#reginianwrites

Barbara reacts as she’s supposed to, as is to be expected of her, a zealous woman of God—scandalized and righteously bewildered, stopping dead in the middle of the doorway, clenching the handle of her makeup bag far too tightly…

(… battling unsolicited images of Melissa’s beautiful hair splayed across a white pillow.)

(And she isn’t wearing a shirt in this vision for some inexplicable reason either, the contours of a black lace bra doing absolutely nothing to contain those creamy, voluptuous—)

“Oh, almighty God in Heaven,” she exhales with shuttered breath, blinking rapidly. Melissa nearly runs into her, the tip of her shoe clipping her heel as she also tries to teeter to an abrupt standstill with all her luggage.

It’s almost funny.

The way that Barbara barely feels the ensuing sting.

“What?” The younger woman grunts as she peers over her shoulder. “Is the room not clean yet or somethin’ because I swear to God, I ain’t carrying all this crap down aga—“

But she stops short, clearly sees the dilemma.

That one bed.

“Ah,” she only says, temporarily rendered speechless, which is a damn near feat for Melissa Schemmenti, who has strong opinions on pretty much everything, from the starting lineup of the Flyers to which Wawa hoagie is the best.

(The Gobbler obviously.)

“We should call downstairs,” Barbara suggests weakly, her throat strangely dry. Maybe it’s just the Allentown weather, and her sinuses are acting up, as they’re wont to do in strange environments.

Because surely, it’s not the prospect of sharing the same bed with her dearest friend in the entire world.

That would be ludicrous to be bothered about. 

Absurd even.

It’s merely a bed, and she’s a grown-ass woman who is perfectly capable of cohabiting a bed with another grown-ass woman.

If it has to come to that.

(She doesn’t think it would be a particularly good idea for it to come to that.)

“See if we can get it changed,” she continues, attempting a smile that stretches across her lips like rusted wire.

“What?” Melissa teases, having regained her composure far more quickly than Barbara. Her chin is nearly touching her shoulder, and that makes the kindergarten teacher feel some kind of way too, as though there’s a tightness coiled just behind her navel. She also blames this on her incredibly sensitive allergies, inwardly lamenting that she forgot to pack her Sudafed. 

“You scared to sleep in the same bed with me? ‘Fraid I have cooties?”

She receives an accompanying smirk and an elbow nudge at this, pinned down by twinkling eyes that remind her of both hearth and home, and Barbara can’t help it; she laughs in spite of herself. 

Because it never really matters in the end. 

Not with Melissa Schemmenti.

Whether she’s irritated about paperwork, stressed after a long few weeks of fearing that her husband has prostate cancer, or experiencing inconvenient sinus symptoms, the younger woman always knows how to tease a smile out of her. She’s a menace and one hell of a saint; she absolutely delights in doing so. 

Barbara used to hate that when she was a younger woman, loathed that there was apparently one person who could sneak past her well-constructed defenses and disarm them all with a sly wink and a shit-eating grin. She used to nag at Melissa all the time for being facetious.

It was utterly inappropriate.

All the jokes and games and innuendos that would make a preacher blush.

They were supposed to be adults. 

But now, nearly three decades down the line, she’s forever grateful to Melissa for continually reminding her of how to play.

“No, of course not,” she insists vigorously. “I just know that you and I would both be more comfortable if we had our own beds. Our backs are more twisted than those kids who won at the end of Footloose.”

“Pssh, that’s the moral you took at the end of Footloose, Barb?” Melissa snorts incredulously, shaking her fiery head. 

“Yes!”

No, it absolutely was not, but she isn’t going to admit to spending an inordinate amount of time admiring Lori Singer’s toned arms. 

As inspiration for her own exercise regiment, naturally. 

“God bless ya,” her friend chortles fondly, “but hell yeah, sure. We can grab our swag bags from the ballroom and swing by the front desk afterwards. And then it’s—“

“—pool time, baby,” Barbara finishes with delicious zeal, unable to contain herself, affecting a theatrical, little shoulder shimmy. 

She’s been looking forward to PECSA for at least a month now, anticipating all the best parts in advance: the long car ride with Melissa and the inevitable hours in the pool with her too, luxuriating in the sauna with Melissa, boozing it up with Melissa, staggering back to the room gloriously drunk at 2AM with Melissa, (wondering why life isn’t always as lovely as this in a tequila-soaked daze).

Waking up to Melissa as the first sight she sees in the morning.

Nursing a nasty hangover.

Thinking it’s an appropriate and welcome punishment for ever daring to be so perfectly happy.

(With Melissa.)

These are the traditions that they’ve threaded for themselves in all these years upon years—their rituals of unbecoming, of leaving school and family chaos and the consummate professionals that they always have to be behind. And, of course, what happens at the conference stays at the conference. That’s their maxim anyway—maybe even their chosen excuse—for the ways they tend to act when they’re alone.

“Well, I was gonna say booze time,” the younger woman grins, “but I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive the way we do it.”

“No,” Barbara easily returns the smile, affectionately knocking her hip against Melissa’s own. “Not at all.”

—

An hour later, they’re stretched out side-by-side on lounge chairs by the pool—pre-gaming for PECSA-geddon with piña coladas—when Melissa gets a call from the concierge; they’d stopped by the lobby before heading upstairs to change into their swimsuits and made the manager aware of the error, leaving with a promise that he’d look for another room and get back to them as soon as check-in rush was over.

But to no avail.

There are no doubles left in the inn.

“He said they’ll send us a complimentary bottle of champagne for the trouble, though,” the second-grade teacher shrugs as she tosses her phone into her beach bag again. “So that’s a plus. I’mma need copious amounts of alcohol to cope with seein’ my sister’s ugly mug.”

Barbara, who had been stuck on the fact that she is in fact going to have to share a bed with Melissa tonight—(again, not that it discomfits her at all! she’s a grown-ass woman!)—is a little late registering what she just said, but when it hits her, when she remembers that they’d run into Kristin Marie before leaving the vendor ballroom, she sharply recalls the way the two sisters had so viscerally sparred.

As they always do when they encounter each other in the wild—claws out, hackles raised, their words like sharp teeth at the edge of the other’s exposed throat.

Barbara frankly thinks that their estrangement has gone on for too damn long. She’s seen enough of their fights to know that beneath all the name calling and cooking-based insults, they clearly love and miss each other, even if they’re both too stubborn to ever admit it. But all the same, she hadn’t appreciated Kristin Marie’s remarkably low blow about Joseph.

Hell, she may have even said something herself had Melissa not gotten there first.

“About that…” She begins, biting her plump lower lip. It tastes like pineapple. She briefly prays—perhaps inappropriately—that the rum will give her liquid courage. 

Barbara is well-aware that they have an implicit but long-established rule not to bring their personal lives with them to conferences. Last year, for instance, they did an exceptionally fine job of not talking about the fact that the Howards had been in unhappy straits, their marriage strained by Gerald’s recent promotion. His long hours exacted a toll from them; his frequent out-of-town trips caused an abyss that neither of them knew how to functionally bridge.

They didn’t argue necessarily—they just constantly disagreed with each other in their normal tones of voice—but that was somehow the exact same thing and possibly even worse.

(Maybe they were too apathetic to even muster themselves to fight.)

They persevered and made it through that dark time, though.

(Mostly.)

They tentatively reconciled.

(They never directly spoke about the thousands of tensions between them, steamrolling over and through them instead, affecting a normality that neither of them looked like they could wholly feel.)

Of course they did. There was no other option. Divorce was synonymous with quitting, and quitting was in neither of their vocabularies. 

But things had been complicated there for a while.

Life had been.

And this time last year, Melissa didn’t have to ask if something was wrong. Attentive to every microgesture, she just capably knew and didn’t press Barbara about any of it. 

Just kept plying drinks into her open hand.

And Barbara Howard had loved her for that—for her discretion, for her clear sensitivity to the delicate situation, for all her innumerable and wordless acts of care—the drinks, her purposefully inane chatter, the way she would sometimes rub circles into the side of the kindergarten teacher’s wrist when they sat at the bar, and every tall man with a sad smile unfailingly reminded her of Gerald.

She’s too something or another—(Involved? Hypocritical? Christian?)—to ever extend her the same courtesy.

“Don’t,” Melissa warns, sucking on the straw of her drink rather petulantly. “I don’t wanna hear it. I ain’t makin’ up with her.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest that,” she replies patiently. (Well, she is. Eventually. If the two of them keep it up this weekend. Both for Melissa’s sake and her own. She’s not willing to play referee to the Schemmenti sisters’ knock-down-drag-out fights again. She’s been there, done that, and every attempt has unfailingly ended with her needing to imbibe copious amounts of wine for doing so.) “I was just going to ensure that you’re okay—see if you wanted to talk about it.”

It isn’t entirely lost on her that Melissa had said the exact same thing to her just two weeks ago when she’d nearly set the school on fire, distracted and undone by the stress of Gerald’s health scare. It isn’t beyond her grasp of irony that they’d concluded that same conversation on a laughing agreement that neither of them believe in the necessity of advertising their stressors.

But still.

It’s them, and they talk through these things when they’re ready or just on the verge of being so. It’s them, and they both implicitly know when the other needs a little push off the terrifying ledge. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be them if they didn’t—push each other and need to occasionally be pushed, that is—always challenging each other in their relationship in some way or another, more than willing to be what the other lacks. 

Melissa immediately averts her eyes, staring at the water mere feet away from them, how it rhythmically laps against the side of the pool, and Barbara stares at her, intransigent and yet so gentle, knowing it is a form of love to not let the moment go.

“What’s there to talk about?” She eventually shrugs. Her green cover-up slips at the gesture and the magenta strap of her swimsuit briefly becomes visible, her slightly freckled shoulder exposed.

Barbara blinks rapidly, forcing herself to concentrate, briefly unspooled by a sudden desire to kiss the creamy skin there, to sample the anatomy of her all the way down…

She coughs into her free hand, briefly choked.

Damn sinuses.

“Kristin Marie’s a little shit,” Melissa goes on, oblivious, still looking away, now idly swirling the colorful umbrella in her cocktail glass. “End of the story. Same old, same old.”

“A little shit who is also your sister,” Barbara parries back with a knowing smile as her friend just as deliberately scoffs, crossing her arms over her chest. “Which is what makes it so complicated, sweetheart—the people we love know how to wound us far more effectively than any knife.”

“Did ya get that off a Snapple lid, Barb?” Melissa retorts. Melissa jokes. Melissa capably deflects. Always, always, always. It’s one of her less aggressive defenses against unwanted vulnerability, the one she tends to wield most in conversations with Barbara. 

(With other people—outsiders—she’d just bark and perhaps even bite.)

But Barbara solemnly shakes her head, unwilling to let her get away with it, thinking of her best friend’s kindness in these last few weeks—how, ever since the fire, not a day has gone by that she hasn’t made sure that she’s okay. Gerald even told her the other night—as they laid in their sheets after yet another round of celebratory relief sex—that he was glad that she’d finally told Mel. 

Mel.

He called her that because he loves her too.

Not in the same way Barbara does, of course…

… whatever way that happens to be.

That’s too complicated for her to ever fully—or at least, audibly—define.

Messy even.

And she despises mess, especially within the immaculate temple of herself; she scrubs it clean at the altar every Sunday, asking God’s forgiveness for a sin that she can’t even name.

She thrilled at her husband bringing Melissa’s pervasive specter into their shared bed, relieved that she didn’t have to be the one to do so; and yet, her hand splayed against his bare chest, she could not bring herself to interrogate the root cause of her own pleasure.

“I was worried about you,” he went on gently, his warm knuckles skimming her forearm as he held her in the dark, “keeping it all on the inside.”

“It was the only thing I could do,” Barbara returned, perhaps a little too quickly, echoing the same sentiment that she had said to Melissa. She could only pray and not talk about it; she had desperately wanted to talk about it, had almost dared to—several times, in fact—as she and Melissa sat at the same table that she’d later burned, as was their habit, as was their decades long norm. But the words remained lacquered on her tongue; the weight of them rendered her incapable of speech; she was convinced that speaking her fears to Melissa would make them all real.

I’m afraid my husband is sick, she could not bring herself to say.

And if he is—if this is our lived reality—then I am devastated, Melissa.

I am so, so guilty.

Our marriage is not what it once was.

She loves Gerald Howard; she always will—he has been her best friend for thirty-seven beautiful years—but she secretly wonders if their renewed closeness in these last few weeks is just mutual and desperate apology, a last-ditch attempt to mend what has certainly been disrupted between them.

They’ve been distant from each other for a long time now.

And it hasn’t been anyone’s fault, really.

All their polite disagreements aside, Barbara is more than aware that Gerald’s promotion was not the fundamental breaking point in their marriage; it was just the easiest grievance to turn into an excuse, the tangible obstacle that they could both offload their hundreds of insecurities into without delving further into any single one of them. They could blame the promotion because it was there. It kept them from having to confront each other, which was far more complicated than having an impartial something to unite against. This lack of introspection allowed their middling reconciliation to be easier to swallow than it probably should have been, and yet, conversely, it made Gerald’s irregular prostate exam results all that much harder to bear three weeks ago. After the fact, they both became alive to the reality that their marriage has long been broken, and they’ve done everything since then to try and bandage the festering wounds.

The sex has been passionate.

Has been sensational even—(they’re both overachievers)—and yet, strangely controlled, as though both of them are seeking atonement from the other’s satisfaction. Barbara appreciates the intimacy; she deeply fears that it is compensating for something that they can never, ever get back. 

“You’re happier now that you’ve told her, though,” Gerald continued, and his voice was so kind as it wound its way down to her in the quietness of their room, and yet, she could distinguish that his eyes were shrewd… and perhaps even a little sad.

That had scared her a little.

And maybe a whole lot.

What was there to be shrewd (and perhaps a little sad) about when it came to her relationship with Melissa?

What did he know?

Was it something that she didn’t? Was it the unspoken thing that she could not force herself to articulate—the twinges in her gut that she sometimes experienced when she looked at Melissa, the recurring visions of the woman in her underwear, the thrill that she just experienced when he had only said her name? Was Melissa the unnamable sin that she kept committing—over and over again—without ever fully acknowledging that she was doing so?

“Gerald—” She started, the slightest plea in her voice. She curled her manicured fingers into the dividing line of his sternum and wished that he had said something that she could truthfully deny.

But he cut across her; he enveloped her hand with his own and lightly squeezed.

“—I like it when you’re happy, Barb.”

And somehow, in their nearly four decades long marriage, that was the cruelest thing he had ever said to her because of what it indirectly and yet so clearly implied.

She was not happy with him.

She found, even in the rawness and the immediacy of that moment, that she could not wipe her hands free of blood and cleanly refute this assertion either, and so, only one ruinous fact remained.

She and Gerald love each other deeply and so much.

They’re hurting each other all the same.

“Be serious, girlfriend,” she tells Melissa, frowning firmly, her mind full of her husband, her chest aching because of her best friend. “I’m not talking about Snapple lids and you know it. I’m talking about lived experience.”

I’m talking about your sister.

I’m talking about Gerald Howard.

I’m talking about us.

(She always is in some way or another.)

We both know what it’s like to be hurt by loved ones.

And equally, what it means to hurt them back.

Maybe she and Melissa—without ever really realizing it—hurt each other every blessed day, just by inhabiting the same spaces and fooling themselves into believing that they are careful about never crossing any of its dutifully articulated lines.

“And I don’t wanna be serious, Barb,” Melissa huffs, the playful smile slipping sideways from her mouth. “I want to drink my piña colada and inhale so much chlorinated water that I accidentally get high. Is that so much to ask for PECSA weekend?”

The answer, of course, is no—it’s not a demanding request at all, and if Barbara is any sort of friend, she’d drop the conversation right here and right now, and allow them to return to their various attempts at self-medication… but she can't entirely help herself, a little reckless under the influence, freer here in Allentown from the facade which circumscribes her in every other given context.

PECSA Barbara has a lot in common with Sea Barbara.

They’re both almost truthful.

“Perhaps not,” she admits grudgingly, watching as Melissa places her drink down on the table between them and starts to take her cover-up off, clearly about to make a run from her feelings by diving into the pool. This is yet another one of her friend’s go-to diversionary tactics, the one she commonly resorts to when joking about her pain doesn’t work.

(It never really works on Barbara.)

“But you miss her, Melissa, and she’s here,” she continues, now dry-mouthed and overwhelmed at the sight of the younger woman in just her bathing suit: the ample exposure of her cleavage, the powerful silhouette of her thighs, the thin pink fabric that stretches tightly over her belly. “Perhaps God is trying to tell you something.”

Her chest bruises even as she utters the words.

She probably shouldn’t be invoking God when she can’t keep her eyes off of Melissa Schemmenti’s ass.

“And maybe it’s just a coincidence,” her friend says bluntly, suddenly standing up and kicking her sandals off. One nearly flies into the water.

Barbara winces at the tone, knows that she provoked it and hates that she did—(why can’t she ever leave well enough alone?)—which Melissa immediately catches, her green eyes softening, her entire expression, a conciliatory smile rising to her lips. It’s as crooked as the necklace of saints nigh perpetually strung around her neck.

“But, uh, enough chit-chat,” she says, jerking her head towards the pool, her messy ponytail violently swinging from side-to-side. “You comin’, hon?”

Barbara quickly decides that she’s pushed her luck far enough in this conversation and nods emphatically, slowly tugging her own cover up above her head, revealing her sky blue bathing suit underneath. It doesn’t escape her notice that Melissa’s cheeks have slightly reddened at the sight, that her pupils have dilated, that she’s rubbing at the hollow of her throat with three fingers. Indeed, thoroughly aware of all these reactions, she swallows thickly, suddenly self-conscious. She makes a meal out of neatly folding the garment and placing it in her bag, giving both of them time to recompose themselves.

“After you,” she eventually says in a voice that’s not her own.

And so, when Melissa wades into the water, Barbara dutifully follows, drawn siren-like by the fiery undulations of the other’s hair. 

—

Barbara showers first, and Melissa follows. 

Afterwards, of course.

Separately.

That’s probably the one thing that they’ve never shared—well, besides a bed, but even that’s about to change in the course of a few hours.

The entire time that she’s getting dressed, blow-drying her hair, smartening up in a green dress and turquoise blazer, meticulously applying her mascara, she’s thinking about that damn bed. She can’t escape it no matter where she moves in the room. It’s too big. It invades the entire space and all her rational senses. Even as she was showering, rinsing off the sharp stench of the pool, she could not escape the inexorable pull it had on her, the sensual thoughts that it engendered…

Red hair on a pillow.

Lace bras that don’t do their one and only job.

Hands touching hands.

Verdant eyes peering out of the darkness, pulling her inwards into the jungle of the night, a beautiful kaleidoscope of revolving bodies… scarlet curls, plum-colored lips, thighs like creamy taffy, skin like smoky quartz.

She can’t remotely blame any of this on her sinuses, so she rationally concludes that she should stop drinking for the evening—

—a resolution she almost immediately gives up on when a bellhop knocks on the door and delivers the hotel’s apology champagne. 

She pours herself a glass in one of the red solo cups she and Melissa had brought with them for the trip and unslowly drinks it, sitting on the edge of the bed that she and Melissa will eventually share. Some paint-by-the-numbers procedural show is playing on the television. She stares at it without really comprehending it and idly wonders if Melissa is the big spoon or the little spoon.

But then that particular line of thought makes her remember that her best friend has a boyfriend, and her stomach unpleasantly lurches at the thought of Gary the Vending Machine putting his hairy arms around her waist, pulling her in to his chest, working his undeserving fingers beneath the elastic band of her undergarments…

She’s never entirely liked the man.

(Yes, she absolutely pushed Melissa to date him in the first place.)

He’s good, he’s fine, he’s perfectly okay—but those are the same sorts of adjectives that one might apply to a functional kitchen appliance, not a romantic partner. 

She takes another distracted swill of her drink and doesn’t clock the precise moment when Melissa apparently steps out of the en-suite bathroom in a white robe, her vivid hair wrapped in a towel. But when she looks over and apprehends this dizzying sight, Barbara can only stare.

“Forgot my bra in here,” she chuckles, which is precisely the worst thing she can possibly say because Barbara’s eyes immediately roam upwards to the v-shaped divot of the robe, where little is visible except for curving shadows, the tantalizing suggestion of something more. “Kinda need that.”

“Yes,” she hears herself agree in a pathetically small voice, squeezing her plastic cup as Melissa saunters past to her suitcase, which is resting on top of the armchair in the corner of the room. It’s all very hypnotic, the pendulum-like swing of her hips, the graceful coordination of all her white-clothed limbs.

Barbara wonders if this effect is intentional, if Melissa knows exactly what she’s doing to her.

But she doesn’t give the thought too much air lest she accidentally name the animal of an emotion prowling around her gut for what she thinks it might be.

(It’s certainly nothing her fellow brothers and sisters in Christ would sanction, that’s for sure.)

(Happiness, her own husband might call it in the dead of night, in the sanctum of their shared bed.)

Melissa bends down to rummage through her suitcase, which doesn’t help matters much either, and Barbara tugs at her layered necklace, thinks she may have clasped it on a little too tightly.

“Listen, Barb, I’ve been thinkin’ about what you said earlier,”' Melissa starts falteringly, clear reluctance in her low voice. “About Kristin Marie. Y’know, at the pool.”

After Melissa had so firmly put a stop to that conversation, Barbara hadn’t brought it up again, and within minutes, they had returned to their jovial selves again—or, perhaps more specifically, the selves who they were at PECSA—hedonists, only thinking about the next physical pleasure. They laughed. They played. They were both experts at compartmentalizing, well-versed in the art of drowning out the noise with a facsimile of a smile. They dried off, finished their piña coladas, and enthused about the party tonight like it was the only pressing matter in their two-person world.

“Oh, do allow me to apologize for that, Melissa,” she frowns deeply as the other teacher finally straightens up with something in her hands. “I know your sister is a sensitive subject for you, and I… I shouldn’t have brought her up… we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

But Melissa vehemently shakes her head, a few damp curls falling from her towel, and finally turns to face Barbara again, a sad smile crooked at the corner of her mouth, a silky black bra dangling from her fingertips.

One hand still gripping her solo cup, Barbara buries the fingers of the other into her right thigh.

“Good, yeah,” her friend laughs, though the gesture doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She shifts uncomfortably, rolling her weight from foot to foot. “That works for me… but, uh, I also just wanted to say thanks, Barb.”

Barbara can’t pry her gaze away from that damn brassiere; Melissa’s own is darting anywhere but her: the ceiling, the carpeted floor, the empty space just over her shoulder. What a pair the two of them make.

“For what?” She asks in a constricted voice, and the oddness of it must draw the other’s attention because suddenly, they're finally looking at each other in the face again. They’re staring, mutually constituting each other in the wordless interaction.

Seeing and being seen.

It is all that they have ever done.

It is all that they seem to want to do.

“For bein’ there for me,” comes an equally charged reply, freighted by that which neither of them can openly name. “I know you were just trying to help out, and I appreciate that.”

“Always,” Barbara breathes immediately, so glad that there is space between them—some six feet and something even more intangible than that. The elaborate ring on her fourth finger digs into her thigh too. “You’d do the same for me.”

A slight beat; she smiles so widely that it almost hurts.

“You have done the same for me,” she adds passionately. “I don’t know who or where or what I’d ever be without you, Melissa Schemmenti.”

But she does in fact know—maybe they both do. Maybe even her sweet husband does too. Maybe it's the most horribly kept secret in the whole wide world.

“God, you’re such a sap,” Melissa laughs because it's easier than actually engaging, and Barbara allows her the indiscretion this time, even joining along.

“Girl, you’re one to talk!”

“Hey!”

She is more than dimly aware that it’s probably better for them both if they continue to treat their relationship like it’s some huge joke.

Because isn't it, though?

They love each other, and they can never actually say it aloud.

Isn’t that the funniest punchline in God’s almighty world?

They love each other, and they can never act upon this reality in any meaningful way.

They live with this crucial fact every single day and spend so many of their waking hours dangerously straddling the borders that they've so carefully articulated to keep themselves apart.

But, of course, that's only when they're sober.

—

With each math-a-rita that they guzzle at PECSA-geddon, the more liberal with their affection that they get, all of their studious inhibitions subsumed beneath the ministrations of tequila. 

One drink in, they start with little gestures.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Innocuous even.

Forgivable.

Barbara places a guiding hand on the small of Melissa’s back as they weave their way through the throng of nicely dressed people, looking for a table with room enough for two. The younger woman is wearing a leopard-print dress.

And she never wears a dress.

And she thinks about this, much longer and more sinfully than she probably should.

Melissa curls her fingers into Barbara’s wrist when they realize that they’re sitting with the Dawn Nichols, whose school supplies are legendary amongst educators. The second grade teacher gives her a knowing look, the kind that clearly says, Holy shit, there’s an opportunity here. 

We can make something happen.

And Barbara shivers with quiet delight as their ankles accidentally glance beneath the table, as the expression in those green eyes does something to her, unloosing her at her tightly knotted core.

Two drinks into the night, they’ve run into Kristin Marie by this point, and Melissa’s entire body is wound so tightly that Barbara thinks that to touch her is to break her.

But she does it anyway—touches her, that is—a little reckless with her head buzzing so pleasantly, the sermonizing voice who often tells her no locked outside her personal church for the night. She interlinks their arms together as they revolve around the ballroom, and Melissa vents about her younger sister being a total puttana—whatever that means—and a shithead—which is perfectly comprehensible.

She gets a little tired of this after a couple of revelations, though, her feet aching in her heels, and she doubles back on her initial resolve to not interfere with the Schemmenti sisters, suggesting the impossible in the same breath—that they try to make up with each other. 

And she touches Melissa’s arm when she says as much.

She presses her thumb into the crook of her soft elbow.

And when they look at each other—really look at each other—less than two feet between them, an island unto themselves in the middle of this crowded room, Barbara somehow knows that they’re both thinking about their conversation in the hotel room earlier—about the fact that they’re always there for each other, and it's not just a trite thing that either of them have unthinkingly said.

It's the truth.

Trust me, Barbara tries to say with just her eyes. I’m here for you.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be there to catch you if you fall.

Fuck you, Melissa all but communicates with her own, though with the deep sigh that comes shortly afterward, she just as immediately intimates, Okay.

Yeah.

Sure.

I believe you.

Trust has been hard won between them in over twenty years of companionship.

(It is a part of the love that they can never fully say.)

Two plus one math-a-ritas in, they’re back at the round table with Dawn Nichols and Kristin Marie—the Schemmenti sisters have finally made up!—and they’re all tipsily laughing about a story that Melissa is telling. Something inappropriate, of course. Something crass. Something about a wild escapade that she’d had when she went to France with a few of her friends for her college graduation trip, where she somehow became very close friends with a young Parisian couple she met at a bar.

“So we go back to their place and I’m thinkin’ that we’re just gonna throw back some shitty European wine,” Melissa carries on, simply exuberant, her cheeks suffused with a rosy glow, “and the guy, God bless him, he was flippin’ hot, but he didn’t have a thought in his head.” 

“Just your type,” Kristin Marie snorts, but the quip doesn’t have any real bite to it anymore. She grins at her older sister lopsidedly, with a reluctant tenderness that makes the striking resemblance between them all the more apparent.

“Yeah,” Melissa acknowledges cheerfully, nodding once, and Barbara is just happy to see her friend so happy, even though she’s not exactly sure where this adventurous story is going. “So his girlfriend’s in the bathroom, and he starts jabberin’ away at me, askin’ if I wanted to take my jacket off." Her eyes twinkling with mischief, she affects a spectacularly bad French accent. “Do you need to use ze restroom? Would you like some… lotion, mon chéri?”

She switches back to her normal voice, snickering at herself.

“Only he didn’t say lotion, y'know."

Dawn Nichols and Kristin Marie must arrive at similar conclusions at the exact same time because the former claps an amused hand over her mouth, while the younger Schemmenti sibling goes, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

“What?” Barbara purses her lips, pouting a little, feeling left out, as she stares between the three women. She’d gotten sidetracked by the leg brushed up against hers beneath the table and perhaps lost the nuance in the conversation as her companions laugh raucously. “What am I missing?”

“It was lube,” Melissa proffers without the slightest modicum of reserve, shrugging her nearest shoulder. “They wanted to fuck me, Barb.”

Barbara can't recover her face fast enough; her mouth falls open where she sits, and she can only blush and suddenly be assaulted with a thousand new images pirouetting through her head—all of which have to do with Melissa and none of which are remotely acceptable to God.

“And did they?” Dawn asks in a hushed voice, her own features delicately feathered with pink, as she leans forward in anticipation of an answer.

“Oh, hell yeah,” her best friend smirks as Kristin Marie guffaws at Barbara, who is now currently choking on air.

Melissa, unshaken and unfazed, takes it in stride, though, rhythmically patting her on the back.

“Oh, shit, ya’ve broken a woman of God,” Kristin Marie snorts, wiping at her eyes.

“Nothing new,” Melissa says charmingly and she leans over to press a kiss against Barbara’s cheek as though to prove a point. 

Barbara cradles her burning face in her hands.

“Lord,” she exhales into her palms, fully incapable of looking at the woman next to her, “I don’t know why I’m even still friends with you.”

Melissa just laughs and laughs, and she continues to massage the spot between her shoulder blades, and she laughs.

Four drinks in, and they’re having a math-a-rita drinking contest with Derek, a bellhop whom they’ve become friendly with over the years. 

Well, Melissa has a drinking contest with him, while Barbara uses the barest sliver of common sense and sobriety that she has left to cajole Dawn Nichols into working with Abbott for at least a year.

“Thank you,” she enthuses, briefly squeezing the other woman’s arm where it rests on the table. “You don’t know how much this will mean for our students.”

“Of course,” Dawn says, warmly observing the drinking game happening a few feet away. Melissa has nearly polished off another glass to Derek’s growing chagrin and Kristin Marie’s violently loud delight. “It’s clear to me that you and your partner are excellent educators; I know you’ll put the resources to good use…”

In her unadulterated surprise at the word used to describe hers and Melissa’s relationship, she nearly forgets to be gracious.  

“Oh, we aren’t—“ She suddenly starts and then stops herself, reevaluating mid-sentence. 

Partner isn’t necessarily a romantic term. Partner simply implies companionship and association with another, inseparability and togetherness. And they have absolutely been those things.

Inseparable.

Together.

A united front.

Partners.

Yes, of course they are and have always been.

“I mean, thank you,” she amends herself politely. “Melissa is truly one of a kind.”

The second grade teacher’s ears must be burning because she apparently hears this and turns back to face them with a radiant smile on her lips, as red as the blush that enlivens her soft cheeks.

“Damn straight I am,” she jests, comfortably resting her chin on Barbara’s shoulder. “What are we talkin’ about again?”

Barbara naturally leans into the touch as Dawn briefly turns away, now engaged by Kristin Marie asking a question about supply packages.

“Oh, nothing, sweetheart,” she muses in a low voice, suddenly feeling herself pulled into the other’s mischief, even wanting to play along; she's simultaneously breathless, intoxicated, by her intimate proximity and the scent of her orange blossom perfume. “Just about how you and I are partners. It’s a rather lofty descriptor for the shenanigans we get up to, isn't it?”

“Yeah, it’d be far easier to just say gay.”

“Melissa Schemmenti!” She nearly chokes. 

Again.

“I kid, I kid! Jesus, Barb! Get a sip of water!”

But there’s not one ounce of water to be found on their table, and so Barbara has to compromise with another hearty swill of margarita.

Tragic.

But she'll cope.

An ungodly amount of alcohol later—(Barbara has lost track of how much either of them have consumed)—they finally stumble into their room around 2AM, supporting one another as best as they can with their altered equilibriums, giggly and utterly euphoric, triumphant in their respective conquests. 

Melissa has outdrunk Derek for the fifth year in a row, and Barbara has secured a contract with Dawn Nichols.

And they are both so drunk and so exhilarated and so unbelievably alive in the moment, that they don’t entirely know how to extricate themselves from each other in the come down from such an exquisite high; they fall into bed—that one, singular bed—in a tangle of loving limbs, still in their dresses, only just capable of kicking their shoes off into the semi-darkness of the room. They didn’t close the curtains all the way before they left for PECSA-geddon, so moonlight intrudes upon the moment, silver and stunningly bright, catching both of them in the simple act of being happy.

Frankly, though, at this current junction of time, as compromised as they are, it’s beyond either of them to fully care. 

“Shit, fuck,” Melissa laughs so hard that she shakes the mattress beneath them. “Your ring’s caught in my hair, Barb.”

“Oh, sorry, girlfriend,” Barbara apologizes and attempts to unravel her fingers from that mass of scarlet waves, but her ring is caught in the wilderness of it, snarled and apprehended. Somehow, in the incredible dysfunction of her mind, she thinks that raising herself above Melissa as she lies vulnerable on the mattress is the best way to set herself free, but all this does is give her a proper aerial view of her prone best friend.

All this does is nearly place her on top of her, their heaving chests inches apart, threatening to collide every so often by the force and desperation of their breathing. Barbara’s slender hands are splayed on either side of Melissa’s head. 

Her face.

She can see every pronounced lineament in the younger woman’s face. Its dramatic height and angular proportions. The complicated expression in her eyes: the profound tenderness of them and something else too. Hunger. Reverence. Melancholy. She can trace the crow’s feet that gather beneath them and at the very edges of them. The redness of her slightly parted lips and the parentheses which enclose them. The slope and the playful upturn of her sharp nose. 

She is beautiful, so unspeakably gorgeous.

Melissa Schemmenti.

Her very best friend.

Her partner.

Maybe even the love of her life, the opportunity who has always eluded her, the what if? just beyond her reach. But, at long last, there is no barrier between them, no insurmountable wall. There is only them and their bodies and the chemistry that electrifies them both whenever they so much as look each other. There is this feeling in her stomach that has been building all day, a tension that she cannot swallow, a queerness that she cannot properly digest. It erects itself in her like a monument, scaffolding its way up the column of her spine.

It will reach her tongue finally.

Those three glorious words.

Fuck me, Melissa. 

(Because I love you is something she still won't be able to say.)

(I love you would make all of this so very real.)

(And precisely none of it can be real; these are the fantasies; these are the fairy tales.)

(The delusions.)

“Ouch,” Melissa murmurs as her hair is pulled. 

By Barbara Howard’s diamond encrusted wedding ring.

It shines in the irradiated light of the moon, glinting harshly, in clear and damning reprimand, and Barbara flinches viscerally, as though stricken. The ring becomes a token again, symbolizing something else besides its own beauty.

Gerald is a good man.

She loves him so much.

She isn’t in love with him, though.

But even still, what gives her the right to ever hurt him?

She straightens up into the air so fast that her head spins, that her stomach lurches, that all the booze she has consumed in the past few hours nearly crests within her and outside of her. She frees her hand; she undoubtedly tugs some more of Melissa's hair. She almost reels backwards into the TV, unable to recapture her balance. She covers her mouth with the hand that always reminds her that she is a married woman, a taken one; the silver band firmly scolds her lips.

“Shit, Barb,” Melissa breathes, abruptly sitting up in the bed, concern in her eyes, such tender and evocative care. “You okay?”

She nods mutely, incapable of trusting herself to speak without expelling all of the accumulated pollution inside of her. Tears form in her eyes and leak over her lower lashes anyway. 

“No, you’re flippin’ not,” her friend readily supplies, standing up herself on rather wobbly feet, but she takes a step towards Barbara anyway, as though to bridge the gap between them, the untenable, omnipresent distance.

And Barbara equally takes a step back, her lower hip hitting the wardrobe that the TV sits upon. 

“Don’t,” she hisses painfully, finally uncovering her mouth.

“Why not?” Melissa challenges, at once defiant and wounded, her brow furrowed over her eyes. The recognition of this makes the kindergarten teacher want to scream. In not hurting Gerald, she’s surely plunging a knife into Melissa. She’s proving her own point from earlier.

Love is a weapon.

It maims and occasionally destroys.

“Because I would kiss you,” she admits, and it feels good to finally say it aloud, to give shape and dimension to these feelings that have seethed inside of her for so long, for so many of the years upon aching years that they've taught at Abbott Elementary side-by-side.

“… and that would make a monster out of me,” she quickly adds because this is also true, and it needs to be said aloud.  

It needs to injure, push away, and deter; she doesn't want to do it; necessity drives her on.

“Oh, yeah?” Comes a reply gentler than it has any right to be. Kind. It Is far less than what she deserves. “And what would that make me then, huh?”

One too.

Complicit. 

Just like me. 

She could say any of these three things but doesn’t; it was clearly a rhetorical question; she can see in Melissa’s darkly lashed eyes that she is willing to accept every wayward epithet if this is the price, if this is the blood sacrifice of their communion.

They can be monsters with each other; they can be so totally in love.

Barbara swallows; thoroughly inebriated though she is, she is not insensible to the magnitude of this offer, the knowledge that all she has to do is say the word and down they’ll descend into hell, hand in monstrous hand.

Alone.

Together.

“I can’t,” she rasps anyway. She swipes angrily at the tears still slipping down her face. She sniffs noisily and loathes herself for it.

“I know,” Melissa returns, her own eyes suddenly overbright. 

But then Barbara Howard leans down and almost does it anyway, gathering the silky hair at the back of Melissa’s neck in her fist, her knuckles softly scraping the skin there. And their noses brush. Their boozy breaths gather in hot pockets in the barest space between them. 

Their lips never touch, though.

Sacrilege remains uncommitted.

“You can’t,” Melissa echoes as a singular tear spirals from the corner of her eye and down the tall plane of her cheek. It collects calmly on the vertex of her chin and remains there.

Barbara brushes it away with her thumb before completely letting go.

“No,” she agrees hoarsely, stepping back for good, and there is a finality to the act that saves and devastates them both.

—

They take turns showering, rinsing the night off them, the copious amounts of booze. Melissa goes first this time, and Barbara follows. 

Afterwards, of course.

Separately.

And when Barbara eventually stumbles back into the bedroom, wearing pajamas that she’s pretty sure are inside out, she sees that Melissa is already in bed, covers pulled up to her face, clearly asleep, lightly snoring.

She’s erected a pillow wall between the two halves of the one bed. 

It’s a smart move.

And an incredibly isolating one.

But smart moves usually are.

Barbara accepts this for what it is and staggers to her side, slipping beneath the sheets as quietly as she can, briefly tossing and turning to get comfortable, which eventually means facing the two feet tall chastity belt, staring at it as her eyelids begin to droop.

Loving it.

Hating it.

Eternally grateful to it.

Disappointed at its necessity, disappointed with herself.

She is so weak in a thousand myriad ways; maybe that, too, is love…

… she doesn’t exactly know what compels her to in the end—(weakness, loneliness, monstrosity, love)—but before she entirely drifts away, she reaches underneath the pillows and is relieved to find a hand waiting for her there.

A concession.

A forgivable compromise.

And so, Barbara allows herself this one pittance too. She intertwines their fingers beneath this latest boundary that divides them, understanding that this—yes, this—is the sole degree of happiness that she can afford without too high of a moral cost.

Sunday, 9:43 PM

Pearl: You’re really going to let him go see the Diamonds?

Pearl: After all they’ve done?

Pearl: After all WE’VE done to stand against them?

Greg: Its what he wants Pearl. who are we to deny him that?

Pearl: He didn’t want her to know about his condition.

Greg: That was different!

Pearl: Sure, Greg.

The three dots of impending doom jumped onto her screen within an instant, but Pearl didn’t wait for what was surely another half-assed justification from a man who seemed to half-ass anything that could be half-assed. (Which was neither fair nor right, but God, she was livid.) She shut her phone down, placed it on the nightstand, and rolled back onto her pillow with an aggressive thump.

Which, of course, did nothing to alleviate the headache that had been beating against the back of her skull all day.

Rose… Rose wouldn’t have wanted this, would she?

Her son fraternizing with the enemy.

With Yellow Diamond.

Even the mere thought of the woman was enough to conjure a clear image of the imposing CEO in Pearl’s mind-eye. She had golden eyes and a hard heart, and her practices—from her exploitation of workers to the conditions of her factories—were far from ethical. She was a tyrant, a monster, a despot.

And Steven was set to enter her lair.

(An extravagant penthouse suite that had reportedly cost over 200 million dollars.)

Her little boy, swallowed up by the yellow beast.

Rose… Rose wouldn’t have permitted this…

… Right?

Right?

It was a single instant of hesitation, but it was enough, and her mistrust and anger and irritation at Yellow, at Greg, at the world, soon gave away to another emotion, one that had been swelling up in Pearl’s chest all day. She rolled over to her side and plucked her phone up once more, clearing Greg’s response away with a furious swipe so she could type in her password.

It was 7673.

It was Rose. 

She clicked the little photo icon and scrolled.

Scrolled past pictures of Steven as he slept during one of his dialysis treatments.

Past twenty Amethyst selfies that had been taken while Pearl wasn’t looking.

Past the family’s vacation to a cabin in the vast, snowy mountains.

And then she abruptly stopped, tapping once to expand the only image she wanted to see.

It was a picture of a picture, of a polaroid Garnet had taken approximately a year before Rose had met Greg, and everything had gone to—

Rose’s arm was wrapped around Pearl’s shoulders, and her pink lips were pressed against her cheek, and they were laughing.

Laughing!

And Pearl was in love.

Even in the blurry polaroid, she could see the faint blush that had traced itself across the bridge of her pointed nose like a messy pink scribble, could see the admiration that had made her eyes shine so bright once upon a time.

And she could feel the phantoms of warmth.

The warmth of Rose’s big, encompassing arms.

The warmth that had spread across Pearl’s entire body, that had electrified her veins.

A hot, itchy sensation climbed and climbed her throat until it welled up in her eyes. The phone went slack in her hand, tumbling to the bed.

Who was she kidding?

She didn’t know what Rose would have wanted.

After all, once upon a time, Pearl had thought that she wanted her.

She would have turned forty today had she not chosen… She bit her lip. She didn’t want to admit it, not even to herself.

It did not compute.

She would have turned forty, she tried again. The tears dripped down her beaky nose. And she would have been radiant.

Monday, 7:02 AM

Garnet: safe drive steven. <3

Steven: Thanks, boo. <3

Steven: And just so you know… I did think about what you told me last night.

Steven: And, like, I really thank you for being upfront with me about how you felt. Pearl just straight up told me that I shouldn’t go, and you took the time to tell me why I shouldn’t go, but this is just something I have to do Garnet.

Garnet: have to?

Steven: I guess I don’t have to, but I want to.

Steven: She’s really nice, and she’s really sad, and I want to be her friend.

Around her, the gym’s locker room was coming to life. Fellow trainers changing into exercise gear for appointments with clients. Early gym comers heading off to the showers for a rinse off. People talking and sipping coffee and slamming locker doors with aplomb. But Garnet was immobile on the bench, her entire world contained in the little screen sitting in the palm of her hand.

She was conflicted, and conflicted wasn’t exactly a feeling she experienced very often.

It was unpleasant to say the least.

Like a fist nurtured into her stomach over and over and over again.

On one hand—one of the fists churning her stomach in nauseating ways—the memories and the rage and the rage those memories roared into existence tore through her overwhelmed head like fire in a forest. She saw Rose Quartz standing on a box in front of the D.E. building, the force and passion in her words inspiring disgruntled workers to join her in protest. Saw her own hands wrapped around a sign that screamed for FAIR WAGES as her hoarse voice did the same. Garnet’s own mothers, Ruby and Sapphire, had worked in one of D.E.’s factories overseas before they’d come to America.

They were the reasons she had taken up Rose’s banner in the first place.

Ruby’s calloused hands testified to cruel work—the kind of stuff that may have broken a lesser person—and Sapphire’s strained silence about those years spoke volumes where she could not.

Whenever they saw Yellow Diamond on TV, they would immediately blanch and grasp hands, as though they were afraid that she would reach through the screen and wrench them apart.

On the other hand—Garnet gritted her teeth to make this concession—Yellow Diamond was her demon. Hers and her parents’ and Rose’s and Amethyst’s and Pearl’s.

Not Steven’s.

She wanted him to inherit so many things from her—some wondrous and some wise.

Love and light and patience and perseverance.

But not hate.

Never hate.

Garnet threw her towel around her neck and stood up with a sigh that reached into her bones and shook them for good measure.

Garnet: okay… i love you steven. <3

Steven: I love you too Garnet. <3

Monday, 9:12 AM

Amethyst: 

Pearl: You’re not driving, correct?! If so, please put your phone down immediately! 

Pearl: If not, very cute.

Amethyst: chillllllllax P

Amethyst: ste-man is getting a snack from the gas station. we’re about an hr out from empire city

Garnet: :)

Pearl: Excellent timing, Amethyst!

Pearl: Remember, his appointment starts at 12, so that should give you plenty enough time to check into the hotel and get situated there.

Pearl: I’ve put the reservations under your name.

Pearl: You have the debit card, right?

Pearl: Oh, goodness. I think I forgot to pack M.C. Bear Bear.

Garnet: i handled it.

Amethyst: haha - nice save G

Garnet: B)

Garnet: i’m psychic

One of the double doors leading out from the gas station was pushed open with a lethargic kind of energy, and Amethyst, who had been leaning against the hood of her car, looked up from her phone to see that the wimpy gesture belonged to none other than her little buddy, her Steven. He closed the door carefully with his weak hand, nurturing a bag of Chaps in the other, and then, without so much as glancing her way, trudged right past her to the passenger side of the car, pulled the door open, and barreled in.

The door didn’t slam to a close so much as it did feebly stutter to one.

Well, that was a huge yikes.

Not waiting to give him time to stew in his feelings, Amethyst pocketed her phone and proceeded to the driver’s side, pulling her seatbelt across her chest and cranking the ignition to her little Honda Civic in one, fluid motion. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Steven was looking at the bag of chips clenched in his hand, but there was something in his expression—something unfocused, something glazed—that told her that he wasn’t quite seeing what he was seeing.

She pulled out of the parking lot and tried to keep her voice as casual as possible. “You okay, little dude?”

He wasn’t. Obviously. But it didn’t hurt to ask.

She knew Steven well enough to know that he’d rather drown in the ocean ten times over rather than share his feelings.

But she also knew that once he started talking through them, like the ocean, they’d flow.

“Yeah… just got a little dizzy when I was standing in line for the register.” He laughed humorlessly, the bag in his hand crinkling in a way that told her that he’d squeezed it tightly. “But I guess that’s just a occupational hazard of this whole dying business.”

They were on the highway now, Jersey speeding past them in a blur of green and gray and black. Amethyst’s fingers choked the wheel.

“You’re not dying, Steven,” she gritted out, trying to see straight. The edges of her vision bursted with red, and all she wanted to do was pull over and slam the kid into a freaking hug. “Get that outta your head.”

“I know, I know.” He rested his elbow on the door’s control panel and leaned his head against the window. She couldn’t see his eyes, but their reflections were dark with trees. Perhaps they were just dark all over. “Just joking.”

Amethyst took one hand off the wheel and squeezed his free one. His skin was clammy and cold to touch.

“You’re not, but that was a good try, Ste-man.”

“What can I say?” He laughed again, and at least this one had a little more body to it. “I’m a virtuoso at using dark humor to cope with my crippling depression.”

And he meant it to be funny.

Meant it to be ironic.

But she wasn’t having it.

“You don’t have to be, though,” she told him, as serious as she could be. “Not with me anyway”

And he turned to look at her, his dark eyes widening in something that may have have just been awe.

She blushed furiously but blustered on anyway because dammit, this kid needed this talk, like, yesterday.

“I mean, I know you front with everyone else, but, like, you don’t have to do that when you’re around me, okay?” Amethyst’s grip tightened on his hand. “I get not wanting to talk about it. I get desperately needing to talk about it. I get you, Steven.”

Because they were alike, him and her.

They had issues, and they tried not to think about those issues and only ended up thinking about them all the more.

It was a cycle she knew well.

She wished Steven didn’t have to.

He didn’t answer immediately. Amethyst withdrew her hand and replaced it on the wheel, driving in silence for as long as the silence stretched thin between them.

She felt his gaze upon her.

Felt the intensity of it, the sadness.

“I just… I just feel so bad, Amethyst,” he whispered. “All the time.”

Amethyst wanted to melt into her seat. A lump rose to her throat.

“I know, buddy.”

“I’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel good.” His voice was fragile—not in the way glass was fragile, but in the way a dandelion was. One puff, and then it was gone.

“I know.”

She heard a sniffing sound.

A surreptitious swipe of the nose.

Amethyst knew better than to look his way.

Monday, 11:31 AM

Amethyst: heyyyy greg. steven and i made it to e city. bout to drive to the hospital.

Greg: Thanks for the update!

Amethyst: yah. np.

Greg: uh, what does that mean ??

Amethyst: no problem

Greg: i didn’t thank you for anything?? ?

Monday, 4:38 PM

Amethyst: sorry for not answering ur calls. just got back to the hotel. steven’s asleep. gonna have to text.

Greg: He’s asleep? already?

Pearl: What did Dr. Maheswaran say?

Amethyst: yeah poor kid’s worn out

Amethyst: she’s not happy w/ his blood count. she says his hemoglobin is low. if it doesn’t get better by the end of the week she might do a blood transfusion

Amethyst: 4 days of dialysis this week instead of 3

Amethyst: steven’s not happy :/

Pearl: That’s it. We’re coming up there immediately.

Amethyst: no!

Amethyst: i mean, not that i don’t want you guys to be here, but u guys can’t afford to take any more time off work

Amethyst: and we’ve got bills ’n stuff to pay

Amethyst: not 2 mention the new iron pill dr. m prescribed

Amethyst: like - i’ve got this

Pearl: Garnet? Greg? What do you think?

Garnet: amethyst is right.

Greg: i mean yeah… I’m not happy about it, but she’s got a point.

Pearl: Okay… but if things get worse, we’re coming up there. Alright?

Amethyst: k

She’d drawn the curtains to make it darker in the room, but even still, a crack of blue light slipped in through the gap, illuminating Steven’s sleeping form. He was curled up under the blankets, which obscured most of his face.

His little button nose poked out.

His closed eyes fluttered restlessly.

Amethyst wondered if he was dreaming.

And if he was, she hoped that it was a good one.

Because frankly, reality sucked.

While Steven had been changing from the hospital gown to his regular clothes, Dr. Maheswaran had pulled her aside and given her a haughty once over that let Amethyst know at once that the doctor wished she were Pearl, who, out of Steven’s four parental figures had the best grasp of all the medical jargon.

“He’s needs a new kidney, and he needs it soon,” Dr. Maheswaran said. No sugarcoating. No bull. She didn’t have the best bedside manners per say, but the nephrologist would tell it to you straight, and that was what mattered most to Amethyst.

“Then find him one, Doc.”

“I’m trying,” she frowned, and the lines under her brown eyes became all the more pronounced. “But kidneys are a tall, damn order.”

Monday, 4:48 PM:

Greg: love ya champ

Greg: i’m so proud of you

Monday, 5:01 PM:

Pearl: Call me when you get up! Love you, Steven. <3

Monday, 5:09 PM:

Garnet: <3

Tuesday, 10:32 AM:

Amethyst: picked up steven’s prescription

Amethyst: we’re @ breakfast

Pearl: How much was the copay?

Amethyst: only like $10

Pearl: :) I’ll add that to my ledger.

Amethyst: neeeeeeerdddd alert

Pearl: This ‘nerd’ does your taxes for you every year.

Amethyst: and i appreciate tht but that doesn’t make u any less of a nerd

“Gosh, I was hungry,” Steven said around a mouthful of waffles. He already had his next bite queued up on his fork, and a trace of syrup dripped down the corner of his mouth.

Amethyst was hella relieved to see that his appetite had returned; last night, he’d stayed passed out until 3AM, and when he woke up, she could only get him to nibble on a couple of crackers. 

“Bet,” she replied, chomping down hard on a piece of syrup covered bacon, savoring more than just its taste. The sweetness was good, but seeing Steven in a good mood made it even sweeter.

“Who were ya texting?”

“Pearl. She was being lame and trying to talk to me about math.”

Steven chuckled. “You should try being homeschooled by her.”

He squared his blocky shoulders and clasped his hands behind his back, two actions which resulted in an uncanny physical impression of their dear Pearl.

“Now Steven,” he mimicked in a high, lofty voice, “you can’t just move the x around like that. There’s a certain finesse to it. A technique. Here, let me do it.” He lowered his voice back to its normal pitch. “And then she starts talking about how my mom was great at solving division problems or something like that.”

Amethyst’s eyes were streaming. She banged her fists on the table, drawing a nasty look from a passing waitress.

“You’re a riot, Steven.”

“Thank ya!” He grinned.

When their meal came to a close—and it only did after they’d each slammed a couple of more waffles—Steven swirled the quarter of orange juice he had left in his glass, and Amethyst pulled out his ever-expanding pillbox from her bag.

Red pills.

Blue pills.

Iron pills.

Diuretics.

And by God, they were all big enough to be choking hazards.

“Ugh, Steven,” she muttered, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “I dunno how you do this everyday.”

“Oh, that’s an easy one,” he replied cheerfully, accepting her offering of his Tuesday pills. “I totally dissociate.”

“Solid, dude.”

Steven downed the pills one by one, chasing them with vigorous swills of juice.

“Tell me about it,” he gasped when he was done, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

They had another hour or so to kill before Steven had to return to the hospital for his treatment, so they took to walking down one of Empire City’s lesser known shopping districts. From time to time, they’d rest on a bench until Steven could catch his shortened breath.

It was during one of these breaks when the little bugger finally breached the topic of conversation she’d been crossing her fingers to avoid.

“If I don’t end up having to get a transfusion,” he began thoughtfully, head angled backwards so he could stare up at all the high rises poking into the sky, “I think I wanna text Blue Diamond soon. Visit her while I’m here, maybe.”

“Maybe…” She hesitated, and Steven was quick to snap up on it.

“Amethyst, I love you, but if you give me the same, old spiel on why I shouldn’t visit Blue, I’m gonna walk away.” She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. His voice was playful, but his eyes were grim, and his mouth was pressed into a thin, determined line.

“You’re sure bent on doing this, huh?”

“Very bent,” he agreed succinctly, nodding with dramatic precision before adding, “Super bent.”

Because there was obviously a discernible difference between super bent and very bent.

Amethyst scratched her neck and sighed.

“If the doc gives you the go ahead, then text her,” she told him grudgingly. “I wasn’t a part of the team when all the big protests against Yellow D were going on, so I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t go.”

Pearl and Garnet seemed to have plenty of reasons, though.

“Thanks, Amethyst!”

“No big deal, dude.”

Their little bench was an island in the stream—solitary, stable, even with so many people flooding around it. Amethyst did as Steven was doing and tilted her head back to drink in the panorama from above, appreciative of the cool breeze that slid across her face and stirred her long hair. Her eyes closed against the bright, golden sun.

“I was doing some research,” Steven said, and he was very quiet. Melancholy.

Amethyst opened one eye to look at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. His hands were clasped neatly on his lap, his solemn gaze still offered to the heavens.

“A couple of years back, there was an awful murder that took place outside of a bar somewhere in this city.” He paused. “The details were too… gruesome, I guess, for the article to talk about. She was only twenty-one.”

She raised a questioning eyebrow at him. “Dark stuff you’re reading there, kid.”

His shoulder rose and fell in a half-shrug.

“It was a dark thing that happened.”

Tuesday, 4:29 PM

Steven: Hey guys! Just got out of treatment.

Greg: how was it kiddo?

Steven: Better than yesterday. We’re heading to the hotel.

Pearl: I’m so glad, Steven!

Garnet: !!!

Steven: Thanks! Love you all.

Amethyst read the texts in the group chat while Steven was hung over the toilet, puking his little guts out.

Insistent that Amethyst stay out of the bathroom until he was done.

She rapped on the door anyway, unsure if he heard her over the sound of his own violent retching.

Dialysis naturally had the effect of making him nauseous, but nausea was also a side effect of the new iron pills he was taking, so really, the odds were just not in Steven’s favor today.

“You okay in there?”

“I feel like the answer to that question”—he paused to gag—“is very obvious.”

Asshole, she thought fondly and barged into the bathroom. Kid needed a Sprite, a cold rag to the forehead, and a nice, little trip to bed.

“Amethyst—“ He whined, lifting his head feebly from the commode. The traces of throw up were edged along the corner of his mouth.

“Shut up, Steven, and let me love you.”

She grabbed a washcloth from the counter and turned on the faucet, the loud hissing noise just not loud enough to mask what was surely another round of vomit.

Wednesday, 3:22 PM

Amethyst: STEEEEVEEENNNN’S GOT A GIRLFRIEND

Pearl: What?!?!

Garnet: nice.

Greg: way 2 go champ!

Amethyst: asgdshafl 

Amethyst: so dr. m’s daughter came in today to read to patients and like she and steven rlly hit it off

Amethyst: her name is Connie

Amethyst: and i’m calling it now. their ship name is stevonnie

Pearl: I think I’m experiencing premature empty nest syndrome. 

Amethyst: ya’ve got the nose for it

Pearl: Rude.

Amethyst: but anyway his treatment’s almost done and dr. m says his blood count’s looking better

Amethyst: no transfusion!

Pearl: Thank goodness. 

Greg: ugh I agree

Garnet: Woo.

Amethyst: and he’s happy today

Amethyst glanced up from her phone to confirm what she was telling the others.

“Buuuuuuut Connnnnnnie, you can’t just leave it on a cliffhanger!” Steven was pleading, fingers mussed through his dark, curly hair in exasperation. “Like, Lisa is literally hanging from a cliff. I need to know what happens!”

“Okay, okay!” The dark-skinned girl pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “One more paragraph… Mom’s about to unhook you from the machine, though.”

Dr. Maheswaran waved her off with a dismissive flick of the hand. “One more paragraph would be fine.”

“Yes ma’am!” She re-buried her nose into the thick book. “Lisa’s hand was slick with sweat as Archimedes…”

Steven leaned forward expectantly, hand tucked under his chin, M.C. Bear Bear clutched tightly to his chest right next to his dialysis catheter and all of the tubing involved.

And he was smiling like a fool.

Like a kid.

Amethyst: he’s rlly happy

Wednesday, 7:41 PM

Steven: Hi Blue… this is Steven.

Steven: That cute kid from the cemetery. :)

Blue: Hello, Steven. It’s so very nice to hear from you. How are you?

Steven: Could be better. Could be worse. You?

Blue: Ah, likewise.

Steven: I was texting to say that I’ll be in Empire City for the better part of the week, and I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of coming to visit, maybe?

Blue: Of course—I would love that.

Blue: When would be the best day for you?

Steven: Friday would be great if that’s ok with you. 

Blue: Friday would be perfect. 1:00? We could do tea and cakes.

Steven: Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Blue: Friday it is then. I can’t wait to see you again, Steven.

Steven: I can’t wait to see you too.

Blue set her phone down on the bathroom counter, and twenty sleeping pills slipped between her tall fingers and back into the bottle.

It’d been a bad day.

She wouldn’t have done it…

She hadn’t been going to…

She had just been thinking.

It had been a bad day, and then Steven had texted.

“Well, I’m home for the night.” Startled, Blue looked up in the mirror to see her wife leaning in the doorframe—arms crossed, a permanent frown carved into her striking face. “Stocks are down, and my investors are running for the hills. It’s a hellhole. I’m in literal hell.”

Yellow detached herself from the door and drew closer. The tips of their fingers brushed ever so slightly, ever so softly.

And that was about as physically affectionate as they got nowadays.

“How was your day?” Her voice sharpened at the end. “I see you’re still in your nightgown.”

“It was fine, Yellow.” It absolutely was not.

Blue gripped the edge of the sink to keep her hands from shaking, determined not to glance at the pill bottle she’d been holding just moments before.

“Are you sure? I could call the doctor right now. Check the dosage on your antidepressant, perhaps?”

“Oh, yes,” she muttered venomously, more to herself than Yellow, but she supposed she didn’t care enough if Yellow heard it, too, “because that’s exactly what I need. An upped dosage.”

That seemed to be Yellow’s only reliable solution when it came to fixing her.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Blue bit out. “Nothing at all.”

And she pushed off from the sink, impelled by dull anger, her shoulder roughly knocking against Yellow’s as she went.

Conversely, if the younger woman wants to yell and scream—kick a desk over and then kick it again, punch the nearest brick wall, issue a string of vicious Italian curses between her teeth—then that would be perfectly intelligible, too. A more than reasonable reaction to the nonsense that her paramour just pulled, embarrassing her like that in front of God and Jalen Hurts! (Mmph! The audacity of him! The absolute nerve! Barbara had told him—at least twice that she recalls—that it was a bad idea to propose. She hadn’t even been intending to help him. She had just wanted to minimize the startling possibility that Melissa could be hurt.)

A supportive friend would dutifully be there in the ugly aftermath, double and triple-checking that the second grade teacher didn’t accidentally break a toe, wrapping her bloodied knuckles in gauze.

Let it all out, she’d maybe say.

I’m here for you.

Now, in theory and moderate practice, it’s all well and good for people to be obliging and supportive. They’re admirable traits that Barbara would advocate in any Christian worth their paid tithes. But the crucial problem—(well, the one that she’s willing to admit to anyway)—is that Barbara Howard, for all of her upstanding moral fiber, has never once been the obliging type, having learned unshakeable grit long ago in the Sisyphean grind of the Philadelphia public school system.

And moreover, even though she would be the first to proclaim her undying loyalty, that’s far from synonymous with her support. The kindergarten teacher would crawl over hot coals to be there for Melissa Schemmenti. 

That’s loyalty. 

The primal abnegation—the inherent masochism—of love. 

But to helplessly watch her best friend punish herself over yet another undeserving man has never been her inclination nor her particular strong suit.

So, if the two choices are to let Melissa run away or further hurt herself, to be obliging or to be supportive —(and these have always been the two choices when Melissa has been in pain)—then Barbara chooses neither, which is to say as soon as the bell rings and all of her students have been ushered to the gym, she chooses to stride over to the classroom across the way and plant herself firmly in the door, folding her arms over her chest.

“I’m driving you home this evening,” she declares and is glad to find that her voice is gentle. (She had been afraid all afternoon that the consolation would come out a little wrong.)

(That she would slip up and sound relieved.)

(And she is that—assuredly.)

(She’s so relieved that Gary the Vending Machine Guy didn’t get to make such a half-assed proposal and get away with it. Perhaps a little inappropriately, she thanks God for his divine mercy in ensuring that the karmic struggle bent towards justice.)

(But she also knows that she has no right to advertise this sensation—this incredible, gut-wrenching relief—somewhere that her friend might see it. She may not be supportive—(hell, she might not even entirely be kind ) —but she isn’t callous. She isn’t cruel.)

Melissa is at her desk, half-slumped in her perpetually creaking seat, staring at nothing at particular. The wall. A faded poster of the solar system. Dust notes suspended in the sunlight trickling in through the blinds. There are sweeping shadows beneath her eyes where her mascara has been running. A telltale redness around the nose. 

“Barb,” she starts tiredly, only barely glancing her way, “you don’t hafta—“

But Barbara intercepts her protestations neatly.

“—I want to,” she insists, intending to step forward and just as suddenly reluctant to even try, discerning something horrible in the other woman’s eyes that terrifies her. 

Something unnervingly still.

Something broken.

She distinctly remembers that the last time Melissa’s eyes had looked like that, she’d been staring down the barrel of an acrimonious divorce. She didn’t smile for an entire year. She just pretended to when she thought that people were rightfully concerned.

“We could… have a girl’s night, perhaps,” she presses on, perhaps a little hesitant at first, sensing that she’s sidling up to an invisible wall. “Yes, a true lady’s evening! Drink a lot of wine. Watch Jeopardy! Order takeout from that—mmm, oh what’s it called?—that… that interesting pizzeria on the corner. The one next to the Shell Station that was robbed last year.”

“It’s Rizzo’s, and you hate that crap,” Melissa snorts humorlessly, never once missing a beat, an expert at finding meaning in her ellipsis. “Said it gave ya indigestion.”

“But you love it,” Barbara returns emphatically, lips kneading into a fond smile. It’s a sorry excuse for a restaurant in her opinion, the pizza greasy, the garlic bread overseasoned. and to add insult to improperly cooked injury, the owners are tremendously rude, always complaining when shedares to complain about the lacking quality of their products. But that’s not the point. The point is: “I’ll guzzle some Pepto. And if it comes down to it, indulge in a Tums.”

I’d do anything to make you happy.

Her smile widens and she dares to hope for something of a crooked grin in return, but Melissa doesn’t seem to find this playful gesture of self-sacrifice nearly half as amusing—nor even endearing for that matter—finally meeting her in the eye, a certain hardness in her tall face, a steeliness that is willing to cut.

“I don’t want your pity,” she mutters, quiet defiance in every syllable, audible defeat in the strained silence that follows.

Barbara knows that her friend has to say some version of this line. She has to make it perfectly clear that she thinks she’s hard to love, and then, for some godforsaken reason, she feels compelled to go as far as proving it, street fighting with just her teeth.

“And you’re not getting it either,” she says firmly, shaking her head. 

“I’d be a blessed fool to ever pity you, Melissa Schemmenti.”

More silence weaves its way into the gap, as thick and as complicated as a rope between them. The younger woman scrutinizes her closely, trying to locate the mockery that she seems to perpetually assume is there, while Barbara stares just as intensely back, refusing to let her arrive at such a profoundly incorrect conclusion in the first place.

“And you couldn’t possibly be that, could ya, Barb?” The second grade teacher eventually sighs, a wane smile bobbing to her dark lips. “Anybody’s fool?”

“Exactly,” she agrees with a certain smugness, rightfully intuiting that she’s won. “And you're nobody’s pity project either. Now grab your purse, sweetheart. As the kids would say, we’re blowing the lid off of this popsicle stand."

But for all this—their familiar back-and-forth, the other woman's stunning pain, their mutual agreement that Barbara isn't a fool when it comes to all matters Melissa—Melissa remains unmoving, though clearly not untouched. She blinks once, and Barbara sees that her pale eyes are overbright, everything about her so tender and visibly scraped raw.

“You serious about this?” She rasps, achingly vulnerable, almost child-like as she sits with her hands loosely templed on top of her desk. “You don’t… gotta babysit me, y’know. I’m gonna be just fine.”

“I know that,” Barbara exhales softly, and more than that, fundamentally believes it. She believes with every atom in her that her best friend is going to get through this latest tribulation with all her pieces intact, that she’s Melissa Schemmenti, for goodness sake, and she’s never known a challenge that she couldn’t capably meet.

“But let me take care of you tonight anyway,” she finishes, all kindness and ferocious warmth for the woman six feet across from her in this cold and empty room.

Her colleague of some twenty-odd years.

Her sister.

Her partner—as loaded as that word is, as Barbara often pretends for it not to be.

“God, you’re such a gagootz,” comes an affectionate reply, and then a hitch of a laugh of a poorly concealed sob.

“Only for you,” she teases right back and shifts slightly on the balls of her feet, suddenly discomfited by the idea that she could actually possibly mean it. 

She swallows lightly and shoves the traitorous thought into one of the innumerable drawers of her mind. Locks it. Rebelliously holds on to the key.

—

Barbara is more than aware that she probably shouldn’t prod the freshly exposed wound. An obliging friend wouldn’t anyway—a supportive one. 

But in their particular friendship, where the only barrier between them sometimes is the fabric that separates their brushing skin, pushing a little harder than they should is an implicit given for them, if only because they know the other is so prone to pulling away.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Barbara asks on the drive away from her own house, where she picked up an overnight bag: some clothes, her toiletries, a bottle of unopened wine, her CPAP machine. She feels guilty for abruptly canceling on Gerald. She’d made plans with him and just as immediately bailed when there were suddenly more important things. 

When there was Melissa.

To his lasting credit, he immediately understood.

Her wonderful husband always understands when it comes to Melissa, something complicated in his eyes and maddeningly patient in his weathered smile whenever they talk about her. Barbara doesn’t know what to make of these microgestures, nor does she try to decode them into an alphabet that makes sense when they’re both currently content to let their arcane meanings go unworded. 

Instead, she grips the sun-baked leather of her steering wheel all the tighter, and asks Melissa if she wants to talk about her pain, perhaps solely for the reason that she won’t have to spend any unnecessary time interrogating her own.

“Nope,” Melissa grunts unhelpfully, eyes eclipsed behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses. “Nothing to talk about. I had a boyfriend. He wanted somethin’ more than that, and I, uh, couldn’t… I could never give that… I mean—and now I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. Simple as that.”

But Barbara hears the clumsy slippage of words, the implicit pain there, the story her best friend is choosing to tell herself, the solely placed blame.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” she murmurs, easing to a stop light that’s just turned red. She takes the lull for the opportunity that it is, reaching over without looking, placing a hand on Melissa’s wrist where it lays across the console. Squeezing once.

Gently—always gently.

Not letting go, even though she absolutely should.

“You told that man. You told him and you told him, and you explicitly told him. It’s hardly on you if he was too obtuse to ever get it.”

“He’s not obtuse,” Melissa snaps, suddenly pulling her hand back into her lap. The violence of it shocks them both, the silence taut, frayed and fraying. Somewhere in the unbearable static, the light turns green without either of them ever being really aware. 

The rusty sedan behind them honks at Barbara to go.

She presses the pedal with a little more force than is required.

“Sorry,” the second grade teacher mutters, flushing a little, tugging at her seatbelt strap. “It’s just… if he’s obtuse, then what am I, y’know? We both thought we were on the same page, and here it turns out I can’t open any book without makin’ spaghetti of the words.”

“Melissa,” she exhales softly. She doesn’t know what to say to such a revealing proclamation, where to even begin, how to unpick a skein of self-loathing that’s as convoluted as that, the threads unwilling to be anything else but a tangled ball.

“Which is why I don’t wanna talk about it yet,” the younger teacher shrugs, harshly swiping at the skin beneath her eyes, angling her body away. “I gotta figure out how to explain it all to myself first.”

“And would it be too much to ask for you to be kind to yourself in that process?” Barbara can’t help but ask, forcing herself to keep her eyes on the road, fingers tightly locked around the wheel. “To afford yourself the same grace that you so generously bestow to others?”

To Gary the Vending Machine Guy.

To Joseph.

You always take up for fools who don’t deserve it, she bitterly thinks and half-despises herself for it. Melissa can’t help who she loves, anymore than Barbara can’t help but drop everything to be there for Melissa, which is probably the same thing as saying that Barbara can’t help who she loves either.

It's a terrifying thought, one that the kindergarten teacher can't exactly afford to entertain when there's a diamond studded ring on her fourth finger that Gerald took out a loan for when they were just twenty-five. He was besotted with her, and she liked him so very much, and she thought that the safe boundaries of marriage would teach her how to love a man like a good woman of God.

Melissa only offers another listless shrug, staring out of the window as the city passes them by. 

A blur of color and light. 

Streaks of meaningless sound.

—

They fall into a familiar routine, the same metronomic cadence that they know by heart after nearly three decades of jokingly calling each other home. They eat. They drink. (Barbara swills copious amounts of Pepto to deal with that disgusting pizza.) They curl up on Melissa’s plastic-covered couch beneath the knit blanket that her nonna made and watch Jeopardy!, shouting out the answers at nearly the exact same time. When the show is over, they drink even more, quickly draining Barbara’s cheap bottle of Merlot to the lees. Melissa moves on to some old beer she had in her outside fridge, refusing to touch her good stuff—the vintage wines, the nice beers, her impressive collection of bourbons—for the occasion.

Barbara decides to sober up in case Melissa needs her, exchanging her delicate wine glass for a plastic Hooters cup filled with water.

The younger woman’s face gets steadily rosier the more she indulges, petals blooming across her cheek, a pleasant ruddiness shading the tip of her nose. She laughs a little too hard at the harmless sitcom that they’re not even really watching. She tucks her feet beneath Barbara’s thigh on the couch to warm them, causing the kindergarten teacher to inexplicably shiver. Around ten, she drunkenly muses about the astonishing merits of her own breasts.

“Gary called ‘em the best honkers he’s ever seen,” she says suddenly, two-thirds into her second Miller Lite, staring down at her cleavage with a frown that makes her plump lower lip poke out.

Barbara nearly chokes on her water, spilling a little on her blouse, her own gaze unwittingly magnetized to the objects in question—specifically, the way the divot of them is just barely visible at the low neck of her shirt. Cream-colored things, smooth and deliciously warmed in the golden glow of the lamp, delicately freckled with sun-spots from so many youthful days spent out in the sun.

“Used t’think that’s the best compliment a guy’s ever given me,” the younger woman half-smiles, “‘cuz my only point of reference was Joe sayin’ I should get a touch up on my boob job.”

The explicit reference to Melissa’s ex-husband snaps Barbara out of her reverie, a cold splash of water over the heat that had been incrementally rising in her face by degrees.

“Joseph was a manchild and a heathen,” she sniffs primly, finally feeling comfortable enough with the details of Melissa’s divorce to confidently say so. Of course, six years ago, she also thought as much and occasionally said it, too, but that only ended with her and Melissa bitterly arguing over what sort of treatment that the second-grade teacher seemed to think she deserved.

Time must really heal all wounds, though, because now, Melissa only limply chuckles between drags of stale beer.

“And if the only compliment that men can ever muster about you concerns the state of your bosom—impressive though it certainly may be—then they don’t deserve the opportunity to compliment you at all,” she finishes pointedly, tapping her long nails against the side of her water. (By goodness, and dear almighty God, she’s trying to let it escape her notice that the Hooters logo is an incredibly apt brand for the conversation they’re currently having, but it's a damn uphill climb when the whole cup is nearly the same shade of Melissa's hair.)

The younger teacher must sense that they've arrived at dangerous grounds, though, skating around the very perimeter of a conversation that she’s so clearly unwilling to entertain, because she polishes the last of her beer off in one gulp and adeptly changes the subject.

“So you think my rack is impressive, huh?” She suddenly smirks, eyes twinkling in the dim light.

“Girlfriend!” Barbara immediately groans, shutting her eyes as something lurches within her at the insinuation. A twinge at the seething core of her. A not particularly unpleasant warmth coiling upwards from the pit of her stomach, coloring her insides the most intoxicating shades of red: scarlet, crimson, candied apple, vermilion.

The exact shade of Melissa Schemmenti’s vivid lips.

“I-I didn’t mean it like that!”

She suddenly feels the pressing need to go to church, but since that’s not currently an option, maybe a cold shower and an unspecified prayer for forgiveness will have to do.

Melissa only laughs at her, long and almost offensively hard, clutching her soft belly. 

“Ha!” She wheezes. “I’m not sure there are other ways t’mean it, Barb.”

—

A little after midnight, Barbara finally settles into the guest bedroom that she knows used to be where Joseph slept in the bitter months leading up to the divorce. It’s small but cozy, containing everything she needs to get through the night—a good mattress, a nightstand, an outlet to plug in her phone and sleep apnea machine—and yet, the kindergarten teacher finds herself in a hopeless war in the pursuit of stillness. She tries to read a few pages from the Danielle Steel book that she picked up from the library, but all the words just seem to fall off the page. She scrolls through her phone for a bit—checking emails, liking Facebook memes, adding to the grocery list in her notes—and just as abruptly stops when she sees that she missed a goodnight text from Gerald a few hours ago.

Night, hon. Sweet dreams. Give Melissa my love.

It’s entirely kind—(Gerald is and always will be)—and it excavates her on the spot for some obscure reason that she is unwilling to try and name. She slams her phone down like it’s the fabled Book of Judgment, flicks off the lamp, and attempts to finally go to sleep, but the smothering dark just becomes a convenient cover for her less palatable thoughts, ones explicitly having to do with the woman in the master bedroom next door.

Did she make it into the shower alright?

Take her medicines, shimmy into some pajamas?

(What sort of pajamas does her best friend wear when she's at home and no one is looking anyway? Surely, not a full set—such as the kind that Barbara prefers. Old t-shirts? A nightgown? Perhaps simply her undergarments.)

(Maybe even nothing at all.) (Barbara shivers in the darkness and idly wonders if the same reason that she cringes when Gerald is kind to her is because she spends her nighttime hours wondering what Melissa does or doesn't sleep in. She sternly dismisses the thought. Calls it absurd. Absolutely needs it to be. Cathedrals of bare flesh erect themselves in her mind anyway: a temple of a body, suffused in a divine and feminine glow.)

Is Melissa finally asleep, the copious amounts of booze that she drank blissfully washing her away into the gentle sea of the night?

Or, is she lying alone in bed, staring listlessly at the ceiling too?

Thinking about Gary.

Heartbroken over the loss of a man who could have treated her far better than he did.

It shouldn’t really concern her, and yet it does. Absolutely. Every unanswered question jabs at her as she lies in the bed that Melissa’s ex-husband used to sleep in, hopelessly trying to get comfortable under such inherently distressing conditions. She squirms, writhes, tosses and inevitably turns. 

She just as suddenly stills at the plaintive knock on her bedroom door.

“Barb?” The familiar voice leans tiredly against the wood. “You still up?”

“Yes,” she just barely breathes, slowly gathering herself into an upright position. Then louder, sounding much more like herself: “Mhm. Come on in.”

The invitation is heeded, the door swinging open to reveal Melissa in the silvery pool of the hallway’s night light, hair still damp from the shower, wearing nothing but an old Eagles shirt that just barely covers the tops of her thighs. 

Barbara swallows thickly, a kaleidoscope of sensations whirling through her stomach: so many colors, indecorous thoughts, and sickly desires.

Needs.

The very center of her tightens, shifts uneasily in response to this unprecedented sight that she'd just been vaguely dreaming of. She doesn’t remember the last time she saw something that she could so easily name as beautiful.

“Couldn’t sleep?” She croaks, loathing how affected her voice sounds, every syllable touched. It’s just her best friend after all, half-naked in the dripping light, looking strangely small in the tall frame of the door.

Nothing worth getting her panties in a twist about.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Melissa confirms, pulling a hand through her hair. “... I’d forgot how much I hate bein’ alone.”

It’s the type of vulnerable confession that the second-grade teacher would never, ever admit in the cold light of day, but here, in the complicated darkness, all of her inhibitions loosened by booze, Barbara can see that the younger woman thinks it might be permissible to finally be truthful.

Maybe, by the morning time, she’ll even forget that she ever was. 

“I’m here,” Barbara murmurs, suddenly aware of the painful emptiness of the space next to her, like it’s a hole in her side, an untenable absence, needing attention. How pathetic of her. 

How lonely.

(She has an incredible, caring husband.)

(Why in God’s blessed name is she lonely even still?)

“You always are,” Melissa agrees, apparently hearing the doubled-speak, too, and with that, there’s nothing else for her to do except crawl into bed next to Barbara, the mattress shuddering with her added weight.

And then there they are, two women lying in the same bed, side-by-faithful-side.

Shoulders just touching.

Hips.

Thighs.

The delicate bones of their ankles.

Melissa’s hair tickles Barbara’s neck.

Barbara's heart revolts in its ivory cage.

“I keep thinkin’,” the second-grade teacher eventually starts, slowly spooning the awful words into the bigness and the blackness of it all, “what if Gary was it? What if that cavolo was the best I’m gonna get at sixty-years old, and I just let him slip away ‘cause I don’t ever wanna see a big, shiny rock on my finger again? He was good to me. He cared. He could do his own laundry, and he always let me have the last beer. Shouldn’t that have been enough, Barb? Would it have killed me to give it a go?”

Barbara more than understands that these musings are not exactly for her—spoken to her, yes, but that’s not the same as directed at her, requiring her opinion, her precise judgments, her thoughts, her thoughts, her spinning, desperate thoughts. The younger woman is just venting, exhaling the noxious fumes before they can build up in her nervous system and explode.

Perhaps a good friend—an obliging one, a supportive one—would just let her do it. Get it all out there, and let her eventually fall asleep to sound of absolute silence. There’s no harm to be done in that, no stain on her immaculate soul if she does nothing that will make her feel like she needs to atone the next morning.

But, of course, maybe the crucial problem isn’t that Barbara Howard isn’t obliging and supportive.

Maybe the essential crux, the truth that she has tried desperately hard to alienate and annihilate and so cleverly elide, is that it has been a long, long time since friend has been a sufficient enough epithet for the intimacy that exists between herself and the woman scarcely inches away in the dark of this room. 

Maybe friend is just the necessary lie that the kindergarten teacher tells herself to make it through the day.

Something easily digestible, a poison that she doesn’t have to think too hard about to continually swallow.

But this particular epiphany, as revelatory as it is, as equally disruptive, is quickly cut off at its knees, oxygen deprived, neatly culled in the well-pruned garden of Barbara’s mind. She cannot think these things. 

They’re dirty, simply blasphemous. 

And yet, she can’t just let Melissa go unanswered either; she can’t let her go around thinking that she’s too damaged to fully love.

“But shouldn’t the precise inverse be true as well, Melissa?” She asks, perhaps a little fiercer in the darkness, and yet, every bit as exacting as she would be in the light. “That if he had loved you enough, he would have listened and met you where you were at? What is a marriage but a signed paper between two people? If he loved you enough, why on God’s green and almighty Earth did he require a government stamp as certified proof?”

Her chest heaves with the weight of this line of questioning; she feels strangely proud of this outburst and simultaneously sick that she does, the bitter extremes chasing each other in whorls in the pit of her gut, totally irreconcilable, both awful and glorious.

There’s no catharsis for the longest time either, the silence gnawing upon them both with razor-sharp teeth, puncturing their already tender skin.

“Melissa,” she bites her lip, fearing she’s finally gone too far, said too much, revealed something about herself that she can't possibly take back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—"

But the second-grade teacher cuts across her. 

“It wasn’t a dick move for him to propose.” And Barbara can hear it in the shattered facets of her voice, how hard she’s trying not to cry—not even here in the darkness where no one except the good Lord can ever really see. “It wasn’t his fault I’m effed in the head.”

“You are not —” She starts vehemently.

“I am.”

“You didn’t settle, Melissa Schemmenti,” she insists, reaching over into the barest gap between them and decisively grabbing the younger woman’s hand, templing it with her own, their ten fingers interlinking beneath the coolness of the sheets. “You loved him and yourself enough to let him go. That isn’t self-destruction, sweetheart, and never could be. You saved yourself. There are plenty of people in this world who wish they had an inch of your bravery to do the same.”

Someone in this very room even.

A pious would-be-sinner in Melissa's ex-husband's bed.

“But maybe I was wrong, Barb. Maybe it wouldn’t have cost me anything t'get married.”

“No,” Barbara says sharply, but then, feeling Melissa’s hand tense in her own, just as immediately softens, brushing her thumb along the sharp spines of the other woman's knuckles.

“No,” she repeats herself, with a renewed gentleness that almost overwhelms her, with all the collected tenderness in her bones. “You already knew that it would cost you everything.”

Melissa sits with this thought for a longer while still, perhaps arranging her counterargument into an fusillade of harsh words that Barbara probably even deserves at this point, but in the end, all that comes out is a low, defeated chuckle.

A squeeze of the hand.

“Jesus, if I only loved myself about half as much as you loved me,” she starts, but Barbara interrupts her again, keen to get the last word in, to have the golden opportunity to define the exact depths of her love.

“—then you’d be the most self-assured woman in the world,” she finishes softly, squeezing Melissa’s hand right back.

“Gagootz,” Melissa accuses her again with a fond sigh, and she shifts in the bed a little—and then a whole lot—until she’s leaning against Barbara’s shoulder, and all of her senses are filled with an excess of her: the slight dampness of her hair, the delicate swell of her strawberry shampoo, skin-touching-skin-touching-smooth-and-warm-skin.

“Forever and ever, amen,” Barbara murmurs, finally daring to press her cheek against the crown of Melissa’s dark head.

She asks for nothing more and daily gets by with so much less, so this is the closest thing to paradise if such a thing exists on this mortal earth. 

The Howards have talked about this—night after night after long and charged night. Neither of them want Melissa, their closest friend in the entire world, to be alone in the wake of a tumultuous divorce, and yet, they refuse to even so much as broach the topic of what it means that they both jumped at Barbara’s suggestion that they invite the younger woman to share their home with them, nor do they discuss how the effect that it produced upon them was instantaneous.

(Of one mind and of one accord, they’d had the best damn sex that they’d had in a long time.)

“I love youse guys too,” Melissa shrugs helplessly between swills of Merlot, “but I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m—”

But whatever protestation that she’d been going to make is immediately undercut and undone by the fact that fresh tears are forming in her eyes, and oh, God, she hates that. She hates crying in front of others, hates appearing weak, but it just hit her that she’s going to be alone in her big, empty house again tonight, and she keeps having nightmares, and Joe—

Fuck that bastard.

That utter stronzo.

She still miss him all the same.

“You’re not fine,” Barbara finishes for her, gently encircling her hand around Melissa’s slender wrist. Her chest thrums at the touch, all of her nerves electric, but she holds on. She doesn’t ever know how to let her best friend go. “And that’s perfectly okay, sweetheart.”

“Let us take care of you, Mel,” Gerald adds without looking up. “You’d do the same for us...”

Melissa looks between the couple, tender and so speechless, her heart an obstruction in her throat.

But eventually, she nods once to show that she’s understood.

She’s absolutely not fine.

She needs them.

(And they want her—they really do!—and she pathologically needs to feel wanted. It is the only way she ever feels secure.)

“Shit, last time I was in a threesome, I didn’t feel nearly as warm and gooey on the inside,” she tries to joke as she leans into Barbara, as she finds herself soothed by Gerald humming to the Sam Cooke song warbling upwards from the record player.

“Melissa!” Barbara cries, torn between amusement and alarm. 

Gerald chuckles, and it’s a rich, crooked sound that settles pleasantly upon them all.

“You’ve been in all the wrong threesomes then,” he smirks, winking at both of the ladies. 

And Melissa laughs so hard that she feels as though she’s going to bust her damn remaining kidney, and Barbara desperately tries and gloriously fails not to crack a smile.

They have a lovely rest of the night, eating dinner and drinking wine, talking about everything and nothing.

They make plans to go over to Melissa’s house later and grab her clothes.

With a flick of her wrist, Barbara puts her sedan into park, but she doesn’t turn off the ignition quite yet. A quick glance at her watch lets her know that they still have some time before lunch is over. 

Ten minutes.

Sure, she just spent the last half-hour combing the aisles at Ross’s with the second grade teacher—showing her how to find the best bargains and helping her choose a cover-up that doesn’t seem like three clashing patterns have gotten sick on it—but Barbara has more in her left to give to the young woman who has looked like a kicked puppy all day long.

She gets it now, having finally met Vanetta Teagues.

That’s Janine’s mom.

“Sweetheart?” She prods gently, leaning back in her seat to better look at her coworker, who doesn’t initially stir at the pet name, carved from stone where she sits. Her chin is propped in one hand; the other is knuckled tightly around the handle of her shopping bag. Sunlight dusts her unmoving curls in gold. 

“Janine?” Barbara tries a little more loudly and succeeds this time, unfortunately startling her. She nearly jumps, restrained only by the seatbelt strapped across her, breathing heavily.

“Oh, sorry, Barbara!” She apologizes vehemently and rather unnecessarily. It seems to be a reflexive habit of hers to assume that she’s the one at fault. Barbara, having only spent five minutes alone with Vanetta, already has a distinct visual map of every time that she must have told her two daughters that they were the problem and the burden, perpetually the ones to blame. “I was just, um… lost in thought.”

“It happens to the best of us,” she shrugs warmly, “especially after a long day. The good Lord knows that I can be two crayons shy of a box from time to time.”

Barbara pauses, mulling over what she just said. It’s actually an uncommon admission for her—not being perfect, having off days, maybe even more often than she cares to admit—but she supposes that it’s something that Janine probably needs to hear. After all, it's what she would have liked to hear when she was a young woman of color, growing up and knowing, far better than most, that the eyes of the world were trained on her, waiting to see if her careful balancing act would ever collapse.

She had to be excellent, and so she was.

There was no room for error; every minor flaw was admissible to the merciless jury of mankind, who ultimately had the power and the audacity alike to pronounce her doomed.

Even though she's now decades removed from being considered young, Barbara still hasn’t quite forgotten those ingrained fears of her adolescence. Maybe she even inadvertently passed a few of them to her own daughters when she was raising them. But inwardly, privately, so secretly that she's likely disguised the selfless intention from even herself, she’s hoped for better lives for them, a world where they could be freer than she ever was—freer to make mistakes, freer to try new things, freer to have big and messy feelings that they don't have to neatly package in the well-ordered systems of their minds. 

Maybe she should tell them that one day and make the hard part explicit, but she has a sneaking suspicion that both of her wonderful girls have already figured that vital truth out for themselves.

Janine, though, she might need a little extra help to see the bigger picture.

That’s clear enough for Barbara to both discern and capably respond to.

She’s never been able to say no to a child in need.

“What, no?! You?” Janine laughs incredulously, picking up on the rarity of the circumstance almost immediately. “You’re Barbara Howard. Your crayon box is always full, and, like, super clean and shiny. It makes all the rest of us kinda jealous."

She smiles sadly at this; it's a familiar refrain—this adoration that she's striven most of her professional career to deserve and the entirety of her personal life to wholly live up to. (Even to this day, she's not sure she's ever completely reached the mark.)

“It’s touching that you think so highly of me, Janine,” she says, lightly shaking her head, “but I have my moments too. Perhaps far fewer than I used to, sure—experience has seasoned me, and it absolutely will you too someday—but still, even at sixty-six years old, I’ve been known to accidentally set tables on fire during my time.”

“Oh, God,” the younger teacher snorts inelegantly, covering her mouth. “I forgot about that.”

“Well, I certainly haven’t,” Barbara says it teasingly, like it’s a part of the joke, their quipping game, but she knows that it very well isn't. Every time she so much as walks in to the teacher lounge these days and sees the pot of sunflowers on hers and Melissa’s table, she understands that it’s covering up her own scorch marks.

Her momentary lapse.

Her nearly costly mistake.

That one bad day.

She’s somewhat made her peace with that, partially because she doesn’t have the energy to make a new martyrdom out of a mole hill, and partially because Melissa once delicately fingered the stems of that ersatz arrangement and noted that there were two.

Just for them.

Only for them.

“Point is, Janine,” she continues softly, “no need to apologize for simply being. I’ve been down that road far too many times before.” (A perpetual hypocrite, maybe she still is.) “So take this as wisdom from an old timer who cares. It’s perfectly okay to be human.”

Janine immediately glances away at the profound weight of these words, visibly overwhelmed and unprepared to be so. She tucks one of her dark curls behind her ear; her shoulders shiver against an unseen cold.

Barbara bites her lower lip and wonders if she’s overstepped yet another line; she seems to be doing that a lot with this particular young woman today, profusely and perhaps even recklessly blurring the margins between colleague and friend, mentee and work daughter.

But her fears seem to be unfounded because she does in fact get a response.

Eventually.

(Harrowingly.)

“Is it okay to still be sad about my mom, even though you just did a really nice thing for me?” Janine asks in a small voice that cleaves the kindergarten teacher’s beating heart in two.

This poor child.

This twenty-six year old woman, who pays rent, drives a car, and is a good teacher to all her children.

But even still.

“Yes, baby girl,” she murmurs, reaching over and curling her fingers around Janine’s wrist. 

It’s a simple gesture, a precious one. 

“That’s part of being human too.”

Janine nods and sniffs once, but she doesn’t say anything.

“The ops are upstairs with Jacob,” the younger teacher says, leaning against the door like it’s both habit and home. Her vivid hair is haloed by the ring of Barbara’s sunflower wreath, and the effect is lovely—all that scarlet, crowned in pops of autumnal gold. 

“Quick. You ‘n me can make a break for it if we hustle.”

“Girlfriend,” Barbara can’t help but chuckle, “you’re fooling yourself if you think I ever belong in the same sentence as the word hustle. I don’t hustle, I—“

“—sedately shuffle from place to place?” Melissa grins, waggling a mischievous brow.

“—gracefully swan from one destination to another,” she finishes with a mock sniff, unable to be especially affronted when Melissa laughs like she does, so loudly, with the entirety of her belly. “Don’t tease! You’re not making it anywhere quick either on that hip of yours."

They both have a bad something or another. Melissa’s bad hip and Barbara’s bad knee. They're mutually bad backs. They complain about these grievances to each other often, especially now that it’s fall and the cold is starting to seep into their bones.

“Sheesh, don’t remind me,” her friend half-smiles. “Almost threw it out again luggin’ that new rug to my room.” 

But then she half-grimaces too, lightly rubbing the affected area with three fingers, and Barbara frowns just as immediately, pushing her playfulness to the side along with her class’s reading report.

"You should really go see a specialist about that, you know.” 

“And let some rich quack put me on a bunch’a painkillers? Hell to the no,” Melissa scoffs easily. She has distrusted doctors for as long as Barbara has known her, thinks they’re all two-bit charlatans and overhyped clowns. The only person she ever goes to see is her second cousin, Frankie, a general practitioner whose practice is adjoined to a pizza joint that may or may not also be a money laundering front.

Barbara doesn’t like to think about that fact very often.

“Well, at least come here and get yourself an Advil for the road,” she exhales, making the more expedient decision not to press the point. They’ll have that row another day, and it’ll likely be spectacular—as their rare arguments usually are—but that’s future Barbara’s cross to painfully bear. “You know I hate it when you’re hurting.”

“I hate it when I’m hurting too,” Melissa quips, always a snarker, even in the pits, but all the same, she obediently peels herself off of the door and limps on over, one plod of her clunky boots at a time. Barbara’s heart inexplicably plummets into her gut when the second grade teacher decides, apropos of absolutely nothing, to partially lower herself on the edge of her desk, rattling her pencil cup with her added weight.

Her sheer and overwhelming presence. 

Her leopard-spotted blouse and those tight black pants. The way the leather rasps when her thighs brush together as she incrementally shifts and makes herself comfortable—cozy even—on Barbara Howard’s extraordinarily immaculate desk. The endless cascade of her fiery red hair and the saints that are perpetually worshiping at the altar of her marble bosom. The slight citrus smell of her favorite perfume.

“What?” Melissa chuckles, apparently seeing something complicated in Barbara’s expression, something that Barbara would probably shy away from in the uncomplicated honesty of a mirror. Sudden heat crests within her. It becomes a knot in the column of her throat, becomes a ticking time bomb, a violent pleasure, a pleasant wound. “You prefer I keep my ass off your stuff?”

She has less than three seconds to decide which is worse—having Melissa Schemmenti on her desk or not having her there. Neither of these options frankly brings her closer to God.

“You’re being absolutely facetious,” she finally mutters, not looking the second grade teacher in the eye as she dives down to retrieve her purse. She makes quite a meal out of rifling through it for a bottle that she handily keeps in a side-pocket.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Your question was hardly appropriate enough to warrant a response.”

“So I’m being naughty, huh?” Melissa guffaws. Melissa jokes. From Barbara’s limited perspective, it’s all a joke to Melissa: her innuendoes and habitual crassness, the intimate geography of their bodies in relation to each other. 

Their closeness in general.

In so many more ways than one.

She’s always like to flirt with Barbara, no matter their respective marital statuses.

Nothing ever truly inappropriate, of course, calling her hot mama here or lightly ribbing her about them being work wives there. And that was all fine and good until one day, after many, many years of them being the very best of friends, Barbara suddenly collected the punchline like a baseball bat to her gut.

Until one day, every touch and casual glance, every hon and other pet name lightly thrown her way, actually did something to her.

Set her eternal soul on fire for one thing.

Condemned her.

(Saved her.)

Condemned her.

“That word has an entirely different connotation, and you know it.”

“I mean, depends on how you’re using the word.”

“Melissa!” She groans, flushing, feeling nauseous, vaguely suspecting that she’s flirting back.

“Okay, fine, fine. I’ll stop being a cagacazzo—“ Melissa chortles obliviously and goes to get up, but before Barbara can capably stop herself, before morality can catch up to the rest of her usually well-ordered senses, she impulsively places her free hand on her best friend’s knee. 

They both shiver violently upon first contact, stunned silent, both incredulous that she actually dared. 

Melissa’s cheeks blanch and then just as immediately color, all the mirth draining from her face and becoming… well… Barbara doesn’t know.

(Barbara doesn’t want to admit the mirrored emotion—even to herself.)

(Especially to herself.)

“You don’t have to get up,” she croaks, withdrawing her hand as though burned, cupping the pill bottle she finally retrieved like it’s the only thing keeping her from kissing her colleague. Surely, there are other barriers, though.

Surely, there is her wonderful husband.

Surely, there is God.

“I was just… joking.”

“Me too,” Melissa says quickly, eyes averted. “I was just joking too.”

And they both laugh then because they’re both joking—obviously—a little too loudly to ever sound entirely sincere. Still, they grant each other the kindness of overlooking this inconvenient truth. Still, they laugh and unpleasantly laugh.

(That’s how this—whatever this is that exists between them—keeps going after all: this almost tango, this halfway song-and-unending-dance. This terrible thing. This beautiful thing. This unfathomable sin. This simultaneous grace.)

(They’re a chemical collision that keeps never, ever happening, and there’s primal relief in the fact. There’s unspeakable sadness too.)

“Here,” she says, untwisting the cap of her bottle and finally shaking an Advil into the palm of her hand. Extends it. An offering. A perfect opportunity to move on from the stickiness of the moment. 

Melissa takes it. Her fingers scrape Barbara’s lifelines.

“Take a swig of my coffee,” she continues weakly, all her atoms thrilling at even that barest touch. “I don’t mind.”

“Thanks,” Melissa grunts, popping the pill into her mouth and hastily lifting the aforementioned drink to her lips. Her nose promptly screws up in disgust.

“Blegh. Too flippin’ sweet.” 

An unsurprising criticism coming from this particular woman. Melissa usually takes hers black.

“It’s just French Vanilla creamer.”

“It’s a milkshake in a mug is what it is,” she shakes her head fondly. “Don’t how you flippin’ stand it, Barb.”

“Oh, well, believe it or not, I have my sundry vices too,” Barbara chuckles lightly. They both do. And it’s far more genuine this time, perhaps simply because it’s the kind of banter they’re more accustomed to. It's familiar territory, safe and solid ground. They won’t get themselves in trouble joking about their coffee preferences, and Barbara almost convinces that she doesn’t regret their capacity for discretion, their exercise of extraordinary and remarkably Christian restraint.

“You? Vices?” Melissa arches an amused brow. “Get outta here, Mrs. Barbara Howard, perfect woman of God.”

Barbara opens her mouth and then abruptly closes it, immediately wants to refute the point, needs for Melissa to know that faith and perfection aren’t necessarily intertwined, that she is as flawed as any other human on this God-blesséd earth. 

But she stops herself; she disciplines her wayward tongue.

She’s spent decades upon unceasing decades constructing the meticulous reputation that her friend is proposing that she has achieved. And that gratifies her, of course—sure, yes, absolutely. Her lifelong project of embodying excellence beyond excellence has clearly been a quantifiable success.

But still, there is something in her that instinctively balks at Melissa elevating her to a lofty pedestal. She wants the whole world to believe that she is perfect but needs just one person—this person—to understand that it’s all just a well-executed and beautifully performed facade

She’s saved from trying to resolve this frankly unresolvable contradiction, though, by Melissa suddenly wincing again, her hand going to her hip as she shifts a little on the desk, and Barbara latches on to this microgesture and readymade excuse gladly. She leans forward, shoving her own thousands of invisible hurts away.

“You should have told me that your hip was bothering you, sweetheart,” she murmurs seriously, still flexing her fingers around the Advil bottle, resisting the urge to reach out and help her friend, to work her fingertips into the sore tissue there… discovering the plump softness… the forbidden fruit… of her rosy skin…

She briefly turns away, coughing into her own shoulder.

Ridiculous impulse.

Absurd.

“We could have gotten one of the Three Musketeers to shoulder an additional load.”

“Pssh,” Melissa rolls her eyes, “I don’t think Jacob could lift a log if the log was a two-by-four with the word log written on top of it.”

“Foul!"

“But I’m right,” the younger teacher grins.

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” she agrees as Melissa laughs again, all mischief, so playful and unapologetically loud. Barbara swats at her arm, always pretending to be the sanctimonious one between them. 

A smile smuggles itself at the corner of her lips anyway.

“‘Sides,” Melissa eventually shrugs, “it was worth it to see the pipsqueak all happy.”

“Mm,” Barbara shakes her head fondly. “That Janine.”

She’s certainly a handful, that’s for sure—overeager and overzealous, clearly overcompensating for something that’s likely above Barbara’s thoroughly abysmal pay grade to ever fix. But even still, the young lady has a kind heart and an admirable passion for what she does. She’s good with her kids and tries hard to be better for them every day. 

Those traits alone aren’t sure signs and predictors that she’s going to survive this Sisyphean hell of a public school system, of course, but they’re certainly not going to hurt her chances either.

After a year of having known her, Barbara likes her—not that she'll ever admit as much to her, though.

“A flippin’ mess.”

“Oh, beyond a shadow of an entire doubt.”

“Think she’ll last?” Melissa asks, which is a pretty remarkable question in and of itself. No new teacher has stayed long enough recently for either of them to bother caring. Their investment is hard won, fought for, far from easily earned.

They’ve both been endlessly burned in the past, or rather, more accurately still, they’ve mutually spent their lifetimes burning themselves trying to care for other people.

“If life has taught us one thing,” she starts thoughtfully, “it’s that good things rarely do…”

Before she can continue, though, Melissa cuts her off with a short laugh like a bark.

“Ha!” Her verdant eyes twinkle. “What about us old bats then?”

“Exceptions to the rule clearly.”

“Clearly,” the younger teacher mocks. 

“Girlfriend!” She chides, laughing. “Let me finish.”

“Okay, okay, go on telling me about how shit the world is.”

“Vulgar,” Barbara shakes her head in a long-suffering manner, “and not where I was going with that sentence anyway. Good things rarely last, yes, but who but the good Lord ever truly knows? Perhaps Janine will surprise us in the end. Maybe Mr. Hill too.”

“Oh, look who’s bein’ all facetious now,” Melissa grins as she finally sidles off the desk, straightening up on the tiled floor with a thud and a slightly pained grunt. She towers over Barbara now, who’s still in her rolling chair. The skin of her leopard-print shirt stretches across all her delicious curves. 

“At least it’s not the same thing as being naughty,” she mutters, glancing away as her friend seizes with laughter.

“Semantics, schemantics, Barb. We both sound like total lesbos sometimes, y’know.”

Barbara can't help herself—she splutters incoherently, accidentally dropping the Advil bottle she’s been fiddling with for the last five minutes. It rattles and comedically rolls somewhere far beneath her desk.

“W-what?!” She eventually gets out, now gripping the arms of her chair. “We don’t? I could never. Melissa! You and I—“

“God,” Melissa goes on, all her features alive with raucous delight, positively shit-eating. She taps her chin with one finger.  “Come t’think of it. I’d make one hell of a good lesbian if I didn’t also like dudes—“

“Melissa! Be serious!”

“I am serious,” the second grade teacher laughs, not sounding particularly serious at all. “About who I am anyway. Don’t worry, hon. I know you play for a different team.”

But that last sentence, even if it’s a part of the joke—of this game of fluster-Barbara-Howard-senselessly that Melissa is expertly playing—suddenly veers into an earnest sadness that Barbara can’t quite unhear and her friend can’t just as quickly disguise.

“Shame,” Barbara mumbles without really intending to, but the word slips from her mouth before she can catch it and scold it for being reckless anyway.

“Shame,” Melissa agrees and tries another smile. It's an exhausted, little thing; it slumps like a body in the darks of her eyes.

“‘Sup, Ger?” Melissa says around the toothpick clenched between her teeth, propping her phone against her ear with her shoulder. She’s just polished off the rest of her leftover steak from the other night, and now she’s in the process of making herself an excessivelyboozy bushwacker with every intention of getting buzzed.

Between the demands of the fundraiser and everyone and their cousins either fighting or eye-fucking, it’s been a long damn week at Abbott Elementary.

Melissa had mostly stayed out of it, except to help two grown men arbitrate custody rights over a cat and give Janine a little unsolicited dating advice that may have accidentally just boiled down to women are hot… but still, all of the collected tension gradually sucked the air from the hallways and kept her on edge—that fine line between general wariness and hypervigilance that she tends to straddle on a daily basis.

So Mama undoubtedly needs a drink… or two… to help ease her into the weekend. She’d been planning on stripping down to her undergarments and curling up in her bed to watch basketball, sipping on her bushwacker through a bright green bendy straw…

When Gerald calls, though—sometime a little after six—she gets a gut feeling that these best laid plans might just have to wait until later.

“Nothing much, Mel,” he returns, and she can hear the tired smile in his voice, his gentle fondness for her, his familiar care. “Still in Jersey for a couple of days. This job’s taking a little longer than expected…” 

Gerald’s a welder and he sometimes gets sent out-of-state for the odd contract or two. Decent money. Effed up hours. It’s been happening with more and more frequency lately too, driving his wife nearly up the wall and through it. 

“He’s never home anymore,” she’d only recently complained. They’d been sitting on the sagging couch in the break room together, waiting for the morning news to come on. No one else had arrived yet, and so their shoulders just touched, the soft lines of their thighs.

Side-by-side. 

Parallel to each other.

Always.

And Barbara had idly played with her ornate wedding ring, twisting and twisting it around the base of her finger, while Melissa had simply watched, mesmerized by the way that the diamonds glittered in the harsh light.

“And even when he is home… even when we’re in the same room—" She had gone on before abruptly stopping, biting her plump lower lip, visibly conscious that she was about to reveal too much.

Even to Melissa. 

Perhaps especially to her.

For all that the two of them shared between and with one another, somewhere along the way of their nearly thirty year friendship, they had articulated an implicit rule to never quite discuss the intimacies of their love lives anymore. 

That particular conversation nearly always devolved into one of their rare and exceedingly bitter fights.

(You don’t know him like I do, they’ve both said to each other before.)

(Why do you care so much?)

“Mm,” Barbara had only murmured, shaking her perfectly coiffed head, “forgive me, Melissa—you shouldn’t have to be subjected to my marital woes before the bell has even rung…”

In that moment, as Barbara expertly smoothed her troubled brow over with a sad and beatific smile, Melissa hadn’t dared transgressed their personal golden rule of noninterference. Letting the other wallow, no matter how much it hurt to watch them suffer. Moreover, she knew from experience that there was nothing to say to that anyway—nothing, at least, that the older woman was ready to actually hear.

But in the absence of words—in the mutual understanding that they were not allowed to confront each other directly in that way—she reached over and laced Barbara’s slender fingers with her own, creating yet another contact point between them.

Shoulders.

Thighs.

Hands.

Barbara had permitted the intimate touch; she even closed her darkly framed eyes and leaned into it.

It was an innocuous indulgence that both of them could live with come the next morning.

“Oh, yeah, Jersey,” Melissa replies neutrally, finally taking the toothpick out of her mouth and lightly tossing it into the nearby trash can. “Barb said somethin’ about that.”

Granted, she can’t help but get one jab in, perhaps as recompense for all the times that she’s had to listen to Barbara endlessly complain about the circular problem, day-in and day-out: “She swears y’spend more time in a hotel than at home these days.”

She has no particular remorse for saying so; she knows this isn't exactly news to him.

“Occupational hazard,” Gerald mumbles sheepishly, his only reasonable defense, his go-to excuse, that same somethingshe’s pretty sure that both Howards tell themselves at night, incapable of admitting to anything else.

“I know,” Melissa frowns sympathetically because even still, despite her frustrations, she gets it.

She really does.

It took her and Joe years upon miserable years to ever 'fess up to the truth of what time had done to them and their once loving marriage—and even then, they could only do it when the barrel of their loaded histories were pressed against each other’s already bleeding skin. 

In the end, she couldn’t stand for him to even touch her.

They fought so much—every day and all the goddamn time. If it wasn’t about their abysmal finances, then it was about his booze problem, the way he drowned a particularly bad fire in whiskey. And if it was supposedly about his jealousy that men and women alike looked at her whenever they went out, then it was really about sexand their increasing lack of it thereof.

In the end, too selfish to ever go long without a good fuck, he cheated on her with Nina Santa Cruz, one of their mutual friends.

And that was that.

The trigger was pulled; there was nothing left to do except bury their vows in a shared grave and call it a goddamn waste.

They had loved each other.

Really.

But that’d been a long time ago, and they had been different people then.

(They had just been kids.)

“But, uh, listen… that’s kinda what I’m calling about anyway,” Gerald continues, his tone now hesitant, appropriately chastised. “Just got off the phone with Barbara and she said that she has a flat tire at our church. Bible Club tonight, y’know… I called my brother, but he won’t be able to help her out for another hour or so. Do you mind swinging by there and taking a look?”

She doesn’t even hesitate. 

“’Course,” she nods vigorously—only dimly aware that Gerald can’t see her—already moving, already raring to go. Barbara is in trouble. Barbara needs her. She unceremoniously shoves her blender glass with the unfinished bushwacker in the fridge, throws on a leather jacket and scarf, and unhooks her keys from their place on the wall. In the mad whirl and cacophonous rush, she almost misses his next response.

“Thank God—I knew you’d say yes,” he sighs in audible relief. “It’s funny. Barb seemed kind of reluctant to call you...”

“Huh?” The question comes out a little more forcefully than she had intended. Hurt even. (Melissa hates to admit it—how easily hurt that she gets.) She’s at the door that leads from her kitchen to the garage, her fingers tensed around the brass handle as she digests those thoroughly unexpected words. “What d’you mean by that?”

Gerald must hear the defensiveness in her tone because he scrambles to come up with a placating answer. 

“Oh, well, you know our Barb,” he chuckles nervously, and her stomach strangely twists at the choice phrasing. Not his Barb. Theirs. As though they have an equal claim to knowing her intimately: her husband and her... best friend. “So prideful… and she told me that you were busy doing something with Gary tonight.”

The strange assertion stops her short.

Not only is it explicitly untrue—(she hasn’t been out with Gary the Vending Machine Guy in ages)—but Barbara specifically knows that it’s untrue. In fact, just before they’d walked to their cars this afternoon, Melissa had told her what her plans were for the evening.

Nothing and jack squat.

Wanna come over for dinner?

It’d both been her way of making sure that Barbara wasn’t alone in her achingly empty house for yet another night while Gerald was gone… and also a subtle opportunity for her to check in with her after everything that had gone down with the fundraiser and Ava. Melissa has had a long week just being at the margins of everything, but Barbara, in the center of it and the thick, has had a hard one. 

There’s a crucial difference in the fact, but there has been precious little time for her to pull Barbara off to the side and ask her how she really feels about any of it. 

She got a sense, from how Ava and Barbara had been laughing together in the gym earlier today at the assembly, that they had at least patched things up; however, Melissa won’t be completely satisfied until she hears it from her friend’s mouth that she’s okay.

Barbara had politely refused her offer, had told her that she was going to Bible Club, but that she'd see her on Monday, girlfriend. And nothing had seemed amiss except for a vague tiredness in her eyes and perhaps a certain tightness in her lipstick coated smile that could have been just a trick of the light.

Clearly, though, something is up.

“Seriously, Mel, if you’re busy, don’t worry about it,” Gerald adds as she mulls this over in complicated silence. “Samuel will be able to get to her once he gets off of work, and there are probably still folks at the church who can keep her company…” 

“No,” Melissa says hastily, realizing that he’s trying to give her a generous out. “I’ve got it. Gary, uh, went home early.”

She’s not entirely sure why she’s playing into Barbara’s inexplicable lie—perhaps to spare her best friend the ignominy of being caught, perhaps because she wants to be the sole one to discover the truth, perhaps because she’s starting to get an inkling that whatever is going on is bigger than she’d originally assumed, and only she seems to realize this.

To recognize the warning signs.

Gerald is… well... absent.

“Oh, good,” comes a grateful reply, a thoroughly oblivious one. “Thank you again, Melissa. What would we ever do without you?”

“Excellent question,” she laughs heavily, shrugging a hand across the back of her neck.

The gesture does not warm her eyes.

— 

Some twenty-five minutes later, when Melissa pulls into the driveway of the Baptist church that’s a little less than ten miles away from Barbara’s house, she’s greeted with an utterly strange and estranging sight: a nearly empty parking lot, a vast and unlit building, and a dark silhouette sitting on the stone steps leading up to the white double doors—simply shivering in a long, silvery coat with a fur collar…

As she eases into the empty spot to the right of the familiar black sedan that’s parked directly in front of the stairs, her headlights rove over and mercilessly illuminate that tall and lonely figure.

Barbara Howard, ashen with the cold, squints and visors her eyes against the twin beams, her mouth rounded in a perfect ‘o’ of surprise.

She’s caught.

Apprehended.

And, just by the looks of her, clearly undone.

Melissa barely remembers to brake her car and turn the ignition off before she’s stumbling out of her door and into the biting air. Out of the corner of her eye, she can already tell that Barbara’s front right tire is indeed flat, but she’ll worry about that later. Knows how to put a spare on with her eyes closed.

There are bigger problems to deal with, far worse demons to bravely confront.

“What the hell are you doin’ out here, Barb?” She calls out, her voice nearly swept away by the wind. Folding her arms over her chest, she marches forward and forward still until she’s at the foot of the weathered staircase, and Barbara’s wide-eyed gaze is consuming her. Her painted lips are chapped, her cheeks noticeably hollow, and unmistakable tear tracks have vertically frozen on the sharply hewn planes of her face. “You’re freezin’ your ass off.” 

“Language, Melissa,” Barbara scolds reflexively, though the sound is vacant, lacking any real conviction. “We’re near the house of the Lord…” 

“Sorry.” She resists the urge to roll her eyes at the familiar sanctimony, recognizing that now is hardly the time. “You’re freezin’ your tush off. Is that better?” 

But she doesn’t receive a response, Barbara now determinedly looking somewhere over Melissa’s shoulder, plainly trying not to cry, so loathe to be vulnerable in front of anyone, eternally convinced that no one wants her emotional honesty, that they’ve come to expect the performance and the impeccable mask. 

Melissa gets it.

She really does.

Nine times out of ten, she feels the exact same way.

“Okay, okay, no more wisecrackin’ out of me,” she says, her voice softening, and she takes the last couple of steps between herself and Barbara at a jog. When she’s even with the other woman, she lowers herself down gently until they’re sitting as they always do—as they have historically done—brushing limbs. Shoulders. Hips. Thighs. It doesn’t escape Melissa’s notice that Barbara’s forgotten her gloves again, and her fingers are trembling where they're clasped in a neat temple next to her stomach.

Without hesitating, she peels off her own green scarf and methodically winds it around Barbara’s chilled hands like she’s bandaging a critical wound.

“So level with me here,” she goes on as she finishes the job, loosely tucking the ends away. Barbara only stares down at her now swaddled appendages, her eyes glazed over, her posture as unimpeachable as ever, shoulders squared, spine ramrod straight, like a perfect, porcelain doll. “You’re sitting outside in the cold in front of a completely dark church even though it’s barely seven o’clock. And your tire’s flat, but ya lie to your husband about why you don’t want me to come ‘n bail you out.” 

Barbara inhales sharply at this last part—at being called out for her fib—snapping out of her reverie as though stricken.

“Melissa, I—” She rasps, audibly horrified.

“—I’m not mad,” Melissa adds quickly, curling her hand around the other woman’s slender wrist and squeezing. It’s true enough. Any anger that she might have felt quickly dissipated upon seeing the kindergarten teacher on the steps, so sad and tired. Irrefutably broken. She’s never had it in her to kick a helpless creature when it’s down. “I just wanna understand. This isn’t like you…”

In the ensuing silence that follows this choice assertion, long and painfully loaded, the harsh wind eddies around them both. Melissa instinctively wants to encircle Barbara with her arms and shield her from it.

But she takes one look at her face, at the divot in her black brow, at the ruins of her ancient eyes just beneath, and immediately understands that the kindergarten teacher is barely feeling the cold right now, that whatever is hurting her springs from some deep well within her soul, spewing forth like a polluted spillage, gurgling and gushing.

Simply oozing.

An infection has settled, and it has made Barbara Howard absolutely sick. 

“Isn’t it, though?” Comes a quiet reply, faint and almost indistinguishable, but wrought with unmistakable bitterness. “I am all hypocrisy, Melissa… I’ve tried so hard to be good, to follow all of God’s carefully articulated edicts, and still fall short of His glory…”

“Is this about Ava?” Melissa guesses—perhaps a little too hastily. Even though she hasn’t heard all the details yet, she’s at least understood that Barbara’s fight with the principal had been about Ava playing dirty with the fundraiser and the older woman not liking it. “If it is, I’ll talk to her.”

And say what—she doesn’t exactly know. 

She doesn’t particularly see anything wrong with what Ava did in the first place. 

Hell, in her shoes, she would have done the same herself.

She has done the same herself. What Ava calls her  charisma, the Schemmentis just know as basic survivalism—whatever it takes to be the last shmuck standing.

But she’s desperate to solve the problem, to propose a solution that will make the woman next her stop looking so haunted. Barbara shakes her head, though, with more vehemence than she’s displayed through the entire conversation.

“No,” she says firmly, cutting her dark eyes at Melissa. “This isn’t about Ava… she… she actually made a lot of sense this week, perhaps being the first person to ever directly tell me that many of my moral boundaries come from a position of privilege—the luxury of never having had to learn better.”

It’s a charged sentence, one that the second-grade teacher doesn’t have to dwell on very long for it to click. Barbara Howard is undoubtedly a sheltered woman in many respects, having never needed one goddamn reason to play in the mud as she had once so indelicately put it, cutting Melissa to the quick. She’d been discounted by so many people in her life that it’d almost become background noise—the way that every Tom, Dick, and Harry had no trouble in presuming the worst of her. But never in a million years had she ever thought the same sort of dismissive rhetoric would ever come from Barbara, her closest friend in the entire world.

Barbara, who had always believed in her.

Barbara, who thought her capable.

Resourceful.

She supposes, though, the other teacher must have limited her definition of Melissa's resourcefulness to just having a guy who knows a guy, willfully ignoring that her affinities for scraping by and twisting arms and shaking people down are crucial extensions of this trait. Indeed, being resourceful to her just means doing whatever it takes to endure a life where she learned quickly enough that just about everyone has it in them to hold a knife.

Melissa is silent at this revelation—awed that Ava of all people had been the one to tease it out of Barbara and maybe even a little jealous that she hadn’t been able to do so herself.

That she hadn’t been the one to make her friend fully understand that there is no such thing as clear-cut morals in a world of monsters and men, especially not when the two are often one and the same.

“This is about me,” Barbara continues of her own accord, her voice breaking on that last syllable, that simple and so heavily freighted word. “And the fact that even though I am well aware of my own follies, of the sins that stain my immortal soul, I… cannot bring myself to fully repent, to refute Ava’s philosophies, to emphasize the straight and narrow way to my students…”

She pauses, glancing at Melissa through long lashes, tears shining in her eyes. 

“To regret shaking down Sister Delisha Sloss for you, Melissa," she breathes, her voice low and constricted. “I was so happy to do that—if it allowed me to make things right with you, if it granted me your precious forgiveness—that it was easy to justify everything I had thought wrong about it in the first place…”

So they’re both thinking of that day, huh?

Of one of the most horrible fights that they have ever had.

Barbara doesn’t regret her apology, she’s saying.

It was sin, but even still—

She did it for Melissa—she cares for her that much—and the confirmation of this settles in her belly with a warmth and a gratitude that she would have never thought possible.

“Barb,” she intones gently, still gripping the other’s wrist, “there’s nothin’ to regret about any of that. Being good and being right sometimes aren’t the same thing in this world. Life's too complicated for that. Humans are, and God’s gotta understand that.”

He’s God, not some fundamentalist Christian.

Surely, He’s made it so that the fate of one’s soul isn’t determined by how well one mindlessly and dispassionately follows a set of written rules.

Surely, that is not all that worship boils down to in the end.

“I think you’re right,” Barbara readily replies, sniffing as surreptitiously as possible. “I think you and Ava both are for that matter—”

“—words I never thought I’d hear ya say for 500, Alex,” Melissa can’t resist the quip and receives a baleful glare in return.

Okay, she deserves that one.

“—but understanding that for myself? Internalizing such a crucial message? That’s even trickier when I’m surrounded by people who don’t get it either,” she finishes with an exhausted sigh, glancing over her shoulder at the church, magnificent and imposing even in the concentrated gloom of this starless night. Melissa follows her gaze to see that she’s specifically staring at the double doors, upon which a neon pink flyer has been taped to one of them.

She can’t make out the wording from this distance, but she doesn’t have to—Barbara explains in a horrifyingly numb voice.

“I’m being iced out,” she says, her eyes flat. “Bible Club was apparently canceled this evening, and the first I heard of it was when I pulled up and saw that notice on the door. I should have received a call, or even just a text from a fellow sister in Christ, but why would I?”

She laughs bitterly, and the unpleasant sound aches Melissa’s sternum—the clarity in it, the conviction.

“When Sister Sloss—yes, her"—she nods vigorously at whatever disgusted expression must be manifesting on Melissa's face—"saw us at the mall the other day, she designated me as not church-like, so naturally, the whole Bible Club—ha! perhaps even the entire congregation!—probably believes so as well now, and I’m being righteously punished for it, judged and clearly found wanting…"

Barbara smiles coldly, the gesture settling like iron on her lips.

"Perhaps the good Lord is in on the joke too if my flat tire is any indication of the karma that I’ve earned."

Melissa just stares at her, blinking.

“So wait—you mean t’tell me that the woman who’s been stealin’ from your church has the gall to call you not church-like?” She huffs indignantly, her breath forming a visible cloud in front of her face. (Goddamn, it’s freezing.) “And you believe her?!”

“Yes,” Barbara laughs again, this time sounding genuinely amused at Melissa’s outrage, this time almost sounding like herself again, and somehow, at the same time, still sounding so broken. (Maybe, though, this is just how the older woman always sounds, and she's just taken all the correct precautions to masterfully hide it.) “Utterly ridiculous, I know.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and I thought I had some image issues,” she shakes her head, unable to see the humor in Barbara Howard loathing herself as much as she clearly does. There is nothing funny about that, nothing acceptable, nothing even remotely light. “But you, hon, you take the cake, icing and all.”

She says this last part very gently, though, well-aware that Barbara’s conception of herself is a delicate subject, and indeed, even at this slight comment, the mirth quickly drains from the other’s eyes, leaving nothing behind but the unwanted dregs—that same sense of loss that she’d perceived in them earlier when she had first pulled up. 

Barbara is as unbalanced as she has ever seen her, standing on a tightrope high above a dark, seething sea. Melissa wants nothing more than to grab her hand and lead her back to solid ground, wants to tell her that she can rest now.

It's over.

There’s no more need to so capably perform.

She's going to fall and break her neck; she's going to plummet, headfirst, into that violent and pitiless sea.

“Yes,” the older woman returns quietly, her shoulders sagging, even if just a little. “I’m starting to recognize that too…”

And a tear finally slips from the corner of one of her eyes, slinking down the crevasse of her angular cheek, collecting calmly, like a crystallized memento, on the vertex of her chin.

But Melissa, without so much as blinking, reaches over and gently thumbs it away, cupping the line of her beautiful jaw. She knows she should let go—painfully cognizant that this moment does not require such prolonged intimacy—but she doesn’t. She just holds Barbara’s face in the palm of her hand, in the gentle caress of her shivering fingertips.

“I’m sorry that I lied to Gerald,” Barbara croaks, leaning in to the touch, more tears starting to visibly well, falling in earnest now. “I didn’t want you to see me like this, the mess that I am.”

“Shh,” Melissa consoles her, continually swiping at her face. “I know. I know.”

“I don’t deserve you, Melissa Schemmenti.

“Don’t say that,” she protests fiercely, meaning it with everything in her, with every atom, every indivisible cell. “Love isn’t flippin’ conditional, Barbara.”

Goddamn, who taught you that?

How did you ever come to think such a horrible thing?

“You… love me?” Barbara asks, her voice almost aching with childlike wonder, and the simple question and the older woman’s rapt, awed expression nearly knocks the air from her lungs, and on the steps of this Baptist church, she’s suddenly staring at her best friend’s lips, which are only inches away from her own—the plum color of them, the beauty—and seriously thinking about committing sacrilege.

“Yeah, ‘course,” she breathes, her fingers still gracefully arched against that cool, smooth skin. “To know ya is to love you, Barbara Howard, all of you—even your messiness."

She loves every part of her. 

Oh, God, how she does.

And she has tried so hard to ignore this crucial fact for years and years now—deeply aware that Barbara is a somewhat happily married woman—but knowing and feeling are two entirely separate entities, and they war with each other daily, unfailingly drawing blood when they clash.

Barbara visibly swallows at this, the peristaltic motion pronounced in the pillar of her throat, and Melissa’s heart throbs against the wall of her chest, damn near close to leaping out of her ribcage and killing her.

(Maybe even liberating her at the exact same time.)

Without being fully aware of what she’s doing, or perhaps being entirely aware, perhaps losing all the inhibitions that have kept her in line, Melissa leans forward, still holding the other woman's face—

—and Barbara, as though magnetized, eyes wide open with melancholy and longing and horror and holy delight, does so too—

—but as their foreheads just touch, the tips of their noses brushing, their hot breaths flooding over each other's skin, they both recoil backwards, like two binary stars who have remembered that their lot in life is to eternally orbit each other.

Spiraling around the same center of gravity for time immemorial but never, ever colliding.

Barbara pulls away violently, gasping for air, unloosing the scarf around her hands so she can massage her convulsing neck. She coughs and coughs—her chest heaving—and she coughs. 

And Melissa, suddenly feeling sick at what she’d nearly made Barbara do, can only pinch the bridge of her nose against the nausea surging through her.

They’re literally on the steps of a temple, and they almost just desecrated it together.

They almost just kissed.

“Fuck,” she spits out, even though she's not supposed to be cursing because something holy happens here. Something decent. But she forgets herself. She'd almost just done a far worse thing. “Sorry, Barb, I—“

“No, no,” Barbara interrupts her, her voice impossibly hoarse. “I just… accidentally slipped, that’s all.”

She had done no such thing.

This is the crucial lie that they will both tell themselves, though, the story they will desperately cling to so as to keep everything the same between them come Monday morning. 

They are just friends.

Barbara slipped.

Melissa loves her but not like that.

“Oh,” she happily plays along, relief flooding through her entire nervous system at this exceptionally good pretense, this readymade out. “You’re always such a klutz.”

She most certainly is not, but this is the role that Barbara will gracefully inhabit to make this charade work for the both of them.

“Guilty as charged,” she laughs, and Melissa does too, the sounds horrible and strained and just a little hysterical—and maybe a whole lot—as they mingle in the darkness of the night, the unrelenting coldness.

“C’mon, let’s get your flat changed before both of us freeze t'death,” she suggests, standing up somewhat laboriously, nearly toppling over, her joints all sore and stiff. She catches herself on the nearest railing. “I’ll follow ya home and make sure the spare doesn’t pop or anything.”

Melissa damn well knows that she should extend a hand and offer to help Barbara up too, but she thinks that could be dangerous.

What if Barbara accidentally slips again? 

So she faces forward, towards their cars, and starts legging her way back to them. Always prepared for emergencies such as these, she’s got a jack in her car and a heavy duty flashlight. It won’t take her long to put the donut tire on at all…

“I’m so sorry, Melissa,” she only just hears the spoken words, whispered as they are to her retreating back, snatched up as they almost are by the brutal, unforgiving wind. “I love you too.”

Melissa pauses on the bottommost step, the heels of her boots teetering on the precipice and the vertiginous edge.

She knows if she looks behind her now, it will all be over. She will not freeze. She will not turn to stone. She will run to Barbara Howard, that married, married woman and tenderly cup the nape of her neck. She will kiss her senseless, spread her lips like they are divine, and she will enjoy every last second of their mutually entangled sin… she’s never exactly had a problem with being a cheat…

… but then, Melissa—just as Barbara must do every single day—suddenly hears Gerald Howard’s soft voice in her ears.

Take care of her for me, will you?

Our Barb.

What would we do without you?

And the horror of those words—the weight of that carefully placed trust—simply guts her. She unwittingly touches her stomach and half-expects for it to be covered in matted blood.

“Huh?” Her voice sounds like a nasty echo of itself. “What was that? I didn’t hear ya.”

(But she did, and despite what both of them would like to believe, there's no rewinding the tape, no unringing the bell, no resetting the sands in the hourglass, no taking back the words they have said and the things they have almost done and the secret something that exists between them, taking up space every time that they sit next to each other in the same damn room. They love each other; the fact is irrefutable. They love each other; they're running away from the fact even now, as though the freshly dug dirt won't be visible in the clear light of day.)

“Nothing,” comes an equally harried reply. “I just said that I’m right behind you…”

Sure, yes.

That’s exactly what Barbara must have said.

Melissa lets out a breath that she didn't realize she had been holding and takes that final step. The soles of her boots harshly scuff the dark pavement, the sound intolerable to her ears.