[call me eddie/ed]

On days that Darlin’s brain refused to get up out of bed, Sam would wake them up slowly. Kisses placed deliberately across their face, hands slowly running across their body.

He’d lay with them in silence, interrupted only by soft hums and tiny giggles— until they spoke first. Once they spoke, he’d bring them into a conversation, letting them take the lead on the topic changes.

He’d wait for the sleep to fade from their eyes, and then he’d ask for them to join him in the kitchen. He’d put on a pot of coffee and start warming a pan to make breakfast.

He always made food for himself too on days that Darlin wasn’t feeling well. He knew that it made them feel better to see they weren’t the only one eating.

The two would sit together and eat, discussing whatever came to mind, or not talking at all.

When breakfast was eaten and plates were empty, Sam got up to wash the dishes. Some days Darlin would follow, holding onto Sam as he bent over the sink. After the dishes were clean, it was time for a shower.

Sam would start the shower and set it to how Darlin liked it, undressing the both of them and coaxing them into the warm water. He’d wash their hair, comb through it while the conditioner set. He’d tell them how much he loved them, how beautiful they were.

He’d wrap them up in a towel, sit them on the toilet while he got his own towel on, and then bring them over to the sink to brush their teeth.

Sam took care of Darlin when it got hard, because he knew that they could do it, but they just struggled with starting the things they needed to do. They just needed an extra push and a little extra loving on the bad days.

“I don't think I'd like it.” 

Her eyes crawl over to find yours, lids lax with the carelessness solely bestowed on the honest summer child. Her heels are burrowed into damp, glutinous mud, still weeping with the remnants of last week’s downpour. Bare feet tilt at a persistent angle, pushed by the creek's current, the only sounds your shared breathing and the babble of liquid motion over stretches of flattened stone.

“What wouldn't you like?” she drawls, her voice lancing through the balmy stillness between you. “Rich's godawful cologne suffocating you while you try to cook his dinner like a serf?” She snorts, fingers lazily drifting through kelly green blades of bristled growth.

The night before, she had insisted on you stopping by right after work while she grabbed a portable radio for your night to the drive-in. Her mother had indeed been slaving away over the stove while her stepfather, Rich, encased her from behind, barely allowing her an inch of movement in any direction. 

But there's one particular aspect that has stuck out in your mind and needled at your idle hours since. 

“He kept kissing her neck.” you finally answer, flicking an ant off of your skirt. “They were loud and wet and…and kind of off-putting.”

Alexis grunts, her agreement not needing to be articulated. But her eyes remain on you, eyebrows raised in droll challenge, irises shimmering with something that tugs at your memory.

"Is it just the thought of him kissing your neck, or being kissed on the neck in general?” she questions, her hand falling stationary.

“The thought in general.” you reply, your nose wrinkling. You've always been rather sensitive, giving your peers and family members no shortage of amusement as you twisted and flinched away from gentle pokes and teasing prods. You can't imagine that having lips where your sensation is most heightened would be anything nearing pleasant.

Quiet resumes, and you've just managed to tuck away your sensibilities enough to lay back on the grass before her words reach your ears.

“I could kiss you there. If you want. To see if you like it.”

Your chest hitches, static weighing thick and heavy over your just prone form. The implications don't need to be voiced. The potential fallout sits like a stone in your throat. 

“I…I shouldn't…” you trail off, fingers curling into your dampened palms.

“Wouldn't you rather find out now?” There's an odd sort of hunger coloring her tone, desperation tempered with a bite that almost makes you wince. “Why would you want to wait for some prick to slobber all over you just to find out you'd rather be dead?”

The word dead coming out of Alexis Getty's mouth is nearly enough to make you break into peals of laughter. She isn't made for talks of mortality, not conceivable in terms of beginning and end. You can close your eyes and imagine her laying on this creek bed at any period, at any era. The world could be in ruins, and she would still be siphoning the sunlight for all it was worth, gulping it down like a rabid scavenger aware of its closing window.

Call it familiarity. Call it something that won't go past your trachea. Either way, it's just wrong. 

You bite your lip, watching as her pupils dilate a touch at the crease in your skin. 

“It…it won't mean anything, will it?” you ask. You're not religious, exactly, but the community might as well be your temple, your family its followers, and its creed forbids aberrations. 

Her face shutters, her nostrils flaring. 

“No.” she mumbles. “It doesn't matter.” Her eyes flash with an accompanying sneer inching at her lips. 

“I'm just helping you. I've done it enough.”

Something hot and sour lances your stomach at the reminder. Girlhood is a toothy thing, blossoming in patches of damp in curves you aren't ready for, shark-infested waters you haven't managed to acclimate to, milestones so far out of your reach while others attain them with every other step. Lip gloss and mascara feel like they're trying to glue your orifices shut, making sure you can't see and you'll never be heard. It ends up leaving you sitting in front of your mirror in a daze, wondering when, or if, you'll ever feel ready. 

Alexis, on the other hand, was born ready in a way that renders you equally dizzy. She flirts and parries advances with blistering ease, caustic insults and saccharine coos intertwining into a symphony that makes your bones chill as you watch from the outskirts. She kisses and tells with identical nonchalance, detailing her exploits with brash satisfaction moderated with boredom while you stew in something nervous and slippery. 

It will be helpful, won't it? To be on the receiving end? To know what she does and how it feels good, so that you can replicate it later?

“Yeah.” you eventually murmur. “You can do it.”

Your eyes slide shut on instinct, not allowing your senses to catch up with what your mind has decided. The second darkness descends, you feel them. Plush, slightly sticky warmth grazes your skin, lighting a traction path that forks lightning around your skull. 

You remember when she first moved here, your mother all but commanding you to show her around. You had ended up on this very same creekbed, what would eventually become your ‘spot.’ She had nicked peaches from a yardside farm stand with a quick snap of her wrist, tucking them into her skirts with a wink and a smirk. 

You had watched her sink her teeth into the warmed, fuzzed flesh, overly eager to see her reaction to the fruits of your land. But then the juice had trickled, and she had slurped the tender meat until you had to focus on your own produce in order to not do something irrational. The thought of her mouth and tongue roving over the mess of sugar and fiber had stained your mind for weeks after.

Now, feeling those same motions on your heated skin, you wish that your dermis could split as easily as a peach's, that she could play audience to the deepest, wettest parts of you.

Seconds or hours pass, time stretching and morphing into a pocket of simple yet devastating pleasure that you can't bring yourself to reconcile with. Her mouth is eternal, her tongue everlasting, and all you want is to fall into the void of athanasia with her.

But eventually, she retreats, breaths puffing in moist drafts over your collarbone. A groan sits leaden in your throat at the sheen of saliva ringing her mouth, and you briefly wonder if it still carries the remnants of nectar.

She looks down at her watch, then jumps to her feet, leaving an imprint in the grass already fading.

“I have to get going.” she mutters.

“What for?” you ask, cringing at the desperation lining your tone. You know it's irrational, but you can't help but wonder if your neck wasn't up to par, if you didn't taste the way men do. You don't even know what men taste like, but a sudden, unquenchable urge wells up within you to not only match it, but better it.

“I have a date.” she answers, blase as ever. A vague silhouette takes form in your mind. Gangly limbs and calloused fingers, nicotine breath and wandering hands. 

And oh, how you ache. How you burn. It doesn't matter. It can't matter. But you can feel your teeth lengthening, whetting themselves on sleek and bitter steel.

“Have fun.” you eke out, watching the creek rush by, continuous and unfeeling. A singular stone tumbles along its current. You know that it will eventually fall out of synch, that it'll stray to the banks and find rest among its kin, too burdened to forever be held aloft. And as she makes the solitary trek back to the township proper, you know the feeling so intimately that it nearly ruins you.

—

She's in your front yard. Her body leans against her beat-up Ford Falcon, the engine idling. Her shoe arcs in drag paths through the packed dirt of your entryway, sending up plumes of sepia tinted dust. 

You open the door and go out to greet her, the words lapsing to quiet before they reach the open air. Her coming to you is a novelty, and the implication has the hairs on your arm standing on end. 

“What are you doing here?” you ask, and ‘here' could mean anything from your property to the mortal plane entirely.

“I'm gonna be gone.” she replies evenly, her hair frizzing in the steadily growing humidity. Her manner is almost frenetic, charged with prey's instinct for watchful wariness. “For a while.”

She looks as though she wants you to wail, to throw yourself down on the earth and beg. But you instead feel a hollow resolve fill your chest cavity. Something ancient and weary resting in your bone marrow knew this day would come, in the half-baked fashion of a child imagining the sun blinking out, plunging the earth into permafrost at the first mention of dissolution. A tumble from the mundane into the ephemeral.

“With the guy from…” you swallow past snarls and profanities. “From that day?” Your voice is limned with a plea so needing and insecure that you almost want her to insult you the way she did the men who lurked outside the storefront window when she bussed tables. 

She nods, chin tilting upward in defiance of a structure you aren't aware of. Her eyes meet yours, and your lips nearly form a perfect circle as the memory from before finally settles into resolution, a stubborn fold in a sheet of paper finally wormed out of its obstinance.

Your mother had taken you to a different county, wanting to show you one of the new-age centers for stray animals.

“They don't euthanize them right away.” she informed you as you made your way through corridors of steel cages and echoing yips and yowls. “They keep the majority of them for adoption.” 

You remembered that your dad had muttered something about it being a waste of tax dollars, but you thought it was rather nice, to give the rejected a second chance, or at least the hope of one. 

You had dawdled by the end of a hallway while your mother talked to one of the volunteers. Peering into the nearest cage, you were caught in your own sort of limbo.

Pressed against the bars was a Rottweiler, lips curled up in a ferocious baring of fatal teeth. But its eyes were open, bare in another fashion entirely, frantically jumping  between your face and your hand at your hip. Simultaneously asking you to touch, and daring you to try.

Alexis looks much the same way, you realize, beckoning you ever closer and promising a fitting retribution. 

Affection, or perhaps a jealous sort of pity, buoys your next words.

“Is he nice?” you reply, knowing the answer.

“No.” she says swiftly, intending it to hurt but unable to follow through. “But he wants me.” 

You let the pointed comment slide by, readjusting your blouse. 

“Well,” you try with a smile, “when you come back, I'll be here.”

A bright laugh tears from her tongue. “You make it sound like you're staying in this shithole forever.” 

“You make it sound like you'll be gone forever.” you retort, but somehow it doesn't sound as funny. 

You hold up a finger and dash into the house, fingers sliding against glass and fumbling under water before you re-emerge, tossing her a farewell token.

A peach.

Her face lifts and falls and goes every other direction in the span of a second, her limbs spasming. 

“A snack for the road.” you tell her. “And maybe a little something to remind you of home.”

She holds the fruit in her palm for a moment or two before biting into it with a savage tear.

“When I come back,” she says through a mouthful of pulp and juice, “we'll share one. We'll buy out that whole damn stand. We'll get sick of them. I promise.”