Blushing Maid, page 15
"I don’t know what to say," she finally told me, after a long silence.
"What do you want me to say?" I asked her, keenly, hurried to make this all better now that I had gotten her talking at least a little.
"It’s nothing about what you can say," she replied, quietly. "It’s just...I was right."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "What were you right about?”
"Us being out," she pointed out. "It’s only going to cause more trouble for us both, isn’t it?”
She finally looked at me, and her eyes were written with an abject pain that hurt me to see in her. I cupped her face in my hand, and she closed her eyes for a moment, like she was trying to pretend that this was all there was – that this moment was all that mattered.
"It’s not more trouble than it’s worth-"
"That’s what you were speaking to your parents about before, right?" She prompted me. "When you came in here, you were all upset. Was it about that?"
I couldn’t look at her. She knew me too well for me to lie to her about this, about anything. It hurt so much to think that there were people out there who saw our love as something dangerous, something that was to be avoided and shut down at all costs. The connection we had went deeper than anything I had shared with anyone before, and I wanted to cry when it struck me how much some people hated us for it.
"Yes," I confessed. "But it was just my dad. He was an asshole about it, but my mom seems much more open-"
"I don’t know if you could call that open," she remarked.
"It’s as open as I can hope for right now," I replied. "And it’s just growing pains, really. They’re taking a while to get their heads around it, but they will, I promise. We just need to give them some time to work it out, and then it’s going to be worth it."
"And what if they just don’t ever come round to it?” She asked, looking deep into my eyes. "What if this is just it, and we can’t find anyone out there to just take us as we are?"
"Alana, you can’t think like that-"
"I don’t see why not," she replied. "I mean, that’s what it’s been like my whole life. I don’t see much reason why that would have changed all of a sudden."
"But this is a small town, people are different-"
"That’s what you told me," she reminded me. "People are different. You said nobody would care, but they care, and that’s what it’s going to be like anywhere we go. It’s all the same, all these people who don’t want us to..."
She had to catch her breath. The pain was evident in her voice. I could feel tears rising in my eyes once more, and I swiftly dashed them away; I couldn’t let them come through, not again, not anymore.
"So what do you want to do?” I asked her. "You think things would just be better if we stayed in the closet?"
"I mean, it’s safe there for us," she pointed out. "I don’t want to go about my life knowing so many people don’t like me for the person that I just happen to be, it doesn’t feel fair..."
"Of course it isn’t fair," I replied bluntly. "And that’s why most people don’t have that attitude these days."
"Not the people we’ve come across," she pointed out. "Even Rick, he’s fine with it, but only as long as we stay in the closet and don’t make a big deal about it to anyone..."
"But Rick isn’t the most important person in my life, Alana," I told her. "You are. Remember?”
"But without him..."
"Without him, you’re still a brilliant, talented woman, and you’d still have everything you needed to get by," I pointed out.
"I don’t know if I can do it," she confessed, and my heart ached for her, God, it fucking ached. I knew that this was something that I had signed up for when I had decided to get involved with her while she was still married to Rick, but I hoped coming back here would have been enough to shake loose something that she had stuck to all this time.
But instead my fucking parents had had to underline the point in Alana’s head that nobody was going to accept her for who she was. No matter if she accepted herself, no matter how much happier she would have been just coming out and being honest and not having to constantly hide who she truly was. No matter how much it would have meant to me, or to our lives together. She was still scared. And it seemed like everything I did to make her fears a little less intense only served to make them even stronger.
I got off the bed and knelt down in front of her, and put my head in her lap; I just needed the comfort of her touch, even if it was only for a moment. I knew that there was so much she was fighting right now, both inside and outside herself, but when I felt her fingers on my hair, it was like they didn’t even exist.
"I need to get out of here," she told me, softly. And even though I wanted to stay, I knew that she was right. I couldn’t make her stay here when the people I had hoped would accept her had all but rejected us both.
"Okay," I whispered back, not moving my head from her lap. "If that’s what you need, then we’ll go."
"Thank you."
But I didn’t have the words to say anything back to her. I just needed to lay here a little longer, and convince myself that this hadn’t all gone as wrong as it felt like it had. The rest of the world could wait for now. I just wanted to be alone with her for a little longer. Even though I knew I would have to face it soon enough.
Chapter 24
People are talking
Alana had her head pressed to the window, just the same way she had done since we had left my parents place. She had hardly said a word since we had packed our stuff and caught the train back to the city, and I was starting to worry that I might have damaged things beyond what I could fix.
But how could that be? I had worked so hard to make sure that everything would be positive for her, how had it ended in such a total mess? Her mouth was turned down at the corners, into an almost comical little frown, and I wished I could have found some way to reach out and wipe it off her face, turn it into a smile.
I knew she felt bad for asking me to leave so soon. Hell, I didn’t feel great about going. With so much left unfinished between my parents and I, there seemed something terribly wrong about just marching on out of there, but I wasn’t going to let her go back to the city alone. I wasn’t going to let the woman I loved be all by herself, when the people who couldn’t accept me for who I was hadn’t decided to come around to me yet.
I had kissed her at the station, hoping that it would be enough to put a smile on her face, but she had pulled back from me as soon as our lips had met and had glanced around as though she expected someone to leap out and photograph us at any moment.
"You know we can’t just do stuff like that," she fussed, smoothing down her hair. I smiled at her, hoping she would reflect it soon enough, but I didn’t get so lucky.
"Nobody here is going to see us," I assured her. "And even if they do, they’re not going to care."
"You can’t be sure of that," she replied, and she glanced away from me. It had seemed like she had been on permanent edge since we’d left my parents’ house, as though being out here in the open was just asking for trouble.
On the train, I slept a little, having spent most of the night tossing and turning; it was hard to rest when she wasn’t there next to me, doubly so when I knew she was hurting. Even on the train, with her right there in front of me, I had a hard time letting go and checking out. I just wanted to be able to reach out to her and connect with her, get under the skin of what was keeping her so far from me in those moments. I figured that that conversation would be best had when I was feeling a little more awake, that said, and I promised myself that I would have it with her when we were back in the city, on neutral ground, where we could talk things out properly once again.
I helped her with her bags back to the apartment, and looked over the studying I was meant to be working on for my university course. I really should have taken it with me, but I knew that there was no way that I would have been able to focus. Even now, it felt like my brain was still back at my parents’ place, stuck in the memory of what they had said to me, what they had done.
It took a hot second to click out of the standards I’d gotten into with her while we’d been away. Being physical with her, being a real couple in public, that had been addictive, even though it had only lasted for a few days. I didn’t want to give it up again, even though it was all behind us now.
"I think I just need to sleep for a few days," She remarked with a long sigh, flopping down onto our couch and running her hands through her hair.
"Yeah, I feel that," I agreed, glad that we were on the same page about something for the first time in a while. I sat down next to her, and wound my fingers through hers, holding onto her tight.
"Shall we go to bed?” She suggested. "Get some rest? Then we can figure out where we stand with all of this?”
"I think that sounds like a perfect idea," I agreed, and she put her arm around me.
"I’m sorry it didn’t all work out like you wanted it to," she remarked. "But we’re going to figure this out, right?"
"Of course we are," I promised her. "You really think I’m going to let you get away with leaving it there?”
"Hmm, well, you are the tenacious sort," she agreed with a laugh. And, just as she was about to lean in for a kiss, the door to the apartment burst open – she jumped away from me, like she had been caught in the act. And standing there, looking at us with a face like thunder, was Rick.
"Rick, what the hell are you-" I started, but before I could go any further, he cut in over the top of me.
"I’m here because someone just got in touch with me to let me know that my wife was seen out with some girl," he replied, and he crossed his arms over his chest and surveyed the two of us like he could hardly believe that he was having to have this conversation.
"What are you talking about?" I asked, leaping to my feet. My mind rushed to find the moment that might have been reported to him, but then it hit me – at the station, there had been a few people there, maybe someone had seen us together...
"Oh, I think you know just what I’m talking about," he snapped angrily. "Come on, don’t play dumb with me. You went away without telling me first, and now this-"
"Now what?" I demanded, stopping him in his tracks. I needed to know what the hell was going on before this went any further. I felt like we had just walked into a trap somehow, and I didn’t much like the feeling of being treated like an idiot in my own home.
"Someone saw the two of you at the station," he fumed. I looked over at Alana; I knew that she would be taking this harder than I was. Her heart looked like it had dropped right on out of her chest. Her face was white, and she couldn’t even raise her gaze to look up at me. Her husband, who I had suddenly decided to hate in that moment, crossed his arms over his chest and leveled his gaze at her, waiting for a response. He knew how much this scared her – in fact, he knew perhaps better than anyone else at all. And yet, he was acting as though she had done something terribly wrong here, just by being honest about the way that she felt about me.
"Okay, and?" I replied, planting my hands on my hips and raising my eyebrows at him. He stared at me for a long moment, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing me say to him right now.
"And people are talking!" He tossed back. "People are talking about the two of you being together, and that’s the fucking last thing we need right about now!”
"Does it matter?" I replied, throwing my hands into the air. "I mean, everyone knows that you’re going out and hooking up with everything with a pulse in this city-"
"That’s not the point," he growled back. I had known Rick for a long time now, and I had never seen him this angry in all his life. I supposed there was some part of him, if I was feeling generous, that was probably worried about his wife; he was protective of her, even if he would never show it, if he could avoid it. They were friends, even if they had never been anything else, and he could likely tell just how much this was frightening her.
I went over to her and took her hand, squeezing it tight, but her fingers were loose and useless in mine. She couldn’t feel anything right about now. I hated that. I hated this. Everything that she had fought so hard to keep quiet about herself, it might just have been exposed to the world at large because I had too hard a time keeping my hands off of her. If I could have just reached back through time, found some way to undo this...
"You need to do something to fix this," Rick told us, angrily. "I don’t care what you do or how you do it, but you’ve got to fix it."
He stood there for a moment, and for a split second, I could have sworn that there was a glimpse of sympathy in his eyes – maybe he was thinking better of this, realizing how much pressure he was putting us both under, and for what? For being in love? It was crazy.
But then, he shook his head, as though dismissing that very notion from his brain. He wasn’t giving us the space to get this wrong. We had to get every inch of this right for him, otherwise everything that all three of us had worked so hard to build was just going to come spiralling apart at the seams.
"What do you want us to do?" I asked him, my voice tinged with desperation. I didn’t know what we could do now. If people had seen us together, then they had seen us together, and there was little that could be done about that. We just had to hope that it was the kind of thing that was easy to dismiss out of hand as pointless gossip. But I wasn’t so sure that we were going to be able to convince them of that.
"I don’t know," he replied, and his voice cracked around the edges. I would have felt sorry for him, but he wasn’t the one who had had to live his life hidden from the rest of the world. He was the one who could go out there and sleep with whoever he wanted and receive a hearty pat on the back for it because he was a man and everything that he did was just part of his masculinity. God forbid that his wife have needs and desires of her own, though.
"I need to go," Alana announced, suddenly, and there was a strange edge to her voice that I had never heard before. Hollow. Like she was just trying to find a way to keep going without keeling over on the spot. Rick and I stood there in silence as she rose to her feet, not looking at either one of us, and headed down to the bedroom. She didn’t pause, not for a moment, to look back or even acknowledge that the two of us were in the room. She just needed to get out of here. And I supposed that I couldn’t blame her. This place was toxic right now, and we had to be careful that we didn’t get caught up in the radiation, poisoned by the outside world once again.
Rick turned his attention back to me as soon as she was gone. I glared at him, angry only because it was easier than letting the tears start to fall.
"Fix it, Billie," he told me, a warning edge to his voice. "Fix it. Because otherwise..."
He didn’t need to fill in the blanks. I knew just what he meant. If I didn’t find some way to fix this, then I might be about to deal with all of this crashing down around me. And that was the very last thing on Earth that I wanted.
Chapter 25
She's mine, not yours
"Morning, baby," I greeted Alana, but she barely looked up at me as she headed to the kitchen. The briefest smile crossed over her face, but I could tell that there wasn’t much truth to it. She was just moving through life because she had to, not because she wanted to, exactly the same way she had been ever since the news of the fact that we had been seen together had hit the rest of the world.
Which had left me to deal with everything else that had come with the revelation. People were very interested, it turned out, to discover the intimate details of what was going on, and they didn’t much seem bothered about just coming out and demanding them from me. Were we involved? Was she a lesbian? How long had we been together? Did Rick know? Was I with Rick, as well? Nobody seemed to give a damn about our privacy, and I had been doing my best to deflect all the questions from the nosier people in our social circle in the hopes that all of this would die down sooner or later.
Rick had been avoiding us, unsurprisingly. He could probably feel the tension coming out of our apartment even from where he was. He had even ceased in bringing home his random hook-ups, practically a noble task for him, probably to make sure that none of them were trying to get a prying peer into his personal life. Every time I had seen him, he had clenched his jaw and nodded at me in greeting without saying a word, like we were in the middle of a warzone with no time to talk.
I needed Alana through all of this, but she seemed to have checked out entirely; I couldn’t find her amidst the mess that we were dealing with, and it was seriously starting to stress me out. I just wanted to hear from her directly that she still wanted to be in this relationship, that despite everything that had happened she still thought we were worth it, but I hadn’t been able to coax so much as a kiss that lasted more than a second out of her since it had happened. Which I supposed was to be expected, to some extent, but that didn’t make it any easier or more pleasant to deal with.
I knew that she had to be in shock right now. So much of what she wanted to keep to herself had suddenly been laid out for all the world to see, and I couldn’t imagine the sheer shock of something like that. But why couldn’t she see this for the opportunity that it was? Why couldn’t she wrap her head around the fact that this was clearly how things were meant to be? Okay, yes, it wasn’t ideal, but it was a chance for us to finally stop hiding and just come out. So what if it shocked some people? So what if it ended her marriage with Rick? Surely, all of that was better than hiding out in these falsehoods that we had been stuck in for such a long time now.
I didn’t want to spend my life in the closet. That was the last thing that I wanted, in fact, but with her, it seemed like I wasn’t going to get much of a choice. I would have to choose between being with the woman I loved, and being honest and open about who I was, and I had no idea which one actually sounded more appealing to me. It was a scary thought, but one that I had to consider, as I hesitated after every question I was asked on the matter, knowing I could just come out at last. And knowing that doing so would hurt the woman I loved more than anything else in the world.
