by G. Benson
So she threaded her fingers in Carmen’s hair and pulled Carmen against her with a gasp. Their bodies melded as their lips touched, pliant and soft and somehow altogether desperate. Thighs slid between each other, and Ollie sighed into Carmen at the touch, at the flex of Carmen’s leg between her own. It was a kiss that Ollie was always craving, that something in the back of her mind was always waiting to occur. Teeth grazed Ollie’s bottom lip, her hips jerking at the sensation.
Carmen pulled back, just barely, her forehead against Ollie’s, even as Ollie’s hand fell to grab at her shirt. Terrified Carmen was about to disappear, she fisted the material in her hand.
“I meant it, Ollie. The other night.” Carmen’s lips were mere millimeters away, and Ollie opened her eyes, only to have her vision invaded by brown softness, a well of something Ollie would happily fall into if it always soothed the ache in her chest like this. “This is impossible.”
Impossible was such a big word, one Ollie hated. And at that moment, all she could think, all she could say was, “What isn’t impossible?”
She tugged the fistful of Carmen’s shirt. Carmen melted into her, her tongue hot on Ollie’s, the brush of it almost too much. As fingers slid under Ollie’s shirt, as Carmen’s palm slid over her waist, Ollie’s skin jumped at the touch, and she couldn’t feel that gaping hole in her chest anymore; when Carmen touched her, she didn’t feel like she was so utterly lost.
She was where she was supposed to be.
Carmen lifted her glasses off, and Ollie didn’t even care where they ended up.
Teeth grazed against her neck and her collarbone, and Carmen’s fingers, one by one, flicked at the buttons of Ollie’s shirt, then slid over the sensitive skin of her belly as she pushed it open. Her lips left a bruise against the swell of Ollie’s breast, the feel of it tattooing itself along her nerves.
When Carmen’s hand, clumsy and fast and perfect, slid into her pants, Ollie came undone with a smile on her lips, her teeth grazing Carmen’s neck.
Chapter 14
Half of Carmen was walking home as if she were skating through the sky, her footsteps light, as if gravity had been stripped away, leaving her floating. She felt dizzy with Ollie’s touches, dizzy with the smell of her, with the memory of her throat beneath Carmen’s lips and the pounding of her pulse against her tongue.
The other half was firmly rooted to the ground, feet dragged down by lies of omission. Ollie had no idea about the life Carmen was living, that she was drowning in struggles while trying to make everything seem normal so that Mattie didn’t fall apart. Ollie had no idea, not really, no matter what she’d read when her friend had done something on the Internet. She had no idea of the ins and outs, the street beneath Carmen’s feet, the brother who was along her side, his DS clutched in his hand.
Carmen had dropped lies, cloaked herself in them, and Ollie didn’t even know Mattie existed. She thought Carmen was inside the system, at school and in a house with locks and safety each night. With food she didn’t scrounge for, or send her kid brother to scrounge for.
Words that weren’t lies had built up on Carmen’s tongue, but then Ollie had looked so shattered. Something about Ollie’s eyes, previously brightly lit with something untouchable, was now dimmed and cracked and broken. When Carmen had clung to her at school, sheltered by bleachers, Ollie had been pliant and warm and receiving. Her gaze had searched Carmen, looked for whatever she needed and offered it up.
Ollie still did that.
But now she was searching for something of her own too. Need sat in Ollie’s fingers, absent before, and coaxed Carmen to ease it. When Ollie had shaken against her, had come apart, Carmen’s name had painted her lips as they curved up for the first time Carmen had seen that night. Carmen hadn’t been able to take her eyes off her.
That broken thing in Ollie’s eyes had, for just a second, looked like what it had before.
“Carmen.” Mattie’s voice was low.
Carmen needed Ollie to go away, but instead she kept jerking her closer. “Yeah, Mattie?”
“Do you miss Mom?”
That word Mom punched low in her stomach, bruised something buried deep. Carmen swallowed heavily as if the motion could drown out the sensation caused by three simple letters. All the while, he adamantly stared ahead as they walked the darkened streets, as if he’d been building up to it forever, as if knowing Carmen wouldn’t like it.
“I…” Carmen’s breath was caught in her chest, left hanging there, leaving her feeling overinflated and unsure. “Sometimes.”
It was the most truthful thing she could offer. If Carmen could help it, she didn’t think of her mother. When she did, her fingers would twitch with an anger so deep, one that had been settled so low in her stomach for so long, she thought it was tacked into her. But layered just under it, tinier and smothered, was hurt and shame and need all directed at the woman who had abandoned Carmen constantly.
She licked her lips and tried to remember Mattie was a kid. His view of their mother was skewed. “Do you?” she asked. They barely talked of her, of their life before, as if doing so would bring forth something neither of them knew how to deal with.
He was silent for a moment, the sound of their footsteps bouncing off stone walls and overly loud in the hush of late night. “Sometimes,” he said.
When his silence stretched on for what felt like forever, she thought that would be it.
“Sometimes more than sometimes.”
She wished he had left it at that first sometimes. His voice cracked over the final syllable, over emotions too big for him. A rushing sound was in Carmen’s ears, and that anger that bubbled so deeply flared and rose in her chest; her mother had failed Mattie so badly, both in life and in death.
They came to a dead stop on the street, bathed in shadows that Carmen knew they needed to get past. People and things she always tried to keep out of Mattie’s sight lurked in dark places here. But the sight of him, his lips pursed together, eyes glittering and as hard as diamonds, broke her heart. She squatted with one knee on the ground, the cement biting painfully into her skin through her jeans.
“That’s okay, Mattie.”
He shook his head, just once.
“It is. You’re allowed to miss her.”
He pushed forward then. His hands fell onto her shoulders, and his forehead touched her own. When his eyes screwed shut, his breath shuddered. “Okay,” he whispered. “Sometimes I miss school. And the house. I miss…”
He didn’t have words for what he missed, and Carmen just let the ones he had hang between them.
They stayed there for minutes, Carmen wishing she could take everything he was feeling and mash it inside herself. They breathed in sync, and she let his fingers bruise her back.
An age later, he straightened his small shoulders, swiped at his cheeks, and gave her a nod.
When they got back to the warehouse, Dex had beaten them there on his bike. He sat on a sofa, cards in his hands, playing a game with Rae. Her face was slashed with a frown. Mattie and Carmen paused and looked at each other, then back at the pair. Mattie’s hand fell to the dog that came to slump against his legs, almost knocking him over with its bulk.
“What’s going on?” Carmen asked.
Rae’s jaw clenched tight, and the muscle in her neck popped. “He’s cheating.”
Carmen snorted. Dex didn’t cheat.
“She’s losing and taking it badly.” Dex picked a card from the pile, a grin splitting his face. “But, Rae, it looks like I win again.” He dropped his cards down, faceup. “Gin.”
For a second, Carmen thought Rae was going to throw her cards at him. That muscle ticked again. But then her shoulders relaxed and she dropped her cards, scattering them on top of his. “I need a drink.”
Dex chuckled, a rumble in his chest. He pulled out a bottle
of whiskey and poured them out a glass each. The cheap, sharp odor of spirits reached Carmen and Mattie where they stood, and they both wrinkled their noses.
“Want to spar?” Carmen had an itch in her feet, one that had been soothed by Ollie until Ollie had tried to slip her hand into Carmen’s pants. It felt wrong, somehow, when Carmen hid her reality from Ollie, when Ollie had such a broken look Carmen couldn’t place, when they had barely had a conversation.
She had touched Ollie because Ollie had needed it. There was something there; Carmen could see it. She just couldn’t put a word to it.
Rae straightened in her chair, knocking back the drink in one hit. With a glint in her eye, she said, “Let’s go.”
“Can I too?” Mattie looked up at her, now cross-legged on the floor, his fingers buried in the dog’s fur.
The memory of the fingers that had bruised her shoulders just moments before made Carmen hesitate, but then Dex stood up. “I think,” he told Mattie, looking from Rae with her gleaming eyes to Carmen, who was rocking from foot to foot, “you and I should just watch this one.”
Dex stared down the rebuttal Carmen saw rising up, and, finally, Mattie huffed and agreed. Carmen led the way to the sparring room, and slipped her shoes off before standing on the old mat in the center of the room. Rae did the same, and they faced off.
Rae could be wild in a fight, all intuition and hard fists. She was fast, and she fought like she was possessed, with no tactics. The style worked for her. No one ever saw her coming.
But Carmen knew her style.
Against the wall, Dex stood next to Mattie with the dog at their feet, his hand dwarfing Mattie’s shoulder.
“Let’s go.” And that was all Rae said before dropping and swiping her leg out in a clean sweep, trying to trip Carmen onto her ass.
Pure reflexes saved her as she jumped over it and bounced back. Rae stood, and Carmen swung forward, a kick aimed for her knee.
They bounced between each other until they were gleaming with sweat, panting hard. Ducking and weaving, only the odd glancing blow landing. They fought with open hands and kicks, certain areas out of bounds unless you knew the other would dodge it. The rules were embedded in their brain.
Breathing hard, they wore each other down until, finally, Carmen managed to swipe a foot out from under Rae, sending her back to hit the mat with a sweaty slap. With a grunt, Rae’s hand shot out, wrapped around Carmen’s ankle, and took Carmen down with her. They both lay next to each other, chests heaving.
And still that itch was under Carmen’s skin, roiling at her nerve endings.
Afterward, the two of them sparred with Mattie. Dex offered words of advice in a low, even tone. With Mattie between them, they threw kicks and swung out at him, slower than they had with each other, but not by much. He was fast—he’d always been fast—and after months of this, his reflexes were honed. He danced away from Rae’s kick, then his arm barred Carmen’s swing and he stepped into her space. In the blink of an eye, he brought the heel of his hand to her solar plexus, stopping just before it landed.
He stared up at her, his chest heaving for air. Carmen stared back. Finally, she grinned. “You’re getting good.”
The smile he gave her was huge. For the next hour, all she could feel was the sting of his hand where it had bounced away against her forearm and the whistle of air as he had almost winded her. She just saw that smile, all teeth and gleaming eyes and dimples that broke her heart with their innocence.
An hour later on the sofa, Carmen slid Mattie’s head off her thigh and made sure the blanket covered him completely. He was heavy in sleep, floppy, his limbs askew and breaths deep. Rae had gone to bed, but Dex sat on another sofa, a book in his hand. She sat next to him, watching Mattie, his chest moving up and down, and wished she could give him more than a life of missing what had left them both with scars crisscrossing their hearts.
She wanted to give him everything but was starting to wonder if she might end up giving him nothing.
And Ollie. Carmen didn’t have time for whatever she was doing with Ollie. But it turned out she was terrible at following through with that thought.
Dex’s arm, heavy and warm, came around her shoulders and tugged her into his side. His never looked up from his book. “I can hear you thinking.”
Carmen slowly relaxed into his side, her head falling onto his shoulder. The dog pulled himself up onto Mattie’s feet, and Dex lay his hand atop her head as she fell asleep, remembering the sound of Ollie’s sigh and the taste of her lips.
Impossible.
The word throbbed across Ollie’s mind, over her chest, and down her fingers.
She wanted to ask why, had wanted to know why impossible. Such a big word. But how could Carmen use it, then let Ollie pull her forward and lose herself in their heat?
Everything was so different than how it had been with Sean—not better, not worse. Not anything like that.
It wasn’t even about him at all. It was about Carmen, the way her fingers grabbed at Ollie as if she were the last thing keeping Carmen on earth, the last thing tethering her to a world that was pushing her away. About how the world had clamored in Ollie’s ears since her father’s words had blown them apart. About how the only time that clamoring had truly dimmed to nothing was when Carmen had smiled, had brushed a kiss to Ollie’s lips.
Ollie hadn’t meant to let it go so far, hadn’t meant to let Carmen slip her hand inside her jeans. But her mind craved the silence Carmen brought, and instead of ending it, she’d pleaded for more.
Carmen was everything Ollie wanted to know and nothing she actually did.
The depth of her eyes hid a secret, something more to this impossible than simply going to a different school now. But she couldn’t fault Carmen and her secrets, not when Ollie had words she kept clamped down and didn’t say even as Carmen asked her, “What’s happened to you?”
She ached knowing that something had changed so drastically within herself that it was visible. Visible to someone who kissed Ollie so hard she wanted to break, but who barely said a word herself. Yet, at the same time, the knowledge that she had been truly altered, that this feeling in her chest, this hollowness, was not something she’d invented, felt vindicating. It existed, splayed across her features in a truth too physical to pretend it wasn’t real.
Ollie spent days bouncing between grief and wanting to see Carmen again. Some moments, when she was thinking of Carmen and her complicated eyes, a glow settled somewhere in the pit of her stomach, warm and almost like comfort. Her brain would jolt, and guilt would tear up her spine and split her in two. How could she feel something like that when her mother was gone and her father was wallowing in loneliness in their too-big house, grief clawing at his eyes as Ollie pushed him further and further away?
One night, with the house too quiet and her father on the sofa, Ollie got a message from Sara telling her to come over. Before she could reply to it, her father spoke.
“Maybe, uh…maybe we could go to the cemetery on the weekend.”
Everything in Ollie froze, cold seeping to her fingertips.
When she didn’t answer, he continued, “Someone, at work… They thought maybe it would be a good idea. To do that. Together.”
That coldness was in her chest, and suddenly wet warmth was in her eyes. The contrast between the two made her want to gasp; or maybe it was the word cemetery. Where her mother was.
“M—maybe.”
He could hear the quiver in her words, she knew, his head turning too fast to stare at her. The look in his eye was too much like what she could feel in her chest. Ollie needed to get out of there. She only took a second to decide: “I’m going to Sara’s.”
She left him behind on the sofa, sick with guilt for doing so.
It never ended. She felt guilty for enjoying Carmen, guilty that she
wasn’t thinking of her mom all the time. Most of all, in that moment, she felt guilty because her father simply dipped his head like he’d expected her response, his empty gaze slowly going back to the TV.
The bus got her to Sara’s quickly, which was lucky, because Ollie thought she might break apart on the seat. The two of them immediately sprawled over the sofa, and Sara just blinked at her.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.” The biggest lie Ollie had possibly ever told. She fell back, hand over her eyes and a lump too large to swallow past in her throat.
Within moments, Sara was on one side of her, squashed between her and the sofa. “Are you okay?”
Hand still over her eyes, Ollie nodded. But halfway through, she shook her head, tears spilling past her lids. Arms wrapped around her, and Sara’s chin rested on the top of her head.
“Wanna marathon Friends?”
Ollie nodded once more against her neck, and they spent the night like that, sprawled over each other, with the lingering sweetness of ice cream light on her tongue.
She tried to remember to breathe. She tried to remember and not crack open and talk about how much she missed her mother. Going to the cemetery would feel like some kind of cosmic joke, salt in a wound.
On Saturday, when Ollie, Sara, and Deon stepped into the bar, the room was crowded, but nothing like the week before.
Deon looked around, and his eyes lit up like they always did when he realized something. “College people have finals coming up. Or midterms. Something.”
At the bar, Dex gave a hello to them as they approached. She didn’t want to, but Ollie found herself scanning the bar for Carmen. Her hands went clammy when she caught sight of her near the back, clearing glasses and wiping a table for a waiting group.
Carmen looked up and caught her eye, and Ollie’s racing heart seemed to stop. She gave Carmen a wave, a smile on her lips. Not for the first time, she wished Carmen hadn’t had to rush back to work the other night.