fingers, or shoving them deep inside of her, shredding up the sensitive tissue where the needles made her numb, scoring lines with her nails, drawing blood, making damn sure Ruth feels every torturous second of it. She should be tearing her to pieces from the inside, and doing far worse things besides, but instead she’s massaging the place where it hurts, pressing down gently with her palm, kneading carefully with her fingers, touching her not like the enemy she’s become but like the friend she used to be, all the while whispering, is this helping?

Ruth wants to scream. She wants to cry.

She wants Debbie to hold her tighter.

She wants Debbie to tear her to pieces.

She wants—

“Debbie.” Her voice is a tremor; her uterus spasms hard underneath Debbie’s palm. “Debbie, please.”

She means, please stop, and she means, please don’t stop, and she means, please, Debbie, please, please, please—

Debbie’s hand stills. The pressure doesn’t ease off; the heel of her hand digs deep into the muscles.

“Is it helping?” she asks again.

Ruth doesn’t have an answer. She’s fully and completely awake now, in every part of herself, but she still can’t for a coherent answer, can’t piece together the relief her body feels, blissfully unspooling under Debbie’s attentions, with the clenching, agonising tension of knowing why it was hurting in the first place. She can’t reconcile the part of her that wants to say yes, oh god yes, the part that wants to bury itself in Debbie’s arms and pretend everything is back to normal between them, with the part that wants to push her away, to kick her out of her bed and throw her out of the room before she learns the awful, terrible, devastating truth.

It’s not fair. It’s not right.

Debbie wouldn’t be here at all if she knew the real reason for those fucking cramps.

She certainly wouldn’t be holding her, touching her, massaging her aching muscles.

It’s not right. It’s not fair.

Ruth lays a tremulous, unsteady hand on top of Debbie’s. She’s pretty sure the plan is to remove it, to peel it up off her aching crotch or simply to push it away to a safer location, to destroy that devastating point of contact completely so she can at least try to think clearly and form a coherent answer to that lingering question. The plan, she’s almost completely sure, is to get some distance between her buzzing blood and Debbie’s too-gentle touch, but that’s not what happens.

Debbie’s skin is soft under hers, and smooth and cool and so fucking wonderful. Her fingers flex lightly at the sudden contact, knuckles pushing up into Ruth’s damp palm, and all of a sudden all she can think of is how neatly, how perfectly they fit together.

“You don’t understand,” she forces herself to say, as painful as a broken bone, as painful as the cramps still wrenching through her torso, as painful as the two long and terrible months since her fuck-up with Mark came to light, since Debbie took away her smile, her laughter, her friendship. “Please, Debbie, you don’t understand. This isn’t... I’m not...”

She stops.

Debbie’s hand tenses under her own.

The pressure on her groin intensifies.

“Ruth,” Debbie says, very, very softly.

Ruth is shaking again. She knows Debbie will feel it — they’re connected everywhere, no more than a quarter an atom of space between their bodies — but she can’t stop it, no more than she can stop herself from choking again, hoarse and shuddery and shamelessly desperate, “You don’t understand.”

It was his baby, she wants to sob. That’s why I’m here, that’s why you’re here, that’s why we’re both here. That’s where all these cramps are coming from, that’s the source of the pain you’re trying to ease. It’s my mistake, my fuck-up, it’s the whole reason why you hate me in the first place. That’s what happened, that’s what this is all about. You’re holding me and you’re telling me to sleep and you’re trying to make me feel better, but you don’t know the truth, you don’t understand, you don’t understand, you don’t—

“Ruth.” Debbie’s voice is still soft, but it’s not like it was a moment ago. It’s a different kind of soft now, not like comfort but like a threat, like the sudden terrifying stillness before a destructive, all-devouring storm. “Do you think I’m a fucking idiot?”

Ruth’s stomach drops. Her chest seizes up. All her organs seem to stop functioning at the same time.

She hears herself gasp, from so far away it might as well be the opposite end of the universe, “What?”

Debbie’s hand slides out from under hers. She pulls herself up so she’s half-sitting, the main bulk of her weight leaning on her elbows. It’s fitting, Ruth thinks, numb and half-falling out of her body, that from this new angle it looks like she’s towering over her, like she did in that awful dream, like the angel of death — of new life, whatever — preparing to pass judgement on the scarlet-lettered sinner.

It’s painful, but it’s still not even close to what she deserves.

Ruth takes a deep breath, keeps it in her lungs until they start to burn, then forces her stubborn, shaking body to move, to roll itself over onto its back, so she can at least try to look Debbie in the eye.

It’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake; eye contact with Debbie is always a mistake.

Her eyes are dark, narrowed almost to slits. Her expression is steely, not quite as hard as Ruth expected it to be but definitely not yielding or accepting; there’s no compassion in her now, or kindness, or care. She looks like she’s trying to decide whether she wants to talk this through or simply strangle her.

Ruth swallows. Her throat is sore.

Debbie inhales. Holds it. Exhales.

“We’ve known each other for nearly a decade,” she says, dangerously low. “A lifetime. A million and one fucking periods. And I have never, ever seen you cramping like this.”

As if on cue, Ruth’s whole abdomen clenches. It’s not a cramp, at least not a proper one, but she can tell that Debbie notices anyway, and that she thinks it’s proving her point.

“I don’t suppose you’d believe it was something I ate?” she suggests, timid and laughably transparent.

Debbie’s single raised eyebrow, her tightening jaw, her twitching cheek, are all the answer she needs.

“I know you, Ruthie,” she says, in a voice that makes it sound like that’s more of a a curse than a blessing. Given the current situation, Ruth can’t really argue that it’s not. “I know your stupid face, I know your stupid heart. And I know your stupid, stupid, stupid fucking body. I know...” She closes her eyes for a couple of short, stuttery seconds, like a blink forgetting halfway through the process that it’s supposed to unshutter itself. “Jesus Christ, I know you better than anyone.”

It’s true. She does.

Nearly a decade of friendship. A lifetime. Three lifetimes in L.A. time, four for struggling actors, and six or seven in the eternally fucked up world of Ruth Wilder. Long enough that it’s not even close to hyperbole for Debbie to claim she knows her as well as all that, long enough that the truth of it makes Ruth’s ribs pull tight, contracting and contracting and contracting, until she’s sure her whole chest will burst, until she’s almost convinced it would hurt less if it did.

Debbie laughing, falling against her after one glass of wine too many.

Debbie running lines with her, lending her clothes, driving her to auditions.

Debbie buying her lunch or dinner. Debbie leaving soup in her fridge.

Debbie climbing into bed with her, holding her tight and holding her close.

Debbie, her lips at Ruth’s temple, her voice in her ear. “Shh, Ruthie.”

Debbie, in bed with her right now, looking down at her with dark, narrowed eyes. Debbie, towering over her, telling her she knows her, telling her she knows.

I know you better than anyone, she said, and oh god, it’s true, it’s so true it hurts, it’s so true it hurts worse than anything Ruth has ever felt in her entire life.

“Debbie,” she whispers, and the name is a flood of salt on her tongue.

Debbie’s eyes are blank. Hollow, just like they were in that awful, horrible dream, when she stood on the top rope, haloed like an angel, a vision in red and white and blue. Lightless but not at all lifeless, her eyes, just like the rest of her, blaze with something deep, something profound, something wild.

“I know you,” she says again, and those dark, hollow eyes drop pointedly to Ruth’s stomach. She inhales, then lets it all out in a sigh that sounds like her heart is breaking. “And I know how to do basic fucking arithmetic too.”

Oh, Ruth thinks, and feels like a complete and total idiot.

She tries to say it, tries to say something, anything, but all that comes out is a choked, broken sob.

I’m sorry, she thinks as her chest heaves, as her shoulders follow, as a second sob chases the first.

She curls in on herself, chin pressed tightly to her chest to try and hold the shudders at bay as the tears start to flow in earnest. She cowers underneath the tumble of her hair, hiding her face from those dark, hollow eyes, hiding her guilt and her shame and her pain from Debbie’s anger, her wrath, her righteous, rightful fury.

I’m sorry, she thinks again, again, again. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, and she knows that it’s useless, knows that it’s worthless, knows that it’s meaningless and pointless and pathetic, but it’s all she has, empty apologies that don’t make it out of her mouth, empty words that mean less than nothing, the empty, scooped-out space inside her belly and the empty, dead space inside her chest.

I’m sorry, over and over in rhythm with the rush of tears. I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry and—

And then Debbie’s arms are there, wrapping around her, an effortless mirror of countless times before.

And then Debbie’s hands are there as well, pressing into her back, pulling her in, holding her close.

And then Debbie’s lips brush her temple, and it’s everything she wants, everything she doesn’t deserve.

“Fuck,” Debbie whispers, hoarse and hitching. “I hate you so fucking much.”

I know, Ruth thinks hopelessly, helplessly. I know, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Out loud, all she can manage is a weak, hiccuping, “Why are you still here?”

She doesn’t really want to know the answer to that, but she’s just enough of a self-flagellating masochist that a part of her wants the pain she knows it will bring.

It’s the least she deserves. Debbie, she’s sure, would be the first to agree with that.

Debbie isn’t relishing her pain, though, no more than she’s getting up and walking out the door, no more than she’s doing any one of the things they both know she should. She’s just holding her, even now, tight enough that it should hurt, tight enough that it doesn’t. Her arms are like vices, nails threatening to pierce the skin even through her clothes. She’s holding her like she wants to hurt her but doesn’t have enough strength, or maybe like she’s afraid of what she’ll do if she lets her go.

Her lips are wet where they press to Ruth’s temple, her forehead, her cheek. Her eyelashes flutter against her hairline, delicate and suddenly very damp. Her shoulders are shaking, her chest is heaving. Ruth thinks she might be crying a little bit too.

“Because you’re my villain,” Debbie rasps, the answer to a question Ruth barely remembers asking. “Because you’re my heel, and if you fall apart the whole fucking show falls apart.” She breathes in, breathes out, a rough, shuddering gasp that rocks through both of their bodies. “Because you’re my partner, whether I like it or not, and we’re supposed to be a team. Because—”

She stops.

Ruth’s breath stops too, stalling out between her ribs.

Her stomach clenches, too high to be another cramp.

She feels—

“Please,” she sobs, and she doesn’t know what she’s asking for, doesn’t even know what she wants, but she remembers a thousand moments over a thousand lifetimes, fever scorching through her in sweat-sick waves, Debbie holding her, smiling against her skin, laughing at her confusion, telling her that she asked, that she begged.

She’d be begging now too, if her lungs could hold that much air for long enough to try. She’d beg for anything, anything at all, if only it would make Debbie’s shoulders stop shuddering, if only it would make her take back those awful, hard-earned words, I hate you so fucking much, if only it would undo the pain she’s caused, for both of them.

Please, she thinks, and Debbie, and I’m sorry, and—

“Because I fucking care,” Debbie spits, and it sounds like the word was torn out of her against her will.

Ruth flinches. Her whole body trembles. She feels—

“Oh,” she hears herself breathe, which should be impossible, really, because she’s pretty sure she’s not actually breathing at all.

Debbie is trembling too. Ruth’s hairline is soaked.

“I’m still here,” Debbie tells her, voice hoarse and breaking with tears, “because I still care about you. Because I can’t stop caring about you. No matter how badly you fuck up. No matter how many bullets you put through my heart. No matter how—” Her fingers clench, nails tearing into Ruth’s back through her shirt. “No matter how fucking desperately I wish that I could.”

Ruth feels a low, desperate whine break out of her.

She doesn’t know what to say, what to think, what to—

She thinks it should hurt like dying, but it doesn’t.

It feels like comfort, like warmth. It feels like a lifetime of being held and taken care of and loved.

It feels like everything she knows she doesn’t deserve and in a way, that makes it so much worse.

“Debbie,” she sobs, and now she really is begging, but she has no idea what for. “Debbie, please.”

Please don’t leave me, please don’t hate me, please don’t care about me, please, please, please—

Debbie pulls away, then shoves Ruth hard onto her back.

For a fraction of a second, Ruth is absolutely convinced she’s going to climb on top of her, wrap both of her hands around her throat, and choke the life out of her.

If she did, she’s fairly sure she wouldn’t fight back at all.

Debbie doesn’t do that, though. She doesn’t climb on top of her, she doesn’t try to choke the life out of her, she doesn’t really do much of anything at all. For a long, heart-shattering moment, she just looms over her, half-sitting, half-lying, with one hand keeping herself upright and the other pressed to her breastbone, holding her heart inside its cage as her chest heaves and heaves and heaves.

If she was crying, there is no evidence of it on her face.

Ruth lies there, suspended above herself, unbreathing.

At long last, seemingly content that her heart is not about to break containment, Debbie sits up more fully. The hand that was on her chest finds Ruth’s hairline, damp with sweat and stinging with salt; it glides through the mussed-up tangles of her hair, pushing it back from her face. Her eyes are still dark, Ruth notes with a pang, but they’re as far from hollow as anything she’s ever seen.

Debbie’s other hand, the one that was holding her upright, moves elsewhere.

She traces the lines of Ruth’s ribs through her shirt with her fingertips, featherlight.

She lays her palm over the plane of her stomach, flat and completely empty.

She touches the point of her hipbone, the stretchy waistband of her sleep shorts.

She presses down on her groin, starts massaging there in firm, tight circles.

She gazes down at Ruth, eyes dark but not hollow, and asks, again, “Is it helping?”

Ruth swallows. Her throat is so tight, it feels like choking.

Debbie’s lips twitch ever so slightly, like she can see that.

Ruth closes her eyes, feels her scooped-out innards spasm hard against the heel of Debbie’s palm, feels the cramps slowly soften under the careful press of her fingers, feels the pain grow less with each moment that Debbie keeps her hand there.

She knows the answer now, and she despises herself for it.

“Yeah,” she says, to the backs of her eyelids. “It’s helping.”

The next time she opens her eyes, her vision is blurry, her head is static-fuzzy, and her bed is empty.

Apparently, even after spending half the afternoon snoozing in Debbie’s arms, her weary, aching body wasn’t finished sleeping.

She sits up gingerly, overly cautious and a little fearful, halfway anticipating that her abdomen will explode from the exertion.

It doesn’t, obviously. It twinges in a couple of places, not quite ready to let go of what she put it through, but it doesn’t explode.

Small miracles, she thinks, as she wakes more fully.

She scrubs at her eyes, waits for her vision to clear.

She expects to find the room as empty as her bed, as empty as her womb. She expects to find the place all neat and tidy and clear, effectively untouched, like Debbie was never there at all. No sentimental ‘goodbye’, no clinical ‘see you on Monday’, no hastily scribbled post-it note telling to feel better soon, not even the slowly evaporating waft of overpriced perfume. Silence and emptiness and the queasy, feverish certainty that she imagined the whole afternoon, that it was all just a desperate, delirious ploy by her subconscious mind to make her feel worthy of being cared for.

That’s how it usually goes.

Not this time, apparently.

But then, all things considered, that probably shouldn’t surprise her. Hasn’t the whole damn day — week, month, whatever — just been one unexpected twist after another?

Sam and his unexpected talent for navigating the muddy waters of ‘women’s problems’. Sam and his unexpected kindness, his unexpected empathy, the doughnuts still sitting placidly on the television.

Debbie hammering on her door, storming into her room. Debbie, thinking Ruth was angry with her, as if she had any right at all to feel that way. Debbie, ending that bizarre conversation with an apology.

Debbie, coming back even after they cleared the air.

Debbie, climbing into bed with her. Debbie, holding her.

Debbie, her lips at her temples, her voice in her ear.

And now, yet again, like a fucking fever dream: Debbie.

She’s still here. It makes no sense, none at all, but there she is just the same, on the other side of the room, leaning against the door with a casualness that’s just a touch too put-on to be real. She’s watching her, arms folded across her chest and eyes surprisingly soft, mouth tugging upwards as Ruth stumbles and mumbles and fumbles her way back to full alertness.

Ruth blinks. Once, twice, three times. Her vision clears, but it doesn’t help the scene to make more sense.

You’re still here, she wants to say, but she’s terrified that if she does, Debbie will disintegrate into nothingness, evaporate like a ghost in some old gothic mansion, leaving the room colder than it was before, leaving her shivering like she’s been touched by death.

The Debbie in front of her, who may not really be real, grumbles, “Jesus, you sleep like the fucking dead.”

Ruth clears her too-dry throat.

“Sorry,” she hears herself rasp.

It’s the first time she’s managed to say that word out loud. The realisation comes sluggishly, stupidly, and with so much shame it almost makes her sick. She’s thought it a thousand times, a million times, over and over and over again, over the course of this nightmare of a day. She’s thought it so many times since Debbie showed up, since she left, since she came back again, it’s basically eroded the rest of her vocabulary.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over and over again, ricocheting inside her head like a game of pinball, and the only time she’s actually managed to push it over her traitorous tongue is now, for something as stupid as sleeping too much.

Fuck knows, her body needed it.

The rest of her likely did as well.

If she has any thoughts or opinions about the needless, pointless apology, Debbie does not voice them.

She says, out of nowhere, like it’s supposed to mean something significant, “You don’t have a fridge.”

Ruth has no idea how she’s supposed to respond to that, so she tries, “We don’t have a jukebox either.”

Debbie glares. “You can’t store soup in a jukebox, Ruth.”

Ruth blinks a few times, mouths a small, soundless “Oh.”

Debbie sighs, heavy and deeply long-suffering, like she’s talking to the world’s dumbest village idiot. It might almost be convincing — god knows, she’s graced Ruth with that particular brand of frustration before — only her eyes are still soft.

“I was going to... you know, like I used to... when you were...” Catching them both by surprise, her voice hitches; naturally, she immediately sends out her spikes to hide it. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter, I don’t give a shit.” She exhales again, not a sigh this time but something weaker, something that almost matches the soft, half-yearning look in her eyes. “It’s all academic now, because you don’t have a fridge and I’m not fucking spoonfeeding you. So...”

Ruth can’t fight the smile that splits her cheeks. It hurts, and so does the look on Debbie’s face, but it feels kind of good too.

“I don’t need you to feed me,” she points out, forcing the smile back down when Debbie rolls her eyes. “I’m not sick, Debbie. I’m just...”

She stops. Her heart kicks at her ribcage, then goes devastatingly, painfully still. Debbie’s eyes lose a touch of their softness.

“Fuck you,” she says, so low Ruth almost doesn’t hear it.

Ruth nods, swallows, lays a hand over her sore stomach.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers again, and it feels so, so empty.

Debbie shakes her head. She’s not looking at Ruth; she’s not really looking at anything at all. She’s blinking hard, gaze sort of unfocused, and there’s a set to her jaw that seems caught somewhere between anger and grief. It makes Ruth’s traitorous body start to shake again, makes her innards clench and seize up, great wrenching spasms of sort-of pain that don’t really feel like cramps at all.

I’m sorry, she thinks, over and over, and wonders how many times she’d have to say those words to make it enough.

She wonders if it means something — not much, not enough, but something — that Debbie is still here, letting her try.

She could leave. She should leave. Hell, she should have already left, should have never come back after the first time she left. She’s had a thousand opportunities to walk out for good, a thousand opportunities to make it seem like she was never even here at all. Ruth slept like the dead, isn’t that what she said? She could have slipped out of her bed, slipped out the door, left her there, alone and oblivious, to wake up rested and convince herself it was all just a dream. She could have stayed gone the first time, after she apologised for bailing during the match, when she assumed — absurdly, unfathomably, impossibly — that Ruth was pissed at her.

She could have just... not come here at all.

But she did. And she did again, and again.

Ruth knows that she doesn’t deserve that. Not the first time, not the second time, not any part of this at all. She knows there aren’t enough apologies in the world to make her deserve even a fraction of what Debbie’s already given her today, a fraction of what she wants but knows she shouldn’t accept. She knows it, and she knows that Debbie knows it too.

And yet, she’s still here.

I can’t stop caring about you, Debbie told her before, pressing her salt-soaked face to Ruth’s hairline. No matter how fucking desperately I wish that I could.

Ruth closes her eyes, slumps back against the flat, too-hot pillow. Her shoulders ache, like she was tensing them in her sleep. Her stomach aches too, and her groin, tired and sore from too many cramps, too much pain and shame and guilt and grief; underneath her clothes, she can feel the tiny prints of Debbie’s fingers, the larger print from her palm, the vague, hazy memory of relief, of a lifetime’s worth of comfort.

From the other side of the room, hoarse and ragged, Debbie says, “I’m not going to hold you again.”

Ruth doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t trust them not to flood with tears if she sees Debbie’s face.

She takes a deep breath. The air shivers in her lungs, her throat. She wills her body to stop shaking.

“Okay,” she says, very, very quietly. “But what if I beg?”

She hears a soft thud, the dull knocking of Debbie’s shoulders against the wall as she pushes off, and then the padding of footsteps across the carpet. She feels a sudden chill, and the black void behind her eyelids darkens even more than it already is as her body is thrown into shadow. Her mind’s eye projects a vision of Debbie standing over her, gazing down at her, eyes dark but not hollow, expression hard and soft, cold and warm, hate and love and all of those things at the same time.

“Fuck you,” Debbie says again, close enough that Ruth feels her breath tickle across her cheek.

Ruth opens her eyes. The Debbie standing over her is a perfect match for the one in her head.

She doesn’t beg. She doesn’t apologise. She doesn’t trust herself to speak at all.

She nods, lays a hand on her tight, cramping groin, and rolls over onto her side.

By the time she closes her eyes again, less than half a minute later, Debbie’s arms are already around her.