#susalice

She knew the drill, though. She went to the store to get a “gift for the host” (she briefly considered the classic champagne or fruit arrangement, but Susan’s expectations would be far, far out of her budget. So she settled on some candle that smelled nice, but that she could rip the price tag off of and no one would know was from Tesco. She did, however, grab a bottle of whiskey for herself, for after the party), prepared her best “fancy casual” dress (she’d never get over her hatred for that oxymoron), and did her best to push down all her sarcasm, opinions, and personality in preparation for the party. 

She’d long since gotten used to the extravagant facades and towering entryways of her neighbours’ houses, but as she watched all the dressed up, stuck up people making their way inside and filling the, frankly, upsettingly large living room (honestly, it was so large that ballroom might be a more appropriate name), she could feel the disdain rising like bile in her throat already. She plastered on a smile as soon as she walked through the door, grabbed the first drink she could find, and started begrudgingly looking around for the host so she could hand off the candle. Alice didn’t know whether she should be upset or glad that Susan proved to be easy to find, talking at the edge of the room with four similarly pompous women. On one hand, finding Susan quickly meant less time Alice had to spend awkwardly carrying around the candle, but it also meant less time she could spend avoiding interacting with the party by walking around aimlessly with the “goal” of finding Susan. Either way, Susan looked around and made eye contact with her, leaving her with no choice but to go up to her. Thankfully, the four other women left and made their way to excitedly greet some other party-goers, meaning she at least wouldn’t have to deal with introductions.

“Alice! I’m so glad to see you here, I didn’t think you’d be able to make it” Susan said with a fake pout as she made her way towards Alice. Alice took a deep breath to prepare herself for the ordeal that was talking with the other woman.

“Wouldn’t miss it! I got you this as a thank-you for hosting.” She hated the fakeness in her voice with a passion and the fake smile she wore as she handed over the candle. Susan didn’t even glance at it as she grabbed the gift and set it down on the coffee table behind her.

“Where’s your husband? Troubles at home?” Somehow, Susan managed to ask it as if it were a completely casual question, her practiced smile never wavering. Alice tried to contain the poison in her voice as she responded.

“Not in the slightest actually. It’s just a busy time with his job so he wasn’t able to call off, you know how it is I’m sure. Oh, that being said, where is your husband? I’ve been in the neighbourhood a year and a half and I haven’t had the chance to meet him once.” If Susan was going to play dirty, Alice might as well play along.

“He’s out in Germany until the end of the week for work, actually.”

“And where was it last time? Spain? I’m sure it can’t be easy on your marriage, him being away so often.”

Susan narrowed her eyes, but kept that same smile stuck on her face. “Oh you know what they say. Distance makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Yes, I’m sure a rich, handsome man like him has spent all this time surrounded by German women missing you terribly.” She’d feel bad for the comment if it were directed at any one else. As it was, Alice was reveling in the murderous expression on Susan’s face. A beat passed and Susan moved to start walking towards the bar.

“Well, help yourself to the drinks and snacks. Again, so glad you were able to make it.”

Alice rolled her eyes as Susan walked away and took another sip of her drink. She was definitely right about the champagne being out of her budget.

The party was supposed to end at 3:00, but 4:30 rolled around and people hadn’t even started leaving yet and, trapped by social etiquette as always nowadays, Alice couldn’t leave before the crowd unless she had a damn good reason for it. Susan, annoyingly, was laughing that obnoxiously pretty little laugh of hers with a group of guests up at the front of the room by the tv, clearly not planning on ending the party any time soon. Alice might could try going up to her and making up an excuse for why she had to leave, but she had just enough mind left to realize she was too drunk to say anything convincing. She was getting anxious to leave, though. The champagne for the party had run out shortly after 3:00, and Alice didn’t want to even risk being here sober. Susan, for her part, seemed to be almost as drunk as herself as she clumsily walked over to the open kitchen.

She walked up to the bar, noticing the lack of flutes. “Ugh we ran out of champagne!” she said, throwing her hands in the air, “I should have some wine in the pantry, can someone help me grab it?”

“I can!” Alice was quick to jump in, willing to do anything to get alcohol back in circulation as quickly as she could. She ran up to join Susan, barely dodging one of the bar stools as she stumbled her way over.

Susan opened a sliding door and entered into her walk-in pantry. Because of course she would have a pantry the size of Alice’s bathroom. She had everything - looks, wealth, status - a walk-in pantry really shouldn’t phase her.

“I think there should be… Yes! There’s some bottles of red wine on the shelf over there,” Susan pointed to the far corner, “You grab one or two of those and I’ll see if I can find that white wine I bought for New Years,” she said as she turned to scan the other wall of shelves.

Alice walked over to the corner, looking for the bottles. The pantry wasn’t cluttered by any stretch of the imagination, but it was full enough that in her current state she was almost overwhelmed looking at all the food and appliances that stocked the shelves. She eventually found them on the second shelf from the top behind a collection of jugs and vases. Susan, with her slender form and long legs, probably wouldn’t have any issue grabbing the bottles, but they were just out of grasp for Alice. She reached for them, doing her best to be careful but having to stand on her toes and lean against the shelves to reach behind the glassware. 

Susan sighed, “We must have finished it off.” She turned to face Alice, noticing her struggle and taking a step towards her. “Do you need help?”

“No, no. I’ve got it,” Alice almost slurred. Unable to wrap her hand around the bottle, she nudged it forward, pushing everything in front of it as well. One of the jugs inched its way towards the edge of the shelf as she tried to fully grasp the bottle.

“Woah!” Susan surged forward to keep the pitcher from falling, placing her other hand on the wall behind Alice for balance. Alice was fully blaming the champagne for her flush as she realized Susan essentially had her pinned to the wall. Susan looked down at her, their faces inches apart. “Okay?”

It wasn’t clear if she was asking about Alice or the jug, but that didn’t matter when all Alice could think about was the warmth of being this close to the other woman and the intoxicating smell of champagne and Susan’s perfume mixing together.

“I uh… yeah.” 

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you’d need a stepstool to reach them,” Susan joked. Alice noted the way she smiled and her eyes gleamed with good-natured humor rather than her typical edge. And the fact that she wasn’t backing away.

“Yeah, well not everyone’s built like a ladder,” Alice replied in kind, unable to keep a smile of her own from starting to form at the teasing comments. “And besides, who stores their glass jugs on the ledge of a high shelf anyway?”

Susan’s eyes flicked down to follow her lips as she spoke, and before she knew what she was doing Alice leaned in to close the last bit of distance between them. Susan immediately kissed back, resting her hand on Alice’s hip while the other stayed on the wall. Alice brought her hands up to Susan’s neck and pulled her down to her height. Susan pushed Alice back against the wall, catching Alice off guard and allowing her to deepen the kiss. Alice slid one hand under the collar of Susan’s top, vaguely registering the muffled sound of someone speaking in the other room.

“Yeah I think she went to grab something from the pantry, I’ll let her know.”

Susan jumped away from Alice a moment before a man leaned into the doorway.

“Hey, Susan. The Willards have to leave to go grab their kid from school,” he said, thankfully not seeming to take notice of Alice or her disheveled state at all. Her mind was racing almost as fast as her heart. The closet felt like it was closing in on her. Had she really just made out with Susan? Oh that was a stupid, terrible decision. She’d ruined everything. What possessed her to do that?! She didn’t even like her! This was really bad.

“Uh… thank you. Send them my regards.” Susan gave an almost-convincing smile and the man turned and left, leaving them alone in the room once again. Silence sat thick between them for a beat before Alice’s anxiety got the better of her and she spoke up.

*＊✿❀○❀✿＊*

"I didn't even know I had a husband!" Susan half-states, half-questions, turning around to face Alice again.

The girl in red laughs a little under her gaze. "You didn't? I thought you'd remember him after all these years." She shifts, hanging the sword back up on the holster resting upon the torn-apart wall. Alice's look flickers to the amber encrusted into the hilt where her thumb had rested, a beetle curled in on itself hiding in the centre.

Susan watches Alice as she places it back, holding her own bloodied sword in her aching hand, her free one running along the side of the blade. "I fear I do not."

It is the truth, as unlikey as it may seem. Susan, despite the ring she now sees on her right hand (she could've sworn there was an indent in her left before), has no recollection of a lover. She has felt something missing for a few days by this point, but she assumes it is lust or thirst, not a gap in something so fundamental to a person's life.

"Look, at the ring on your finger and the one on mine." Alice says once more, walking over to Susan and leaning up to place a hand on her shoulder. "There's marriage. How did you forget?"

"I am not sure." Susan whispers as she brings the sword back to her side, eyes resting on where Alice touches her so gently.

Alice smiles. It is small, it is weak, but it is there. "Let us go the main room. It must be much calmer there, shouldn't it? We don't need to be carrying around such weapons, I fear either of us getting hurt." Susan feels blood from Alice's hand and her own sword seeping into her shirt and skin. She nods, but does not move her body nor her eyes from where they lay.

"Let us go." Alice mutters, slowly removing her hand, ignoring the thin strings of blood it leaves between them, reluctantly turning and revealing her back to Susan as she backs away.

Susan is left, as Alice walks, with an oppurtunity. The chance to kill somebody who had, supposedly, torn her life apart, killed the love of her life. Glancing at her sword, the blood makes her believe that surely death could not be so bad, right? It could not possibly, compared to the countertop she could not look at without thinking up scenes from the depths of her mind that had never happened.

She has missed her oppurtunity from the thoughts rushing through her head. Rather, she debates the possibility that Alice could be lying.

No, Susan thinks. She may be a trickster, a fiend, but she is no liar, not when it comes to a matter of the heart.

*＊✿❀○❀✿＊*

They both sit together languidly on the sofa, glasses filled with wine that Susan had retroactively grabbed from her cellar's winery in hand, the taste oddly irony and reminiscent of blood, though it may just be from the years dwelling below the ground.

Susan swirls her drink and waits for Alice to make the first move, watching her like a hawk to its upcoming prey. She smiles and raises her eyebrows at the other's hesitancy to drink.

She has no such restrictions. Drinking has become a habit for Susan since…

Since…

"What do you remember?" Alice eventually asks in the warm quiet of overhead lighting, chandeliers casting down flickering shadows onto the pair, disregarding the nearly drawn-to curtains that still let shreds of the sun through.

"At all or about my supposed husband?" She jokes.

Alice shifts again, taking a wary sip of her wine. "Either."

"Well." Susan sighs, grabbing at a book from the shelves behind the pair. A Chronological Collection Of The Full Works Of Shakespeare, reads the title, emboldened on the front and the spine of the hardback. She thumbs through the pages absentmindedly. "I remember most things. I remember my childhood, my adolescence, meeting some heathen I met at a theatre camp I had come to for my interest in Shakespeare." She adds the last sentence with a scowl and a pointed look at the woman across from her.

Alice laughs. "We both know you were obsessed with me, don't you try and kid yourself about it."

Susan rolls her eyes and continues after another 'sip' from her glass. "I recall my parents. Rich, as I am sure you can tell by now." She gestures around the room, her arm hurting from the gesture, where refined old weaponry hangs from scabbards on the walls, where portraits of a distant relative is places above the fireplace, where finely made wallpaper tears from the chaos.

"I didn't notice…" The other mocks, pretending to glance around at whereever Susan points but in reality never once moving her eyes off of the woman before her.

"Right." Susan scoffs, placing the book back onto the shelf. "Well, I'm sure you're aware, at least. Long family line, goes back a while, but… now's not the time. As I was saying, my family is well-off, so of course they would-" She stops in her tracks. "They would…" What was she going to say? They must've done something, and it claws at the edges of her mind, but she cannot remember.

What did they do? They were kind, loving, took care of her. She had, as a rebellious teen, snuck down to the winery to become what she is now, and, though her parents were well aware, they didn't do anything about it.

That's the only bad thing she can recall them doing. She downs the last dregs of her wine as she mulls it over, and the pain in her head numbs from the sharp taste filling her body.

Alice shuffles again on the sofa (she needs to learn how to keep still and be polite, Susan thinks). "How…" She takes a breath. "How old are you?"

"What a personal question." Susan jokes. "Have you never learned your manners, for I might just have to drill them into you." She leans forward and begins filling her glass back up from the bottle left open on the table. She notices Alice's body flinching slightly at the movement, though she dare not ask why. "I turned nineteen but a month ago."

Alice freezes. "You're twenty-six. We grew up in the same year, Susan. Tell me this is another one of your japes, please."

Susan leans back again, fiddling with her drink. She stares at the wedding ring on her finger, the one that feels so tight and imperfect and wrong she has to resist the urge to tear it off. But, she stops herself. If she truly had a husband, she would want to remember him, would she not?

She chuckles. She doesn't remember him anyways. Nevertheless, glad to have a token of wealth around, the quartz in the band holding fast and polished.

Her own thoughts try and drag themselves away from Alice's words. They are too quick and painful and sheerly confusing to be heeded. But she crawls, pulls herself across the carpeted floors, blisters from the fractured wood underneath cutting open her chest with every movement — crawls, slowly, towards them. Alice is not a liar, she thinks again. A heathen, a fraud, but nothing so earth-shattering.

Seven years. Susan sips. She has forgotten seven whole years. How… how ignorant could she dare to be?

But yet she still doubts the woman's words, so she asks:

"Are you pulling one of yours?"

Alice stares at Susan. Her eyes betray hurt and sorrow, both mixed with some odd relief, only enforced by the quiet sigh that echoes as the only noise in the room other than the slow, interspersed breaths. "I am not." She exhales through a masked smile. Susan cannot tell if it is real or fake.

They sit in the quiet for a minute, as the sun of a former noon slowly dips down across the sky. The garden fades in and out of shadow from the clouds that meld together into hearts only to float apart again. As the chill seeps through the open window and into the lounge, Susan pours herself another drink subconsciously. She finds herself downing some more, only to turn and spot Alice looking at her reprehensively.

"Why are you flinching?" Susan finds herself asking as the taste of wine nags at the back of her throat.

Alice stirs her drink, only a third lower than when they had begun talking, watching her glass intently. She mulls it over in silence for a moment, then whispers. "I mean, you have had an issue with drinking before. I suppose it shouldn't be your fault that your husband—" She clamps a hand over her mouth.

"My husband, Alice?" Susan sets her drink back onto the table, wanting an answer, waiting for Alice to tell her. "Whatever do you mean?"

There's another bout of quiet. Their breaths mix in the air as Alice turns to face her, and the room smells of alcohol and detergent. As the sky turns overcast once more, Alice steadies herself, taking a slow breath, and, quietly, asks (Commands? a part of Susan's brain thinks. She dismisses it. The idea of being commanded about sickens her). "Show me your arm."

Susan laughs. "My arm? What could that have to do with anything?"

"Please."

Susan complies. Alice pulls the sleeves on her green shirt up, wincing as she does so, shaking her head. "It's worse than even I remembered…" She mutters.

Just as Susan is about to ask what that means, she looks down again.

Her arm is covered in cuts and bruises.

Scabbed over, raw white lines and large patches of black and purple that spread across all her skin. How had she not noticed it before? The ache was sharper, more intense as she now looked at it.

"How- How did-" Susan breathes out.

"Your husband wasn't a good man, Susan." Alice sighs. "He didn't… I had to protect you." She said, taking a hand away and sliding the other down Susan's arm to clasp her hand.

Although she can't tell if it was the words or the action, something, suddenly, in that moment, feels right for Susan. It feels as if the pieces of her life just fell into place. She holds Alice's hand tighter, trying to stop herself reaching for the alcohol on the table, to stop everything, just to leave. Abandon reality for a bit, wouldn't it be nice, to retreat into that comfortable numbness instead of venturing into something so new?

…What had she been thinking about again?

Her arm aches. There's pain, and- and there's bruises, cuts along her skin, when did those get there? She doesn't recall seeing them before.

Alice watches her as her expression keeps changing. She squeezes Susan's hand tighter. "I'm sorry. But, in a way I'm glad you don't remember, unless this is some long-con joke."

Susan doesn't speak.

"He was awful to you." Alice says, her voice still soft and smooth. She moves her free hand to hold Susan's with both. It's oddly comforting. "I'm sorry, Susan. I did what I had to."

"You killed someone." She manages. "You ended somebody's life."

"I did it to save yours."

There's quiet again. Susan thinks about the nineteen years of life she remembers having. Growing up, being taught manners and etiquette by her parents, drilling their lessons into her. Turning to the winery. Going to schools, then college and the start of university with Alice as her best friend. It was hard to shake away the fondness she had for the woman.

She doesn't know how Alice feels about her. Seven years have gone by. She's been married. How useless could she be to forget that?

"Are we still friends, Alice? After all this time?"

Alice looks up, staring at Susan's face rather than their hands. "…Of course. If that's what you want to be."

Susan struggles to find her answer. She doesn't know, she isn't sure of anything. Then as the room stills again, Alice raises up Susan's cradled hand with both of hers and kisses the back of it.

It's only then she knows for sure what she truly wants them to be.

Alice looks at her expectantly, but resigned. "Didn't you say something about having your own husband?" Susan manages.

"We broke it off a few days ago." Alice smiles, still holding Susan's hand to her lips.

She resists the urge to grab the bottle of wine. She resists the urge to go back, to stay safe not knowing. She resists the urge to conform.

Susan takes a deep breath.

"Can… can we be lovers, Alice?" She says, and waits for the disappointed look that should be inevitable from her-

"We can be whatever you want us to be, whenever you want that." Alice takes one of her hands away to cup Susan's face, intertwining their fingers. "My love."