graysen

it ends, as these things always do, with a picture, with a phone. it’s the digital age after all.

it isn’t her personal. ‘b’ has long learned to be careful with her things, has been careful for a year and then some, has a second one ‘k’ doesn't know the number of that lives in a battered jimmy choo shoebox at the back of her closet - remnants of when her mother ached for her to be a real girl - forced into hiding; a thin glass-metal body, devoid of weight, shameful and small.

so, it starts with someone else's phone, a staffer's, a boy from the comms team who is desperately young, twenty-one and not yet devoid of ambitions, and he finds a photograph he was never meant to, while doing exactly the job he was hired to do: which was to look.

‘b’ leaving a building on the west side at eleven in the evening in a floor-length black khaite coat called roth on the website, a quarter polyamide with a classic collar and open front; a khaite coat that isn't hers. ‘b’ again, four days later, same building, same hour, different coat - mouth fallen open wide at the sky as she laughed, so wide the moon could’ve rolled right down and sat like a pill at the base of her throat. a laugh with a strength that shook her whole face, a high swing of her usually raspy voice, authentic in a way the family's photographers had never once managed to capture in four years of political portraits.

and she has to laugh, really, though she can see the blowup that will reverberate through this townhouse they use as campaign headquarters, yet another detonation; yet another western-kissed bomb. she laughs because she has siblings and they’re all much messier than their mother would like for presidential children, a spill of humanity, caught out in more mortifying ways.

she still remembers last summer when the mockingbirds in her mother’s dust-drowned aviary caught a hook on the word sweetheart, sang a chorus of endearment all summer long: sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart. and then they’d learned her eldest brother was seeing a man twice his years lived, grey at the temple, a mouth that trembled when he said ‘please, sweetheart’ after her brother had sobbed out that he had to let him go.

she hasn’t seen that brother in a week or so.

anyway, the staffer. so, he takes it to someone who takes it to someone else, and by the time it reaches ‘b’s’ mother it has already stopped being a simple good-time photo and has transformed into a liability, a large one; a line item, a problem with tangible shape.

and it’s her mother, so she has to curse at her eldest daughter, storming the house with her claws out. and ‘b’ has to let her draw blood or it’ll never be over. the confrontation happens in ‘b’s’ favorite room, the one with the 290 grand piano (imperial bösendorfer) no one plays and the portraits of several presidents who are decidely not her mother yet but will be again, god willing, in nine months—and ‘b’ stands in the middle of the carpet like a sixth-grader called to the headmistress's office while her mother reads the room the way she reads everything: optics first, feelings somewhere a little further down the line, heart in the grave.

“tell me it isn't what it looks like.”

‘b’ doesn't answer fast enough, and that alone is an answer, and there’s a cleave in her mother's face, a sudden drop that occurs when whatever she's been most afraid of turns out to be true. no softening, never a softening, just recalculating, fast, blank arithmetic spinning; a woman trained in decisions for survival, facing a fact rather than feel it.

“do you ever think? do you ever, for one fucking minute, think about what you do?”

‘b’ closes her eyes, baby blue shut tight, mouth twisting as she feels the ocean rise in her throat. her dad used to call her gaze blue lace agate, chalcedony. he could name all kinds of rocks, did a lot of digging for them.

he died cutting one right wide open.

the backs of her eyes turn from black to that scarlet splatter scored against an emerald geode’s innocent face.

“do you understand what you've done? do you understand what this does to us, six months out, do you understand—”

“i’m always thinking,” ‘b’ says, and that's the mistake, that's the exact wrong thing to say, and her mother's voice goes up and up until it isn't even her voice anymore. it's just sound, raw and furious and completely unfamiliar, the kind of scream ‘b’ has not heard since she was small enough to hide from it behind furniture - curled up against the herculean back of a settee, eyes blank and wide to the wall.

in the aviary off the east hall, where her mother keeps the birds she never has time to enjoy, the mockingbirds catch it. they tend to catch the loudest thing. they will keep it, turn it over, offer it back all week in fragments—a shriek here, furious syllable there—long after the actual fight has been snuffed, hachet still visible in the snow; long after ‘b’ has been sent upstairs to think about what she's done like she’s gone back to nine years old, like she’s never been twenty-two, like there is anything at all to think about that she hasn't already, privately, permanently decided.

she goes back down anyway. she always goes back down. it's the only apology her mother has ever taught her how to give: no use for words, but the body arriving, chastened; ‘b’ in the doorway, white-blonde braid swinging, asking permission to be forgiven for something she intends to do entirely again.

“do you have anything to say for yourself?” her mother demands, and ‘b’ knows the staffers are all huddled outside the door. some of them just can’t stand her.

and she feels like a little girl again, hair loose, barrel curls a shower of gold as her head tilts to the floor and she bores a hole into the shiny tips of her loafers. if only rockwell could paint her now. the reference makes her bottom lip tremble; ‘k’ would like that she made the connection.

she looks up from beneath her lashes, tongue pink and sweet against her teeth, pushing at the front two the way she pushes at ‘k’s when they kiss. behind her, the mockingbirds are still mimicking her mother’s scream from earlier, over and over, a chorus of agony.

she has to keep the smile back as she softens her face and says, “promise you won't be mad?”

she knows she's not in a position to be promised anything.

prologue ii ⊱ ‘from blood, wings’, susie benes, c. 2021.

you have to know this second.

it started as a practicality, and paige turned it into something else before azzi could even notice the shift occurring, agree to its happening.

they needed a way to text that wasn’t a way to text: no names, no nicknames, nothing a stranger could screenshot and place, because paige was already pumped full of paranoia, born and bred of being a public figure whose sentences got decoded by people who were never meant to have read them.

so, it's paige insisting, but then azzi’s idea, actually, the letters; dry and practical the way azzi is dry and practical about anything that frightens her.

“let’s just use initials. how about… ‘b’ and ‘k’? it’s nothing. nobody looks twice at nothing.”

paige considers this for exactly four seconds before she ruins it.

“there’s always something in the nothing.”

azzi’s face falls, and paige feels a roll-over in her chest like fire, dog on its back, a score of disappointment, and she shifts closer so that she can hold azzi by the hand.

“‘b’ and ‘k’,” she tries again, turning it twice over like a coin, testing the weight. “b for baby.”

she says it easy, teasing, watching azzi’s mouth teeter to-and-fro because she wants to smile and won't quite let herself. her lipstick is nearly gone (clinique’s almost lipstick in black honey) and paige wants to kiss the rest off, lick the wax off of her thumb.

“and ‘k’ for—” a beat, theatrical, drawn out for effect. “kryptonite. obviously. you're the only thing that could take me down.”

azzi huffs something that isn't quite her normal laugh, swats paige with the essay draft still in her hand, says something about how paige has clearly spent too much time constructing a bit instead of finishing her final project, and that's the end of it as far as paige’s concerned.

it’s a joke, filed away, the kind of nonsense paige produces when she's pleased with herself and wants an audience.

it is not the end of it for paige.

because what she doesn't say—what she has absolutely no intention of ever saying, not now, maybe not for a long time, maybe not until it's already too late to take back—is that she'd meant something else entirely on the drive over, lying in the back of a car she wasn't supposed to have requisitioned for a “study session,” running the letters over in her head like a rosary.

k for kryptonite is the version she hands over, funny and small and safe, a joke sized to fit in ‘k’s’ palm without cutting her.

k for keeps is the one she actually means. it’s what she’s playing for.

she doesn't examine that too closely. she’s gotten good, ‘b’, at not examining things too closely this past year - at holding a feeling the way you'd hold something too hot, quick, glancing, never quite settling her full weight onto it because she knows herself well enough by now to know what happens when she does.

so she’s ‘b’.

‘b’ is not a person who wants things a little. she has never once, in her entire life, wanted anything a little.

and so she keeps it there, filed under the joke, under kryptonite, under the easy laughing shorthand of two letters on a phone screen, and lets ‘k’ believe it's nothing, because ‘k’ believing it's nothing is the only way ‘b’ gets to keep having it.

that night she texts ‘k’—contact name just the letter, nothing else, the way they've agreed—and stares at it on the screen longer than it warrants, a wave of something silent and enormous moving underneath her like water beneath ice.

and ‘k’ texts back and she forgets, because she’s sometimes messy like that. ‘k’ texts and says, i love you, paige; all formal like she’s written an email.

and ‘b’ puts the phone face-down, because she is paige, because she can’t be anything else, codename shallow, and she tries her hardest to make herself stop.

so, you know, now.

part i. ⊱ stephen mackey, 'we only come out at night', c. 2014. 

paige had no illusions about the university chosen for her.

it was far, tucked into the recesses of northernmost vermont, dead center in a town called orlaith that seemed to exist mostly in fog and the constant wet moan of church bells crying a second too late. a town small enough to be walked end to end before the cold really found you, population somewhere around four thousand, which meant most of her professors could keep a wide eye on her, and paige would be incapable of enacting her disappearance the way she had grown so stellar, over the years, at doing.

it was the ideal scenario for her mother—a presidential candidate campaigning for a second term—who had learned, more than once and always the hard way, that a child was easiest to manage when they were at their smallest and watched by everyone around them, all at once.

paige could already feel the dread of it settling low and cold in her stomach, not unlike swallowing water too quickly, that inside-out-burn as you drown, that particular drag of understanding that you are about to waste away somewhere airless and obstinately beautiful.

because orlaith was beautiful, she would give it that much: slate roofs done up in sea green, pine teal, carbon black, charcoal blue; old maples crisping at the edge, passing into the endless amber, nearly left too long in brine; a cold that arrived early in the year and meant every bit of the business it promised, nothing like the manicured warmth she spent a childhood honing for cameras - god in the flash.

she had managed, somehow, to avoid orientation in the flesh, loath to be beholden to the wasp's-nest hum of whispering and the less-than-subtle staring, her back aching against cherry-wood pews set into the amphitheater like church furniture repurposed for hours of excruciating instruction. so far she had met all but one of her professors, and of those she had met, she liked exactly one: dr. taurasi, who took a single look at her, rolled her eyes, and told her, without any warmth, to sit up straight and produce a report on bergman's through a glass darkly within three weeks whether she liked it or not.

paige had liked it despite herself, the tart plainness of being handled like another student rather than a spectacle.

for now, she was living in her brother's apartment, an arrangement her mother had agreed to with visible reluctance, only because paige had fought for it as though it was the last good thing left to her - because, in a way, it was.

ingemar (mar, to the shrinking list of people who loved him) was technically only her half-brother, the product of their shared father's first marriage, gone from the house years before paige was old enough to know him as anyone but the name pinned and scrawled in shaking cursive on the backs of old photographs. but there had been a strange overlapping window, once—where paige was still small and he, already halfway out the door—and something about those years had stuck to them both, permanent without either of them ever choosing it, or managing to get it off their backs.

he was the only one of her siblings who had never once made her feel like competition, and the only one who had left the family circus entirely and come out the other side looking, if anything, lighter.

he was, in a way, her biggest dream.

ingemar lived with nikolaev. niki, to everyone—his full name a name borrowed from a city on the black sea that neither paige nor mar had ever visited. he was older than mar by a stretch wide enough that their mother had had opinions about it for the better part of a year before conceding, silver threading in at his temples like frost finding a windowpane, and an unhurried, immovable calm about him that made paige understand immediately why mar had chosen to disappear into a life this small and warm. niki called him “inge” or “sweetheart,” and mar blushed at both - pale skin sanded with texture and a mole at his right cheek, neck flushed a heavy insectile red.

their apartment sat above what had formerly been a hardware store, built on orlaith's one real street, drafty, and it smelled, almost constantly, of woodsmoke and the coffee niki made far too strong and refused, on principle, to apologize for. the only time it erred from that profile was when it smelled strongly of the fig bath salts mar used after a particularly hard day.

from what paige understood, niki came from money—some hedge fund family or another—and had urged mar to live, only live, and if he must work then to do something he loved. so, her brother had become a piano teacher, and the apartment showed it.

it was two levels (maybe three if you counted the foyer when you entered), the store now converted, and covered almost feverishly in carpet. there was a small touch of dark wood when you first stepped in, so that shoes could be toed off before continuing to the upstairs. the carpet itself was shagged and pink, or maybe only appeared pink in the light—always soft and yellowed, never harsh. though paige would never confess it, she loved going up and down those stairs, toes curled against the landing and usually shielded by whatever oversized trousers she’d chosen to pair with her sweater of the day.

right as you entered, there was a darkness ahead of you. the lower level, which held a bathroom and some space paige never fully got around to exploring. it had seemed frightening to her at first and then grew steadily more compelling the longer she inhabited the flat, though never any less mysterious.

upstairs, the upper level was flooded with light and held a grand piano. a steinway, black and coaxing, lid kept open and propped so you could see its insides; strings gleaming, ribs pulsing red and black as the students pressed a key here and there. that was always paige’s favorite part, when she sat in quietly on a lesson: the punch of a pedal resulting in the jerk of the body, bone lifting from muscle, all that blood resolving into a melody that flowed beautifully if the child had put in enough time to properly learn it.

the room was surrounded by a spread of furniture either covered in sheet music or frames, glass slipped over the smiling faces of people she didn't know. the musical deluge spilled into the dining room, the kitchen, which paige could see from her perch on the navy suede couch against the far wall—especially when her posture was perfect, back ramrod straight.

they had a dog, a little maltese named suzy, who hated anyone who wasn’t niki or mar. she could never be let out while paige was ghosting through the house, and certainly not on the nights mar invited parents to sit in and watch their children play; a first discomfort and embarrassment for many of them, but a good solution to stage fright all the same.

the day paige first arrived, there was a housewarming invitation from some months back, still propped in its frame on the entry table. niki's doing, sentimental in a register he would never have admitted to owning, cardstock gone soft and pale at the corners. in embossed script, it read: the blessings request the pleasure of your company.

paige had stopped dead in front of it.

blessing was niki's surname, not mar's. they were bueckers’ blood, through and through.

her phone was out of her pocket before her coat was even off, a single photograph sent with no caption, and the reply arrived quickly enough that she knew she'd caught him somewhere unguarded, somewhere he wasn't braced for this unforeseen ambush.

» so you’re the one taking his name, then. « it was not my choice. he had the invites made. i didn't ask him to. » didn't say you did. « p. » you didn’t correct him? « paige. » i didn’t mean anything by it. just saying it's sweet. « well, don't.

she read well, don't three times over, turning it in her head the way you'd turn a stone looking for the smooth side, and knew—the way she knew so much about her family without ever being told forthright—that it wasn't really an order to stop.

it was an old, tired kind of request. their whole family had always spoken about love this way: sideways, at an angle, withheld, terrified of the noise it made once acknowledged. you learned early on to hear the actual sentence underneath the one presented.

what mar meant, she was fairly sure, threading through the single clipped syllable of it, was please don't make me acknowledge this affection, i am not built for it. i have only just learned how not to flinch from its grip; i barely look at it in private.

she saved the photograph anyway. she had a feeling she would need it later: for blackmail, or a moment closer to comfort. possibly both at once.

most things in her family eventually turned out to be both at once.

now she sat nested dead-center of the lecture hall for the single course she had chosen for herself—arth 3692, art history colloquium, a curriculum so extensive it ran the length of the entire sophomore year—taught, apparently, by a newcomer by the name of professor fudd, who was by every account as much an enigma as paige herself and, infuriatingly, rather beloved for it.

every alumnus who had taken her class across the six years she had taught here guarded her like one would guard a priestess, kept her half-secret and precious, closing ranks the moment anyone new so much as asked after her, and had already, in the four days paige had been on this campus, found some way to fault her personally simply for having asked.

for her first day of classes, paige had dressed as though she had arrived somewhere far more highbrow than a lecture hall: oversized fendi sweater in a color like wet bark, pinstriped wool trousers of the same brand pooling loose over polished coal-black loafers, dark leather gloves in the same shade that she had no real reason to keep on indoors except for the fact that she liked the slight rebuke of being fully accesible; a slim gold watch chain at her hip, inherited from a man three generations dead.

she looked, she knew, like she was arriving at a funeral, all of her colors so dark.

she liked that about herself. she had always dressed like a harbinger.

she was unsuspecting of what professor fudd would be wearing when she walked into that colloquium, didn't know yet about that black turtleneck dress, modest at first glance, hem falling well past the knee as if she taught in a convent, the cream curve of the peter pan collar sitting at its neck. didn't suspect the sheer over-the-knee socks beneath it that would only ever be visible in flashes, a slip of dark at the ankle when she crossed the room too quickly or leaned to write something on the board, gone again before anyone could be sure they'd seen it at all.

she didn't know yet that the first time she caught that flash (just a glimpse, just a hint), something in her stomach would flip, would exhale a small, stupid, undignified oh, entirely against her better judgment.

she knew only, sitting there in the amphitheater's flat morning light with her spine straight because dr. taurasi’s voice was still somewhere at the base of her skull telling her to sit up, that she had already decided to act as her default: unimpressed, uninterested.

she would be wrong about that. she was aware, somewhere beneath her familiar fortification, of having been wrong before she had even had the chance to be right.

that peek, that hint—it was the miniature beginning of a sprawling scavenger hunt. she was at the site of discovery, and no one had handed her a shovel. she’d have to lower herself, get on her knees, and feel the twinge in her back as her hands snarled into the dirt.

yes, she’d dig.

the girl didn’t care, and it drove azzi quite mad.

it wasn’t that she was inattentive, exactly. she had never once been caught on her phone, never slouched so far as to be reprimanded, never given azzi the easy satisfaction of an obvious target. it was worse than that. she sat constantly with the aggravating air of one who had already decided the entire enterprise was beneath her, chin propped on one gold-ringed knuckle, gaze fixed somewhere just past azzi’s shoulder as though the real lecture was happening in the middle distance and this one, the one azzi was actually delivering, was simply background noise she was too polite to interrupt.

azzi had taught difficult students before. she had taught bored ones, brilliant ones, cruel ones, sad ones dressed up as bored ones. she had never quite had one who made a show like this, shrouding herself in an outfit of indifference, put on with the same care paige clearly put into everything else about herself.

today’s slide was a photograph of aurelio cabrera y gallardo's san sebastián, the marble saint bound wrist-high to his post, body arched back in a line that could as easily be agony as ecstasy; mouth fallen open on something unresolved between the two, rope biting soft grooves into unmarked stone. azzi had taught this sculpture for six years, this interpretation of saint sebastian, and it had never once failed to snuff out a room—the audience uncomfortable with the detailing of torture and the idea of pleasure found in the act.

azzi allowed the silence to steep, settling backward until the underside of her thighs kissed the cutting edge of her desk. her dark gaze flickered up to where paige was always situated, though today her hair was mussed into two aureate plaits, the braids pinned hastily around her head as though she were a farmer’s daughter. later she would undo them, the mass like nectar poured around her head, and azzi would think of a painting: circle of jean-baptiste regnault, french, ‘danaë’, c. 18th-19th c., detail.

“could someone tell me what themes are being depicted here?” azzi asked, having finally remembered herself, and let the ensuing silence linger a beat too long, waiting to see who would break first.

no one did. paige, predictably, appeared the least inclined of anyone to be the one who broke it. azzi decided, with a perversity that belonged to every teacher who’d ever run out of patience, to aim the next lobby at her.

“alright, you, give it a go. what first stands out to you?”

paige’s eyes came back from the middle distance slowly, almost insultingly slowly, her gaze like pale ice as she assessed azzi in her entirety, face thinly twisted with an expression shy of a challenge but not far from it either.

“well, it's a guy tied to a tree, professor fudd, with a bunch of arrows in him,” she said flatly. “looks like it hurts.”

a current of laughter rippled through the room, grateful for the release. azzi didn’t join it, only crossed and re-crossed her ankles.

“that's a description. i asked what stood out to you, what called.”

“i mean, same thing everyone else does. a martyr. suffering for god, or whatever.” a small shrug, deeply bored, painstakingly put on for an audience of one. “it's not that deep.”

“it is always that deep. never make the mistake of assuming otherwise,” azzi snapped, and something in her own voice caught her slightly off guard, the vehemence. she pushed past it, past the sudden flowering of pink across paige’s cheeks as she minimized under the sudden onslaught of shame. “look again. i’ll instruct you. look not at the wounds, but at his face.”

paige looked, harder this time. azzi observed her study, saw her brow furrow and disrupt her affected disinterest, her face disturbed in the way of a pond's surface holding dead calm right up until a näkki finally moved underneath.

“um, he doesn't really look like he's in pain,” paige spoke slowly, boredom dropping away like a coat. “or, i mean, he does, of course, but it's not just that. his mouth is open like—” she stopped, restarted, selecting her next words with more care than azzi had seen her extend to anything other than a lecture in four weeks.

azzi wondered if she was opening her mouth just like san sebastian, trying to feel her way through his agony.

“like he's somewhere past the objection to it,” paige continued. she sat up straighter without seeming to notice she had done it. “it's a whole conversation, isn't it. god's always pushing. always asking: can i cut a little deeper here, can i take a little more, ouch, look honey, look what you'll get to become if you let me - a saint, a whole halo, your name on a stained-glass window next to mine, somewhere some kid will stare at during a homily, bored to tears in four hundred years.

“you have saints for days built exactly like this. agony and ecstasy…they're not opposites at all, whatever anyone tells you. they're sisters. they used to be sisters. now they're basically twins; nobody can tell them apart anymore, not really, not if you're honest. but honesty doesn’t make the myth.”

she was speaking faster now, words nearly dribbling out, warming to it, rising to it; outrunning whatever guardrails she usually kept up. “that's what's actually being depicted, why the body first draws you in, why his face is hidden, so far back. it’s the illusion. the truth is: he’s not suffering, or not totally, i don’t know—willingness. he’s not fighting his ropes; he's—leaning into them, kind of. like the only way to prove you'd take absolutely everything for someone is to actually take it, in front of witnesses, and let them watch you not flinch.”

the room had gone very quiet in the midst of her analysis. azzi didn’t dare move.

something crossed paige’s face then: an understanding, delayed, a second too late to the realization of how much of herself she’d just handed over to a room full of near-strangers. and the color rushed up her throat in a fast, ungovernable tide—carmine flooding—and she looked down at the desk, at her hands on the flat of it, as if the desk itself had personally betrayed her.

“anyway,” she muttered, duller now, retreating. she sat, making them all wonder when she had stood up. “but it probably isn’t that deep. some things aren’t, i don't know.”

no one else in the room said anything for a long moment. azzi was aware, distantly, of twenty-nine other students she was meant to be teaching at the moment, and of the fact that she had not thought about a single one of them in the last ninety seconds.

“ouch?” azzi repeated, letting a smile play about her mouth. paige glanced up and found its gentle curve before it fled.

“ouch,” she echoed, a confirmation.

azzi nodded, smiling fully now before turning away.

“well done,” she offered, tossed over her shoulder, and it came out quieter than she’d meant it to, quieter than her usual praise, which she engaged in generous volume for lesser insights all the time.

paige’s mouth tugged up, pleased, trying incredibly hard not to look so pleased, and for one second a note of something else underneath that azzi didn’t have time to get a handle on before it was erased. clearing her throat, azzi reached for the syllabus bound and spiraled atop her own desk, an ordinary shape for that of her own authority.

“since apparently some of us do have thoughts that develop past a shrug—five hundred words. pick two works discussed in class from the semester so far and argue for a relationship between them. due in two weeks.”

there was a chorus of pained groans, and azzi relaxed at the familiar sound of her students’ whining, crossing behind to her chair as the theater emptied in the edgeless scrape and shuffle of bags and chairs. paige took her time gathering her things, unhurried, always last, and was nearly at the door—nearly clear—when azzi, not once looking up from the roster in front of her, called out.

“if you want to punish yourself with a dedicated lack of attention and failing this course, that's entirely your business. feel free.” a pause. “but i will punish you for acting as though you're stupid when i need you to rise to the occasion. i only take thirty students, paige. you aren't here for decoration.”

paige stopped in the doorway, turning laggardly, a flicker of emotion playing over her face before she tamped it into an expression like stone.

“are you insinuating, professor,” she said, “that next time you'll humiliate me?”

azzi glanced up then, and held paige’s gaze for far longer than the question strictly required.

“god is always pushing.”

for once, paige had nothing at the ready to say back, her own words turned against her. she stood there a second too long, light coming in behind her eyes; a bulb changed, product of being caught out twice in one hour. and then,

“the first day? i liked your socks.”

azzi froze, her pen suspended in mid-air, mind struggling to clamp down on the conclusion that paige had somehow been privy to what was under her dress. and it was only when the door eased shut on its own weight that she found the ability to look up again, only to find an empty threshold, the door itself cracked open to allow in a shadow of the real world.

hum of the hall outside it, no paige in it at all.

the assignment really was nothing: five hundred words minimum, comparative visual analysis, pick two works from the syllabus and argue for their relationship—and yet.

paige turned in four hundred and twelve words of something so carelessly, infuriatingly good that azzi sat with it open on her laptop for a long time after the rest of the submissions had been graded. she wasn’t quick to anger by nature but close to it now; a body dressed up as anger, wearing it badly, really a cousin. that was the head of the feeling. the heart of it, she found, sitting there in the grey light of her shitty one-bedroom studio with all other essays long finished, was nearer to delight.

and the fury, she'd admit only to herself, was mostly a form of offense, like handing over a gift and watching someone shrug at the wrapping, holding yourself hostage from the urge to rip their throat clean out.

because paige hadn't tried. that was the thing that got her.

azzi had had high hopes for having inspired some real interest in the course since the san sebastián discussion. the way it had piled up on itself, unbidden, overflow spilling from the girl's pert mouth. but now it read as though paige sought to reprimand azzi for forcing her hand at all. her strike back was this essay, in which she'd paired seurat's le cirque with chagall's l'écuyère - a choice that spoke well to a hidden attention to detail, a proclivity azzi hadn't let herself hope for until now.

it wasn't the moonlit lovers everyone reached for when they thought, minorly, of chagall, but the rider mid-air, weightless, her face turned somewhere the viewer could never follow. and the argument—half-formed as it was, half-won as it was—had an organic spine to it: a loose commentary on how both painters used the circus as a place where the body performed function for an audience that would never once wonder whether the function was real, assuming it was because they'd paid for it and so expected a service. how the paintings could be read as studies in the loss of autonomy—le cirque by way of the audience, l'écuyère by way of the rider herself, held to the horse by a man barely visible in the frame—and the commodification of the human spirit that followed from it.

it was a garden of sentences hidden, rather cleverly, in the dirt of an assignment that otherwise fell apart. fruitless, possibly written at two in the morning, one paige hadn't bothered to finish developing, because why would she? it was due at nine, and she had better things to care about than a class she'd chosen as neutral ground in an otherwise fraught schedule.

god, it was like pulling teeth, azzi thought, scribbling madly.

see me after class in red at the top, and underneath it, smaller, because she couldn't help herself: this is not a c+ idea. it is a c+ execution of an a idea, which was arguably an inch too much taken.

paige read the note on her walk to her week's sole biochemistry lab, brows raised, and showed up to office hours highly armed; chin up, ready for a fight she'd decided to instigate and enjoy well in advance. she'd had her hair redone that week, ice blonde, the dye still fresh enough to catch light differently than it had before, and she was dressed, as always, like a symbol of death: black prada turtleneck sweater, wool trousers in a soft slate grey, prada loafers that had never once touched anything undignified, not even a little rain.

azzi had learned by now not to react to any of it, though it cost her something immeasurable and private every time.

her office was small in the way most of the humanities offices were small and underfunded, one narrow window facing the quad, a radiator moaning through the space in ancient argument, and books stacked in tremulous towers that only needed a bare breeze to topple. but it was hers in every visible way a rented room could be.

azzi hadn't planned on anyone being in to see her that afternoon beyond the ordinary trickle of office hours, and so she’d dressed for herself rather than for a lecture hall: black ribbed sweater, mellowed and shapeless with wear, a grey pleated skirt she’d owned since graduate school, tall black calfskin boots, a single thermal glove she'd forgotten to take off after crossing campus, sitting discarded now on the corner of the desk - shed skin.

"i don't see the problem,” was paige’s greeting.

azzi closed her eyes, prayed briefly for strength.

"you’ve gotten a grade that reflects what you were willing to give it," she answered, peering intently at a fresh stack of freshman essays she was trying, with some difficulty, to grade fairly, "which is not the same as what it's worth. sit down."

"i have somewhere to be."

"according to the scheduling office, you have approximately four hours until your next commitment, and we both know it." azzi finally looked up. "sit down, paige, and read this to me."

paige sat, body rigid with discomfort, disgruntled at not being let off easy, a pale hand coming forward to angle the red-marked paper toward herself.

“‘although stylistically distinct, chagall and seurat intersect in their exploration of the performing body as a site of commodification, where individual autonomy is compromised by spectacle. in le cirque, this critique is made explicit through the ever-present audience, whose collective gaze reduces performers to objects of consumption. in l'écuyère, however, the same tension is conveyed more subtly through the central rider, whose body is secured to the horse by the waist, suggesting both physical restraint and dependence.

“‘the man who holds her remains only partially visible, yet his presence reinforces her constrained position, implying a loss of agency even as she occupies the center of the composition. rather than depicting the audience directly, chagall locates the mechanisms of control within the performance itself, where the rider's body becomes the focal point of spectacle and an object subject to another's authority simultaneously.’”

“mmm," azzi said. she leaned back, tapping a long plum nail against the desk's dark face. “and why was this thesis dropped so carelessly into the generally shoddy work you turned in to me, rather than expanded and centered upon? there are places, marked in green, where your work reads as genuinely exceptional. and places, marked in pink, where your care bleeds through. the circus is a pressure point for you. you struggle to stay impersonal about it. why? and why are you ignoring that? this could have been an easy a, paige. honestly.”

and this, this was the part azzi would turn over later, on her stomach in the dark, once things had gone somewhere neither of them had intended. this was the second time she was privy to watching paige’s collapse, her practiced posture faltering, caught unaware by a genuine question posed by someone who plainly intended to wait for a genuine answer as its match.

“um.”

azzi let her gather her thoughts, scratching out another misspelling with a firm drag of her wrist. paige watched the red scar on the page like it might reveal something about herself in this moment.

“my grandfather took me to see one,” she said finally, and it came out a little cracked, her voice lowering as she went on, unable to fully stop it. “a circus. before it all.”

azzi knew paige’s family was of importance, though dean baltazaar had remained tight-lipped about the exact level of it. but she knew no one of consequence with the surname blessing. a search—done once, guiltily, late at night—had turned up nothing but a rather unremarkable piano teacher.

“i don't really remember it. i remember the tent smelled like popcorn and hay, and i remember not being scared during the trapeze part, when every other kid around me was crying. i liked watching people be that good at something dangerous and make it look like nothing.” a pause, her eyes gone somewhere distant and half-lit, chasing the memory. “there was a woman, a wire-walker, who didn't smile once. everyone else up there smiled the whole time, big and practiced, teeth out for the cheap seats, and she just refused. she was so focused on not falling, as if she were the only real thing in the entire tent and everyone else was decoration around her. i think she was hellbent on not breaking her neck.” her mouth twitched, shy of a laugh, no true humor in it. “i liked being dangerous, too, as a little girl. now, too, i guess.”

paige shrugged, already shuttering closed, reaching instinctively for a bit of armor. "i don't know. it's not that deep."

“it's exactly that deep," azzi said, a callback to their lecture interaction, hushed but purposeful, and didn't push further, because she'd already learned this much of the code: that paige gave things up like small animals slinking out of hiding, coaxed forward only if you refrained from reaching for them the second they appeared.

“we'll redo the essay. together,” azzi offered. "over the next few weeks."

paige was surprised by that; azzi could tell, though azzi had always been rather more than what people suspected of her at first glance.

“which is to say, you'll redo it, and i'll refuse to stop letting you redo it," she clarified dryly, “and you'll hate me for pushing you so hard, and you'll learn eventually that i can never let a good thing go once i've seen it properly. you're deeply attuned to this work, paige. you have the mind for it. i won't let you pigeonhole yourself into failure as some act of resistance. there are other ways to stand your ground that don't cost you an a.”

paige said nothing in return, briefly stupefied, and azzi motioned for her to gather her things.

she wasn't in any particular hurry to leave. she had been logging azzi for four weeks now without meaning to, or without admitting that the meaning had ever been separate from the doing. she could have reproduced her from memory if asked, habits included.

azzi’s coffee had gone cold an hour ago at her own elbow, and azzi hadn't noticed, hadn't so much as glanced at it, entirely unbothered by the small deaths of ordinary things around her. paige collected these qualities like stones from a beach—not out of longing, necessarily, nothing so soft as longing—but out of a colder, more helpless compulsion to simply have, to hold some proof afterward that she had been paying the closest attention in the room.

it was on her way out that she saw it: azzi’s purse, paloma philana in wine, tipped where it sat against the desk leg, its contents spilled in a small accident onto the floor: a gas receipt, a set of keys, a slim gold tube of lipstick uncapped and rolling, and beside it a lip liner, the good kind, tip worn soft at the corners, aching for a sharpener.

paige crouched and gathered both.

“you dropped this,” she said, holding out the liner alone, face perfectly arranged, and set it on the desk. the lipstick she kept closed inside her fist, metal growing warm from her own palm the longer she stood there.

azzi took the offered pencil, smiling wide with gratitude. paige stepped away, stopping on her way to the door, gaze swimming up the wall to behind azzi’s head, where a lempicka hung. an original, so well kept that most students assumed it a reproduction; a woman rendered in hard, confident planes of color, chin lifted, entirely unbothered by being looked at.

paige studied it a moment longer, then let her gaze fall back down to azzi, whose face was bent away from her toward the essays.

“you know, you look just like her,” she said into the quiet, not quite looking at azzi as she said it, already half out the door, tossing it back like it cost her nothing at all.

in her periphery, she could see when azzi offered a crooked smile, glancing back at the painting. “never heard that one before.”

paige turned around at that, hand still on the handle.

“you do. it's the mouth. just a little too full.”

that evening, alone in her brother's bathroom with the tap running and suzy scratching faintly at the door, paige rolled up the lipstick and drew it to herself; tracing a careful line across her cupid’s bow in the mirror's unkind reflection. she watched herself become, for just a second, someone else.

she cleaned up the excess with a manicured nail, carving out pigment until her mouth was perfectly outlined.

it wasn't her color.

part ii. ⊱ john simmons, 'hermia and lysander’, c. 1870. 

the first of what would be many walks occurred on a tuesday in late november.

in orlaith, november was a verb. something the year did unto itself, the way a hand closed. winter had begun its long weeping, benighting the early afternoons until they dissolved into a sea of black with stars driven into its face like nails, eventually obscured by the great grey swallow of storm clouds. the threat of snow imminent, the speckle of it fragmented.

on this first occurrence, paige walked into the office without knocking. she’d taken up the habit of never knocking, not once, not even in the earliest weeks of their tutoring sessions, the essay long completed. this was not rudeness—eros didn’t knock either; sappho told us he came like a thief, came like an animal shaking a tree—it was simply that some people experienced every boundary as mere suggestion and paige was one of them, hair grasped back low into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, a few pieces already come loose; the fraying of a traditional system.

she said, by way of greeting,

“let’s go on a walk.”

this was not a request. ask amy fuller what the difference was between a request and a verdict. she would tell you: tone. though her daughter had cleaved to her father’s side amid divorce, when you peered into the glass from its side, she was her mother all the same.

azzi redirected her gaze from the rather passive-aggressive email she’d been copied into this morning—something to do with the lack of adequate parking space near the humanities building—to the hard line of paige’s jaw, one dark brow arriving well ahead of the rest of her expression.

“good afternoon to you too, paige.”

“good afternoon,” paige mocked, already reaching for her coat off the back of the chair, as though the matter had been settled before the proposal had finished, settled somewhere upstream of this room. “god, azzi. just say hello.”

“professor fudd,” azzi corrected, her lips flattening with irritation. somebody had to hold the line. “i have office hours. another forty minutes of them, to be exact.”

“no one’s coming,” paige returned, not unkindly, simply as fact. “it's tuesday. your tuesday people are the two idiots who dropped last week and the boy who emails you constantly instead of coming in, because he's frightened of you. you told me that yourself.”

azzi opened her mouth to object to the sheer range of presumption: the walk-in unannounced, the diagnosing of her own schedule back to her, the casual theft of an hour she had yet to freely offer. and she did not, in fact, tell paige that herself.

she found, with a rather reclusive irritation, that she had no actual objection ready, only the abstract sense that she ought to have one. paige had a way of doing this to her - arriving at a request already so certain of its reasonableness that arguing against it felt less like the defense of a boundary than being difficult for its own sake.

this is what people meant when they said disarmed. it was not that the weapon had been taken, but that you found your hand already empty when you went to check, and couldn’t remember when it had gone.

paige was, azzi noted, dressed for the walk already. overdressed for a quad-crossing, if she were honest, bundled instead for dense weather. a heavy wool overcoat, cut for a man twice her width and worn close to her silhouette. it had clearly been tailored for her instead of the body it had most immediately been designed for.

sleeves pushed to the forearm, the reveal of her veins, blue lace snake under an ivory swathe of skin; underneath it a plain white undershirt, one you could find folded in a father's dresser drawer. dark trousers, crease down the center, sharp enough to speak to having been pressed that very morning. combat boots, unlaced at the top, somehow erring from appearing sloppy, as though her constant disregard for her appearance was often considered from several angles before being permitted out the door.

for a moment, paige was turned from her and azzi could see the ripple of muscle along the bend of her back. the movement made her stomach stutter, the flex of such obvious youth deterring her from protest.

caspar david friedrich, wanderer above the sea of fog, german, c. 1818.

she assigned the painting in a flash of thought: the back turned, the vastness, the fact that you never did see the man’s face, only his posture, held - the view at his command, under his possession only by virtue of standing in front of it.

azzi had noticed all of this weeks ago. she had told herself, weeks ago, to stop. limited success. she caught on to it all, every symptom of paige’s existence.

the way paige dressed was nearly exclusively from a wardrobe that belonged, by every rule azzi had ever been taught, to the opposing sex: sharp-shouldered coats, ties worn loose and unknotted around an open collar, trousers cut for a body with none of paige’s actual softness. no room for the give of her hips or the gentle expansion of her thighs. on anyone else they would have been borrowed, simply a girl in her brother's costume, a joke about gender, over by morning. yet somehow the woman made all of it look more like a semblance of correction, adjusting for error; as if the clothes had simply been cut for the wrong person all along and paige was only now setting the record straight.

“you can't keep doing this,” azzi told her, without much conviction. she was already closing the laptop.

“doing what, exactly?”

“assuming the importance of my time, taking it upon yourself to designate what i'm doing with my afternoon, using me as a way to avoid your other term work.”

paige turned to face her, considered this with the mildest shadow of a smile; humoring a rule she had no intention of ever actually following.

“you could say no.”

“i am saying no.”

“you're putting your coat on while you say it.”

azzi glanced down at herself. half into the coat already. evidence, if anyone needed it, that the mouth and the hands did not always work for the same government.

she told herself, buttoning it, that this was supervision; a professor keeping half an eye on a student prone to disappearing off campus without telling anyone. duty of care, dressed as an afternoon off. she was aware, as she constructed the reasoning, how little weight the joists could hold, how little she could actually bear.

“besides,” paige added, stepping in close. almost lazily, she reached out to fix the scarf at azzi's throat. “i like most of my other term work. we’re reading a short story in professor bird’s class, a joy williams. quite good, surprisingly.”

this close, azzi could smell her: the heady rush of peony, lily-of-the-valley, a bit of green—stephanotis?—a thread of black tea, apple gone warm under water steeped with spices.

“you smell lovely,” spilled outward before azzi could stop it, her fingers curling at her sides as if to claw them back.

too late for that kind of prayer.

“yeah?” paige answered, eyes alive with a sudden light, delighted, halfway to the joke. “it’s called ‘had me at hello.’”

at that, azzi did laugh.

the grounds were halfway to hibernation, bare maples gone black-limbed against a sky drained to the color of skimmed milk, the lake road empty enough that their footsteps were the only solid sound for the first fifteen minutes. snow had not yet arrived, but was clearly rehearsing for it in the close cold.

paige walked with her hands in her coat pockets and, as always, in no particular hurry, matched her pace to azzi’s without seeming to think about it. azzi wondered what it was like to languish in that luxury, to know that you were always afforded time.

halfway down the road, she produced—from seemingly nowhere; perhaps some inner pocket, some infinitesimal, unbroachable logic of paige’s own devising—a slim gold case. she held it out, the object rolling sluggishly about her palm. it was beautiful, a thick beginning, tapered in toward the middle, then flaring out again, a deep engraving of roses embellishing its top, the name of the shade lurking shyly at the bottom in looping, black script.

“here.”

azzi took it on reflex before she’d even registered what it was. a lipstick. new, sealed, a shade lighter and colder than the one she actually wore, a pink that bordered on red, vermilion at the tip but a lush rose closer to the bottom. a shade that she had been brought to tears over, having thought she lost it, having scoured the large shops and the boutiques only to come up empty-handed.

“i’ve—i don't need—it wouldn’t be—”

“i know what it wouldn’t be. i know all of that, but thank you for telling me.” paige was already looking elsewhere at the lake, at nothing, the offering made and immediately treated as though it required no further discussion. azzi suddenly felt chastened. “it's not really about you needing it. it's just yours now.”

azzi turned the case over once in her gloved hand and decided not to inquire further. she put it in her coat pocket instead, where it sat the rest of the walk; a small, unaccountable weight.

“do you know who i am?” paige asked it lightly, conversationally, a question that could have been nothing at all. the wind-up to a wisecrack, an opening for flattery—except that the steel underneath it wasn’t lightweight at all.

she was waiting closely, very still, to see what azzi had to say, would inevitably say.

azzi considered it, genuinely, turning the actual available facts over: the name on the roster, the surname higher staff had kept mum about, the utter absence of anything when she’d searched it in a weaker moment.

“you’re a blessing,” she offered.

something crossed paige’s face then: brief, unreadable, gone before azzi could properly catch it. a door opening a crack onto a room she didn’t yet know existed, and closing again just as fast.

“yes,” paige said.

it wasn't quite a lie. it also wasn't, azzi would understand much later, anything close to the truth.

“the tuesday boy,” azzi said, a little further on, apropos of nothing, mostly to fill the quiet. “the one who emails instead of coming in. how do you know that he's scared of me? i didn’t tell you that.”

“yes, you didn’t,” paige agreed, smiling crookedly, unashamed at her deception. “he told me.”

“you two talk?”

“we’ve…talked. only once,” paige said it without a hint of emotion, decidedly closing the subject rather than continuing it, and something in the way she said it made azzi acquiesce, wisely or not.

she did not ask what, exactly, had been discussed in that one conversation, or why a boy who’d emailed apologetically on multiple occasions in october had simply stopped emailing at all by the middle of november.

azzi filed her unease about it away with everything else about paige she'd decided, for now, not to hold to the light.

it was on the walk back, cutting behind the chapel where the path narrowed, and the last of the other students crossing campus were well out of sight, that paige stopped her with two fingers hooked lightly into the collar of azzi’s coat.

azzi went still. it wasn't quite a touch, barely that, two fingers and the fabric between them. and yet, she felt it the way you'd feel a hand actually laid flat against the skin, every place paige wasn't touching suddenly as loud as the place she was. paige tugged the collar closed properly, adjusting it the way you'd fix something on a child, and stepped back before azzi could decide how to respond to any of it.

“get a better coat,” she instructed. “you're always cold.”

and then she was walking again, already three steps ahead, as if she hadn't just put her hands on a woman ten years her senior in broad daylight and left azzi standing there, mouth ajar, body still swaying into the phantom motion, heart as quick as a hare underneath her scarf.

the following tuesday, there was a butter-yellow garment bag hanging on the top-most hinge of her office door when she arrived.

there was no note and the absence of a return address; the bag otherwise plain except for the calligraphy logo of one of the most expensive department stores in the state. inside, folded and arranged with care: a floor-length espresso colored coat, wool heavy enough to promise certain warmth against the worst vermont winter. below the lapel, where the buttons should have sat on the left, a soft dark lining of vintage mink, worn just enough at the edges to prove it had a history that predated paige by decades. there was a detachable belt lazing about both sides, clearly intended to be the method of closure.

azzi stood in front of the open bag for a long time before she finally touched it. she thought, distantly, of asking someone what a coat like this cost. she knew the number would be torturous. she thought, more clearly, that she did not actually want to know the answer, because the knowledge of it would make it impossible to keep it as she pretended it was: a small thing, a student’s odd, oversized gesture of thanks.

she thought of the lipstick still sitting, unused, in the pocket of her old coat, a better place than the mess of her handbag. she would return it to paige, insistent that she could not take this.

yes, she would.

for a moment, her curiosity won out over propriety, and she slipped the coat on, found it fit her perfectly. her hand slid into the pocket at the right side, the cut talentfully hidden, its seam only noticeable by touch, and felt her finger cut across the top of a square of cardstock. she pulled it free, flipping it over to find words written in a familiar hand.

if i didn’t, you wouldn’t.

that was all.

azzi didn’t need any more to know it was her.

“was niki crazy about you?”

ingemar let his eyes flutter open from where they had slid closed, and side-eyed his sister. often, he and suzy made the same expression. the thought made paige nearly burst, and she lifted a hand, pretending to wipe her mouth free of dinner as she worked to hold her laugh.

“god, you just say anything, don’t you? nothing held back,” mar drawled, accepting the hovering cup of rosehip tea, the accompanying saucer crafted of fine china just like the mug sat atop it. he reached out a hand to niki’s retreating arm, squeezing gently in a silent deliverance of gratitude. “i don’t know, to answer your question. my niki was a vault when we met, as was i.”

“why do you talk like you’re in a fucking movie?” paige groused, and niki smiled, pleased at her annoyance.

“i was,” came the quiet admission, forcing both their necks to crane beyond them, locating niki where he leaned against the kitchen doorway. “exceptionally so, i think. nearly transferred the case when i realized.”

mar had been his client, paige recalled now. oh, the danger, the complexity. but their family never wanted anything they didn’t have to work for.

“how sweet,” paige said drily. mar hit her. “but i meant more—i don’t know. did you ever feel like this tide, this sense of going insane, the slow drag of it. a—a madness.”

“wow, that literature class is truly getting through to you. glad to see the youth impacted by the works of today.”

now paige hit him. niki let out a laugh as mar pretended to be wounded, then disappeared back into the kitchen, the tap running as he returned to washing. it was only when he’d been at the washing for a dish or two that mar turned to his sister, gaze frigid as he hunkered down.

“yes,” he murmured, voice low. “i felt like that. it was like being a car run down, then someone came and fixed it, and i was revving and revving. do you—do you remember that horse you tried to claim as yours when dad paid for your equestrian lessons? how it bucked and threw you, kicked you in the chest with its hindleg, and dad thought you were one short a screw because you kept trying to get back on?”

paige remembered.

she had been eleven, perhaps twelve, a collection of knees and elbows, forever growing faster than her limbs knew what to do with themselves, bones unconvinced of their certainty. every saturday morning, her father delivered her to the stables before sunrise, the paddocks still argent with frost, each fence paling beneath a skin of mist. the horses steamed gently in the cold, their breath rising from dark nostrils, the ensuing smoke like shrine offerings.

even now she could summon the smell before anything else: the dampest hay, saddle soap, sweet feed dissolving into mud, the mineral tang of rusted iron and animal heat. it had lived somewhere deep inside her ever since.

they had assigned her a gelding named samson, chestnut and broad through the shoulders, with a white blaze that wandered crookedly between his eyes as though someone had painted it, brush quavering with an unsteady hand.

he isn't yours, her instructor corrected whenever paige called him mine. my horse. she never abided, pushed on anyway.

everyone else left when lessons finished, but she lingered. paige learned where the muscles beneath his neck softened underneath her fingers, discovered he preferred to be scratched beneath the jaw instead of along his poll, tucked sugar cubes into the pocket of her riding coat until they dissolved into sticky crystals against the lining.

she polished tack she hadn't dirtied, brushed him until copper hairs floated through the stable, set on fire in the afternoon light. sometimes she simply stood in his stall while he ignored her entirely, convinced proximity itself would fix their divide.

surely affection accumulated. surely devotion gained weight. surely living things eventually leaned toward the hand that returned often enough.

samson disagreed.

it happened in less than a second. one moment she was seated deep in the saddle, smug with the certainty that today would bear fruit, and the next her world had turned over. a violent arch of muscle; the impossible suspension before gravity yoked her to the earth’s face. a sudden swell of clear sky, then the mineral kiss of dirt.

the crack of her helmet against the packed earth rang loudly enough that the entire arena seemed to tremble in its aftermath. she didn’t cry; she refused to. she remembered lying there more irritated than anything else, blinking profusely up through the latticework of the roof while adults descended around her in a swarm of polished boots and worried mouths. someone held her shoulders down as another asked whether she knew her own name.

but all paige could see was samson.

he’d trotted several yards away before stopping, calm already. he’d only needed to get rid of her. his ears flicked lazily toward a pigeon perched on the fence, and paige watched as a groom caught his reins with embarrassing ease. he did not appear guilty in the slightest nor triumphant. he looked exactly as he had been, before she'd ever loved him.

the kick had come later.

against every instruction, paige had risen, marched back across the arena, cheeks muddy, lip split, ribs aching with her every breath. her father was shouting now, one hand around the instructor's arm while the other reached uselessly for her. she ducked beneath it.

she remembered the warmth radiating from samson’s flank before she remembered the pain. another flash of that chestnut hide, another explosive coil of cultivated muscle. then the hind hoof met her square beneath the ribs with enough force to empty her lungs all at once.

there was no immediate pain, but an absence. air ripped from her body so visciously, so completely, that she became convinced, for one immaculate second, that she had died.

they carried her out.

she was back the following saturday. and the saturday after.

her instructor stopped trying to reason with her after a month of her tenacity. her father suggested another horse, but she refused. samson never did grow kinder; never once softened because she had remained. he never acknowledged the private mythology she had built around the two of them.

what unsettled her now, years later, was not that he had thrown her. it was that she had never once considered loving him any less. the possibility had not ceased to exist. she had only wondered what she ought to change about herself to make him finally permit it.

“it was like that, but endless.”

paige blinked, brought out of her head, eyes still focused intently on the view outside the window.

blue lace agate, mar thought fondly.

“but it ended, didn’t it?” she asked, and she sounded younger than she really was. “you’re with niki now. he let you on.”

mar laughed, chucking her chin before tossing off the blanket as he stood.

“oh, żabka. i was the horse.”

the slide changed, and azzi’s voice changed with it, somehow denser with love as opposed to the stark professionalism she afforded all other paintings on the syllabus.

john william waterhouse's lamia and the soldier swallowed the screen whole. the room had dimmed, and somewhere above them the projector exhaled into life with a mechanical click of its throat, pale december morning come knocking only to withdraw by various degrees behind lowered blinds. in the darkness, everyone was illuminated by that strange blue-white glow unique to the screen and hospitals, a light that diminished faces while making the dust’s waltz past appear almost celestial. particles drifted lazily through the beam between projector and canvas, rising and falling without urgency, visible only because something brighter insisted upon passing through them.

azzi stepped into that light without seeming to notice. she had exchanged the severe black dresses she’d favored at the start of term for softer fabrics as winter continued to hold over.

today she wore ivory silk, matte where it lay still and suddenly luminous whenever she moved beneath the projector's light. the neckline skimmed the collarbones without ornament, save for a small embroidered moon resting over one shoulder and a pompeian-blue dragon at the hip, gold thread catching now and then like a fish turning beneath water. the hem refused symmetry, dipping lower behind her until it trailed half a thought after every step, as though the dress possessed a slower understanding of departure than the woman inside it. her shoe of choice was a modest, beige kitten heel with a bow shrugging sadly over the straps, top pieces striking meekly against the flooring as she walked.

paige wondered whether the choice had been a deliberate call to the watercolor workings of the piece under discussion. it was impossible not to, standing beneath waterhouse's lamia dressed almost as though azzi had wandered quietly from the painting’s edge. the coincidence irritated paige. she disliked not knowing when something meant something.

there existed no wasted movements within azzi. everything she did possessed the economy of long practice. she uncapped the marker with one hand, rested the cap precisely on the lectern. her lithe, brown fingers folded around her clicker as though they had always belonged there, and paige thought about what it would be like to have those fingers around her arm.

“waterhouse, 1905. lamia and the soldier.”

paige looked dutifully to the painting, then back. then, irritated with herself, returned to the painting.

she sat where she always sat, dead-center, spine straight from four months of dr. taurasi’s voice living permanently at the base of her skull, and did not take a single note.

on the screen: a woman kneeling at a soldier's feet in a wood gone dim and close around them, a hand on his knee, her face turned up toward his in an expression that could either be seen as adoration or the breath held before a bite. often, it felt the same. at her hip, faint, half-shed, the last iridescent scales of a serpent's skin not entirely gone, not entirely human. she’d been caught in the single worst moment of any transformation, the moment where you could still see both things you used to be and were trying, so hard, to cease being.

“the myth predates the painting by roughly two thousand years," azzi continued, pacing the small stage the lectern gave her, hands loose, unconscious, shaping the air as she spoke as if to sculpt the point directly into their young, impressionable minds. “lamia was a woman first. a queen, in some tellings. loved by zeus, cursed by hera for it, and the curse took her children. every one of them, one after another, until grief itself turned her, transfigured her into something else. a serpent from the waist down. a devourer of other people's children, in the crueler versions. but keats’ version, which waterhouse is painting here, gives her one mercy: the chance to become a woman again, just briefly, to love a man who has no idea what she actually is.”

someone near the back asked whether the soldier ever found out. they were at the point of rapture now, fully entrenched in the atmosphere of learning under professor fudd, wholly devoted to her for the remainder of time under her tutelage.

paige watched azzi’s mouth rise in a half crescent, joyous at the question being self-professed rather than forcefully excavated.

“he does, yes,” azzi answered. “that is one facet of its tragedy. the moment he sees her, transparently, glimpsing what she really is beneath the disguise love let her wear—she can't survive it. she doesn't turn into a monster in front of him. she simply vanishes. the myth seems to suggest those aren't different endings.”

the words arrived, meaning did not. paige did not write any of this down, though she knew she should have. this was bound to be on the midterm. she understood every individual component of the sentence, watched each settle neatly into place beside the last like brick inlaid to a wall, yet together they refused to become anything more. they remained only brick.

her attention slipped. nothing so obvious; a shoulder easing quietly from its socket, a tiny displacement that nevertheless rendered the whole limb unusable. her gaze found azzi’s face again with the unconscious inevitability of a compass returning north.

her bracelet had come undone, 18-karat gold if paige had to guess, mother-of-pearl, intricate charms in the shape of clubs interspersed along its thin chain. the clasp had fallen half open, a lobster closure. it had loosened enough to allow the bracelet to fall lower each time she lifted her arm toward the screen, revealing the narrow inside of her wrist before falling obediently back into place.

again.

again.

silly thing to notice. sillier still to notice it repeatedly. paige dragged herself back to the slide.

“…victorian audiences preferred monsters they could desire,” azzi said. “desire became significantly easier to regulate if it first announced itself as something dangerous.”

paige sat very still at that, and thought, with a clarity that frightened her slightly even as it arrived: i understand it. i don't know how to have you.

the desire was not specifically the issue. paige knew how to want things. wanting had never once been the difficult part of her life. she had wanted with ferver, from the horse then onward; wanted her mother’s undivided attention on the few occasions a year she was permitted it, wanted her father back, wanted her mother to lose her cool in front of the cameras so the world could see her as she was instead of always, always finding the angle that made her look like the most reasonable in the room.

desire was easy. it asked nothing of you except the capacity to keep going after being refused. having was the part paige had never been taught.

she watched azzzi’s hands flutter with her enthusiasm, thought about the coat that had sat in her own closet before hanging now in azzi’s; worn, kept, the note read and understood exactly as intended. in her chest there wasn’t triumph at all, though it should have been. it felt closer to what had stained her when she’d stood dutifully at the edge of that stall, age eleven, sugar melting sticky in her pocket, certain that enough proximity would eventually be mistaken for enough love.

pens scratched all around her, and paige blinked, glancing down at her ipad, so starkly different from the performative moleskins bulging at the seams in various totes and shoulder bags. where there should have been a page on keats and waterhouse, there were observations so minute they bordered on absurdity.

no ring. ambidextrous. laughs first through her nose, then out. thirty-two, a birthday in november, already passed. struggles in tall heels.

paige stared at them, heat climbing the back of her neck like ivy of flame.

what was this?

it was not simply attraction. paige knew attraction. attraction had always revealed itself plainly enough, certifying its hold before she'd had time to invent another explanation.

women had beautiful mouths, strong shoulders, clever hands. women had god between their legs, their thighs the stairway to heaven. women had bodies soft as clam meat, pleasure sticky and sluiced all over themselves, their post-coital blush so arresting that many a brand had made cosmetics with its name.

paige had survived twenty-two years perfectly capable of desiring someone without whatever this was. this was…

paige didn't know what you were supposed to do once someone let you close. she only knew, with total confidence, several increasingly elaborate ways to get there.

what happened after the arrival, she thought, watching azzi’s mouth continue to imbue knowledge into the recycled classroom air, is where i've never once had a plan.

professor fudd was still speaking, and paige had absolutely no idea what she'd been saying for the last several minutes. she listened now, or tried to. a slight roughness entered azzi’s voice after sustained speaking. she pressed her tongue briefly against the inside of her cheek whenever searching for a more precise adjective. her eyebrows drew together when a student answered not incorrectly, but when she believed she'd explained something badly herself.

none of these things belonged to paige. none of them had anything to do with waterhouse.

lamia had been given a body to be loved honestly, and the honesty was exactly what had killed it. paige turned that over, disturbed, aware of some private echo in it she didn't yet want to name.

(two-phone shoebox at the back of her closet, an ill-fitting surname she was allowing azzi to believe, b to k, k to b.)

there existed a region of herself she had never previously encountered. and she had intended to leave it unexplored by all, including possibly azzi; a country that had apparently been there all along. what would it be to get close enough to see all of it at once and decide, the way the soldier eventually had to decide, if you were loving something that wasn't fully real?

paige thought, i would rather vanish than be looked at like that.

she thought, a half-second later, with the same unstartled stagnancy she’d brought to every stubborn decision of her whole stubborn life: and i would still get back on that horse tomorrow. i would still get back on every single day there was a horse to get on.

mar was the horse, paige was the rider.

azzi’s gaze swept across the room, checking inventory, cataloguing the glazed inattention that meant she’d lost them. and it caught, for one unremarkable second, on paige, who was not glazed at all, who was watching her with an attention so total it should have registered as alarming and instead registered, in the microscopic millisecond before azzi’s gaze moved past, as something closer to being seen back.

neither of them said anything about it.

there was, that day, nothing yet to say.

on what must’ve been their fifth walk, azzi wore the coat.

she had told herself she would return it—had rehearsed, on three separate mornings, the sentence she’d use to hand it back, something dry and final about propriety and appropriate gifts between a professor and a student. instead, she found herself buttoning it every tuesday without much aplom, the mink at the collar gone soft and familiar against her jaw, warm in a way that made the returning of it feel, each week, a little more like amputation.

it had ceased, somewhere along the line, to feel like an object that belonged to another. it had acquired her shape: the sleeves now bent where her elbows bent, one pocket beginning to collect the lustreless sediment of her days, a receipt from the campus café, a fountain pen cartridge, a peppermint gone soft in its wrapper.

azzi found the realization faintly horrifying. she buttoned it again the day after.

they walked the lake road. the trees had surrendered almost everything by now. bare branches webbed against a white sky, reflected in the water below with enough fidelity that the lake seemed to possess its own winter, another season turned upside down beneath the first. their footsteps disappeared into damp gravel almost as soon as they were made.

their strolls had become one of those habits one stopped noticing until they tried to remember when it had accrued. when tutoring ceased, paige had blustered about having a few questions after class. azzi had seen right through, given that paige now had one of the strongest averages of her pupils.

then, the loss of excuse, a push for walks to the gate. then, somehow, the lake road; a promenade about the corner, paige coldly furious if azzi was occupied by a student who, for once, properly needed her. they did nothing but converse, each time laying down another imperceptible layer until whatever slept beneath bore no resemblance to when it had first settled.

paige fell into step beside her the way she always did now, matching pace, hands in her pockets, hair pulled loose at the back of her neck in that half-finished bun that always looked one strand away from falling but somehow never did. halfway down, without warning, she reached over and tucked a strand of azzi’s hair back from where the wind had pulled it loose across her cheek.

it wasn't a large gesture. it shouldn't have registered as anything at all, the small correction a friend might make to another without either party remarking on it, except that paige’s hand didn't withdraw the way a friend's hand would have. her fingers trailed, slow, thoughtful, from azzi’s temple down along the clean angle of her jaw until they came to rest, with a startling, sudden firmness, over her lipsticked mouth.

azzi went stockstill. every instinct she had arrived simultaneously, contradicting the other to the last. she found herself absurdly aware of the smallest details: every inch of cold gathering inside her gloves, the weight of her coat across over her shoulders, the steady pull of gravity through her heels into the frozen path beneath them. her breathing was suddenly louder than the water beside the road, quickened by the warmth of another person's hand against her face; a touch she had gone long without.

azzi had spent years teaching herself that the body was merely another instrument of thought, something to be directed with enough discipline. now it felt unexpectedly autonomous. she needed to break this, needed to leave this here.

there was no step back.

“tell me what to do with this,” paige said, low, and there was something desperate in her voice azzi hadn't heard from her before. she was devoid of the classroom bravado, and her easy teasing regularly deployed on these walks, a note rawer underneath both of those, stripped strangely bare of performance.

“that's the whole point of you,” paige continued, urgent, her gaze never wavering. “you're supposed to know what to do with things i don't.”

there were moments—and they came less frequently now than they once had—when paige appeared every one of her twenty-two years, sharp certainty concealing youth rather than replacing it. then there were moments like this, when she seemed impossible to age at all, as though intellect and longing had conspired to produce someone who had skipped several mandatory stages of becoming.

azzi didn't understand, not really, not in a countenance she could have explained if asked. but she understood enough to know the question wasn't really about anything either of them could speak to, so exposed to the public in the middle of this road. she reached up and closed her hand around paige’s wrist, meaning to pull it away, meaning to end this the way a reasonable, careful person would end it.

paige’s pulse beat there, so damnably young, so thrilled to be alive. and paige held on.

it was a rather nonviolent moment, which was somehow the worst part. she held fast with total refusal, and it made azzi’s hand feel suddenly very small around her wrist, an insistence that had nothing to prove and everything to keep.

then, just as abruptly as paige had taken it, she let go.

the world rushed back in. azzi stood there for a moment with her own pulse loud in her ears, ghost-print of paige’s fingers still warm against her mouth, and reached, without thinking, for something guileless to say, something capable of restoring proportion to the afternoon, something that would put them both back on solid ground. what came out instead was nothing at all.

it was paige who broke the silence. brave, reckless, paige; always striding through. her gaze drifted downward. she noticed, with a small private flicker of something azzi was unable to decipher, the faint stain at the corner of azzi’s own thumb, a trace of red gone slightly dark, smear left over from the raspberries she’d eaten too quickly at lunch and hadn’t properly disposed of.

azzi looked at it too, as though seeing her own hand for the first time.

paige took her hand before azzi could think to pull it back a second time, lifted it, and for one impossible second azzi believed she meant only to point it out. but then, without any of the hesitation that should have accompanied an act like this, paige brought azzi’s thumb into her mouth, behind her lips; a vanishing act.

warmth, barely more than that. the rasp of a tongue against skin so brief it might have been imagined had it not been for the astonishing precision with which paige watched her while doing it, pale irises fixed not on azzi’s hand but on her face, as though the gesture itself mattered less than whatever crossed her expression in response. she licked every remnant of red left behind, her eyes lowering half-shut, savoring the taste, only leaving azzi’s gaze to take in the part of her lips while she did it.

paige let azzi’s thumb free, then said against her knuckle, “you must know—”

an abrupt halt. then she was gone.

turned already four steps down the road, nearly running, putting distance between herself and what it was she'd just done before she could be made to account for it, shoulders set with almost exaggerated composure, as though she had entrusted the aftermath entirely to azzi.

you're supposed to know what to do with things i don't.

azzi stood on the empty lake road for a long time after, her thumb still faintly damp in the cold air, dazed into paralysis. she watched across the water as a bird lifted from the reeds. there was a line running under everything now—under the coat, under the lipstick, under every stroll that had started as an innocent—and she had no idea. she’d had no idea. this was—it had all been—

standing there in the cold with paige’s mouth still imprinted somewhere just beneath her skin, she searched backwards through memory, scavenging to find how long this had actually been running, or how far back it went.

how she had managed not to notice until this exact moment, when it had finally surfaced directly beneath her own hand?

paige dreamed of her, woke in the deep neck of night; iris blue room, the fantasy of the two of them entangled, azzi’s thigh on her thigh, her stomach slick with sweat as it expanded, begging breach.

she wanted to tell someone what she had done, but it was only getting worse now.

it was only getting worse.

azzi called caroline that night, still in her coat, sitting on the edge of her bed like a guest in her own life.

“so,” caroline said, once azzi had gotten most of it out (not all of it; she withheld the thumb; she couldn’t yet make herself speak about it), “let me see if i have this right. a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate bought you a coat that costs more than your car, wrote you a note that sounds vaguely like a threat, and today cupped your fucking chin in broad daylight—”

“it wasn’t broad daylight. it gets dark early now,” azzi corrected.

caroline barreled on, “and you're calling me to ask whether this is concerning."

“i'm calling you,” azzi said, “to ask what i do about it.”

“you stop it. that's what you do about it. hello?” caroline’s voice had hardened, taking on the role of someone who loved you enough to be unkind on your behalf. “my god, azzi. i love you. you know that. i love you with everything in me. i have loved you since we were twenty-three and you cried over a grade you got in our mutual class you didn't even need. but you have been letting this girl get away with things you would end a friendship over if i tried them. you let her walk all over you, deciding what you do and when you do it. you’ve kept the coat, az. you didn't send it back like you wanted to; you've been wearing it every single day—”

“it's warm,” azzi said weakly. “i have low iron.”

“so, take a pill, azzi. this is nothing but a leash with better tailoring.”

azzi said nothing.

“i'm not trying to be cruel,” caroline said, tender now, hearing the silence for what it was. “i just think you've been calling this mentoring for months, and i don't think it's been that for a while. and i think some part of you has known that and kept doing it anyway because it feels like being wanted, actually wanted, in a way that doesn't usually happen to women our age from most people, let alone someone that… intense. but intensity is not always the safest, and this is dangerous. you know that. tell yourself that. you love your job, you’ve been enduring, and this could—”

“i know,” azzi interrupted, her voice even.

“do you?”

azzi looked down at her hands, still faintly absurdly aware of where her thumb had been.

“i'm going to stop it,” she said, and meant it, in that moment.

she meant it. she did.

she meant it for four days, gave it a good go.

she stopped answering when paige knocked—no, she reminded herself, paige never knocked. she locked her door, stayed seated when the handle turned, said i'm not able to meet today through the wood like a coward, which was, she supposed, exactly what she'd become.

she rescheduled their tuesday walk twice, citing grading, citing a headache, citing anything that wasn’t the truth: which was that she no longer trusted her own hands around this girl and had decided the only responsible thing left to do was to stop giving them the opportunity.

paige did not email. paige did not try the handle again.

paige, as far as azzi could tell, went quietly, furiously silent, which frightened her considerably more than any of the usual noise would’ve.

it was close to eight on the fourth night when paige found her.

azzi was still in the office, papers she didn't need to be grading for another two weeks spread across the desk, an excuse to be anywhere but home, when the door opened without a knock—of course, without a knock—and paige stood in the frame in her coat, cheeks wind-scraped red, breathing like she'd run the last of it. she must’ve seen the lamplight in the hall.

“what, do you fucking live here?”

azzi didn't answer; couldn't, immediately. she found her throat had closed around every sentence she’d conjured for exactly this eventuality, all of them useless now, dry paper in her mouth. she looked up at paige and felt her eyes go wide and stinging, black holes the two of them, mouth trembling around nothing, four days of silence chipping at her.

paige’s face changed note the instant she saw it. the anger went out of her all at once, and she crossed the room and dropped, actually dropped, knees to the floor beside azzi’s chair, and took azzi’s hands in both of hers like a bird small and injured she'd found by the road.

“please.” her voice had lost every trace of the fury it had walked in with. “did i hurt you? tell me. tell me about it, tell me anything, please, i can't—” she stopped, began again, negotiating. “i've spent four days trying to figure out what i did, and i keep landing on all of it, and none of it, and i need you to just tell me. please.”

azzi looked down at her, and saw the wound in her; unguarded want of her face turned up in the jonquil light, and saw, a feeling older and sadder than it was supposed to be—the look of a girl who had spent her entire life under the logic that being loved and being managed were the same event, and anyone who mattered enough to matter would eventually decide to leave or to lie. the only defense you were handed against either was to make yourself impossible to walk away from before anyone got the chance.

azzi didn't know yet where exactly that had come from, but she could see the shape of the injury even without its history; a scar that had cost even if paige hadn’t told her the story of the knife. azzi saw the wound in her, and she leaned forward, an inch, maybe less, and put her finger in it.

paige understood instantly.

a low moan left her, a sound sleeping between relief and pain, and then her mouth was on azzi’s, careful at first and then not careful at all, one hand coming up to cradle the back of azzi’s neck like she’d been predicting this for months and was in disbelief of the vision come true; terrified at the risk of getting it wrong.

azzi kissed her back, following her lips when paige pulled back to groan, “fuck, yes".

paige kissed her again, hand on the back of her neck, free hand now softly against her throat, guiding her to the side, slipping her tongue into her mouth until azzi was dizzy. azzi’s hips jerked in place, and paige put a hand to them, thumbing at the bone, silently instructing her to slow, to wait.

it didn't last long.

azzi pulled back first this time, breath unsteady, and rested her forehead against paige’s, temples touching, close enough that neither of them could fully see the other's face anymore - only feel the warmth of it.

“you will,” azzi answered, quiet, almost wondering, breath ragged. “you will hurt me.”

part iii. ⊱ frederic leighton, ‘the painter’s honeymoon’, c. 1864.

sometimes paige had a bad feeling inside her, like biting into your cheek. and then again, on purpose, to see if it still would hurt the time after.

she knew it was an innate part of her, could hear it like a snake’s moan, and it crawled over her tonight in the midst of her first bath in three years, water gone lukewarm around her, badly-dyed wheat of her hair turned something closer to strawberry jam where the bleach had fought the old color and lost. a bucket was overturned at the tub's edge from where she'd tipped it, rinsing herself too quickly, too roughly, skin raw and red. punishment chosen whenever the bad feeling came.

paige didn't get up to fix it.

she liked looking at the mess a little.

she sat with her knees drawn up, chin resting on them, and let herself go back, the way the bath always seemed to invite her to go back, water being the one place her body had never quite had to follow the rules. she lay back fully after a moment, flaxen hair like sea moss against her spine, pale neck glinting as she rolled it to the side; bare sign of submission.

outside the bathroom, mar and niki’s date night playlist was droning on and on. a heavily reverbed voice of the forties crooned to her, nearly cajoling her into allowing entrance to the wave of sleep she’d felt lapping at her chest since lunch. she brought a hand up to her collarbones, pushing down, the bones so prominent it felt as though—with a little more applied pressure—she could’ve fissured the skin. dug her fingers in, and pulled it out; white necklace.

once paige had had a best friend she liked so much that it made her mean, her mouth chalky with the rage. the rage was exceptional when the girl rolled her skirt up at the waist the way the rest of the others did, showing off for boys who didn't deserve the effort. she was supposed to be better than that, different than the rest.

so, paige would yank it back down by the hem, a hard yank, sending the girl reeling. she'd pull it down, and the girl’d pull it back, a game of tug-o-war: up, down, up, down, smack! paige would be struck away, her friend finally having shoved her off, furious. then, it would be rolled up again. and so it went.

and every time, paige would just stand there, strangely satisfied, as though she'd won something even though she'd clearly lost. she didn't understand it then, what it meant to want a girl so badly you wanted to snuff her right out. she'd thought it was just the wanting-to-win kind of feeling, the kind you got over a board game or a race down the hall, some speckless, uncomplicated hunger for a thing to go her way.

she was thirteen. she didn’t have the vocabulary yet for the specific, awful tenderness of wanting another’s attention so completely that the wanting curdled at its furthest edge. curdled into something that looked, if you squinted, a lot like wanting to hurt them a little. not kill them, of course, just…dent them, leave a thumbprint—criminal trace—in a hiding place that only they’d notice later.

in the shower, maybe, throat choked in horror as they wondered. paige, in on the secret.

she knew the words now. she just knew better than to say them out loud, in the open, even if she was the only animal in the field. despite what her mother thought, paige did have a base level of self-preservation, and she knew speaking it aloud would make it sound worse than it was, and they’d send her somewhere.

she happened to think it really wasn’t all that bad, actually. it was just attention. everybody wanted attention. she just wanted it a bit more than other people, and with a little more follow-through.

and now that her mouth had covered azzi’s, now that her hand had felt azzi’s stomach jump like a rabbit startled awake, some old ache of hers finally getting out from wherever she kept it locked, “m-word” rising up-up-up—and paige hadn't wanted to hurt her, not really. that part's important; she'd tell you if you asked, though you'd be forgiven for not entirely believing her. no, paige didn’t want to quell her at all.

that was never it, had never once been it.

she had just wanted to bring azzi to her knees. just wanted to show her the effort she’d made, had wanted her to see the work. nobody had handed paige a shovel for any of this. she’d dug the whole thing herself, on her hands and knees, and she wanted azzi to see the hole before she fell into it face-first, wanted her to know exactly whose hands had made it.

you didn't get to keep something by wanting it once, hard. you kept it by coming back and back and back until the desire had worn a groove into the bone that only you, as the socket, would fit. nobody else’s hands would ever quite fit it again.

the vision had been strong since early september, but azzi just hadn’t seen it. paige liked that part best, if she was honest. the blind spot, the places where azzi couldn’t see it, dim-sighted and scrabbling. because that’s where paige fit.

paige like a revelator. paige with her mouth on the thin, breakable skin of azzi’s inner thigh, tactile learner, feeling her way through. paige, unbearable; paige with her mouth at the back of azzi’s neck, soft and unprotected, keeping it safe under the delve of her teeth, scruffing her.

her grandfather trapped a fox once, out past the tree line at the main estate, and it had screamed. and that scream—high and human, more furious than hurt, outrage borne of the misguided belief that it couldn’t have ever been caught. paige thought about that sound sometimes, at inconvenient moments, and wondered, with the same colorless curiosity she brought to most of her worst thoughts, whether azzi would sound anything like it. if azzi would sound anything like that when she was cumming, hips held down by the staying power of paige’s hand, bunny-eye-pink squeeze.

someday, she’d find out, once paige finally got her cornered all the way though.

paige didn't chase the thought any further than that. and it wasn’t because it scared her, but more because she liked having somewhere left to go. most things lost the magic when overly interrogated.

the water had gone properly cold now. she stayed soaked in it anyway, same thing: knees drawn up, chin resting on them, watching the strands of her hair, strawberry-blonde, fan out around her like something spilled; sat with the bad feeling.

sat with the bad feeling and letting it keep her company, the way she always had, the way she suspected she always would.

she thought that wanting someone this much was supposed to frighten her. she thought, then—without much alarm—that if this was supposed to be the part where she felt the terror and guilt, nobody had alerted her body yet. it was strange that it mostly just felt like coming home to a house she’d built herself, brick by brick, with her own two hands.

and nobody, not one single person in her whole life—if they even knew of it—had ever once thought to take the keys away from her.

she supposed they knew better. she figured that was probably part of the problem, and that problem was really part of a set. but once, before all those rocks came tumbling down on him, her father had told her: when you really love someone, when you feel that click? that’s them loving you back. and when they love you back, nothing else tends to really matter.

and, so, maybe she did have a problem, a set or two, but birthright, really. she figured she’d deal with it some other day.

there was a click of the grammophone out in the hall - niki had a real one, how droll - and a fresh choir of voices bloomed, wedging underneath the door, their warble rattling at the window panes. paige closed her eyes, one hand coming up to her left to grip the tub’s slick rim.

and when they love you back, nothing else tends to really matter.

everything else was just window dressing.

she lazed down straight to the bottom, the soap and cold swallowing her with an eager mouth.

she’d never been any good at floating. her mother had long been terrorized by the fear that she’d drown.

( when they reach the point at which paige can reveal the feeling, can peel back her heart to the dark root underneath, sleeping, silver like a wolf’s eye in the night, paige says: “i don’t know why i’m like this.”

they watch her mother win another primary, television screen emanating a lunar glow. azzi thinks very hard, i think i know why.

but azzi tells her, “i don’t worry about it, honey. i have little interest in making you better.”

‘h’ for honey. ‘b’ for baby. ‘b’ for bueckers, blessing. ‘b’ for best.

paige sinks into the couch, fingers like claws, thinks real hard: can i please keep it? can we stay like this forever?

looks at azzi, thinks: please, stay with me forever. )

they did not speak of the kiss for a week, both of them paralyzed by it, which was, azzi would think later, a relief—to know that this meant as much to you as it did to the other.

her life felt instantly changed, and she wished she could discuss this with someone, but caroline would kill her and her mother would need to be told outside a hospital, and the kiss with paige had already rearranged the furniture of her life. she could only begin her walk around the new shape of the room. it was paige who finally said it plainly, cornering azzi after class on the monday of the second week, her voice sharpened into a blade of bluntness - reserved for whatever actually mattered to her; everything else in her life apparently negotiable except this.

“we can't keep meeting in your office.”

“i'm aware,” azzi said, and hated how much relief moved through her at being told the obvious rather than having to say it herself.

“someone's going to notice. someone probably already has.” paige said it without drama, a simple accounting of risk, and azzi understood, not for the first time, that whatever else paige was—reckless, strange, entirely too fluent in getting what she wanted—she was not stupid about the mechanics of being watched. (she’d spent her whole life being watched. she knew exactly how it worked, better than azzi ever would.) “you have office hours in a public corridor. i walk in whenever i want. that was fine when it was—before. it isn't fine now.”

azzi didn't ask what the “before” was covering.

“what do you suggest, then, paige? you’ve gotten us into this.”

paige rolled her eyes. “you kissed back.”

azzi huffed, and paige smiled, the sides of her eyes crinkling.

“my apartment is my brother's. there's no version of that where i explain you away.”

paige said this simply, already moving past it, already three steps ahead the way she always was.

“yours is just, well, yours. no dean’s aide checking a guest book, no downstairs neighbor who reports back to a committee who’d care enough to fire you. if we’re going to keep—if you’d like to continue—” a small pause, the only hesitation she allowed herself in the entire conversation. azzi met her gaze from underneath her lashes, nodding with a small smile— “whatever we're doing—it has to happen somewhere no one's looking for it.”

it was, azzi reflected, a logical argument and surprisingly thorough in its consideration. and, it was also, unmistakably, the most honest thing paige had said to her yet: not i want to see you, not i can't stop thinking about you, nothing so soft as either of those. only the practical fact of being two people who could not be seen together needing somewhere they would not be seen.

azzi told herself, walking home that evening with her pulse foxtroting in her throat, that agreeing to this was simple prudence. she told herself a great many things that week that would not survive a close examination.

the first time paige came to the apartment, she did not stay long, and behaved for once, as the girl she was.

she came across as having wandered in by accident, rather than by her own design. azzi let her in through the small, crimson door, the paint chipped under the thick body of the deadbolt. it was small, and azzi didn’t know if paige had expected that, if she knew what pennies the university paid.

she gazed upon her, perched on the battered end of her coral pink chaise sectional—facebook marketplace, god bless you—teal dressing gown pooled around her thighs. she watched as paige studied the bookshelves with her hands clasped behind her back like a visitor at a museum forbidden from touching the exhibits. when paige asked about the two framed photographs on the mantel—azzi’s brothers forced together by her mother’s glare with the backdrop of their grandparents’ farm behind them, another of an aunt long dead—azzi found herself surprised by the interest, suddenly called back to a childhood summer she barely remembered.

paige left before nine, kissing azzi once at the door on the very end of her nose, careful and brief though no less affectionate, and said not a word about coming back. but then she was back the following tuesday, sweeping azzi out by the arm into the blistering cold, citing a walk for her “old age,” which made azzi push her half-heartedly near traffic before dragging her desperately back.

and she came the one after that.

the one after that one too.

and then it was no longer a question of tuesdays at all. paige was simply there, the way she had always been there at office hours, except now there was no pretense of tutoring left to disguise it, no essay excuse. nothing between them but the plain fact of wanting to be in the same room.

slowly paige began to populate. she brought a book she was reading for another class and left it on azzi’s coffee table, did not take it home again. i’ll be back for it soon. keep it for me, love? she’d hummed over the phone. azzi felt her body relax into her mattress.

next, paige left a coat on the hook by the door, a second coat beside azzi’s, forest green wool with a plaid drenched inside, as though she had privately decided the apartment required its own small wardrobe now, separate from the rest of her life. azzi catalogued these accumulations the way she’d note the tide coming in, not any single wave, but by way of the fact that the water had, at some point she’d failed to mark, reached much further up the shore than it used to.

paige never asked permission for any of it, and azzi never quite got around to minding.

by the time the first hard blizzard came, sealing the lake road under a skin of ice neither of them walked on any longer, paige had a drawer. azzi could not have said, if asked, on what day exactly that had happened, only that one evening she’d gone looking for a spare charger and found, instead, a single drawer in her own dresser that had become entirely and unmistakably paige’s.

a wooden hollow suddenly flooded with the make of her: black silk boyshorts trailing the sides, two replacement heads for her electric toothbrush, sleeping tees a size too large and faded like the dead.

a new thing, learned: paige smoked. azzi hated it.

she hated it with the thwarted vehemence of someone who had once, before her university days, spent an entire year lecturing high schoolers about the body as a temple. all that good it had done her. she found herself watching paige stand on her studio balcony, a juliet with enough room for two, long frame shivering in the cold, cable-knit sweater shrugged off the shoulder as she drew smoke into her lungs with obvious pleasure.

“you're going to ruin your health. this will kill you,” azzi berated her, the first week, standing in the living room with her arms crossed like that alone might constitute an argument.

“my health is fine.”

“yes, now. you're only twenty-two.”

“i'm aware of my own age, thank you.” paige didn't turn around. the smoke went up in a thin grey ribbon, dissolving into the streetlights' shallow reach before it ever really cleared the railing. “you don't have to watch, if it’s torturing you or whatever.”

“i live here.” a beat, the admission catching slightly even now, weeks in, still strange in her own mouth. “you're on my balcony.”

“then come stand on it with me instead of scolding me from the door like my mother,” paige said it lightly, but something under it wasn't light at all, some old scar azzi had learned by now not to press directly. “she used to do the smoking-and-scolding thing. different substance, same energy. all annoying.”

azzi was hurt by that, she recognized later, her face shifting as she turned away and receded into her bedroom, path lit by two floriform tiffany lamps, the tops iridescent green and structured into tulip blooms around the bulb. paige had not come to find her, though azzi had awoken the next morning to a bouquet of blue: delphiniums, tweedia, lisianthus and ranunculus in rows of white, silver dollar eucalyptus and a peek of white rose. beside it lay a note in uneven scrawl: i’m sorry. call me; the day is yours. i’ll take you anywhere you’d like to go.

azzi had called, and upon pickup immediately said, “god, it’s like you think we’re in a film.”

“you like it,” paige countered with a low drawl. “you like that i dote on you. don’t worry, mommy, i like it too.”

azzi had gone bright pink and silent, and the phone clicked off.

it became, over the following weeks, one of their several small rituals: paige on the balcony rail, hip against the cold iron, a blanket settled over her shoulders courtesy of azzi’s consideration. azzi in the doorway or, more often now, beside paige, not smoking herself, but present and close, watching the cherry burn down in the dark while paige exhaled up and away from her out of some instinctive, unrequested courtesy.

azzi, of course, never stopped hating it. she only, slowly, stopped fighting it, sometimes leaning into the blow of the smoke to feel the warmth as the snow spun in its silent spiral.

the ashtray appeared on a thursday.

paige noticed it before azzi ever addressed it, noticed it the way she took notice of everything about azzi, the same old compulsion simply relocated from an office to a home. it sat on the little table beside the balcony chair that paige either sat in or slid to the side so that she could curl in azzi’s lap, nicotine dragging through her blood as azzi hummed an aimless melody. it was gold and sleek, cast in the shape of a shell, its ridges catching the moonlight in a wide spread.

“what's this?”

“an ashtray,” azzi said, from just inside, arms crossed in rote, though her posture had lost much of its old severity. “you've been using a coffee mug, paige. it's disgusting.”

paige turned it over once in her hand before setting it back exactly where it had been. “you bought me an ashtray.”

“i—well, yes. i thought—well. i bought a shell-shaped receptacle for a habit i still think is going to kill you,” azzi blustered, “because the coffee mug was worse, and because i would rather you do the thing i hate somewhat properly.”

it wasn't a declaration, or azzi clearly hadn't intended it as one. had said it, if anything, in the same dry, faintly martyred register she used for most things concerning paige’s more self-destructive habits. but paige stood there with her cigarette burning down forgotten between her fingers and felt something in her chest give out, ribs traveling back like a bramble forest with its spell broken. heart suddenly unguarded, red and wet.

because azzi hated it. she had said so, repeatedly, at length, with real concern. but she had gone and bought paige something beautiful to do it in anyway; had decided, somewhere in the midst of her own disapproval, that if she couldn't stop paige from doing the thing that frightened her, she would at least make sure the doing of it was tended to - made lovely, made safe in every way that was actually within her power.

paige said nothing more. she only reached out, once azzi had stepped back into the studio, and tapped her ash carefully into the shell for the first time. she found that she wanted, more than she'd wanted almost anything, to never once let this object break.

and maybe it was the ashtray that had done it, the sudden adjustment to a habit paige had simply no intention of giving up. whatever it was sent paige waking early one morning, pacing anxiously in the kitchen as she made coffee barefoot, casting fleeting glances to azzi’s pea-green coffee pot as it labored under her instruction.

she hadn't slept. she’d lain there instead, long after azzi’s breathing had gone slow and even beside her, watching the snow-light move across the ceiling and rehearsing the explanation she kept discarding for sounding too practiced, much too close to a line a communications team would have fed her. she’d almost said it there, in the dark, mouth an inch from azzi’s shoulder, but she hadn't. paige wasn't sure yet if that had been cowardice or mercy.

so she was still awake when the grey started coming up outside, and still awake when azzi stirred and found the coffee already going—paige barefoot and pale in the kitchen light with an expression azzi clearly didn’t recognize on her; something rawer and much younger looking out from underneath her skin instead. the tile under paige’s feet was like a glacial kiss, but she endured.

azzi made her coffee like this, barefoot, and she always took it black. she thought it was sweet, the way azzi always wanted to be so grounded. paige required milk, needed a little bit of tenderizing.

“hey, honey.”

paige closed her eyes, let the endearment spill down her back, stomach going sticky with delight. azzi paused at the sight, a hand coming to rest on the doorway of the kitchen. she came in closer, running a hand down paige’s hip. stabilizing her, paige realized. she hadn’t even realized she’d been swaying.

“you're up early,” azzi continued, cautious.

“mmm, couldn’t sleep.”

azzi came flush against her without needing to be formally asked, the way they always went to one another now, and took paige’s hands before the blonde had even finished deciding whether she wanted them taken. folded them up in her own, warm from the mug she’d only just abandoned. she waited, practiced across an entire semester at coaxing this girl out of hiding one small admission at a time.

“nightmare?”

paige shook her head, flexing her feet against the tile. she’d woken up once or twice in a flame of terror, skin beaded with sweat, her body shivering with the aftershock of a dreamworld she’d only just escaped. when azzi had asked upon the fourth time, paige had rolled onto her side, blue eyes dull disks of white in the evening light, and said—so matter-of-factly: my father was a geologist. he died.

azzi’s face had crumpled, dark eyes welling with tears. she’d reached out, and paige had followed the motion, slightly unnerved by the discovery of her cheeks being wet.

how?

paige had turned her head deep into the pillow, leaving only a slight crack so that her lips could move comfortably, answer slipping easily from rose pink: avalanche.

“you said once that you don't know who i am,” paige said, now, voice hoarse. “not really.”

“i remember.” that warm hand running all over her back. “and i don’t know, honey. i haven’t looked anymore into it.”

"i think that's on purpose. i think i've made sure of it.” her hands tightened in azzi’s, involuntarily. “i keep thinking about that painting. the one with the snake woman and the soldier—”

“lamia.” azzi provided, and paige smiled faintly at the interruption.

“yeah. you know how the second he actually sees her, she can’t survive being looked at anymore?” paige swallowed as azzi nodded slowly. “i've been so afraid of that happening to me that i never let you look properly at all. and i don't—i don't want to do that to us. i don't want to be a person you loved by accident, because you never had all the facts. i don’t—we’re about to be in the thick of it, and i’m so afraid that i’m—”

azzi’s thumb moved once, slow, over the back of paige’s hand. she didn't say anything. instead she slowly leaned in, never stopping until their foreheads pressed, clasping paige’s hand in one while the other moved to her neck.

“paige, honey. it’s alright. you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“i want to,” paige murmured, leaning in to drop a kiss on azzi’s cheekbone. “i want you.”

deep breath.

“i used my brother-in-law-to-be’s last name when enrolling,” she sighed. “it's not a lie, not really. it’s just…not the whole truth either. i am a blessing. i’m also a bueckers. i kept my father’s name; i wanted to. but i’m also—" she forced herself to say it plainly, no flourish. “i'm a fuller, too. my mother is a fuller. one of the famous ones.”

it took azzi a second. paige watched her sort through it, watched the pieces arrive one at a time and then, immediately assemble themselves into something enormous. there was only one largely famous fuller family at the forefront of american society.

“wait.” azzi’s voice had tumbled somewhere low, had gone very quiet. “paige? are you telling me—do you mean as in—the president. the woman currently in the white house.”

“yes.”

“the woman trying to stay in the white house.”

“yes.”

“you’re telling me that the president of the united states of america is your mother.”

“yes.”

neither of them moved. outside, the snow kept falling, indifferent, the same grey morning it had been ten minutes ago before any of this had been said aloud, and paige realized she was still waiting—braced—for azzi’s fingers to loosen around her own.

they didn't. in fact, they tightened so severely that paige thought her circulation was at risk of being permanently cut off.

“i think i’m going to faint.”

“what?!”

azzi promptly collapsed, bringing paige down with her. the combined drop of their weight was so deafening against the floor that it sent her neighbor claudia running up from the level below.

© hcneymooners.