Pieces

by G. Benson

  Belying the simplicity of her small wave back, Carmen’s eyes looked deeply into Ollie’s, searching her face before turning back to the table.

  Sara elbowed her, and Ollie jumped.

  “What?” Ollie asked.

  The smile on Sara’s face was definitely shit-eating. “Deon asked what you wanted to drink.”

  “Oh, a beer. Thanks, Dex.” Ollie looked away from him, then noticed Sara was still grinning. “What?”

  “Could you be any more obvious?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Sure, Jan.”

  Ollie’s brow furrowed. “What?”

  “The Brady Bunch? You know, that meme?”

  “Did you just speak words?”

  Sighing, Sara shook her head. “We need to get you and your art on Tumblr.”

  “Sure, Jan.”

  “No. Not how you use it.”

  Ollie accepted the beer Deon handed back to her and tried again. “Sure, Jan?”

  Groaning, Sara took her own drink. “No!”

  Ollie shot her a small smirk, and something around Sara’s eyes softened.

  “What?” Ollie asked.

  Sara shook her head. “Nothing.”

  She could see the words, though, building in Sara’s eyes. The I missed you. It would make things serious and maybe pull the smile from Ollie’s face, so she just bumped her shoulder against Sara’s for a second.

  “Hello, Ollie.”

  Ollie’s eyes closed for a moment, and when she opened them, she turned slightly. Carmen was behind the bar.

  “Hi.” Ollie’s voice went a little breathy. The last day they’d seen each other, Carmen’s hands had been in her pants and Ollie had felt as if some of her pieces were being put back together. So of course she was breathy. Kind of like in a bad romance movie. If life were a movie, everything would have slowed down, and Carmen’s hair would be wafting in some strange indoor breeze.

  “Hi, Sara, Deon.”

  The two raised their glasses at her and pulled up stools.

  Carmen and Dex floated in and out, serving others and Carmen picking up glasses.

  Ollie tried to focus on her friends. She watched Sara and Dex speak in low tones across the bar, watched how easily they spoke, Dex rolling his eyes as he poured her out a tequila.

  “Did you hear about Sara’s test?” Deon asked.

  Ollie shook her head, her curiosity piqued as Sara turned to them and rolled her eyes.

  “What test?”

  “It was nothing.” Sara’s cheeks were dusky with a blush.

  Across the bar, Dex chuckled, the sound a deep, rich rumble in his chest. “Your face says otherwise.”

  Ollie looked between Deon and Sara. “What happened?”

  Sara narrowed her eyes at Deon even as her lips quirked up. “I aced some test they give to the nerds and can fast track to college if I want.”

  “Should I be surprised?” Ollie wasn’t. Sara was one of the most scientifically minded people she’d ever met, her math scores miles ahead of anyone else’s in their school.

  “Well, anyway—” Sara took a sip, “—I want to stay at school.”

  “Why?”

  Sara cocked her head. “I don’t know. Everything feels…settled. Good. I like it.”

  “I’m not complaining if you stay.”

  Under their stares, Sara shifted in her chair and changed the topic. Deon brought up a party from weeks ago and their friends who had collided into a hookup and then fizzled out over a matter of hours. Ollie tried to listen but barely paid attention. There was something so different to Carmen than when Ollie had first seen her, something harder that Ollie had noticed that first night at the bar. Carmen had always been all angles and maturity, but now there was something more profound, and she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. After her mother’s death, Ollie had been trampled with the effects of it. And Carmen had not only lost her mother but had been in and out of foster care, had a history Ollie couldn’t begin to understand.

  But still, there was something else besides all that. Something more.

  She wanted to fall into Carmen and pry out her secrets, one by one, and uncover what lay beneath her skin.

  When their eyes caught across the bar, something in Ollie jumped, ticked over, and she wished they could meet somewhere Carmen wasn’t working. She wished she could drag her out of this bar, out of that group home, and somewhere none of their dead parents or cloudy pasts could touch them.

  A few hours later, Deon had gotten louder, and Sara was slumped heavily on the bar. Yet the same beer, lukewarm, remained in Ollie’s hand. Behind the bar, Carmen glanced at Ollie and whispered something to Dex. After a scan of the room, he gave a nod. Carmen ducked under the bar and was there next to her, close enough to touch, her eyes lidded.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Ollie smiled a little.

  “Would you like to have a drink out back?”

  Mouth dry, Ollie said yes. She slid off her chair, and suddenly Carmen was reaching across the front of her for the two drinks Dex was holding out. She handed one to Ollie. “Gin and tonic, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Carmen took a sip of her own drink and froze as she looked past Ollie. Her eyebrows crashed together. When Ollie turned, someone was sidling up to their group, all dark leather jacket, dark eyeliner and, maybe, ridiculously hot.

  “Rae?”

  The girl focused on Carmen. Though girl didn’t seem appropriate. She looked a bit older. “Hey.”

  “Where’s—” Carmen looked at Ollie, then back at Rae, the set of her jaw nervous.

  “With Jia.”

  The tension that had seized Carmen’s shoulders seeped out. “Okay.”

  “Rae!” Dex held his hand out over the bar and she clasped it. “I didn’t know you’d be in tonight.”

  “Had some stuff to do.” Her gaze swept over the group and settled on Ollie, her proximity to Carmen clearly gaining her attention. “Who’re these people?”

  “This is Ollie,” Carmen said.

  Ollie gave a wave, and Rae just stared her down.

  “And Sara, and Deon.”

  Rae had stopped looking from person to person as they were introduced and focused on Sara, her head cocked. Still leaning against the bar, Sara stared straight back, her jaw clenched.

  “Oh…” There was something about the narrowing in Rae’s eye Ollie didn’t understand. “I know Sara.” A smile was growing on her lips, but nothing about it seemed friendly.

  Ollie blinked. Sara was normally open, a little rough around the edges, but she smiled easily. Not right now, though.

  “You do?” Ollie asked.

  “We were in a foster home together,” Sara finally said.

  Neither elaborated anymore, and everyone just stared from one to the other, the music and other bar noise behind them all, Carmen’s shoulder warm against Ollie’s side.

  This Rae person knew Sara before where she was now? When she was misgendered and miserable? Ollie narrowed her eyes, not sure she should leave Sara alone right now.

  “Well, that’s cool—a link between you all.” But the glares the others shot Deon’s way had him looking like he was about to sink into the floor. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked them in.

  Dex cleared his throat. “Drink, Rae?”

  At her call for a beer, Sara started up a conversation with Deon. With a flick of her eyes, Sara caught Ollie’s gaze and made a shooing motion with her hand. Ollie raised her eyebrows, but Sara narrowed her eyes and repeated the get lost motion with a sleazy wink for emphasis.

  Ollie looked to Carmen. “Drink?”

  Carmen led the way, and Ollie followed. The noise outside was sealed off as the d
oor closed, and the silence fell like a brick.

  Instead of sitting on the chairs, Carmen flopped onto the cot in the corner, sitting against the wall. Not sure what else to do, Ollie sat next to her, their sides barely touching and their feet beside each other on the floor.

  They had barely had a conversation, and that had never been more obvious than right at this moment. But she still wanted to turn her head, though, and brush her lips across Carmen’s neck, to wrap her fingers in her hair and breathe her in, to kiss her lips and feel the wetness of her tongue against her own.

  Everything was easier when buried in the physicality of Carmen.

  Clearing her throat, Ollie tried to think of something else. “Your friend Rae seems…nice.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  Ollie wasn’t expecting that answer, nor the amused looked that accompanied it.

  “She doesn’t seem nice,” Carmen said. “I know that.”

  Ollie chuckled a little, the sound still not sitting right in her ears as it pushed in among the constant heavy feeling her mother had left behind. “No, okay, she doesn’t. But I’m sure she is.”

  “She’s my best friend.”

  “Did you know she knew Sara?”

  Carmen shook her head, something in her eyes Ollie didn’t know how to read. “No.”

  “It’s a small world.”

  Carmen turned and looked at her properly, something quizzical on her face. “It is.” Carmen rested her head against the wall, never taking her eyes off Ollie. “Tell me something.”

  Ollie waited, and when Carmen said nothing else, she asked, “What?”

  “No, tell me something. Anything.”

  Carmen blinked at her, so sincere that something caught in Ollie’s chest and held. She put her drink on the floor, if only to get a break from that sensation and from the need she had to brush her lips against Carmen’s.

  “Um.” Ollie sat back against the wall, her head tilted to look at Carmen’s. Nothing about that helped: their faces were inches apart. “I like pizza.”

  Carmen rolled her eyes. “Fine. To be fair, I didn’t know that.”

  Ollie liked her like this, so relaxed. “Tell me something.”

  “I don’t like pizza.”

  “No.” Ollie shook her head. “You’re lying.”

  “Nope. I don’t really like cheese.”

  “That’s tragic.”

  That made her huff a laugh. “Oh, it’s the biggest tragedy of my life.”

  Ollie wanted to kiss that smile in the hopes it would be carved into her lips and she would never have to go without it again. After a moment, the look on Carmen’s face became expectant. “Oh. My turn?”

  At her nod, Ollie said the first thing that popped into her head: “I want to kiss you.”

  Her pupils blew wide, and her gaze dropped to Ollie’s lips before shooting back upward. “We’re getting to know each other.” Carmen’s voice had lowered, the timbre deep. “So behave.”

  Ollie sighed and tried not to think about the way she could feel Carmen’s heat, so close, yet not close enough. “Fine. I never had a brother or sister, but I always wanted one.”

  Carmen looked away, then back at Ollie. “Which would you prefer?”

  “I thought a sister, once. But now Sara is like my sister.”

  “Friends can be family.”

  “Exactly. Your turn.”

  “I once stole a skateboard.”

  “No?”

  Carmen laughed, the sound low. “Yes. I was seven. I tried to go down a hill, and karma caught up with me, and I broke my arm.”

  The image of tiny Carmen on a skateboard was a little adorable. “That’s rough karma for a seven-year-old.”

  Turning so she was facing Ollie a little more, her shoulder digging into the wall, Carmen took a moment to answer. “Maybe.”

  “Um…” Ollie’s gaze fell to Carmen’s lips again. “I liked kissing you.”

  Those lips definitely quirked up a little. “Focus.”

  “I climbed our Christmas tree when I was three, and it, and I, went through a window.”

  Carmen blinked at her. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Four stitches.” Ollie pulled her hair away from her eye, and Carmen’s eyes searched until they fell on the scar that was almost unnoticeable. She ran her fingers over it so gently that Ollie closed her eyes.

  “I’m scared of needles.”

  Ollie opened them. “You?”

  Carmen’s grazed her hand down Ollie’s cheek and then let it fell away. “Completely. They’re disgusting.”

  Ollie laughed, delighted. “I didn’t think you were scared of anything.”

  “Everyone’s scared of something. It’s your turn.”

  “I once cheated on a test.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Carmen frowned. “I didn’t peg you for the type.”

  Ollie winked playfully. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  That sincerity laced itself on Carmen’s face again. “I know. I’d like to, though.”

  “Me too.”

  In the gaze between them, something heavy landed, and Carmen’s brow bunched, her eyebrows together and her eyes searching Ollie for something. “What’s happened to you, Ollie?”

  Those words, again. That question, like an arrow in Ollie’s chest, piercing the exact thing Ollie was trying to ignore. There was no desperate kiss to throw herself into this time; the words harder to dodge—she might just drown in her own answer.

  “My…” Ollie licked her lips. She looked away, her eyes stinging, and then back to Carmen. Their knees were touching, and they had curled toward each other a little, but it wasn’t enough to feel like she wasn’t going to splinter apart. “My mom died.” She drew a shuddering breath and clenched her jaw.

  Carmen’s eyes, butterscotch in color, stared straight into her. “I’m so sorry.”

  A hand was on her knee, sure and steady and grounding. The fingers squeezed. “Thank you.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  So Ollie did. She told Carmen about how her mother liked to throw herself into work but was never the absent type. About that one time she’d raced through the halls of Ollie’s school in scrubs she tried to hide with a trench coat, all to watch Ollie win some kind of art prize. Two seconds of an announcement and a certificate held in her clammy hands, and her mother clapped with so much force Ollie had thought her smile would break her apart. Once, her mother slapped a woman who hurled a slur at Ollie, something about her skin that Ollie had been too young to really understand. There’d been fire in her mother’s eyes.

  “What happened?” Carmen asked.

  “She had a massive heart attack.”

  “I wish I could say something more than I’m sorry.”

  Ollie shrugged. “My dad was with her.”

  “That’s something.”

  Their foreheads were almost touching, and Carmen closed the gap.

  Ollie closed her eyes. “I think he hates himself,” she whispered.

  “Why?” The husk to Carmen’s voice pulled at something in the middle of Ollie.

  “She was a cardiothoracic surgeon, and Dad isn’t. I think he thinks if their roles were reversed, she could have done something, but he was useless.” Ollie hesitated then, her eyes squeezed shut. “And I think I kind of hate him for it too.” She didn’t need to say she knew it wasn’t fair. The way the words choked out, the wetness on her cheeks, made that clear. They left something acrid on her tongue, a bitter taste for bitter, evil words.

  “Oh, Ollie.” And Carmen pushed forward, her lips on Ollie, who pulled her in harder, desperate for something that burned away the guilt at the words she’d felt
every day but had never spoken.

  Chapter 15

  School seemed unimportant.

  Once, it had meant a lot to Ollie. Not because she’d been overly good at it. She’d always been an average student. But she just liked it, for the most part.

  Not anymore.

  Ollie walked the halls scattered, lost in thoughts of the heat of Carmen’s kiss and the way her lips quirked at the things Ollie said. Seeing each other was difficult; a week could go by with only one catch-up. The days spent waiting left Ollie with an ache in her belly and her mind whirring and distracted.

  Before, she’d been distracted by a grief so dark and deep Ollie had thought she would drown. Now that darkness was bursting with something pushing through. It was filling with a glow that built and built and seemed as if it would overtake everything.

  Sometimes, that glow was overwhelming. Ollie lay in bed with her heart racing and feeling like she was about to float away in the warmth that just the thought of Carmen caused, but then her limbs would go cold at the guilt that flooded her. Her mother was dead. Yet Ollie was starting to feel better than she had ever thought she could.

  Even so, she could still barely look at her father.

  Some nights, she wanted to pad down the hall and knock at his study door. To watch him look up from his computer, surrounded by models and paper he still insisted on using, even with the computer programs that could make his life so much easier. He would pretend to admonish her for being awake, even as something in his eyes, darker than hers yet the same shape, would light up. They’d whisper in the almost-darkness, awash in the light of the computer. One by one, she’d spill her thoughts for him to accept, to look through, to put together so that everything made some kind of sense.

  But instead, she lay in her bed and hugged her knees to her chest, because on the nights she used to do that, her mother would eventually come in. She’d be sleep-addled and dozy, glowing white in the darkness of the room. Eventually, she’d usher Ollie back to bed, and Ollie would hear the comforting murmur of their voices as she fell back to sleep.