by KL Hughes
Charlee snuggled in closer. “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything,” Charlee said. “Everything.”
“Everything? That could take a while.”
“Your voice makes me feel better.”
Alex drew Charlee closer. Her cheek smooshed against Charlee’s forehead. “It is a nice voice.”
“It is.”
Alex grabbed the spare quilt from its perch on Charlee’s bedside trunk and messily threw it on top of them. Charlee helped her by kicking her feet under the quilt until it spread out over their legs, then she wasted no time in burrowing in again.
“Tell me a story about us,” she said, one hand slipping under Alex’s shirt to rub her back while the other remained squished between their bodies.
“You know all the stories about us. You’re half of all of them.”
“I love you, Alex.”
“I know.”
“Tell me about the time we got drunk and went to the diner and had to wash dishes to pay for our food.”
Alex smiled. “How did we remember to put pants on but forgot our wallets?”
“Good question.”
“You wore your bicorn pants,” Alex said, remembering that night. “I still say that’s the best coming-out gift anyone’s ever gotten.”
“Leave it to my dad to buy me a pair of pink pajama pants with rainbow bicorns all over them as a way of saying, ‘Hey, kid, we accept you.’” Her voice fractured around the words, each one rougher than the last, and Alex felt each break like a fissure through her soul. “I don’t even know where he got them.”
Alex grabbed the top of the quilt and threw it over their heads so the bright sun spilling into the room was muted.
“What are you doing?” Charlee whispered.
“Making the world go away.”
“It’ll still be there when we come up for air.”
“So then we’ll take a deep breath and dive back in.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
It was stiflingly hot under the blanket, but Alex refused to move until Charlee was ready. She didn’t care that she could already feel the sweat beading along her spine and between her breasts. Sometimes, hiding from monsters was better than fighting them.
“Charlee.”
“Alex.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
Charlee stands in the open doorway of her old bedroom and stares at the partially covered lump in her bed. She takes in the long, bare leg sticking out from under the covers and the polka-dotted panties adorning the firm ass peeking out from under one of Charlee’s own T-shirts. She takes in the gentle sound of Alex’s breathing and the tangled mess of hair that looks to have devoured her pillow. Even with Alex’s makeup smeared around her eyes and halfway down one cheek, Charlee could look at her forever. She absorbs the sight, the sounds, the moment, and lets it all sink in before finally moving fully into the room and closing the door behind her.
The bed creaks, a quiet sound, as Charlee perches on the edge. She reaches out and carefully pushes back a wave of hair, brushes the back of her hand down Alex’s cheek. Her chest swells with the touch, with the intimacy of the moment. It feels familiar, painful. It feels right.
“Alex,” she says, unable to stop herself from running her thumb across a plump bottom lip.
A tiny groan escapes the sleeping woman, making Charlee smile. She glances to the door for a moment before taking a deep breath and shifting on the bed. She lies down beside her, their heads sharing the same pillow, and takes in all the lovely lines of Alex’s sleeping face. Guiding her fingers from Alex’s cheek up into her hair, Charlee scratches lightly at Alex’s scalp and pretends it is okay. She pretends she’s years younger. She pretends Alex is still hers.
“Alex,” she says again, a little louder. A thrill rushes through her system at the quiet sound of pleasure rumbling in Alex’s throat. “Wake up.”
When Alex’s sleepy green eyes open and lock onto Charlee, a lazy smile draws up one corner of her mouth. “God, you’re beautiful.”
Charlee’s stomach flips and flutters. “And you’re asleep in my bed in my mom’s house.”
Alex’s brow furrows for a moment before her eyes bulge, and she rockets up in the bed. “Shit,” she says. “Shit. Shit. I thought I was dreaming.”
“Stop freaking out.” Charlee grabs Alex’s arm and encourages her back down. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” Alex says, tugging back up.
“It’s okay.” Charlee gently pulls on Alex’s arm again, and this time, Alex lets herself sink back down. “It’s okay.”
Alex settles onto the pillow, her face only inches from Charlee’s. “It’s not okay.” She closes her eyes. “I don’t know why I came here. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“You’re not mad?”
Charlee ignores the question. “Do you dream about me often? About how beautiful you think I am?”
Alex gapes at her. A slight blush colors her cheeks. “Are you serious?”
“You look like a raccoon.”
“I probably smell like one too.”
“I won’t disagree with that.”
Alex rolls her eyes, and Charlee reaches across the space between them to poke her arm.
“About last night,” she says, but Alex quickly interrupts.
“Don’t. We were drunk.”
“That doesn’t excuse it.”
“No, it doesn’t, but you don’t owe me an apology. Nothing happened.”
“Something could have happened.”
“Well, I didn’t stop you,” Alex says. “I wouldn’t have stopped you. It’s both our faults.”
Charlee tries not to dwell on those words. “I wouldn’t have stopped you.” Tingles ripple down her spine, prick pleasantly at the base.
“You’ve been talking to my mom all this time.”
Alex licks her dry lips. “Yes.”
“I’m not mad.” She scoots closer so her knees bump Alex’s.
“You’re not?”
Charlee says nothing for a long time, simply lying next to Alex and looking her over. And then, “You never came home.”
“I know.”
Their hands find each other of their own accord, as if there are magnets in their fingertips drawing them together. Charlee weaves her fingers between Alex’s, holds her hand between their bodies, and says, “I never went after you.”
Alex nods against her pillow, the swishing sound practically thunderous in the quiet room. “I know.”
“I gave up on us.”
Alex’s eyes turn wide and wet as she nods again. “Yes.”
They tilt forward until their foreheads press together. It’s amazing, Charlee thinks, how everything can feel so right and so terribly wrong at the same time, in the same breath. The same touch. The same moment. “I gave up on us, and you were alone.”
“Yes.”
The crack in Alex’s voice makes Charlee feel sick to her stomach, and she releases Alex’s hand long enough to lean over her. She grabs her old quilt from the trunk beside the bed and flings it out over them so it covers their bodies, clouding over their heads. When they are encased in the dark of the quilt cocoon, Charlee scoots as close as she can and wraps her arm around Alex’s waist.
“What are you doing?” The question is hardly more than breath, and Charlee brushes a hand down Alex’s back in response.
“Making the world go away.”
“Oh.”
“Alex?”
Alex’s breath is hot against Charlee’s face, bitter. “Charlee.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Alex’s sharp intake of breath comes only seconds before her lips press gently to Charlee’s forehead. �
�So am I.”
Silence envelops them as they remain wrapped around one another, and despite Alex not moving or making a sound, Charlee can feel her tears soaking the pillow beneath their cheeks.
“Cam’s bringing pizza,” she says after a while, giving a soft tug to Alex’s borrowed T-shirt.
A wet sigh slips into the space between them. “I should go.”
“Wait.” Charlee grips the shirt tightly. “Can we just stay here a little while longer?”
“We have to stop.” Alex’s voice rocks around the words like she has to force them out, like she would prefer to do anything, anything but stop. “We can’t keep doing this, seeing each other and touching each other like this. We have to stop.”
“I know. I know, but—just a little longer? Please?”
“How long?”
Charlee shifts and runs her hand from Alex’s back to her hip. Her fingertips tap over Alex’s naked thigh, evoking a gentle gasp before she latches onto Alex’s hand again.
“Until I forget,” she says, hoping Alex will understand. She wants to forget that this isn’t real, that this isn’t who they are anymore. The world will still be there when they come up for air.
Charlee knows Alex understands when she feels her nod against the pillow, their foreheads brushing. Their fingers tangle together between their bodies as they hide from the world and stare at one another in the dark, pretending for a breath in time that some things can last forever.
Chapter 8
“This is a good step.”
“So you’ve said.” Charlee and Gabby watched Cam plop down onto yet another mattress and spread out like a child making snow angels.
Gabby nudged Charlee with her elbow. “I just want you to be happy.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“So you’ve said.”
“You’re a doctor, Mom, but not a psychiatrist, so stop trying to analyze me. I keep saying I’m fine because I’m fine.”
“Yeah, Gabby, she’s fine,” Cam said from her place atop a king-size mattress. “She’ll be even finer when we get her one of these memory-foam mattresses.”
“Memory foam?” Charlee poked the mattress. Her finger sank in and left an impression that slowly faded when she pulled it back out. “Why do I need a memory-foam mattress?”
“Because you love me.”
“So, what you really want is for me to buy a mattress for you? You know you have a bed in your apartment, right?”
“But I sleep at your place more than at mine.”
“What does that say about your life, kid?” Charlee teased, sounding so much like her father, even to her own ears. She smiled to herself at the thought and noticed the tiny hint of an echoing smile on her mother’s face as well.
“It says I have a best friend who always has a stocked fridge and is down with binge-watching Netflix with me any time I want,” Cam said. “Why wouldn’t I always be at your place? You even rub my nubby when it’s sore.”
Charlee snorted. “That sounds vaguely dirty.”
“That sounds blatantly dirty,” Gabby said. “There’s nothing vague about it.”
Cam winked at them, cackled, then flopped onto the next bed.
“You should get the mattress you want, honey.” Gabby drew her attention back to the task at hand. “This is about you. You’re making new strides, changing things up. Getting back to being yourself.”
“To being by myself, you mean.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. But, yes, it applies.”
“I’m just getting a new bed, Mom. It’s not a big deal.”
“And turning your bedroom into a studio,” Cam said from her new position, curled up in a ball on a pillow-top queen. “Which you still haven’t let me see, by the way.”
“It’s a work in progress.” Charlee turned her back to them and focused on the mattress nearest her. Her stomach curled in on itself as she thought of the locked door in her loft. Lying to them was hard, but Charlee could no longer take Gabby’s sad looks or Cam’s late-night motivational speeches, which, depending on her mood, ran the range of everything from holding on, to letting go, to getting back out there, to Cam’s own rendition of “Independent Women” by Destiny’s Child.
They worried about her being all “doom and gloom,” and Charlee hated to make them worry. She wasn’t ready to start dating again, but she thought maybe this one small step would be enough to make them think she was finally starting to heal enough to set her family at ease.
“Besides,” she said, “an artist’s process is private, so her workspace should be too.”
“Yeah, but you’ll let me see it eventually, right?”
Charlee pointed toward another queen-size mattress two sets down. “What about that one?”
Distracted, Cam quickly moved over and crawled on top of it. “Hell yes,” she said, sinking down into the mattress with a sigh. “Good choice.”
“Good. Let’s go with this one, then. We’ve been to three stores already. I’m tired of looking.”
Gabby smiled. “I’m glad we were able to make a decision today.”
“It’s not like she really had a choice.” Cam waved her hand at the sales rep across the store to call him over. “She already got rid of her other mattress. She can’t sleep on the floor.”
Charlee laughed, the sound hollow in her chest and atop her tongue, and tried not to think about all the things she wasn’t saying, all the things they didn’t know.
The silence in the loft is deafening as Chris stands across from Charlee, his eyes wet and bloodshot, and gapes at her. She feels uncomfortable, breathless as she holds his gaze and waits, waits for him to say something. She’d expected the anger, the confusion. What she hadn’t expected was for it to pass so quickly, to dissipate in minutes, to be replaced with nothing but this tense, weighted, quiet hurt.
“I don’t understand,” he says after what feels like hours.
Charlee shifts on her feet across from the man who has shared her life for the last ten months. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why her? Wh—” He runs a hand through his hair, down his face. “What is she to you?”
She doesn’t know how to answer, doesn’t know that she should answer. Telling Chris that this decision had something to do with Alex hadn’t been part of the plan. But he’d guessed. He called her on it, on how different things had been between them since that night in the gallery—how little she contacted him, how she avoided his touch, how she avoided sharing his bed, or letting him share hers.
She’s spent too many years lying about this. Too many years holding the truth in. “Everything,” she says after a moment. Chris deserves the truth. “She’s everything.”
“Everything?” A bitter, broken laugh barrels free. “She’s everything? Then what the hell am I, Charlee? A way to kill time?”
“No,” Charlee says. “No, Chris. That’s not what I meant. You are special to me.”
“But Alex is everything.”
“It’s complicated,” Charlee says. “It was different with her. What we had was—”
“Everything. Yeah.” Chris uses the neck of his red cotton T-shirt to wipe at his cheeks before letting it fall, slightly rumpled, back into place. “Then tell me this, Charlee. Why didn’t I even know she existed?”
Charlee stares at him for a moment, unsure of how to answer, but Chris doesn’t give her the opportunity.
“I get that you two had a relationship and it was great. She was your first love. I get that.” He steps toward her and reaches for her hand. “I get that seeing her again is overwhelming and you’re feeling the rush of that, but that’s all it is, Charlee. It’s adrenaline. Nostalgia.” His voice cracks again as he clutches her hand, and Charlee closes her eyes at the sound of it. “It’s temporary.”
“It’s not temporary, Chris.” Charlee pulls her hand from h
is. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to pass.”
“We’ve been together ten, almost eleven months, and her name has never even come up. Not once. Don’t you think that means something?” He turns from her, pacing. “And you’ve obviously been fine without her. It’s been five or six years. I don’t know. But you’ve been fine without her, so she can’t be that important. I mean, you still go out. You still have fun. You haven’t fallen apart, Charlee. You have a life. A good life.”
“I know I have a life,” Charlee says. “I’m not saying I can’t live without Alex. I can. I’ve done it for years now, and I did it for years before I met her. I’m saying I don’t want to live without her. I can have a life without her, but it’s not the life I want.”
Charlee runs a hand through her hair, frustrated, unsure of how to make him understand. She glances toward her studio, feels her stomach lurch. After a moment, though, she sighs and motions for Chis to follow her. She grabs her key ring from the hook by the studio door and unlocks the padlock. Opens the door and steps out of the way.
“Go ahead,” she says. “See for yourself.”
Chris stands frozen outside the studio for a moment, his gaze darting back and forth between Charlee and the open door. “You’ve never let me in there before.”
“I know, but you need to see it.”
Chris hesitates only a moment longer before stepping past her into the small studio. A second later, Charlee hears his small intake of breath. She steps in beside him, sees his mouth hanging open as he takes in the room.
Canvases of various sizes adorn the walls, the same sad, lovely face staring out from most of them and interspersed between newer, commissioned works and pieces for the gallery. Old photographs and playbills are tacked to a large corkboard mounted over Charlee’s supplies table. Pieces of Charlee’s past have been frozen in time and color: Vinny and Alex laughing together, Cam pointing to her name in the playbill of the university’s spring showcase, Charlee wrapped in Alex’s arms and pressed against Alex’s lips. Mementos are stacked about, placed wherever space is available: old pieces of jewelry, a T-shirt from an Alanis Morissette concert Alex gushed about for weeks, souvenirs from spur-of-the-moment road trips, and sticky notes still sporting the loopy handwriting of her former lover.