KIZ

By the time she was forty-two, Cassie had become so accustomed to the absence of touch that she no longer recognised it as a wound.

It had simply become the climate of her life.

Nobody really noticed, I mean how could they? She smiled at the right moments, she remembered birthdays, she answered texts, held doors open for strangers and laughed at jokes. To the world, she was warm. Easy to be around. 

Independent.

People loved independent women.

More specifically because they never had to carry them.

Every morning she woke to the cold side of the mattress, unironically, there was no 'other side' anymore. Her body still reached, sometimes. A blind movement before consciousness arrived. Her fingers reaching out and searching for a presence that had never been there long enough to become a memory.

Then she would wake fully, pull her hand back, curse herself out for what only she thought was her losing her mind. Her apartment quiet, awfully quiet, definitely not the peaceful kind either. The kind of quiet that felt like being forgotten, the kind of quiet that seemed too loud to go unnoticed.

She would shower longer than necessary, standing beneath water hot enough to redden her skin. The pressure against her shoulders was the closest thing she had to an embrace most days though she never really admitted that to herself. Some truths become embarrassing when left unattended too long.

She couldn't admit it to herself. Admitting that would make it more real than she was ready to deal with.

At work, she listened. God, she listened. She let people pour themselves into her, unknown to the overbearing loneliness she carried.

Though there was something about her invited vulnerability that seemed to attract other people's forlornness.

And that's when she met Victoria.

Victoria Javadi had spent a lot of her life being told what was best for her that she could no longer reliably distinguish her own voice from the echoes of everyone else's, she couldn't recognise her own desires from the expectations that had been placed upon her. It had become so arid, so fallow, that every time she even took a second to think about her future, she heard her parents' voice before she heard her own.

She could not remember exactly when her parents stopped feeling like parents.

As a little girl, Victoria had reached for her parents naturally. She would crawl into their laps while they watched television, she would wrap her arms around them without thinking, she would seek comfort after bad dreams, scraped knees, and difficult days, she would sit and pray with them to a god she didn't really think she believed in. 

Children do not question whether they deserve affection. They assume it will be there.

But as she grew older, something changed.

It wasn't as though the affection disappeared overnight. There was no single moment she could point to and say, there. That was when everything changed. Instead, it happened slowly, the way daylight fades into evening. So gradually that by the time the darkness arrived, she could barely remember what the sunlight looked light.

She saw the sunlight again when she looked at Cassie.

On paper, Victoria and Cassie made very little sense.

Victoria was twenty. Cassie was forty-two.

People noticed the difference immediately. They noticed the years between them before they noticed the way they looked at each other, before they noticed how naturally they occupied the same space, before they noticed that neither women seemed particularly interested in explaining themselves.

What nobody understood though, was that their connection had very little to do with age.

It began with recognition.

Victoria, having spent most of her life feeling overseen, noticed Cassie's insatiable need to please almost immediately. Cassie, having spent most of her life feeling burdened to the isolation, noticed Victoria's unbearable obligation to prove herself almost immediately.

There would be times Victoria would spend twenty minutes explaining why she was worried about some minor decision, expecting correction, expecting judgment, expecting someone to tell her what she should do.

Cassie would just listen quietly, asking questions like, "What do you want?"

And every time, without failure, the questions unsettled Victoria, because, nobody had ever asked with genuine curiosity. Only faux interest wrapped in a barbed wire of judgement. Due to her past, the gift of Cassie's attentiveness seemed almost too good to be true, like it had strings attached.

Cassie had a habit of reaching for Victoria's hand without thinking about it. Resting her palm against her back when walking through crowded places. Pulling her closer while they sat together on the couch.

Simple acts of affection. The endearment that people barely noticed, Victoria noticed every single one.

And at first, she almost didn't know what to do with it. The years of emotional deprivation had left her touch-starved in ways she rarely admitted aloud. Like Cassie, she had become habitual to bearing her loneliness privately, to convincing herself she didn't need affection because actually needing it felt disconcerting.

She told herself she was fine more times than she could remember, but every time Cassie placed a hand over hers, her heart reacted like a stray animal being offered food for the first time in weeks.

Touch-starvation is not hunger. It is famine.

Victoria carried not the sharp ache of wanting, but the dull ache of having wanted for so long that the wanting became part of her anatomy, settling uncomfortably within her bones, living beneath her ribs.

The two of them could forget that it was real when together, Victoria forgot about it more when Cassie would nuzzle into her palm, knelt in the surrender of contiguity. Cassie forgot about it when Victoria would hitch her breath as the older woman grazed her thigh with the tip of her fingers, desperate for the warmth.

Cassie became shelter to Victoria before she became a person, a steady voice. The first place Victoria had ever felt seen without being evaluated. To someone so starved of tenderness, even ordinary affection can feel miraculous. And Cassie, in turn, found in Victoria something dangerously comforting; someone who looked at her with reverence, someone who really needed her presence in the way thirsty ground needs rain. It made her feel important. Necessary. Irreplaceable.

That was the beginning of the problem.

Their closeness started to resemble ivy around a crumbling wall - beautiful at a distance, but tightening with every season. Victoria began measuring her worth by Cassie's attention. A moment of distance felt like abandonment. The little girl inside her, still waiting to be favoured, attached herself to Cassie with desperate longing.

Cassie did not intend to hurt her, but intention is not the same thing as balance. She became the centre of Victoria's emotional gravity without realising how much weight it carried. Sometimes she'd pull Victoria close with extraordinary gentleness; sometimes she withdrew into her own weariness, leaving Victoria suspended between devotion and fear.

Victoria sat cross-legged at the far end of the couch, pretending to watch whatever movie was playing. The television casting a pale blue light across the room. Cassie sat beside her, scrolling absently through her phone. The distance between them barely a foot, to Victoria, it felt like miles, and she hated herself for noticing. More than that, she hated for what noticing revealed. Because beneath the anxiety was the overwhelming truth that she needed Cassie in ways that frightened her.

You're being ridiculous, she told herself.

But it didn't erase the feeling, the familiar ache, the old one she tried her hardest to push away. The same ache she'd felt as a child standing in doorways, wondering if her parents were too busy for a conversation. The same ache she'd felt whenever affection seemed conditional, when attention felt earned rather than freely given.

The same ache she'd replaced with lust as she dropped to her knees in front of Cassie, feeling the hand of her saviour fisted in her dark brown hair, and if she closed her eyes long enough, if she just let herself feel, she would finally be met with the peace she recognised so well.

Cassie taught herself to forget her self-indulgence when her eyes met the dark brown ones that looked up at her with such soft reverence, where ones own desires collide with ones want to please, with Victoria, she only ever chose to seek out what Victoria wanted, her own desires could wait until later on. Even if that completely disregarded that touch-starved trauma that hid beneath her skin, she did that for the woman knelt before her.

Because who was she to deny the one thing that made her whole? The one thing that soothed her in ways she couldn't soothe herself. Who would she be if she repudiated the very reason of her being?

So she held her palm out, and the young girl fed. Cassie looked down with blown-out pupils, watching Victoria force her cheek against her own hand, trying to crawl into her skin, absorbing the warmth of a touch that was bound to disappear if she blinked too fast. "That's it, baby. You've got it." She whispered.

The words seemed to hit Victoria's system in an instant, her eyes fluttering shut as her hands wrapped around the back of the older woman's thighs. Cassie could feel Victoria's nails indenting in her skin, a form of possession, a language only the two of them spoke in moments like this, moments that could shatter from the noise of a pin drop.

The worshipper revering to her god.

Even if her god was a woman in the simplest form, she would still lay herself bare at the alter, she would pray for something bigger than herself, for a touch very few people would understand, that very few people could confer.  

And Victoria made the prettiest of noises, the soft cries of unadulterated yearning that left her lips played an unforgettable melody in Cassie's ears, that only fuelled the perpetuation of hunger that threatened to consume her body.

With Cassie's hands wrapped around the young girl's waist, her palms splayed out against her bare back, all she could think about was how Victoria's skin burned to the touch, how the lewd, breathless sounds that escaped such an innocent woman pounded through her ears, how she always, without failure, managed to think about how young she really was. She knew that was the guilt talking, it always spoke louder during intimacy, reminding Cassie of her perversions when all she really wanted to think about was making the woman, who praised her at her feet, feel good. Feel worthy. Feel seen.

She pushed them down, those voices telling her how immoral she was, and for a long time it worked. For a long time she felt like she had finally fixed the only issue separating the emotional connection between the two, only to be swallowed by the impending guilt she felt as her back arched up and the oxytocin released from her body. 

Victoria felt it too, daring the shower to wash away the culpability of constantly needing Cassie close.

Not even the purest of water could cleanse that. 

The two of them guilty in their own ways.

The two of them using one another in the way a drug never could.