Chapter Text
So how do you torture a woman? You can pry her body away from her mind or you can pry her mind from her body. [...] To pry away her body from her mind you need to physically humiliate her. Of course rape is the most traditional method but it's not the only one. You can ridicule her body [...] You can make her embarrassed about periods. You can make her scared of puberty, frightened of sex, frightened of aging, frightened of eating. You can terrorize her with her own body and then she will torture herself.
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
For a long time, Lena associated criticism with love. Because, as Lillian would put it, if someone didn’t really care, then they would let your misconduct be until you really were under fire by someone else who would treat you with much less grace. If it doesn’t hurt, then it isn’t the truth.
To tell you that you shouldn’t eat too much bread, is love.
To tell you that you needed to smile more, is love.
To take a beating from the hand that feeds you, is love.
So what now? She taught herself arithmetic early so that she could learn to count calories but she still couldn’t fit in the sizes Lillian had chosen for her.
She laughed more at men’s jokes that were made at her expense, and the only reward she received was being called a bitch for turning them down when they got their hopes up and thought she was being a tease.
She took the switches against the back of her legs with a stiff upper lip and it only gave her strange sexual urges.
Do you know how it warps you when the abuse also brings you pleasure? Enjoyment doesn’t strip the meaning of what is happening to you.
Her first intimate partner clipped the side of her lip with his ring when he backhanded her over a disagreement she had long forgotten was about. She was primed for her entire life before him to chase the scraps of tenderment he could spare her and believe that this is what life should be, chasing the fleeting moments of euphoria over being cared for in the midst of anxiety and distress so constant it would become monotonous.
Some people think that abuse is being chained up in your parents’ basem*nt or being raised in a cage or being raped by your father every day. Although that can be so, some of the most prevalent and successful types of abuse are ones that are interspersed with so much syrupy attentiveness forced into the back of your throat with two fingers until you can barely take it.
When she was ill, Lillian would hand feed her rice porridge and pad her sweating back with a terry cloth towel and place her cold hand on her burning forehead with such a tender touch that her heart could burst.
In her delirious fever, she would forgive her for restricting her rare friendships with that girl named Sam who had a child when she was a teenager, or threatening her with the switch when she didn’t speak up politely enough in front of her father’s business partners when they wrapped a lewd comment into a compliment about her developing body.
When she was well again, it was back to the normal schedule. So sometimes Lena would shuck her jacket into her backpack before leaving the house so that the cold weather would make her sick again.
The push and pull made her hesitate to tell her teachers anything. Because if Lillian went to jail for this, or if Lena was removed from the house, then who would feed and take care of her when she got sick again?
Her father took her into the Luthor home so that she wouldn’t collapse into a vicious and callous system. If she found herself in the adoption process again, it would render his action, whether motivated by a sparse moment of kindheartedness or guilt, totally meaningless.
If her ex-boyfriend left her because she wasn’t complacent enough, then who would stand between her and other men who stalked her and created elaborate schemes to corner her alone? Who would walk her to her car after late nights out so that she wouldn’t keep scraping the sensitive skin raw between her fingers with the metal teeth of her keys?
She had finally broken up with him when she read an article about a man who had stormed into his girlfriend’s apartment and had beaten her to death because she rejected his advances for sex the day before. He had been drinking with his friends, and then went to her address while she was sleeping, let himself in, and then snuffed her existence out like one would for their birthday.
He was charged for manslaughter, since she had died days after being comatose in the hospital, and not instantly from his blows to her face and neck and arms.
What is it that they say again? That the only good woman in a domestic violence case is one who is dead? What bullsh*t.
They sentenced him to nine months in prison, give or take forty days. She could have had a child in that amount of time.
But no one would ever know if she would have.
When she finally told someone what he had done to her, and what he had threatened to do to her if she did tell anyone, she was asked why not leave him sooner? She has the money, has the privilege.
Hire the best lawyer in the country, file an air-tight restraining order. Blackmail him back, or just shoot him in the middle of the street. Why stay?
Beyond mountains are mountains. Having no wealth can invite violence upon the body but you must understand that wealth is not the body. If she has tried to leave he too could destroy her body and use his own wealth and his privilege to dismiss her character, which the court could attach to the value of her body. How much power do you have holding currency when they still own the bank?
They would most likely congratulate him, even, as a rising star of a fellow lawyer for getting rid of whor*s so early in his life, simple distractions for men who are destined for greater things, like Madonnas.
It’s not your fault, you were brainwashed.
That’s well-intentioned, thank you. However, brainwashing isn’t real. There has never been a tactic, although it definitely has been attempted numerous times, that can completely wipe someone’s mind and reset it back to tabula blanca then superimpose the will of another. A common belief is that people who are subjugated comply like drones, drooling with no coherent ideas of their own, totally lacking accountability or higher order thinking. But she did resist, you do resist. However, you try to explain away the evidence right in front of you that someone is actively siphoning your life away when doubt surfaces. Because what is the alternative?
That you foolishly allowed yourself to be taken advantage of just because they said a kind word to you once in a while? That you have no idea how to maintain a friendship, no less a relationship, even though you’re a legal adult? That you have been, since the age you could form concrete memories, watching yourself live instead of actually living? That, if you leave him, you risk crossing paths with someone even worse? That the only person that you felt like loved you is dead and gone?
Could you accept these as truths in this life that you will never get to relive? Could you?
And so I ask you in return:
Would you leave?
Lena learned that nothing you do as a woman can placate the monster, the beast that wants to shuck your muscles from your bones and chew them up then spit them out, then demand more from you. There’s nothing to gain from placating him, so there’s nothing to lose.
If he wants to kill her for leaving, then kill her. She’s tired.
So, she did leave.
Because even after him, you still can’t hope to be liberated.
Be thin, but not a bag of bones. Don’t earn too much, but don’t be overly needy. Be good at giving head, but also don’t ever put out.
And the list goes on.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around why Lillian was obsessed with making her more appealing to men who had the money to sway the courts if she knew that this was what men do to women.
You can’t run, you can’t hide, and you can’t fight back. You can’t even die.
When you’re born, the first thing you do is wail. And if you become a woman, you don’t ever stop howling.
So if love isn’t supposed to hurt, if it isn’t the hurt itself, then what is it?
When you hurt me, but your absence hurt me more, what does that mean for the definition of love? If love is desire, and you always desire what you don’t have, then did I only love you after you were gone?
Is that why my mother was my father’s greatest love?
Since she died young, and still beautiful, and he had never seen her coffin, he could reform her image of when they were at the peak of their devotion to each other until he keeled over from a heart attack. But I saw her, and she was a bloated, water-logged corpse. Nothing separately unique, from other bodies that have drowned. It wasn’t fair that he could live in innocent ignorance when he was the reason I existed to see my mother in this pitiful state.
If I were a poetic type, I would say that it was from a broken heart.
But, pragmatically speaking, to say that someone who you had sex with as a married man still thought of you as fondly as you did her - when you could not choose between the reputation that you yourself had ruined and commit to the responsibility to the family you had fostered - that she paused her entire life to wait for you, and that she let herself drown because she didn’t know how to live without you, is the love of your life, is frankly, plain nonsense.
You died from unhealthy life habits, overindulgence and stress, alcoholism, and a predisposition of cardiac disease on your mother’s side, which then I later learned was passed onto me. You died clutching your egotistical fantasies, your arm outstretched to a lover you’d never be able to reach, even with all the money in the world that you possessed. Because how could you justify being buried to a woman who you were not married to?
If death is for the living, the funerals and the burdens, then so is love.
When you died when I was a teenager, I mourned the implication of who was going to be the next head of the house and what would that mean for me feeling well ever again.
Those who were at the funeral tried to feed me lines such as the fact that you still loved us and were looking down on us from the afterlife. But I knew you were not there. Because if you were, then I would have never been taught to be afraid of myself.
Lillian bought a plot to be buried next to you when she was prepared to take the fall for my brother’s corruption. Meanwhile my mother was alone, underneath the ground on a hill, where the tips of the grass that grew there were always cold from the village island winds.
Alone.
You have granted me a life in which I don’t particularly want to prematurely end, but has made me sometimes wish I was never born. When you brought me to the United States, it was an act of mercy, not love.
You had set the standards for how I believe I should be loved, and allowed that woman to further erase the nuances of its gradation until she made me believe the world was divided into only two categories: perpetrators, and victims. And it’s better to be the victim, because that is how women are taken care of.
Even so, you are my one and only father, the greatest grá teaghlaigh of my life. There will be no man before you, or after you.
But you should know that I was born hungry. You should have been warned by God that seemed to favor the Luthor name and let our blood live this long even though it had long been tainted by deceit when I opened my eyes for the first time.
“O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” As a product of someone who had everything but wanted more, I too had inherited that as a family heirloom.
The clothes I wore could always be tailored from better quality fabrics to fit my frame in a more flattering manner. The food I ate could always use more sugar, more salt. The wine I drank could always be more tart, infused with riper fruit. The sex, deeper, harder, more satisfying. The houses, grander. The cars, faster.
No, more than hungry - I was born starving.
After taking the requisite group photos, with Kara on one end and Lena on the other, acting as the bookend to the rest of their friends flanking Nia and Brainy sitting in the armchairs in the massive halls of the lobby, a smile bordering on painful on Kara’s face and a ambivalent, practiced one on Lena’s, they dispersed to their rooms to prepare for the afterparty.
There were markedly fewer guests in the hotel than at the venue, which was to be expected. With no children and busy parents, and distant family members and those who were over the age to be awake all night, there were about twenty people left. Besides the group that she arrived with, and Lena, she only recognized Nia’s sisters, although she couldn’t remember their names, and some other people that were irrelevant to her.
It didn’t matter. Her main objective now was to drink enough to feel loose, but not absolutely hammered, watch her sister or her friends make a fool of themselves playing stupid party games, and see if Lena wanted to be alone with her, and if so, how.
Kara was standing towards the front with Alex and James behind her as she pressed the button for the 17th and 20th floors when she saw Lena get on the other elevator to the left of them, holding the ends of Nia’s dress so that it wouldn’t get caught in the mechanisms of the lift. Brainy was holding the door with his arm, and saying something that made them both laugh.
Lena’s head lifted as if she sensed someone was looking at her, although she couldn’t see past Nia’s back, and her lips faltered from being drawn over her teeth. She seemed to be ashamed to have been caught looking so unguarded, even though she had shown Kara more than the cards in her hand previously in the taxi.
The sound indicating that the doors were closing chimed as they slid together, and it took Kara’s entire will not to slam the metal back open to demand an explanation for what was transpiring between them. Her shoulders tensed with the effort, shifting visibly underneath her jacket.
“You alright?” Alex nudged at the middle of her back.
“Yeah,” Kara replied as she adjusted her glasses back up her nose. “I’m just tired.”
“Can’t argue with that,” James said. “Don’t know how people go through multiple marriages, much less one. I just showed up to sit for a bit and eat some food and I’m already beat.”
“Wouldn’t turn down free drinks though,” Alex quipped.
“Another statement that can’t be debated.”
“You know they want to go sightseeing tomorrow?”
“Christ.”
“Don’t know how I’m going to even manage to wake up tomorrow, forget going hiking or whatever they got planned for photo ops.”
“I feel like the next few days are going to be a preview of their honeymoon.”
“I have only one word - exhausting. But, I mean, if Lena really is the one bankrolling the whole thing -”
“Might as well milk it for what it’s worth. I mean, a few thousand is like a typical weekend for her,” Alex began to say, but her teeth clicked together and she threw a concerned expression in Kara’s direction.
Kara said nothing during the conversation, but clenched her fists at the mention of Lena’s name, and stared up at the light blinking at each floor. On the 9th floor, a few strangers got on, and no one spoke besides to tell those saying excuse me that it was no issue. Kara was pushed toward the back in between James and Alex, and looked over a man’s shoulder back to the light.
It evenly lit up on each subsequent floor until it reached the 15th one. The doors slid open and there Lena stood, her fingers detangling the end of her updo from a bobby pin as she asked if it was going up or down. Someone murmured up.
Alarm shot through Kara, whose eyes shot to the dark brown ringlets cast over her bare, delicately sloping shoulders, and stood ramrod straight. Alex furrowed her brows but blessedly said nothing although her crossed arms indicated an addition to a future conversation Kara didn’t want to have. Lena didn’t seem to see them, hidden by the crowd and the dim elevator light, and stepped in to stand in the front of the line.
For two floors, totaling a run time of three minutes, Kara stared at her back, mapping the flawlessness of it, of the bodice of the dress cinched around her waist, and lamenting how she couldn’t see any lower with the other people blocking her view. She couldn’t muster any more energy to hold her fantasies back, and imagined running her hands down to unzip it, slipping into the folds and moving them to where she used to to make them both breathless.
“Earth to Kara. It’s our floor,” Alex announced.
James was pressing on the HOLD button with his mouth twisted in a smirk as if he could read her thoughts, and Lena was in the hallway, switching her purse over to her other shoulder, looking almost as taken aback as Kara was, who lighty shoved her way through the strangers while muttering apologies. She scratched at the spot between her brows as her sister and James engaged in talk about the latest football scores she could care less about while they strolled down the hall, and Lena trailed back behind with her.
“I didn’t see you guys there,” Lena started.
“I thought you were helping Nia.”
“I was. I went up to the penthouse suite with them, but I didn’t go in. I went down, realized it was the wrong floor, and had to take another elevator.”
“I see.”
They rounded the corner, Alex and James’s voices becoming farther away.
“I heard that you paid for the whole thing.”
“Not the whole thing.”
“A lot of it, though. It makes sense, the whole thing was very…fancy.”
“Yes. I think that’s what they deserve.”
“I didn’t - I didn’t mean any offense by saying that.”
“I know,” Lena said, not in an accusatory tone, but in one that indicated that she was simply acknowledging the fact.
“When you get married, do you think you’d be paying for it?”
The question came out before she could hold it. They both knew she wasn’t asking about who would be paying for Lena’s wedding. Who could. To who.
“When?” Lena asked back, as if to coax Kara into answering for her, a waving red flag for her to run into. Instead of giving her time to come up with a response, she surrendered by turning away, scanning into her room, and quickly retiring within it, leaving Kara to stand alone in the hallway, facing the numbers 1726 in silver embossment on the dark red hardwood.
She knocked the side of her jaw with her palm in frustration and turned away from the door to trot over to catch up with her sister and James with her tail in between her legs.
“Where’s Kelly?” Kara said from behind the pair.
They paused for a moment and Alex answered, “She’s still in the lobby making a few calls. One to the babysitter, and another to work or something.” She looked from left to right, and asked, “Where’s Lena?”
“She went into her room.”
Alex hummed in acknowledgement, and they all walked in relative silence to their respective rooms to decompress and change into more casual clothes.
“Can’t wait to ditch this tie,” James said as he stood in front of his door, which was next to Alex and Kelly’s. Kara’s was on the left of the couple’s.
“Reminds me of the office, which I don’t want to think of on my day off.”
“I get what you mean,” Kara said, “Ties are fine. I hate belts and collared belts. I always feel like I’m choking in them.”
“Agreed.”
“Whatever I’m wearing right now is much more comfortable than a uniform,” Alex remarked.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” James said. He ran his card over the scanner and held down the handle of the door when it made a triple beat beeping sound. “I’ll catch you two in a bit, downstairs. I’m going to get undressed and maybe take a nap.”
“Got it,” Alex said, and faux saluted. “See you in about an hour.”
They both watched as the heavy door swung closed behind him and looked up at each other at the same time.
“I’ll drop my stuff off and swing by yours in a bit?” Alex asked.
“Sure. Just give me fifteen minutes,” Kara said, and then went into her room.
Lena had known that Kara and Nia were connected somehow, since this city was only so big. But she still couldn’t contain her shock when she saw a name she hadn’t spoken aloud in more than half a decade printed neatly on the guest list. She could viscerally feel her heart lurch and beads of tears form from underneath her eyelids, and pressed them down with the heel of her palms.
What would she say to her? What could she possibly say? That she was sorry, that she didn’t mean what she said? That wasn’t true. She meant it when she wanted Kara to somehow overcome whatever injustice had been done to her as a child so that someone could focus on healing Lena for once. To stop vexing her by the mere act of breathing and to stop reminding her that she was turning into a clone of Lillian while wearing the skin and heart that her mother had given her. She meant it all back then even though it mortified her years later that she was ever capable of such venom.
What else could she tell her? That even though we are young and were younger back then, that I had known that I will always love you? That I know that there will be no one like you for me ever again?
She evaded Kara and retired to her room, where she promptly unzipped her dress and haphazardly let it fall to the floor. She stepped out of the dark red pool and stretched as if reborn again, her emerald eyes set as hard as the gemstone as she glowered at her own reflection.
Lena went over to her small suitcase which had been brought up to her room, and rummaged through to find her makeup wipes. She perched herself on the vanity and began undoing the makeup that the stylist had applied early this morning. She had practiced with her psychologist to try to view herself as not a third party to critique, but rather treat was empirical and observable in front of her, but she imagined how Kara would feel if she was standing behind her, watching her watch herself.
And that was comforting, somehow, even as more uneven skin and dark circles and spots on her chin were revealed as she ran the wipe across her face. Kara had loved her without any product on as much as she did with her face done by some of the best makeup artists in the country. It wouldn’t seem like that would change.
Even so, she misted the air near her face with some moisturizing spray and waited to let it dry while flipping through Science and Subjectivity to prepare to apply more lightweight makeup for the gathering tonight.
Tonight, where she would seek out Kara.
And there, she would seek resolution. If it ended in interconnection or retribution or conclusion, then that was what she’d have to accept.
Kara, while you envied me, I too looked upon you and yearned for not only your heart and body and attention, but also how you carried your quiet strength. You degraded yourself often, and downplayed your accomplishments, which then became your self-fulling prophecy, but you must have had some level of confidence to not conform to the gender expression that was imposed on us as young women.
You seemed like a feather in the wind when you wore your oversized linen button-ups and black leather belts and size 9 men’s shoes. When you skidded on the ice and thudded your chestplate when you scored a goal straight in the net. When in the black-and-white photo of yourself when you were probably 8 or 9, under the Spanish sun and crouched over on the sand with the waves washing up your back, you were smiling while I was secluded in the estate as to not to tan.
I wanted to bask in that kind of freedom, your freedom.
You exposed your vulnerabilities, sure, the dark period of your life spent in uncertainty where each week could be spent in a different city, the foot you had always kept on the outside of our relationship to make a swift exit at the first sign of danger, the eye you kept at the door when we had sex. But that tension, that hypervigilance was attractive to me, because it meant you’d be on alert for the both of us.
Initially, I didn’t mind your damage. In fact, and I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I loved you more because of your damage, not in spite of it. I thought our scars would fit together to make us whole again. But you don’t have to have multiple doctorates to understand that exposure like that just makes the laceration septic.
So when you began to really break down and lose your patience with me, with the world, when you wept in the middle of the night if we had been drinking, or when you flared up in anger whenever I needled you about the color of your tie or the diet you ought to have, I couldn’t help but become disgusted with you.
How could you be so soft and emotional all of a sudden? You were supposed to be strong. You were supposed to be able to withstand the people calling you a dyke and a man with a puss* and you were also supposed to be able to withstand me. I couldn’t understand it. I too had been tossed aside and used and abused and I could take it. So why couldn’t you?
When I sensed that you wanted to sabotage our relationship, I wanted to sabotage you. I could not accept the reality that my greatest protector at that time, that my shield that defended me against my mother, the terror, the fear of the greater world could have cracks in it.
I treated the breakdown of our relationship like a duel in those classic Western movies. You could not devastate my body if I pulled the trigger first.
I was vigilant against spite, but defenseless against affection. I could not bear being sunken underneath the ground in such a state as my mother had been. Even if I was not worthy of being loved, and even if I was inexorably tied to someone in passionless matrimony, I could not be buried alone.
So I could not be with you.
Lena was stirring her Manhattan and eavesdropping on gossip at the hotel bar while keeping a part of her attention on the door. She either didn’t engage in conversation or kept any that other people tried to start with her rather short in case she missed Kara coming down the stairs that led from the lobby. The only other person she wouldn’t cut their interaction short with would be Nia, but thankfully she was so swarmed with attention that she didn’t try to rope Lena into the circle of people around her.
She was staring into the distorted glass when she spotted Kara, dressed in a polo shirt which looked white but discolored in the reflection of her drink, coming down to the floor, snickering immaturely at her sister tripping over the leg of a chair, asking if she was already drunk.
Lena suddenly stood, and moved an inch in Kara’s direction, but the group swerved around the bend of the bar counter and disappeared to congratulate the couple once more and speak to them more at length. She could see Kara looking up at the menu, contemplating with her lip between her teeth from between the gaps of the stacked bottles behind the bartender. Their eyes met in the glint of the light, and Lena primly plucked the straw out from her drink and downed the rest.
She sat back down and leaned against the back of the chair, letting all the air expel from her nose as she closed her eyes. She fluttered them open when she felt a cold sensation brushing against the back of her hand. A Sazerac, but made with orange peels rather than lemons, since she didn’t like how the sourness sizzled on her taste buds. Kara still remembered.
“Maybe we could take the night a little slower,” Kara said, not judgmentally, but in a compassionate way. Lena shot her hand out and bunched up the collar of her polo, and then let go in almost the same second. She let her hand fall above Kara’s breast, and pressed against her sternum with her fingertips. Kara covered her hand with her own.
She looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was looking, and when it appeared that no one was paying attention, Lena gripped her wrist and ushered them through the back door exit, huffing the chill night air as if she was emerging from the surface of a lake. She could hear Kara take a sharp intake of breath from the sudden drop in temperature, but she made no move to try to retreat back into the warmth.
“You think it’s okay to be sneaking out during someone else’s wedding party?” Kara asked, smiling beneath her wrist while she spun the front of her bangs with a finger.
“We’re not sneaking out, we’re ‘getting some air.’”
“Right.”
Lena leaned up against a brick wall and Kara stationed herself against the other side, but the alley was so narrow that they were within arm’s length of each other. With no drinks to find something to occupy their hands or their mouths with, they both stared down at the ground as if the right words to say were etched there.
“You knew I’d be here,” Kara said, after a solid few minutes of ruminative silence.
“Yes, I did,” Lena said, and interrupted Kara’s next question which she guessed correctly would be asked next, “And why didn’t I not come? Because she’s been a good friend to me.”
The next sentence came out while Lena nodded to herself once, as if she was putting in a vote on whether or not to become even more open.
“And…I wanted to see you. To see if you were doing well.”
“Am I?”
She had grown more into herself, her face more angular, her body more toned, like she was no longer as ashamed to adopt the body type that was more masculine, that was hers. Her clothes were not too different from the ones she wore in college, but were more elevated to fit her status as a young professional. Although her eyes were slightly sunken and veins prominent on the back of her hands and arms, her overall demeanor and light in her eyes contained the gumption to live, which was not commonly all there in the past.
“You look well. But only you know what’s going on in your mind.”
“I won’t lie. Some days are damn hard. And when I saw you, it was really hard. But I’m glad I did,” Kara kicked off the wall a little with one foot towards her. “You have no idea how good it feels to be talking to you again.”
Kara opened her stance and took her hands out of her pockets to hold them out as she continued, “I want to apologize, for what I did back then - pushing you away, saying those things. I wanted space, but I didn’t know how to ask for it.”
When you’re penalized for speaking, you don’t think it’s an option, even though in most cases, it’s the simplest and most obvious key to solving an issue than scheming up ruses.
“I want to tell you I’m sorry too, Kara, but I would be lying to you. But I’m not angry about it anymore. Some people apologize, and forgive, even though they still hold so much anger. The actual words aren’t important to me. It’s how you feel.”
“I understand.”
“I know you would,” Lena said, and tugged on the strap of her belt so that Kara swung forward, and their lips met, the momentum driving Kara’s hips into hers. She gasped, and Kara swallowed it as she bracketed her head in between her arms as she leaned further into her.
“Want to go up to my room?” Kara asked huskily into the crook of her neck. Lena pulled her shirt that was tucked into her pants out, and slid her hands into her back pockets, but she could not say yes.
“I-I don’t know,” she said, short of breath as Kara’s nails bit into the back of her thighs,
grinding forward.
“It’s okay,” Kara said, pulling away and sheepishly laughing with the ginger from her
Moscow Mule on her breath. “Sounds like an insane thing to do if you think about it.”
“This whole thing has been…” Lena snapped her fingers a few times as she tried to find the words, “Unexpected.”
Kara nodded as she held the door open for her so that they could go back inside and rejoin their friends. “But not unwelcome?”
“No,” Lena replied, and put her hand on Kara’s flexed bicep, bringing her into the hearth of the bar.
They spent the rest of the time nursing their drinks close together, making sideline comments about people making fools of themselves on the dance floor. Although they didn’t touch each other again, and the air between them was no longer charged, but easygoing, Kara couldn’t complain about the outcome.
It was well over 1AM when Kara managed to drag herself back up to her room after sluggishly telling her friends good night. Lena had excused herself early, and even though Kara wanted to convince her to stay, she didn’t want to test their tenuous reunion by pushing her boundaries in front of other people. She let her go, letting her head fall over the back of her chair, tilting it to get a better view of her walking off. Alex shot her a strange look, but she ignored it.
She took a hot shower which helped her sober up and felt entirely refreshed with the gel in her hair and dense smoke wafting from the bar all washed down the drain. Afterwards, she read an excerpt from her book as she dried her hair and patted her ears with a small towel and was wrapping a towel around her middle when her doorbell buzzed.
Kara went to the door and peered into the peephole, and draped her towel over her shoulders before opening it. To answer the door topless was scandalous, but so was standing in front of someone’s door in seemingly nothing but a bathrobe.
Lena took a step back when she saw Kara’s state of undress, but quickly collected herself and raised an eyebrow as she crossed her arms. She angled her face a little downwards, and it asked if Kara was going to let her in.
“Full disclosure, I asked you because I was a little drunk,” Kara said, and her smile became reminiscent of how it was when they were outside of the bar, placing her book on the side table in the small foyer. “I still mean it, but you know how sleeping together will make this more than a little complicated, right?”
“I know. But I want to.”
“Absolutely sure?” Kara asked, although she was already reaching for the edge of Lena’s robe.
“Are you?” Lena challenged.
In the hotel room, alone in the world, but together, Lena wrenched her up by the knot of her towel, loosening it and Kara towards her, the knuckles of her fingers pressing into her hip bones, halting Kara’s heaving form so that they could look each other in the eyes.
Bodies understand each other well even when their owners don’t. They do not lie. They don’t second guess and they barely think.
Kara anchored her on the bed, head tilted as if she had been waiting her whole life to do whatever Lena wanted.
“Tell me you love me.”
Without hesitation, Kara’s mouth dropped to her collarbone, nosing at the scent of her that lived there like she was asking for permission to also be allowed inside.
“I love you, Lena. I love you.”
Lena opened her mouth to reply, but instead, she turned into Kara’s shoulder like it was as familiar as walking into her home, and bit into the tender and tense muscle there. A sharp breath exhaled through the gaps of Lena’s teeth into a specific type of whine that preceded weeping.
What was it about the quiet night that made her feelings louder? She suddenly wished for a loud wind to rattle the blinds.
“Don’t fall in love with anyone else again.”
Her voice was hoarse, just above a whisper, but Kara heard her over her own heavy breathing. A drop of sweat ran down the side of Kara’s temple and splashed against her clavicle. Kara laved her tongue from where it fell, tracing a path up Lena’s throat, under her jaw, into her mouth. Lena tugged Kara away from her lips by her hair, the sweet agitation tight against her scalp.
Kara’s sharp bottom teeth became visible as she puffed through slightly chapped lips, her eyes roving down Lena’s body, half-lidded yet keen at the same time. She entered her once more.
“I never fell in love with anyone else.”
Lena’s nails flew up against her shoulder blades, digging into the skin, piercing the flesh, scraping blood from her muscles there as if they were performing an occult ritual to raise their love from the dead.
The heart cannot look away.
Their bodies had dried under high shared body temperatures but Kara’s hair was still damp, sticking to her scalp and forehead uncomfortably. She sat up in the bed and fanned her neck with a room service menu while Lena gathered her hair in one hand and threw it over her shoulder, letting her skin breathe.
“I never forgot you,” Kara said as she placed the laminated paper back onto the nightstand and flicked off the lamp, plunging the room in darkness as she shuffled back under the covers and the sheets, hoisting them up on Lena’s side. She shifted her legs so that she fit perfectly under the tent that Kara had created.
“When you left, I was nothing less than heartbroken,” Lena said.
She put up a hand when she saw Kara’s mouth open and it closed just as quickly. “And
that’s exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t know that you could be that hurt from getting what you wanted.”
“I’m sorry.”
Kara sentimentally stroked Lena’s cheek with the back of her hand but Lena kept her at arm’s length with a splayed palm against her sternum.
“You apologize so much. Before, you never apologized for anything,” Lena said.
Kara raised the hand that touched the skin above her heart to her lips. Lena skated her hand from Kara’s mouth to the front of her neck, pointed nails painted red pressuring it, lightly compressing her throat, feeling her Adam’s apple scraping against the skin of her palm before removing her hand.
Lena detached from Kara and leaned over to the night table to draw it open and scoffed when she saw religious text with a box of chocolates on top of it. She popped a chocolate in her mouth, savoring it as it melted on her tongue, the cherry jam filling spreading across her taste buds.
She drew two fingers around the silver chain that Kara wore and guided her towards her so they could share the bittersweet taste. Then they sunk into it, and into each other.
Lena’s eyes blearily cracked open when she smelled the familiar aroma of potent woodsmoke circulated around her. It brought her no alarm, since she or her bed partner sometimes favored a cigarette afterwards, but she didn’t think of Kara as a smoker. She thought of questioning her about under what duress she developed such a habit that had been known to shave off a few years of one’s life.
Lena definitely had her reasons.
It was too agonizing to be alive, to be human.
But Kara had a future.
She was about to inquire why when Kara sensed that she had awoken without having to turn to face her.
“Sorry, should I put this out?”
Kara angled over Lena’s prone form to fizzle the end out on the ashtray on her side despite having one for herself on her lap. Her arm rubbed against the tips of Lena’s breasts and she shivered. Flecks of charred tobacco landed on the white bedsheets.
Lena pushed herself up on her hands and swayed her body into Kara’s personal space. She slid her fingers under her jaw as if it were the stem of a glass and the flavor of Kara’s mouth was a particularly costly selection of wine.
“Come closer.”
And Kara had no choice but to do so. It was almost unfair how much power Lena held over her despite how much jurisdiction Kara had in her daily life, most namely in her occupation. She could imagine her assistants and her coworkers mocking her for listening to Lena’s instructions like they were gospel, to be so affected by one woman. Kara swore she would get on her hands and knees in front of Lena in front of everyone whose respect she cared about garnering if it meant that Lena would tell her that she loved her again.
What humans would be willing to do for three words can approach inhumane.
Lena pressed her lips against Kara’s and let the smoke evaporate between them, spilling out of their mouths like the remnants of a wildfire seeping through the burnt, decimated trees.
“I feel like my entire life is dedicated to killing one large bird with two separate stones,” Lena said as she retracted back under the covers, sweeping her fingers through a galaxy of dark hair, shimmering in the moonlight that filtered through the window as she rested more fully on her slender arms propped up on her pillow.
Kara held her hand in hers, running a finger up a prominent blue vein. “Then run away with me.”
“How far can we run?”
Lena felt Kara stroke her palm with her thumb, and although two hours ago Kara was hilted inside her, fiercely whispering how nice she looked beneath her, how pliant, this relatively innocent touch made her shy. “How fast?”
“Then stay instead,” Kara said as she drew her arms around Lena, pulling her close and burying her nose into thick black threads.
Lena couldn’t help but feel drowsy in Kara’s pleasantly warm embrace, much like lounging in front of a fireplace when there is a blizzard raging outside.
She was cut off from the rest of the world, but it brought her no distress, but rather relief in the temporary fantasy that there was no worriment, no heartbreak to encounter within these four walls.
The sun was on the verge of breaking over the dawn. Lena was running a brush in her lustrous hair at the vanity when Kara awoke.
She sleepily blinked a few times and the first thing that came into focus was the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle. She rustled under the covers for a moment, turning over so that she didn’t see it. She wanted to preserve the illusion that Lena shared a house with her, and that she slept in their bed, for as long as possible. But her movement alerted Lena that she was conscious, and she severed the dream instantly.
“I don’t have enough cover-up for this,” Lena said as inspected herself in the mirror, groaning in chagrin at the purpling marks from her shoulder to her neck. Kara rumbled in satisfaction and Lena threw her an annoyed look which she didn’t feel the barbs of at all.
Kara slinked out of bed and came to her side, leaning against the corner of the vanity, feeling sharp marble irritating a bruise against the curve of her hip. She attempted to swallow down some invisible sand that had accumulated in her throat while she couldn’t think of anything to say.
Lena leaned closer to the mirror, scrutinizing the redness in her right eye, then she returned the brush into the drawer of the vanity, her hands tight against the marbled surface of the table as she closed it.
“I hope, when I die, I’ll be forgiven. I hope I’ll be told I did my best. And if reincarnation is real, I hope that I can become a person to say sorry for all my wrongdoings,” Lena said as she dropped her gaze from the mirror to the polished marble. “That is the only reason why I’m alive.”
It was difficult to discern with the pattern that the marble created on the surface of the desk, but Lena came to the brisk, shameful realization that she was crying and the swirls on the smooth surface weren't the effects of recrystallization, but palpable, legitimate tears.
When Kara brought her head to rest against her abdomen, she didn’t resist and clung to her waist.
Her tears felt hotter, fell faster, with Kara here.
Lena held the tie of her robe that she re-dressed in close to her pelvis as she leaned over Kara’s nude sleeping form, slightly snoring, salivating onto the pillowcase. She affixed her hair over her ears, already able to picture how badly it would point upwards since Kara went to bed with her hair still wet, looking like a co*ckatiel.
Lena briefly smiled at the image, which died hurriedly when she considered the possibility that she wouldn’t be there to see it. No matter what they said in the heat of the moment, of trading little deaths, having sex didn’t avow permanence.
She kissed her cheek and caressed Kara’s upper arm, branding the sensation of both into her memory. So that even, by some miracle, she died of old age, even when her brain corroded for good, she would be able to relive this in vivid detail.
Lena hoped that wherever Kara decided to go from here, she wouldn’t travel too far where the time difference was too great, so that she could imagine that Kara was with her, thinking the same thoughts when they looked at the same moon.
This is a way to ensure that we don’t leave each other again.
Before Kara woke up she knew that she was alone.
She turned over onto her stomach and coiled her body into itself. The sun bore down on her bare back harshly the sheets slipped off as if to reaffirm that there was no one else in the bed. Kara gripped the space where Lena’s lipstick smeared on the bedspread, and kissed it, then lifted her head to the ceiling.
“Left alone in the morning,” she said to herself, “after all that.”
Will you still love me decades after your tears fall free like an archer letting loose a bow and I am nothing more than a faint, faded image in your memories? When your lips no longer are required to form around the edges of my name, will you be able to call it when we meet again after you die? If I can’t feel your touch in the afterlife, and you can’t say my name, how will we see each other if my back is turned? I would hate to miss you.
And so I run, trying to catch the train to your heart. But each time, I miss it when it’s just out of reach. I run, sprinter’s pace, every time, until I realize that no such station exists. Then I don’t have a choice but to let go of a ticket to somewhere that’s defunct.
No one will know that we loved each other here. No one will care. We can love and love until our bodies turn to dust spread across the vastest of seas and it will not stop the sun from exploding as we return to the stars a billion years from now.
Even so, I love you because I love you.
I love you, so that’s what I’ll waste this grain of life, this minuscule, meager offering of a life, doing.
Lena stood on the curb in a long-sleeved one-piece dark blue dress, rotating her watch around her wrist a few times as she waited for her chauffeur. She didn’t see Kara at breakfast, and had a coffee and half a croissant with Nia’s sister who tried to imply that they were finding a way to pay her back until she firmly refused. She seemed flustered, but pleased, and Lena finished the rest of her cup by herself, looking over the veranda to the garden below.
She looked down at her watch and saw that it was well past eleven, and that after saying farewell to the newlyweds, there was little chance that the guests would linger. She could have been mistaken, but she had seen Kara’s sister and her wife check out early so that they could go pick up their child. Kara had likely already left with them.
Lena sighed.
Partings are so anticlimactic.
“Lena!”
She snapped her gaze to see Kara dashing on the sidewalk that led up to the entrance of the hotel, her frame becoming more and more apparent as she ascended the hill, wearing the same wrinkled dress shirt from yesterday and her bag bouncing against her legs raised in sprint. Lena was speechless as she ran to her side, and doubled over, panting with her hands on her knees, the crown of her short blonde hair darkened with sweat.
“Thank God you’re still here.”
“Why were you running?”
“Well, I was going to leave with my sister but then I couldn’t just let this go. So I made her stop the car.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere on Sullivan St. They were about to turn onto the highway.”
“But that’s…that’s over two miles away.”
“I know. But, I couldn’t let you just go like that.”
Lena wordlessly offered her hand, and Kara enfolded it into her palm like it was a precious jewel. Kara hooked a finger under her chin, her smile turning a little wry.
“Maybe we’ll never see each other again after this, or maybe we will take the time to really understand each other, and be friends. And maybe down the line. we might fall in love over and over and split up over and over. Whatever you decide, I respect your decision, even though I can’t promise you what the future would look like.”
Their faces were closely adjoined, but not touching so that they resembled the famous optical illusion of a vase, the sun radiating in the negative space.
“But I know that right now, I’d really like to take this taxi again with you.”
Her name dripped from her lips in platinum gold as the brightness ate everything.
