Broken in Soft Places

by Fiona Zedde

  These days Sara slept much better. More often than not, night found her curled inside the warming cradle of Rille’s body, Rille’s legs tangled with hers, the balcony blinds drawn and the sliding door left open to let in the breeze that they both preferred to the artificial and too-cold air-conditioning. On those nights when they slept naked, she wondered if Rille felt exposed to anyone who might care to see them. Did Rille feel naked now with Sara’s eyes on her as she leaned over to whisper something in the boy’s ear then pulled back and, like Raven had said, left her fingers tangled in his hair? Did she ever feel naked?

  Sara pulled herself from around the corner where she peeked like a thief and walked instead, in the open, toward her. A few feet from the sofa that nearly overflowed with bodies, she stopped.

  She called Rille’s name. “Can I talk with you for a second?”

  Rille turned, brow wrinkled as if in annoyance, but she came, unfolded her lean shape from the sofa, slipped her feet back in her sandals. In her white peasant skirt and pale green tank top, with her hair a flyaway mess around her smiling face, Rille seemed too innocent to ask the question Sara needed to ask.

  “What’s up?”

  “A lot. Or nothing.” Sara’s hand tightened spasmodically on Rille’s arm. She hoped it was nothing. Prayed. “Can you come up to your room with me?”

  “Um…sure. Just let me tell them I’m going.” Rille’s frown deepened the lines in her forehead.

  She went to her friends, and in moments, she was back and walking with Sara toward her dorm. Once in the warm silence of the room, Rille closed the door behind them. Sara sat on the bed.

  “That guy you were sitting next to in Alexander Center, do you have something going on with him?”

  Rille came close to the bed in front of Sara but did not sit down. She crossed her arms and looked down into Sara’s face. “What do you mean?”

  Everything revealed itself then in Rille’s body. Sara felt surprise that she was able to read it all so clearly. In the tightened jaw, Rille’s outrage that Sara would question her actions. A subtle toss of the wild curls, eyes hardening with impatience that Sara had called her up here for nothing more interesting than this. Could this girl ever feel shame?

  “Did you sleep with him?” Sara asked quietly again, feeling hysteria climb in her throat despite her resolve to be as calm and passionless as Rille was now. But how could she? How could Rille have broken her promise so easily?

  Rille’s face spoke of an urge to lie, to misdirect Sara to look elsewhere for answers, but she seemed to surprise them both. “Yes.”

  “Did you—” Her voice broke. “Did you use a condom?” Please say yes. Please.

  “Of course. I’m not stupid.” Then Rille’s face changed again, a movement of muscle and bone under skin.

  “You used a condom the first time,” Sara said, interpreting the look, seeing with her knowledge of Rille the play-by-play of what must have happened. Her voracious appetite, her impatience, the boy not caring as long as he got more of what she had to give. A frantic tremor began in her spine.

  She clenched her cold hands together in her lap. Fingernails dug into the backs of her hands. “I think he has HIV.”

  Rille froze. Then she laughed. “Don’t fuck with me. That’s not funny.” But the truth of it must have shone in Sara’s face. Her laughter quickly dried up. She backed away from the bed and from Sara, shaking her head. “This doesn’t even make sense.”

  “Yes, it does.” The words burst from Sara in thin-voiced panic. “Did you give it to me? Am I going to die too?”

  “Stop it!” Rille jerked close to Sara, her face only inches away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you do either.”

  “He went to the clinic!” Sara hissed. “It’s in his file.”

  Realization dawned in Rille’s face. She knew that Raven worked at the clinic. “Did that cunt roommate—”

  “No!” Sara jumped to her feet. “No. Don’t blame her. You did this.”

  The look Rille flashed Sara was almost like hate. Eyes slitted and her neck like plucked strings. In a blur of white cotton and pale curls, she flew from the room, the door slamming open so hard that it banged against the wall and the opaque glass rattled. For shocked seconds, Sara could only stare after her, blinking in the aftermath of Rille’s poisonous anger. Then she followed quickly out of the room. Sara gripped the banister as she scrambled down the stairs then across the courtyard, her sandaled feet slapping against the tiles. Palm Court flew past. Stares, curious and surprised, peppered her skin.

  “You nosy, jealous bitch! Open this fucking door. I know you’re in there!”

  Rille banged on the door to Sara and Raven’s room, first the doorframe then on glass. “Coward!” She banged again and set the glass trembling.

  “Rille!”

  As Sara ran up the steps toward the room, she saw a few doors open. Heads peeked out. A few whispers and stifled laughter. Her closest neighbor, Ling, stood in her doorway wearing an oversized T-shirt and bare feet. Her short hair stood up in spikes around her face. When she noticed Sara, her face retreated into embarrassment. For Sara. With a brief flickering glance at Rille, she closed her dorm room door.

  “Dyke drama,” a voice said just as the door down the open corridor clicked shut.

  “No.” With bared teeth, Rille shoved Sara away. “Get away from me. I want your bitch ass roommate to come out here so I can teach her a fucking lesson about messing in other people’s business!” Her fist banged even harder on the door, punctuating the last three words.

  “She’s not in there! Let’s talk reasonably about this.” Sara reached out for Rille, but caught herself in time, gripping her own arms before Rille could shove her again.

  “There’s nothing to talk about. You’ve said enough. There’s nothing else that I want to hear from you. Not a damn thing.”

  “Let’s go in the room and talk. People are looking,” Sara said, her cheeks heating with embarrassment. She twisted around Rille to shove her key in the door, or try to, but another key blocked it from the inside.

  Sara put her mouth close to the door. “Raven?”

  “Take that slag somewhere else, Sara.” Raven’s voice was muffled from the other side of the door but unmistakable. “I don’t want her in here.”

  Rille flew against the door again, fists flailing, spit flying from her mouth. “I knew she was in there. Coward! Come out here, you fucking cunt! Ass chomping little parasite!” Her face glowed damp with sweat and the breath whistled harshly through her teeth.

  Sara gasped as Rille’s fist crashed into her cheek. “Shit!” She fell back, pain exploding in her face.

  Urgent footsteps sounded against the stairs behind her. “What’s up with all this noise?”

  Jason, their RA, jogged up to Sara. His hair, thick and flowing to his waist in a jet-black fall, kept moving even after he stopped.

  Sara breathed a quiet sigh of relief at his presence. She couldn’t control Rille. Someone else had to help deal with her.

  “I thought this weekend was supposed to be about love and all that shit.” Jason spoke in his calm, almost sing-song voice. “Rille, why are you disturbing the first-years?”

  Rille pounded on the door again. “Back off, Jason. Just back off. I’m handling personal business.” Her eyes were vivid circles of desperation.

  “No. You’re acting like a psycho. And if you keep that up”—he gestured to the door, his mouth smiling faintly—“your hand is going straight through that glass and this will become another situation altogether.”

  Sara hugged herself, pressed her cold hands against her sides, gaze swinging between Rille and the RA.

  “No, this is a situation, Jason. Something really fucked up.” She still banged on the door, but more slowly, as if signaling someone far away for help. Her mouth began to tremble. “You don’t understand.”

  “Then come make me understand.” He held out his hand to her.

  She shook her
head, and the hair floated across her face, sticking to the sweat and sudden tears. “I don’t understand this.” She sank to her knees in front of the door. Bang. “I don’t understand.” Bang.

  Jason pulled her to her feet and against his chest. “We can go talk about this more privately.” He turned to Sara. “Do you want to come with us?”

  “No! Not her.” Rille turned her face from Sara and into Jason’s T-shirt.

  Pain hitched in Sara’s throat, but she stepped back and let Jason take Rille away, cradling her to him while she muttered over and over again, “Not her. Not her.”

  Rivalry

  Stephen/2004

  “I met your girl today.”

  Stephen looked up from the bike catalogue. He’d heard the store’s front door open a few minutes ago when he was busy checking out a customer, but aside from greeting the man with a perfunctory “Hi, welcome to Different Spokes,” he barely paid any attention.

  Now, Lucas’s tall figure in work drag—charcoal suit, muted silk tie, heavy-lidded gaze—stood in front of the register. At nearly closing time, the store was empty. Manny had long gone home, and the audible hum of the air-conditioner only amplified the silence.

  “Who’s my girl?” Stephen asked.

  Lucas dropped his arm against the counter in front of Stephen, fingers in a loose fist. “I guess you’re right. She’s not really a girl but a grown woman who should know better than to do half the things she does.” His mouth tightened.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Merille,” Lucas said. “Merille Thompson. The campus succubus.”

  Lucas had recently started taking a theology class at Emory. To help him understand life better, he said.

  Stephen closed the catalogue and gave Lucas his full attention.

  “You didn’t think I knew you were seeing someone else?”

  “I didn’t think it was any of your business if I was seeing someone,” Stephen said, deliberately not adding the “else.”

  Lucas’s eyebrow twitched, an indication of pain that lanced across his face before he could mask it.

  Fuck. “What I mean is, you and I aren’t together. It shouldn’t matter if I’m seeing someone or not. We didn’t work out because there were things you couldn’t give me.”

  “And she gives these things to you.” The tone in Lucas’s voice made it clear exactly what he thought Rille was giving that he couldn’t.

  Stephen tried to hold back the heat from his face. But he knew he couldn’t hide the other less obvious signs of his embarrassment. The minute flicker of his lashes. His body tightening with a faint squeak against the leather stool. As much as anyone alive, Lucas knew him.

  “Yes,” Stephen said.

  In the next moment, Lucas’s composure left him. His strong face crumbled under its skin. His fist tightened against the counter.

  “Does she soothe you back to sleep when you wake up screaming for your parents?” Lucas asked. “Does she give you half the things that I did?”

  Rille gave him none of those things. She forced nothing on him but the strength of her presence and the certainty that she knew where he was going and how he would get there.

  “Have dinner with me tonight,” Stephen said, not quite sure where the impulse came from. “I close the store in a few minutes. We can go to The Patio for beers and burgers.”

  Lucas watched Stephen from beneath heavy brows before finally shrugging. “Okay.”

  Of course it was okay. That cruel and honest part of him acknowledged that Lucas would still do anything to be in his life. Stephen wanted to relieve Lucas’s agony, not prolong it. And dodging Lucas, pretending that he hadn’t chosen someone else wasn’t going to do either of them any good.

  Stephen put the catalogue away and began the closing up process for the night. He had just counted the money and dropped it in the deposit envelope when the bell above the door jangled and someone walked into the store.

  Standing in front of the magazine rack across the room, Lucas looked up from a fitness magazine. A look of grim amusement flashed across his face. The days when Stephen wanted to close the shop on time were the ones most likely for someone to step in at the last minute. This same thing had happened too many times during his and Lucas’s relationship when he’d wanted to close at nine on the dot, whether to go meet friends or grab a quick fuck in the back room.

  Stephen put on his most charming smile. “Welcome to Different Spokes. Can I help you with anything tonight?”

  “No, thanks. I’m just looking.” The man, goateed and balding, glanced distractedly at him before moving deeper into the store.

  After nearly a half hour of searching, the customer confessed to looking for vegan cycling shoes in a size eleven. While Stephen put in a special order for the shoes and took the man’s deposit, Lucas turned off the store’s neon “OPEN” sign then went back to his magazine.

  “God! Was that like old times or what?” Stephen laughed as he and Lucas crossed the lamplight-yellowed street.

  They passed a group of teenagers sitting on the edge of the sidewalk in tattered sneakers and designer jeans, smoking cigarettes and arguing about the feasibility of reparations.

  “Yes. Old times. Gone times.” A bittersweet smile ghosted Lucas’s mouth.

  Stephen sobered. “Whether or not Rille came along, you and I were over. You have to admit that.”

  “I hadn’t given up on us yet.”

  “You should have. I would have given up on me a long time ago.”

  “You mean too much to me for that.”

  “No. No.” Stephen shook his head. “Please move on. You’re just making yourself miserable by holding on like this.”

  Months before, he had just wanted to push Lucas out of his life, letting him sink or swim in the debris of their relationship, but seeing Lucas’s face in the shop, the strain around his mouth, the petty and hurt way he had approached Stephen about Rille, he couldn’t do it. Whatever they were now, Lucas had meant too much to him in the past.

  Lucas stopped at the entrance to the street-side pub, his back stiff and unyielding. “Is that why you invited me to dinner? For a pity farewell? If so, please count me out. I never deserved pity when you left me, and I certainly don’t deserve that shit now.”

  “I’m not pitying you, Lucas. I just want to talk. Besides”—Stephen shouldered Lucas aside to go into the restaurant—“I’m starving.”

  Walking past the chalk-written sign at the restaurant’s door that directed incoming customers to seat themselves, Stephen scanned the crowded pub for empty tables. He spotted some outside and led Lucas to the patio with its twin fireplaces at opposite ends crackling with heat to fend off the chill.

  At a table not far from the metal railing separating the patio from the lazy evening traffic, they sat down. Lucas dropped the two menus he’d grabbed at the entrance on the table and put his suit jacket and briefcase in the empty chair.

  “I don’t understand why they light the fireplaces so late in the spring,” Lucas said. “It’s got to be seventy degrees out here.”

  He hadn’t relaxed much since the store, only loosened his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, a parody of a carefree man. But they hadn’t been alone in public in months, not since toward the end of their relationship. They’d had plenty of confrontations in Stephen’s condo, but this somehow felt more intimate. Lucas, unusually vocal, obviously felt that too. His discomfort sparked a sympathetic ache in Stephen.

  “People obviously aren’t complaining,” he said.

  “True. Look at that woman. She’s practically sitting inside the grate. If she gets any closer she’ll catch fire.” Lucas tilted his head toward the other side of the patio.

  Stephen turned to look, surprised to recognize the lone figure. A bottle of white wine, nearly full, sat next to the remnants of her dinner while she drank from her glass and stared moodily into the fire. Should he go over there and say hello?

  The question answered itself when a waitre
ss drifted by her table. As she glanced up at her, her gaze caught Stephen’s. She raised her glass to him in salute, briefly answered the waitress before looking back into the bright flames. In her pale blouse, tight dark jeans, and high-heeled black boots hugging her slim calves, she looked inviting, sexy. Nothing like how she had dressed for dinner a few weeks ago.

  “Someone you know?” Lucas glanced at the woman again.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s attractive.” Lucas opened his menu. “Doesn’t seem like the type to ride a bike.”

  In his roundabout way, Lucas was trying to find out how Stephen knew her. The thought made him smile.

  “She’s Rille’s girlfriend.”

  Lucas glanced up from the menu, an eyebrow raised. “You’ll have to run that one by me again. And go slower this time. I don’t think I heard you correctly.”

  “You did. She’s Rille’s…” Stephen searched for the term Rille used. “Primary partner.”

  Lucas absorbed the words with a slow nod. “I never figured you for one to settle for second place.”

  “Believe me,” Stephen murmured, his voice rumbling deep and intentionally provocative, “I’m not settling.”

  At Lucas’s abruptly shuttered face, Stephen regretted his words and the self-satisfied way he tossed them at Lucas. Despite their incompatibility, Lucas deserved better than this.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No. Say what you mean. That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about you, Stephen. No bullshit. No matter how painful.”

  Pain. The only thing left from the relationship they once shared. Nothing but pain and the realization that the past two years had been only leading to this separation and drift.

  Stephen cleared his throat. “Do you know what you want?”

  Lucas looked at him. “Yes, I do.”

  Without saying anything else, Stephen closed his menu and signaled a waiter over. Maybe this impromptu meal hadn’t been such a good idea, Stephen thought. But he shoved aside his regret and did what had to be done.

  Over burger, beer, and fries, he slowly unwrapped his truth to Lucas. The truth that he’d realized through this new, amazing person in his life. Spending the last few weeks with Rille and snatching precious minutes with her on the phone, he had begun to solidify what he wanted from another person. With Lucas, he knew what he didn’t want. With Rille, unlimited possibilities unveiled before his eyes every moment he was near her. With her strength, she challenged him to be a stronger, better person when dealing with others even while he submitted to her.