Pieces

by G. Benson

  “I’ll be more careful.” Because what else did Carmen have to offer but false promises? Ollie’s accepting silence left something hollow in Carmen. As she sat farther back on her stool, the distance expanded between them.

  The evening was a slow one, time passing in fits and starts. Even in the moments when Carmen was serving and cleaning and clearing, it dragged along. She could feel Ollie’s eyes on her the entire shift. When things quieted down and Carmen sat on the stool next to Ollie, their knees knocking between them, or when Ollie stood across from her on the bar, their elbows on the bar top and mere inches of air drifting between their skin, time raced by. She was left unsteady when she had to move away from their easy conversation to serve a beer or wipe down some tables. Dex floated between them, only rolling his eyes once. That Carmen noticed, anyway.

  Mattie knew she would be late today, and Carmen was just happy he had agreed to stay behind more the last few days. He’d panicked the morning he’d seen her eye, and she had told him the truth: she tried to protect him from some things, but also needed him to understand that the world they were in was filled with things that sought to bring them down. Carmen felt like she had when she’d been tiny, no more than five, and had slipped on her mother’s shoes and tried to walk in them: she was carrying things too big, too adult, walking a path too large for her, yet stumbling was not an option.

  Thirty minutes before they closed, Carmen slipped into the office, then slipped out again, nodding to Dex. He turned over the Closed sign and disappeared out the back with a wave.

  Ollie watched him go. “Shouldn’t we walk out with him?”

  Carmen shook her head, her heart fluttering and her stomach a hive. “Not tonight. I’ll do the final close.”

  Slowly, like she couldn’t believe it, Ollie smiled. Still on the stool, she hooked a finger into Carmen’s belt loop and tugged her between her legs. She wound her arms around Carmen’s waist.

  Carmen could have sighed into the contact and never left. Everything with Ollie made her feel settled and like she was reeling at the same time, uncertain with her footsteps, yet marching on determined all at once. “Come with me?”

  Ignoring Ollie’s questioning look, Carmen led her toward the office, her hand clammy where Ollie clutched it. She opened the door and stepped in, watching Ollie’s face.

  The room was lit with mismatched candles, as many as Carmen had been able to find. Dex had donated some from the ones they kept both in the bar and in the warehouse for emergencies; others Carmen had used sticky fingers to get.

  The light flickered, shadows playing across Ollie’s face as she stared around the room. The fingers wrapped in hers twitched. For a second, everything stood still as she waited for Ollie to say something.

  She’d held her breath yesterday as she’d slipped a packet of tea lights under her jacket in a supermarket. Right now, though, it had been worth it.

  Or maybe not. Ollie still hadn’t said anything.

  It was too much. Too corny. Too much like a bad romance movie, a cliché. But she had no spare money for movies or dinners, and Ollie deserved a date.

  Ollie deserved everything.

  Finally, Ollie beamed, and Carmen let out a breath, the pressure expanding in her ribs the last tense few seconds.

  Candlelight was in Ollie’s hair, in her eyes. As they ate the pizza laid out, the softness of the flame seemed to settle inside her, glowing in her chest. She didn’t like pizza, but Ollie loved it, and Carmen would eat it with her every day if Ollie wanted to. Trading the free pints with the shop across the road was the best idea she’d had in a while.

  Cheese caught on Ollie’s chin, and Carmen swiped at it with her thumb, following it with a kiss.

  “You don’t eat your crusts?” Carmen asked.

  “Nope.” Ollie dropped one with a clatter on her plastic plate. “I don’t.”

  “But they make your hair curly.” Carmen couldn’t remember who told her that, and with a stab in her stomach, she wondered if it had been her mother.

  Ollie’s eyebrows rose, and she looked up as if she could look at her own hair before she looked back at Carmen pointedly.

  Carmen chuckled. “Okay. Fine. You don’t need curlier hair.”

  Though Carmen wouldn’t be opposed. She loved Ollie’s hair. The tightness to its curl. Just less than Mattie’s. Slightly softer. Her hair was like tiny springs. Absently, she moved closer, elbows digging into the table, and wrapped the end of a strand around her fingers.

  “How’s school?” Ollie asked.

  Innocence in such a question. The tendril of hair unraveled from Carmen’s finger, and she twirled it again gently. “Fine. Same, same. How about you?”

  Ollie’s gaze dropped to the table. “It’s okay. I’m catching up after falling behind.”

  Letting her fingertip fall slightly, Carmen traced a line down Ollie’s cheek. “That’s good.” She smiled. “Are you concentrating on more than just art?”

  Ollie huffed a little, softly. She smelled like citrus. A new body wash?

  “Yes. I’m being good.”

  “Can you bring your portfolio next time?”

  Carmen had watched Ollie bring things to life on napkins on the bar, simple doodles that captured whatever she was drawing perfectly. Some were pinned up on the office wall. They marched along behind Ollie, covered with sketches of regulars. One of her favorites was Dex, pulling a pint and staring at nothing.

  “You really want to see it?”

  Turning back sharply, tearing her gaze from those sketches, Carmen gave Ollie’s hair another gentle pull. “Of course.”

  “Okay.” Her voice was quiet. “I’ll bring it.”

  They ended up on the cot, their shoulders together. They sat against the wall, as they often did, feet and legs hanging off the side, forgotten pizza crusts scattered over the table.

  “How is your dad?” Carmen asked as usual. She knew how it felt when your heart lit up with rage, then froze toward a person in self-protection. But she also knew that Ollie’s heart held the ability to melt, and that as her grief settled, so would that rage.

  Ollie kissed Carmen’s shoulder and hummed, the skin heating up with the motion. Puffs of warm air added to the sensation. Carmen smiled. Did she ever need to leave this bubble?

  “He’s okay.” Now Ollie’s lips moved against her shirt, and she turned her head, her cheek on Carmen’s shoulder, their sides melded together and their hands interlaced. Ollie’s traced her spare hand gently over Carmen’s bruised eye, her gaze following the motion.

  Did Ollie know how much Carmen held back?

  She didn’t want to hold back.

  “We talked…a little. I told him—” Ollie’s fingers tightened “—about you.”

  Carmen turned her head completely, Ollie pulling back a little at the quickness of the movement. “You did?”

  “I did. I’d like you to meet him one day.”

  That anger that usually coated Ollie’s gaze was simmering, not raging. Carmen smiled, tighter than she meant to. Would it ever be possible to meet Ollie’s dad? “I’d like that. One day.”

  The answering grin left Carmen warm, a tug low in her belly that she had started to think Ollie owned. They met in a kiss bathed in stuttering candlelight, and Carmen would give anything, she realized, to keep Ollie this close. She shared so much, so easily, and Carmen wanted to give her something to meet that trust and match it. Fingers plucked at her shirt, and soon it puddled on the floor with Ollie’s, followed by bras and pants and underwear. With a gasp, their skin was flush together. and Carmen thought she was going to shatter apart at the touch of Ollie’s fingers, the feel of her beneath her. The first time they were naked together, Carmen didn’t know if it was Ollie’s tears or her own on her cheeks.

  Bruises, Carmen was learning, faded quickly
sometimes, and sometimes painfully slowly. The bruises that smattered her insides were still tender, as they had been for years and years. Some matched the imprint of her mother’s voice, and others Carmen’s own bitter disappointment. The one on her eye disappeared so quickly, it was like it had never existed.

  The ones that danced over her collarbone, red from Ollie’s lips, Carmen never wanted to disappear. Carmen liked to carry a part of Ollie that was all hers.

  The warehouse was getting hot, as it did this time of year. Too hot. It left Mattie cranky, surly, a glimpse of the person he could become in a few years. They were crawling toward her eighteenth birthday, and she had no idea how she was going to get out of there, to get Mattie out of there and back in school. Having been so long out of it, he’d be so far behind.

  So would Carmen.

  And he asked questions now. “Why are you smiling?”

  Rae scoffed. “Yeah,” she said, a smirk on her lips, “Why are you smiling, Carmen?”

  Other days, it was more obvious. He liked to throw questions at her while they sparred, and cheekily use her distraction against her.

  “I heard you laughing at the bar the other night, from the office.” That night, Mattie had come, and Carmen had insisted both Dex and Rae walk home with them. Shadows had loomed from all sides, and not for a second had Carmen been worried about herself but for the boy who felt like a part of her. Who was a part of her. “You never laugh like that.”

  Carmen cleared her throat and bounced to the side as he threw a hit. “Sloppy,” she said, and his eyes narrowed. For a second, Carmen saw her mother. The jolt of it made her pause and stare and ensured the next punch landed as Mattie took advantage of her hesitation. He crowed with his success but bounced straight back in defense, not one to rub in the shot. He was a good kid.

  Dex watched them from the wall, noting the play of Mattie’s feet, the way they danced and how he ducked under her arm. Dex had mentioned boxing one night. The suggestion had left Carmen glaring at him with as much venom as she could gather. Even if it made sense. Even if Mattie loved this.

  Carmen didn’t want that for him.

  But damn, did it make sense.

  “So who makes you laugh like that?” He made the face of a disgusted nine-year-old. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Carmen paused, her arms lowering slowly, and Mattie stayed ready but cocked his head as he looked up at her. “What if I had a girlfriend?”

  Why was her heart racing?

  His brow furrowed and he looked like Mattie again, small and young and confused. She really hoped that anger didn’t build in him, didn’t take him over.

  He just stared at her, clearly thinking. “Do you?”

  Carmen could feel Dex’s gaze on her, intent and heavy. “I think so.”

  Mattie grinned, ducked close, landed a hit to the padding on her rib, then danced behind her so she had to whip around. “Okay.” He shrugged. “Can I meet her?”

  Carmen stepped in on his left side, taking advantage of the fact that he was a lefty and threw him off balance. She tripped him up and before he could scowl at her, heaved him over her shoulder, her knees struggling with the bulk of him. She spun them too quickly, his shriek of laughter making Dex boom out a laugh himself.

  Later, Dex forced Mattie to sit down to study something mathematical that made Carmen itch to join in. She’d loved math, the formulaic manner it had, the way there was always an answer. After only ten minutes, Mattie threw down his pencil.

  “I don’t even need this.” He looked up, the brown in his eyes scathing, painful.

  Carmen met the gaze, even as something in her yearned to flinch away.

  “I don’t go to school anyway.”

  His chair scraped loudly, Jia looking through her office door, and Carmen and Dex watched as Mattie pounded up the metal steps.

  The sound seemed to echo in her chest. She looked to Dex, and he looked back steadily. “He’s right,” she said.

  “Which part?”

  That question held a test. “Not that he doesn’t need it.”

  Dex blinked.

  “In his frustration. The fact that he doesn’t go to school.”

  Dex nodded. “He’s a bright kid, but that anger could end up eating him alive.”

  Carmen waited ten minutes and followed him up, pulling Mattie onto the roof to sit next to her until the knot of his shoulders eased and he swung his legs in time to hers, a breeze playing through his hair, now grown into a cloud over his ears again.

  She owed him more than this, but her hands had nothing else to give him.

  It was the type of night that wrapped its way around Ollie and left her woozy with contentment.

  The table was littered with long-abandoned empty glasses, some still holding warm, flat beer at the bottom. The music verged on too loud, people straining their voices just slightly, but not so loud that anyone had bothered to ask that it be turned down. It was a Friday night, the kind that left Ollie layered in satisfaction with an urge for the future sparking in her limbs, even while craving everything to stay the same.

  She breathed more easily now. Her house wasn’t trying to smother her. She and her father took two steps forward and one step back, rather than vice versa, and sometimes Ollie wanted to collapse under the relief of it. Some moments, she found happiness spilling through her chest, and she took a second to enjoy it, to gasp at the shock that she wasn’t drowning in grief so much anymore but treading water.

  She’d even told him she was bisexual, and he’d just repeated he just wanted her happy.

  Sara was trying to balance a glass on her forehead, her head thrown back, and Deon shoved her, trying to knock it off. Every now and again, one of them would throw cards down at the game they played on and off. They all kept picking it up intensely for five minutes before losing interest, only to start again.

  On her break, Carmen plopped into the empty chair at Ollie’s side, her cheeks flushed with the heat of busing tables in an overcrowded room. She dropped a kiss on Ollie’s lips, soft and short and perfect. Ollie grinned at her in a way that should probably have been embarrassing. A comfortable kiss was almost better than the ones they shared alone, heated and gasping.

  Almost.

  As Carmen pulled her away, Rae, leaning against the bar with a tumbler of golden-brown liquid in her hand, caught Ollie’s eye. There was something about Rae that could catch anyone’s attention, a dangerous silence, an attractiveness that threatened to burn people who came too close.

  The last thing Ollie saw before she left the room was Sara next to Rae at the bar, her face screwed up, no doubt dripping something frustrated in Rae’s direction. Those two were like sharks sometimes, opposite each other, and Ollie was expecting one to drag the other down with a scream.

  But that was easily forgotten, and she found herself against a door, a thigh between hers and hands up her shirt. She giggled, an actual giggle, one that sounded like it belonged to Ollie from forever ago, but also one she was starting to realize could still be hers.

  “I have ten minutes…”

  Ollie smiled at the words whispered against her neck. “Ten minutes is plenty.”

  There were fingernails under her bra, and it should have hurt, but instead Ollie bucked, a groan guttural in her throat. It was so easy to lose herself in Carmen.

  When they tumbled out ten minutes later, maybe fifteen, actually—Ollie winced—the bar was filled with even more people. “I have to go soon.”

  Carmen turned back to her, her eyes sparking and deep and reminding Ollie of chocolate, the taste sweet on her tongue. “What?” she asked.

  Ollie put her lips to Carmen’s ear, feeling the shudder it enticed. “I have to go soon.”

  “Oh?” Carmen pulled back, those eyes imploring her to stay even as Ollie knew
she would kiss her good night and watch her leave if that’s what Ollie said she needed to do.

  “I told Dad I’d be home at twelve. I’m trying a new thing…”

  Carmen’s lips twitched up, and Ollie shrugged, gaze on the ground. “I’m glad.”

  “Where’s Sara?”

  Ollie glanced to their table. It was devoid of her friend. Carmen looked behind her and then suddenly laughed.

  “What?” Ollie followed Carmen’s line of sight, and her mouth dropped open. In a dark corner near the entrance, Sara and Rae were entwined, hands grasping hair and pulling each other close. “Oh my God.” Ollie couldn’t look away, and it made Carmen laugh again, the sound grating against Ollie’s shock. “Carmen! They’re kissing.”

  “You’re really surprised?”

  Ollie turned an openmouthed look on her, hoping her expression conveyed it. “Uh, yes?”

  Carmen chucked her fingers under Ollie’s chin, and Ollie shut her mouth obediently.

  “I don’t think anyone else is,” Carmen said.

  Was it really that surprising? Ollie looked back to the two in the corner, and her mouth dropped open again, ever so slightly. It really was. Blindly, she followed Carmen, and laughter finally made her look at her friends at the table.

  Deon was staring at her expression, occasionally flicking his glance back and forth between her and the quiet spectacle of Sara and Rae. “Seriously?” he asked. “You’re shocked?”

  Later, with Sara falling asleep against the window of the last bus, Ollie would arrive home when she’d told her father she would.

  But she was barely thinking of that as she stared at Sara.

  Finally, Sara opened one eye. “Shut up.”

  Ollie smirked. Sara’s lips were swollen, a red mark scratched over her neck. “Didn’t say a word.”