by Kit Power
Yuck.
She doesn’t much feel like waking up, truth be told, but she’s also got a practical streak. She recognises that it’s going to happen anyway, so she goes with the process rather than fighting it, reconnecting with the concept of eyes and eyelids, linking the theory to the hardware, and as she feels the connections slot back into place with a couple of flickers, she opens her eyes, slowly.
Above her is a vision. She’s probably the same age as Alex, maybe even a year or two younger. She’s got brown hair that falls past her shoulder, and a round, warm face – red cheeks, full lips. Even her chin is cute. She’s in profile, so Alex can only see a single bright blue eye, framed by dark lashes, untainted by makeup. The button nose completes the set, thinks Alex. This girl is breathtakingly beautiful.
Alex’s eyes go back to the girl's arms, noticing that they are bare. The girl is wearing a no-sleeve vest over a fairly serious set of breasts, which combine with the youthful face on just the right side of obscene, thinks Alex, gamely trying to ignore the reddish stains that can only be blood across the front of the shirt, grateful that the angle is too acute for her to have any more than the vaguest peripheral vision of those hands on her stomach.
Because, something bad.
Alex takes her in, marvelling. Her breathing syncing with the rise and fall of the girl's own. That something bad is starting to form, now, a darkened shape in her rear-view mirror, threatening. Alex is hurt.
The girl shifts, leans forward again, and Alex feels a momentary throb of pain deep in her guts. Just a single pulse, but it drives the breath out of her, forces tears to her eyes. She blinks hard to clear her vision, and sees a small silver cross swing out from the girl’s cleavage, dangling free. In her mind, Alex sees the cross above the stage, the dickhead with the bomb and the blade, remembers the punch in the back and the explosion.
Oh. Right.
The flare of pain recedes, but there’s a deep rooted throb that remains, still pulsing in time with her heart. Worse is the oozing feeling down there, the feeling of each pulse sending warmth out of her, into the world. You can’t move heat from the cooler to the hotter, she thinks randomly, you can try if you want, but you’d far better notta, fucking thermodynamics.
Still, the girl is bloody lovely. Might as well make conversation.
She draws a couple of more breaths, experimentally, again re-engaging with the mechanics of the process; tongue and lips and breath (oh my).
“Nice chest. I mean, vest.”
The girl yelps with shock, body flinching back and away, and again there’s a moment of pressure relief before it returns, and this time the pain moves from a snarl to a low growl, and Alex has to pant for breath, too shocked to cry out. Nevertheless, Alex is smiling. Grinning, in fact, as the pressure comes back, and the pain drops away.
Oh yeah. I still got it.
The girl’s face turns fully towards her, and Alex notes with little surprise that she’s just as beautiful in portrait as she was in profile. Maybe even more.
She’s also scowling. Alex allows the grin to relax into a smile, trying to keep out the strain. She licks her lips, trying to get her spit flowing again.
“Come on, that’s not bad, considering the circumstances. Pretty sharp.”
The smile raises first. Then the frown begins to fade. It’s an odd transition; the pacing is off, but Alex is forced again to reflect on the beauty in this face. There’s even a dimple in her left cheek, for crying out loud. Just her left cheek. It’s borderline unreasonable.
“If you say so.”
Her voice is soft, admirably calm, thinks Alex. The words sound so lovely, shaped by that smile.
“I do say so.”
Those clear blue eyes hold her own captive, frank and open and caring. Alex holds the look as long as she can, but she’s drawn back to her cheek, her ears, her lips, that ridiculously cute dimpled chin. She knows she’s being inappropriate, even rude, but Alex feels that, under the circumstances, she’s allowed to not give a fuck.
Life’s too short.
Alex’s eyes do return to the girl’s, and she realises that the girl has just been staring right back the whole time. The realisation makes Alex feel giddy, but it’s like the opposite of the swimmy feelings she had as she was waking up.
Say something, for fuck’s sake.
“So, are you my nurse?”
Role-play Alex? Are you mad? Never on a first date...
“Yes, if you want. I mean, I’m not really...”
Alex shakes her head, making a pfffft noise. Lord, thanks for sending me this one. You’ll make a believer out of me yet, gunshot wound or no gunshot wound. That light-headed feeling is back, a weird kind of elation, floaty. Alex is carried on it, exuberant.
“Good enough for me. Can’t imagine the ones you get on the NHS would do a strip tease just to cheer me up. I like you better.”
The girl flushes at this, right down to her roots, turning an alarming brick shade of red, and Alex is slammed by a rapid series of revelations, intuition heightened by adrenaline and the diamond clarity that comes when you understand that your life may be measured now in breaths, in minutes, but almost certainly not in hours.
She sees this girl. Sees her loneliness, her vulnerability. Sees the cross in her mind's eye, and puts it together with the revival nonsense and the plain vest and the fierce blush and the undecorated beauty and the easy, friendly smile, the borderline spectacular breasts, and the tone of her voice and a thousand other noticed unnoticed subtleties, and what she sees is:
This girl may never have been kissed. She’s certainly never been seriously flirted with – or at least, not the right way, a good way. Is there some spotty dickhead with wandering hands lurking somewhere in the background? One who saw those breasts and simply had to grip them, jerk off fodder for months? Oh yeah, almost certainly. And maybe the odd crude comment on the way past in a school hall. But no-one has ever caressed them, lovingly. These breasts are criminally unnuzzled.
This girl is repressed enough that she doesn’t even realise that she might like other girls. Well, she does, on some level - we all do know, thinks Alex, deep enough down - but it’s not something she’s spent any serious time thinking about. Dreaming about, maybe, but not thinking about. Banjo country like this, the small silver cross of the believer-by-default, girls kissing girls is just not a thing. Probably not in a ‘oh-how-sinful’ way so much as a ‘completely-outside-of-anything-that-is-thought-about-or-discussed’ kind of way. This girl may never have allowed herself to think consciously about whether or not she likes other girls.
This girl likes other girls. At least, she likes the other girl whose stomach she is holding together, which is why she’s smiling like her face is going to split, even as she turns practically puce with embarrassment. Good for you girl, thinks Alex. Better late than never.
The smile gives way to a chuckle that Alex finds delightful. Even though the girl is looking away, Alex can see a sparkle in her eyes, and Alex feels another wave of something warm spreading from her stomach to the tip of her head, and for a precious second, neither young woman is thinking about bombs or blades or bullets or death, or anything except the pure wonder of each other.
Alex laughs, just a dry huffing sound. It’s enough to trigger a wave of pain across her stomach, under her diaphragm, a dark ripping feeling, and this time she can’t keep the grimace, the clench, off of her face.
“Jesus, don’t make me laugh, please.”
“I’m not the one cracking jokes, am I?” Her voice is strained, like she’s really angry, but Alex thinks it’s just stress talking. They had a little moment, and now the shitty world with its shitty pain and misery is back in the conversation, all elbows.
Still, play nice.
“Sorry, nurse.”
The smile flares again. Good.
Alex allows her eyes to go to the ceiling; her head to lie flush against the floor. She feels both cold and sweaty, which is probably not a good thing. She can
hear harsh, heavy breathing to her right, presumably from the woman who wins the ‘most-unusual-labour-story’ prize in her antenatal class. Alongside the ‘scariest-moment’ award and a special lifetime ‘above-and-beyond-the-call-of-trauma’ for chronic overachievement in the field of shitty luck.
Other than that, things are pretty quiet. There’s some sobbing, mostly of the near-silent variety, and a lot of breathing. To Alex it feels like the whole room is sighing, like a musical round without words or tune. For a moment it feels to her like she could float on it – just rise up and drift into the rafters, through the roof, into the sky, up into the light, away from pain and fear...
She blinks rapidly, trying to come back. It helps, a little, but she’s really light-headed now, and that floaty feeling recedes but does not entirely dissipate. Alex suspects she’s stuck with it, and she feels the shadow that lurks behind that thought, and for the first time, she shivers.
Her focus shifts back to her blue eyed beauty, her angel. Her face shows concern and fear. And affection. Unmistakable. Alex feels a spike of rage at the realisation. No fucking time.
“What time is it?”
The girl looks up and away, at the clock hanging over the door. “Quarter past three.”
Shit.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I really didn’t think... I mean, I didn’t expect, um...”
“Hey, sometimes I surprise myself.”
Again Alex smiles, and again she sees the smile answered, but there’s sadness there this time, and she thinks this girl sees the shadow too.
“What’s your name?”
“Katie. I’m Katie.”
"Pleased to meet you, Katie. I’m Alex.” Alex raises her arm, faintly surprised that she still can, and is delighted and a little shocked by the warmth she feels as Katie’s hand holds her own, gripping gently.
The touch hums with gentle energy, and any lingering doubts in Alex’s mind are dispelled. She sees Katie’s pupils dilate, that magnificent bosom hitch in a deeper breath. Alex can smell soap on her skin over the sweat of her fear and the background smell of urine that now surrounds them like an overused toilet in a dirty pub.
Beautiful. She is so, so beautiful. Alex feels again a surge that fills out her chest and stomach, and Alex notices the feeling stops there, does not spread across her hips, or into her thighs. Alex understands for the first time that all sensation from the waist down is lost to her – not even a numbness, just a total absence of feeling – comprehends what this must mean, the understanding clear and bright and cold and hard, but still she marvels at how she feels, at this wonderful stranger who is filling her up with a pretty smile.
Katie.
“Wow.”
“Wow.” Katie agrees. The smile is fucking glowing on her face, and as her fingers trace circles in Alex’s palm, Alex has time to think take me now, Lord. It doesn’t get better, so just take me now.
Then the contact is broken, and the hand returns to her abdomen. Alex feels the pressure down there increase again, and for a second there are spots in front of her eyes and a sickening wave of pain that makes the world go grey, before the colour bleeds back in.
“Fuck!”
“Sorry!”
“Don’t. Don’t ever. Apologise.”
They stay that way for a while, Katie looking at Alex, Alex looking at Katie. Eyes you could dive into, swim around in. Alex feels this, sees it, and feels herself pulling away as she falls forwards. It’s wonderful, but it’s all wrong too, because Alex is feeling colder and colder, and she knows that the pulling away is not part of the good thing but part of the bad. The sensations are getting dangerously mixed in her mind as the edges of everything become blurry and indistinct. Alex has always hated being cold, and she’s infuriated that it’s going to be the last thing she feels, and she shivers again, a shudder this time, and the ripples across her abdomen make her cry out.
Katie’s face contorts, in sadness and reflected pain. She looks around, frantically, and Alex is sad because she doesn’t want Katie to look away, she wants – she needs – Katie’s eyes on her. Alex thinks she can deal with whatever comes next, just about, if she’s holding that look when it happens.
She’s about to speak, to call Katie back to her, but Katie thoughtfully saves her the trouble by turning back herself.
“It’s okay. Katie, it’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t! It is not! You need...”
“Katie.”
Alex raises her arm again, palm flat, dismayed to discover how heavy it’s grown since she last did this. Stop.
Katie does. Her eyes are moist though, and her lower lip is trembling.
“No time? Okay? No time.”
Katie starts to shake her head, in mute rejection, tears now starting to fall. Alex wishes distractedly that she could sit up and kiss those tears away.
No time.
“Katie? Do you hear me?”
A sob. Then, “Yes, I do.”
“Take my hand.”
There’s a moment’s hesitation as desire wars with fear and duty, and Alex is cheered beyond measure when desire wins. The pressure on her stomach lessens again as Katie’s hand returns to her own. She sees red in her peripheral vision as Katie’s hand passes through her field of sight. She feels that awful drawing back, that draining sensation, each heartbeat seeming to push her further away, but that beautifully warm hand is back in her own, and the glow with it warms her in ways that the encroaching cold can’t touch.
This is it, thinks Alex, as the pain in her abdomen begins to catch fire again. Find the fucking words.
“Katie, you...”
“You can kiss me if you want.”
The tears are still fresh on her cheeks, her eyes are gleaming, but her voice is calm and steady. Alex feels her mouth fill with water. No longer trusting herself to talk, she nods instead, and Katie brings her face down, and their lips meet.
It is delicate at first, tender, lips almost resting against each other. It’s beautiful. Alex gets the faintest taste/smell of strawberry lip balm, and it tastes like childhood sweeties in paper bags. She tries to raise her head to push closer, but it’s too hard, too much effort. Katie feels the attempt and pushes forward herself, mouth beginning to open under the pressure. Alex feels those amazing breasts pressing against her, and raises her free right hand to hold, to caress. She feels more of that warmth, that heat, the firmness of the swell, the faint rubbing of a hard nipple poking through layers of fabric against her palm, and Alex is transported, in heaven.
Katie’s hand leaves hers and takes hold of the hand over her breast. For a moment Alex thinks she is being rebuffed, then Katie plunges that hand up under her T-shirt and beneath her bra and clenches it into the warm flesh of her breast, squeezing, and at the same moment, her mouth opens fully, and their tongues meet and their teeth clash as they push into each other, tongues dancing, lapping, warm spit flowing, eyes screwed shut, creating a wet warm space of sensation to live in. Their mouths tingle with the heat and intimacy of the kiss. Alex feels as though her hand is burning, branded by the shape of Katie’s breast and the nipple now pressed deep into her skin, and she can feel her heart hammering in her chest now, and each pulse sends her just a little further away, a little closer to the darkness and the cold, but Alex gives not a single solitary shit, only wishing this be the last thing she knows, because she thinks right now it was worth every fucking second and indignity and horror and pain, because she’s finally kissing a girl the way she always dreamed she would but never had, and she’s finally found something that she’d began to dismiss as fiction, something that makes all other encounters she’d had out to be the palest imitation.
Then the moaning starts again, maddeningly close, and for a few precious seconds they both try and ignore it, to just hunker down and live inside the space they’ve created between their mouths, in the meeting of their tongues, but of course the noise grows, and the pain and the fear are too clear and too unmistakable, and both feel the in
trusion, and gradually Katie draws back, and Alex does not try and fight it, even though she feels the loss bitterly. Alex allows herself a split second to hate the pregnant woman and her fucking kid with the fire of a thousand suns, and then opens her eyes.
Or at least tries to. They won’t open. She tries to figure out why they won’t open, and then realises with a spike of fear that she can’t remember how to. The memory of that particular muscle function is gone, and darkness is all she has left. She tries frantically to recall how, willing her eyes to open (ah, but even that impulse, the panic, is growing faint, indistinct, mushy) desperate to see those blue eyes again, but while the memory of sight remains, the part of motor control is simply... absent. Erased. This should terrify her; she wants to be terrified, in point of fact, but she finds herself merely regarding the information, noting the fact of it, assimilating it. It doesn’t seem to matter much.
Nothing seems to matter much.
She’s aware that she still has a warm, firm breast in her right hand, though it feels like that hand is a mile or so away, the signal coming from a tin can on the end of a long piece of string, and that there’s a heart beating hard enough behind it that she can feel the tremors right across her palm. That somewhere someone’s moaning (lord, kum by ya), but that’s it for external signal – otherwise, she may as well be floating in space.
Slipping. Falling, away and out. The glow from the other side of her unresponsive eyelids is fading, the sun setting, the light bulb grows dim, the warmth in her hand also seeming to fall away. The anger flares one final time, a ghost of its former life altering self, a guttering candle flame in what used to be her stomach and is now just another dark place.
She hears her name, faintly, close yet impossibly distant, a phone call from the far side of the moon. She tries to smile, but doesn’t know if she’s succeeding.
There’s more moaning, and then a male voice, yelling with an urgency that feels alien to her,