by Kristen Mae
TWENTY-SEVEN
Claire pried her wrist from my outstretched hand. “I’m going to be late to my rehearsal. We already missed breakfast.” She was still naked from sleep and had been trying—without success—to go take a shower.
I sprang out of bed after her and captured her in my arms, rubbing my body against hers. Goosebumps rose on her arms. I brushed my lips against her neck, and she exhaled in the way I had come to know meant she wanted more.
“See?” I whispered, smoothing the skin on her arms.
She yanked away from me. “Yes, Hazel. I see. But reality still exists, you know. The world doesn’t stop spinning just because you want to fuck. Get ahold of yourself.”
I felt like she’d driven a two-by-four through my sternum. The pain must have shown on my face because she said, “Sorry. That was mean. But I really do have to shower now.” She walked to the bathroom, but before closing the door, she turned back to me. Her face was tight with worry, or maybe exasperation. “You have to be able to let go, Hazel. We have to be able to let go.”
She closed the door.
I sank back onto the bed, feeling like a kicked dog, and watched my chest rise and fall in time with my frantic breathing. It wouldn’t matter if rehearsal started ten minutes late; the students were always late anyway. My heart hammered with an agonizing mix of desire, embarrassment, and fear at the ease with which Claire had just torn herself away from me.
The shower was running. I closed my eyes and put a hand between my legs, mimicked the movement of Claire’s fingers with my own. I imagined her breath at my neck, her wet mouth on my breasts, then my stomach, moving down, down, down until her tongue probed me in the most intimate of kisses. This was the Claire I knew—the Claire that would be forever seared into my brain. I came quickly, shuddering, gasping, and entirely unfulfilled.
I was five minutes late to rehearsal, but so was Paolo. Iris showed up a few minutes after us, smiling brightly and singing “Sorry!” but her face was pale and blotchy and she had ugly purple bags under her eyes. I looked away. I could barely focus on the music, much less concern myself with Iris’s relentless compulsion to make herself miserable.
When rehearsal ended, she hung back, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot as if she wanted to talk to me but was afraid to speak first. I felt she was waiting for me to offer something, a kind word perhaps, or some token of womanly support. I slipped the straps of my violin case over my shoulders and faced her directly. “You know, Iris, you don’t look so hot. You need to sleep.”
She flinched, and her cheeks turned pink, eyes shining like she might cry. Guilt tugged at me then, the way a child pulls at the hem of their mother’s dress, and, like an exasperated mother with no time to spare, I shook my head at her. “Get ahold of yourself, Iris.”
Get ahold of yourself: The same cruel phrase that had been so painful to hear from Claire’s lips that morning. And yet, as Claire had done to me, I left Iris standing by herself, hurt and humiliated.
I went to our restaurant to meet Claire for lunch and ordered two waters. When the waiter returned five minutes later with the drinks, Claire still hadn’t arrived, but I went ahead and ordered a bowl of spaghetti with pesto verde, thinking surely she’d show any second.
Ten minutes later, my pasta arrived, but Claire had not. My stomach churned. I left the pasta sitting untouched and examined the family photos on the restaurant wall: recent images in bright color, but also older photos in black and white, somber and grainy and ancient-looking, vestiges of a simpler time, not so long ago.
I tried to focus on the pictures, tried to convince myself Claire wasn’t fed up with me, but I couldn’t stop replaying the scene from that morning. “Reality exists. Get ahold of yourself.” The past week I’d clung to every second we had, shutting my eyes against the probability that I’d splinter into a million pieces when we returned home, but Claire had already begun the process of tearing herself away from me. Why was it so easy for her to return to real life? I’d had the privilege of witnessing her cry out while I fucked her, seen her eyes go serious in the moments when it was far beyond just fucking. She could feel these same intense things, I was sure of it. But, unlike me, she seemed able to shut off her feelings as though they were dispensed from a spigot.
I stared at my untouched bowl of pasta, counting the minutes until I could be sure Claire had stood me up. It made me crazy that she got to have control over her emotions, that she’d grown up so normal, with supportive parents, without trauma. Of course she would have control over herself. My throat was tight. The waiter approached, but he must have seen my uneaten food and desperate expression and thought better of it. He swiveled on his heel and left me alone.
I finally gave up, threw enough Euros on the table to cover the meal, and left. It was only a few blocks to the stone wall. I climbed up one of the rising paths and found an empty bench, and I sat on that little wooden bench on the ancient stone wall in the beautiful city of Lucca, Italy, and let my tears fall. And with every hot tear that rushed down my cheeks I knew that, beyond a doubt, I was fucking crazy.
After my students’ rehearsal that afternoon, I packed up and bolted home to change into running clothes. I had three hours until quartet rehearsal when I would have to face Claire and try to act like a person who had not come completely unhinged. I planned to spend as much of that time running as possible.
Crying on the wall earlier that day, I’d resolved to accept whatever distance she deigned to put between us. All of it, everything we’d been doing, was insane, and we’d known it from the start. How could I have let myself fall apart like this? I barely recognized myself.
I jogged out under the large archway with the bottleneck of cars jockeying to enter the enclosed city, then took a quick pace through neat neighborhoods of stucco homes, gleaming white sidewalks, and freshly swept streets. I ran until the houses thinned and fell away and I found myself surrounded by rolling hills and bullet-shaped trees.
The lightness of the air around me was a strange juxtaposition against the heavy, aching sorrow in my chest. It made me think of how Claire and I had experienced pain and ecstasy at the same time, how I had felt like I was pulling apart at the seams, but in the best way. The thought made me run until my lungs were on fire. She’d already started pulling away, I told myself. I had to pull away too.
I showed up at the cathedral on time for our dress rehearsal, freshly showered and limping. The others were already set up and ready to play, including Claire, whose delicate-looking arms rested on the shoulders of her cello. She snapped her head up as I came through the door, but I couldn’t tell if the look in her eyes was concern or pity. I smiled at her as neutrally as my face would allow.
“Hey, Hazel!” said Katrina. Raymond was turned around chattering to Frank, who was sitting in a pew with a fat novel tucked under his arm. Katrina turned back to her music and engrossed herself in practicing some tricky run, sending the soprano strains resonating throughout the cavernous room like siren song.
“Sorry I missed lunch,” Claire said as I approached, opening her music. Her voice was falsely bright. “My flip-flop broke and I had to go back to my apartment to get a new pair of shoes.”
I got my violin out of its case and sat down next to her. Her fucking flip-flop broke? I kept my focus on my music while a hot, shivery feeling crawled all over me. I’d run twelve miles and could barely feel my feet. “That’s okay!” I said. “I figured something must have come up.”
Raymond was still prattling on to Frank about a new café he’d discovered around the corner, saying how it had the best little pizzas that weren’t really pizzas at all, and that he was pissed he hadn’t discovered the place sooner, because now he felt like he’d wasted a ton of time eating other stuff that didn’t taste as good.
I understood exactly what he meant.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Holy shit, Hazel, how fucking far did you go? It looks like someone dribbled acid on the soles of your feet.” I was lying
on the bed in my apartment (our apartment, really, who were we kidding?) in my underwear and bra while Claire massaged coconut oil into my legs.
“I just…went running. And I’m a little sore.” I pressed my feet into the sheets, hiding my soles from her. “It’s not that bad.”
“Um, yes it is.” She grabbed my foot back and resumed rubbing my calves. “How far did you go?”
I hesitated. What would she say if she knew I’d run twelve miles? “I thought you didn’t show up because you didn’t want to see me.”
She shook her head. “Hazel, you are really something.”
I furrowed my brow. “Is that good or bad?”
“It’s both, I think.” She frowned. “But good or bad, the way I feel about you is going to be irrelevant soon. We knew this from the beginning. We can’t just…lose ourselves in each other.”
She gave me a hard, knowing look. A look that said, I know you went on a crazy run and ripped your feet to shreds because I didn’t show up to one fucking lunch, you psycho freak.
I lifted up on my elbows and faced her. “Why can’t we keep losing ourselves in each other? Why not have this now, while we can, and worry about the mess later? Why ruin it by holding back, just because the end is looming?”
She was still massaging my calf with her glorious, strong cello fingers, but stopped and put my foot down on the bed. “I think we need to recognize this for what it is. This is not a relationship, Hazel. This is lust. It never was, and never will be, anything else.”
“Just lust, huh? That’s it?”
She cut her eyes at me, and I understood with great relief that this was a lie she needed to tell herself.
“The thing is, Hazel,” she said, “is that you love Oren and he loves you, and the last thing I want to do is damage your relationship with hi—”
“We’ll be fine. He practically begged me not to stop.”
“And I love Mike and he loves me, and after this, the two of us are going to go back home to our awesome husbands and start families, and this time we’ve had here in Italy will always be this amazing passionate experience that we’ve had between us, but it will be in the past.”
“Oren and I aren’t doing the family thing,” I said. “It’s just him and me.”
She resumed massaging my calf. “You don’t want kids? Why not?”
I shrugged. “What in the world would I do with a baby? I’d definitely screw it up. Besides, I’m not good with…people. I can barely share myself with a husband.”
“You are capable of sharing yourself. You’ve shared yourself with me.” She slid her hand up my leg, high onto my inner thigh, her eyes glinting at me.
I laughed and lay back down, staring at the ceiling as she worked her knuckles into the unblistered arches of my feet. “Are you going to have kids?” I asked. For some reason Claire seemed complete without children. I didn’t know why it hadn’t ever occurred to me that she would want to be a mother.
“Sure. I’m sure I will.” She set my foot back down on the bed and climbed on top of me, pushing my knees apart and pressing her pelvis between my legs. “But not today.”
My eyes fluttered open. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the window to the bedroom was wide open, letting in a cool summer breeze to stir the air. Claire’s curls glinted in the moonlight. She was snuggled up against me, her leg thrown across my hips. I couldn’t tell if she’d put it there in her sleep or if she was awake and had done it intentionally.
“Claire?” I whispered. The night was preternaturally silent.
I couldn’t see her face in the shadows, but her voice came to me quiet and surreal. “Only four nights left, Hazel.”
I found her mouth with mine and slid a hand between her legs.
She said it again Thursday morning—“four nights left”—and we skipped going to the Anfiteatro and ate each other for breakfast instead. After morning rehearsal, she pulled me into the storage room where she kept her cello and locked us in together. The room was pitch black and smelled of ancient clay. Her hands brushed over the fabric of my clothes, probing my curves in the dark.
“Claire,” I said, “this is a church.”
“Crazy, huh?” Her lips were at my neck, kissing and nipping and tasting.
“But—”
“Hazel, you said you didn’t want to hold back. This is me, not holding back.”
“We…” I couldn’t think with what she was doing to me with her hands “—should we get some lunch?”
“Shut up, Hazel.” She giggled and pushed down my pants.
“We need to run the slow section again,” Katrina said.
Claire sighed. “It’s fine. We’re ready. Can we be done?” Her knee bounced beside her cello and her voice was tight and restless.
I looked at her curiously. She’d been on edge like this the whole evening. We were only halfway through our dress rehearsal, with another entire piece still left to run through. It would be a good hour before we finished.
Raymond laughed. “What’s the matter, Claire, got a hot date tonight?”
Her eyes widened and her knee stopped jiggling. “Of course not. I just…just tired, I guess.”
My skin heated on Claire’s behalf.
Katrina raised an eyebrow at her. “Let’s at least run this other piece so we can check for any spots that might need brushing up. Okay?”
She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “Of course. Yeah, of course we need to run this. I’m sorry, I really have no idea what my problem is.”
I kept my eyes on my music, afraid to look at her.
That night, back at the apartment, with my arms pinned over my head, her mouth inches from mine, she whispered, “You, Hazel. You are my fucking problem.”
“We’re pretty popular, aren’t we?” Raymond peeked at the huge crowd. Five minutes remained before we had to go on stage, and already audience members stood along the back wall, packing the church until they spilled out of the massive wooden doors and into the streets. I thought how impressed Oren would be, and it was startling to suddenly consider him with such affection. I almost pushed his face from my mind, but instead I took a deep breath and embraced the image. I loved him, and I had to choose him; he had to be enough.
“Maybe they’ll like us better than the regular quartet and invite us back for a repeat next year,” said Katrina. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at Claire, gorgeous in a flowing, emerald-green gown, her curls rebelling against her efforts at pinning them back. She was already looking at me. We tore our eyes from each other and refocused on the crowd.
After our concert, which was met with a roaring ovation, we went out for drinks with everyone from the festival. Many of the locals joined us as well, congratulating us on our impeccable performance by trying to get us drunk. Claire was in an adventurous sort of mood and declined no drink offered to her. Once I’d reluctantly accepted my fourth mojito, I reduced my consumption to tiny sips in favor of keeping an eye on her as she downed drink after drink.
Katrina and Frank laughed at her swaying body and slurred words, but she was beginning to worry me. “Hazel, my Hazel,” she said, drawing the z out into a hiss. “We’ll never forget Italy, will we?”
Raymond, who’d been chuckling over something with Paolo, paused to give us a curious look. I shrugged. “She’s pretty drunk, huh?”
“Oh, Hazel, that’s good. Very good.” Claire propped her cherubic face in her hands and batted her eyelashes at me. “Everyone?” She addressed the group, slurring, and I prayed she would pass out right then so she would shut the hell up. “What you see here with Hazel”—I considered punching her—”is merely the tip of the iceberg. There is soooo much more hidden deep under the surface. No one can get down that far with Hazel, though. Not even Hazel herself.”
A furious blush lit fire to my face, and I scrambled to cover. “I…wrote this dumb metaphorical poem. Icebergs and stuff. And holy crap is she drunk, yeah?” I scooted my chair out and took Claire by the arm. “Claire, I’m going to wal
k you back to your apartment, okay? Let’s go.”
“My apartment?” She snorted. “Let’s go to your apartment. I love it there.” Her tongue stuck on the l in a way that could not be mistaken for anything but lascivious.
I searched my colleagues’ faces to see how much of Claire’s rant they were getting, but they only looked bemused. “Okay, fine. Sure. I’ll make you something to eat.”
She grabbed her glass to take another sip as I pulled her out of her chair and dragged her away from the others. “Yeah, I bet you’ll give me something to eat.” She giggled into my ear, and I thanked god for the noise of music and conversation and clinking glasses. I would never let her get drunk in my presence again.
She made it to the sidewalk outside the apartment building before she vomited.
“Well,” I said, “better than the stairwell, I guess.” But it gave me a hollow feeling to see Claire’s bile dribbling down the pristine Italian streets. I didn’t like seeing her so out of control.
I got her upstairs to my bathroom where she knelt in front of the toilet and puked again. “I drank too much,” she groaned between heaves.
I started the shower and helped her undress.
“Get in here with me,” she said, hooking a hand behind my neck and trying to pull me in with her, clothes and all. “Come on Hazel, don’t you wanna fuck me in here?”
I grimaced and slapped her grabby hands away as I pushed her under the water. “No way, Claire. You’re drunk.”
“Oh shit, it’s cold!” She shivered, shampooing her hair in a stupor. When she finished, she managed to shut off the water on her own, but only after three failed attempts at turning the nozzle. “These Italian showers are really weird,” she said, stepping out of the shower on wobbly legs.