Bingo: virus, marriage, mechanical keyboard
enjoy some blatant fem dnf pre-Florida
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It’s entirely too late, or maybe it’s too early—there’s a haze in the sky that's evident of pre-dawn, but she knows neither of them have slept yet. It’s been difficult to manage time passing, rather than meals and sleeping periods being the markers for days, they’re whenever Claire leaves the call. Ever since Grace’s visa was declined, Claire hasn’t left her alone. The discord logo lights up her monitors with a number nearing the triple digits, steadily increasing.
It’s been harder than ever, recently. Moving in with your best friend is supposed to be easy, regardless of the thousands of miles stretched between them. But then there were applications and denials and Covid and now Grace just wants to cry.
It was at the tip of her fingers. Claire was just one touch away. Now, ripped apart, she feels like a shell of who she was.
Her desk is littered with papers, things she had printed out from her mom’s shoddy printer in the back room. There are a lot of bolded words that talk about do’s and don’t’s of things she had thought she’d followed but apparently not. The most recent denial letter sits on her second monitor, coating her face in a red shine that she’d never want to share in the company of Claire.
“I just don’t get it,” falls from her lips. She’s not sure when the last time her face changed. So far from the happy girl that Claire knows her as. Grace just doesn’t know what to do. She wants to give up.
She wants to give up.
“I thought I did everything right. I don’t understand where I went wrong.”
“Sometimes they do that, G,” Claire mumbles, her mouth obscured by her hand. Grace wants to give up but how could she when she knows every single mannerism, every moment of the other even when she doesn’t have her camera on? “They’re, like, I don’t know, picky? They want to be careful of who they let into the country.”
“It’s dumb.” Grace feels her eyes dampen and she rolls them so hard they hurt. She’s spent too long crying over this in the last couple of days, and she knows that if she keeps going over it the more she’s going to hate herself. She brushes her tears away with the back of her hand: she wouldn’t be surprised if her skin is bruised. “What am I going to do? It’s not like I’m going to blow everything up.”
Claire laughs softly, chokes on a cough before settling down again. Claire never gets sick and yet here she is, borderline bedridden and alone in another country without her friend or her family to help her deal with it. This year’s been harsh, everything piling up on top of each other, and the nail that is Grace’s stability keeps getting hit on the head as thing after another impacts her life, and her and Claire’s relationship.
The ugly monster of selfishness crawls underneath her skin. “How are you feeling today?” She asks softly, like raising her voice will cause either one of them to go down some sort of spiral again.
“As good as someone with Covid can.” Claire blows her nose and groans afterward, then Grace hears it heavily slap against the desk, no doubt into a pile of pre-used tissues that have accumulated over the duration of their call. “The clinic said this was the new strand, Delta, I think? I’m so special I get the new strand.”
“That’s so dumb,” Grace laughs, fiddling with a hole in her sweatpants. “You don’t even leave your house and you get all the good stuff.”
“It’s just the joys of Door Dash, G.” Claire shuffles around, probably adjusting her position so her bones don’t ache as much. She’d said it wasn’t as bad as she was expecting it to be, but she complains about her muscles aching and feeling so heavy wherever she is. Grace can’t remember the last time she ate, and when she had she’d talked about her nausea, her lack of appetite, the pain it caused her head. Now, she fluctuates between her cushioned, reclined gaming chair and her bed to stay on the phone with Grace. She knows that if her visa didn’t decline, Claire would have slept through the entirety of her sickness. She’s a good friend. A really, really, good friend.
“Maybe it’s not so bad that you… couldn’t come,” Claire says delicately, like if she says ‘decline’ the floodgates would open again. To be fair, they probably would. Grace isn’t normally emotional, prefers to bottle everything up and never talk about it, but this is something that can’t be stored. She tears her heart out into little pieces over a red mark on pre-signed papers. “‘Cause I’m sick. I’d be all snotty and then you’d want to move out straight away.”
Move out implies that she’d be moving in. She knows this, of course she does. There’s a room in Claire's house with a blue-made bed that has a welcome pack prepared and placed on the foot. Grace wonders how many cobwebs have formed on it, whether the blanket Claire had crocheted still smells like her perfume or if it’s been too long. In their calls, when she shows Grace, the room looks cold, unlived in. She supposes that’s because it is, but there’s no ‘almost’ about that room. Is it even hers?
Grace hums, not wanting to commit to an answer. She’s not sure what she would say that isn’t horribly telling. She just wants everything to fall into place, she wants them to settle beside each other and only be brought apart to be put back together.
Claire huffs and her chair squeaks as she sits herself up. Grace slumps back in hers as she hears the stupid clacking noise of Claire’s horrible mechanical keyboard while she types something. It’s white with RGB lights that were programmed to flash as she clicked them, entirely too advanced for the Walmart-branded base they were on. More often than not they black out and the lights don’t turn on at all, sometimes it disconnects from her PC even though they’re plugged in. They make so much noise, Grace supposes it’s what you get when you buy a mechanical keyboard for $20 from a supermarket, but it’s so impossibly Claire Grace can’t really complain. In the last 4 days, it’s been the only source of comfort, the repetitive non-smooth clacking as she types a thousand words a minute at some idiot on Discord.
The clicks peter out for a second, before picking up again, faster than before, repetitive with many spaces in-between the words. She’s never seen them, but Grace imagines her fingers as she types. Does she paint her nails? Does she wear rings? If she does—what about her left hand? Is there space there for a ring that only Grace could give her?
“Check your email,” she says suddenly, and her chair squeaks again as she lowers herself back. She’s panting slightly, and there’s a short pang of bad going through Grace’s spine at the fact that Claire exhausted herself for her. She clears her throat and leans forward, clicking out of the nasty email that hasn’t left her screen in days, and navigates to the main page. There are hundreds of unread emails from the past few days, many subscription services or promotions from websites, but the top one is from Claire with a smiley face as the subject line and every anxiety melts from her.
She opens it and furrows her brows.
“This means a lot to you, yeah?” Claire asks, and it’s heard over a tapping on the desk. “Like, a lot. Me too.”
“Yeah,” Grace breathes, because really, what else is she supposed to do? “What does—”
“Do you want to get married?”
Grace bursts out laughing, the bubble exploding out of her throat and erupting before she even gets a chance to think about being polite and hiding it. Claire just sits in silence, not responding.
“Dear, god! Thank you, Claire. I needed that laugh, oh my god.”
“I’m being serious, G,” Claire mumbles, and the tapping stops. It’s still in the call for a beat, not enough for it to really mean anything. That doesn’t stop Grace from overthinking. “We could get married. They keep denying your visa but if we get married you can get your green card and you can live here. You can stay here.”
“We aren’t together, Claire. Don’t we need to be dating before we get married?” Grace hums, but tries not to let her emotions bleed into her voice. This isn’t a topic she’d expect she’d be having with Claire. Maybe about other people but not about each other.
“It doesn’t have to be real.” It’s quiet. “It can just be for convenience. So you can get here. We can divorce in a year or something so it’s not suspicious if you want.”
If you want. What if Grace doesn’t want to?
“You’re serious?” Grace doesn’t know what’s funnier: how outlandish Claire’s proposal was, or the fact that she’s already considering it. She feels a little selfish like she’s playing house and manipulating her feelings. “You don’t even like girls, Claire.”
Claire is uncharacteristically quiet. For a long time. The silence kind of sounds like nights locked inside her room, sounds like careful eyes looking down in the locker room, sounds like staying up too late and looking up ‘Am I gay?’. It sounds a bit too familiar to something Grace has already gone through.
“Claire?”
“I’m sick, Grace.” Claire mumbles, and Grace can picture a soju red flush on her cheeks. “I don’t want to talk about it now.”
Grace notes how she didn’t say that she isn’t thinking right. She means this, it’s not something that’s just randomly come out. Has she thought about this before? Has she typed this very email many times before, with the hope that Grace will accept? Is this the way that she tells her that she’s gay? That she loves Grace the same way she loves Claire?
No. It can’t be. Don’t be an idiot.
“Think about it, okay?” Claire sighs and it seems further away, like she’s sunken further into her chair. Grace clicks on the links that Claire had emailed her and saves them to her bookmarks bar, typing out some half-assed name for them that she hopes she won’t cringe at the lovey-dovey-ness when she’s not so in her feelings about everything. She wonders if Claire can hear the affection and fondness drip from smooth Gatreon Reds. “I… I need you here. I don’t want to wait anymore.”
Grace melts. If only everything could be easy. If only this stupid virus was gone and she could fly over and hug her, buy her a new keyboard just to keep the last one for sentimentality.
Tomorrow is another day, whenever tomorrow happens.
Now, she indulges her. “Would you wear a dress?”
Claire giggles, covers her face with her hand for a beat. “You’re an idiot, G.” The mood lifts, and for the first time in a while, there’s something good in the air. The call isn’t filled with anxiety and dull-toned clicks. “Only if you do.”
