Broken in Soft Places

by Fiona Zedde

  “I haven’t had my full two hours yet.” Mrs. Thompson looked up from Rille’s hand. “You should come back another time.”

  Embarrassed heat prickled Sara’s cheeks. She stood and looked at her watch. “We’ll come back after two o’clock.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Just then, her parents stepped through the door, but she silently waved them back without introducing them to Rille’s mother.

  “She wants to spend time with Rille alone,” Sara said. “Another hour.”

  By the time they returned at two thirty, the hospital room was empty except for Rille lying in the bed. Beverly Thompson had left the iPod, and Rille lay against the sheets with her freshly polished nails and new lace gown, looking sweetly asleep. Sara sat with her parents for another round of waiting.

  Throughout the afternoon, Sara found herself watching her mother. Wondering what lay behind her smooth face. Behind the actions that spoke of concern—fluffing Rille’s pillow, getting water for Sara and her father, reading to Rille from the day’s paper. Sara wanted to scream at her to stop the charade. Stop pretending to care. Just go back to Florida and mourn her dead son. The living did not need her.

  But Sara said nothing.

  She leaned against her father as he read silently from his Bible.

  In the background, night arrived, darkening the landscape outside the windows, switching on sharp overhead lights, ushering Stephen into the room. The day had been hard on him. He sagged on his feet, dragging himself across the floor with hesitation. Fear. His face, hanging over Rille’s bed with sadness drooping at its contours, attracted her mother’s soothing hands down his back. Something she hadn’t done for Sara since she was a baby.

  Millicent made gentling noises as she stood quietly behind him, watching Rille as her hand moved, as if searching for something in the still face that would offer an explanation for the depth of Stephen’s misery. Or her daughter’s loyalty. Sara turned away and pressed her face to her father’s chest.

  Collision

  Sara & Stephen/Atlanta

  “Good night, Daddy. Mama.”

  She and Stephen waited until her parents disappeared up the stairs toward the guest bedroom before getting up to clear the dishes. Stephen made a noise of frustration as Sara scraped the plates clean over the garbage can then moved to stack them in the dishwasher.

  “I think your mother just wants to make things right,” Stephen said, dragging a damp cloth over the kitchen counter. Though he looked at Sara, his eyes were distant, as if he didn’t really see her. He’d been out of it since they came back from the hospital.

  Sara shook her head, unable to deal with his issues on top of hers, and made her own escape. A searing shower. Under the water, she massaged exfoliating apricot scrub into her face and rubbed the stone pumice over the bottoms of her feet. She emerged from the bathroom’s glass bubble with her newly exposed skin tingling and hot. Sara smoothed on lotion, lay naked between the covers. Could not sleep. Slept.

  *

  When Stephen came in, the bedside lamp still illuminated the room. Under its light, Sara lay sleeping, sprawled on her belly with the thin sheet pulled up to the middle of her back. He gently closed the bedroom door and slipped into the bathroom. After he finished, he turned off the light and climbed into the bed, under the sheet, sighing helplessly at the relief that wormed through his body. It had been a long day.

  Sara popped up in the bed. “What—” She blinked, looking around the darkened room. “What’s going on?”

  He adjusted the pillow under his head. “Nothing. Relax. It’s just me.”

  At his words, her body lost its stiffness and became liquid against the sheets.

  “Are Mama and Daddy okay?” she asked, voice sleep-thick.

  “Yeah. In the room watching TV. You don’t have to worry about them. They’re the ones worried about you, remember?”

  She said nothing, only made a vague nodding motion, skimmed her hand across the empty space between them. “Yes. I remember.”

  *

  And there was so much that she didn’t want to remember. The relentlessness of this entire day, each word stirring up memories she thought she’d forgotten, bubbling emotions to the surface. She missed her brother. And as much as she had mourned him when he first left, she hadn’t really said good-bye. Her reaction to her mother proved that. Sara had loved him for himself and felt her whole world shake and crumble at his loss. But he was also the chalice filled with her mother’s love. Millicent Chambers put everything into Syrus. Anyone who’d seen her with her two children would know him as the favorite. Would hear it in the current flowing beneath her words, in the lingering and not-lingering of her gaze.

  Through Syrus, Sara had captured her mother’s love. Syrus loved her like he was the parent, always made provisions for her, always taught her new things. And old ones too. When he died, the chalice broke, and all of Millicent Chambers’s love that Sara had felt by proxy spilled and disappeared into the earth. She remembered.

  She grasped wordlessly across the space in the bed.

  *

  Earlier in the hospital, Sara’s mother had touched him. Such a simple thing, but it undid Stephen for the rest of the night. What he had gone looking for from Lucas, he’d received instead, unasked, from a near stranger. He remembered what it was like to have a hand on his back in comfort. To hear a voice whispering nonsense, conveying care through vocal vibrations alone. And something inside him broke. Stephen had barely been able to hold himself together in the hospital. Within moments of that touch, he’d had to excuse himself to stumble, isolated, to a narrow and deserted hallway where he leaned, fingers gripping his knees, his breath chuffing from between dry lips. He couldn’t remember how he made it home. To bed.

  He rolled over onto his back to stare at the ceiling, his breath shallow. There were so many things he missed, so many words that had gone unsaid between him and his mother. He hadn’t told her that he loved her on that last day. Sometimes he found himself wondering if she remembered that. Wherever she was.

  A rustling movement on the sheets beside him. Sara’s hand. She made a soft noise and he reached out to her.

  “You all right?”

  She clutched painfully at his skin. A groan scraped across the space between them. Did it come from him or her?

  “Are you okay?” he asked again.

  And he felt her mouth on his. He flinched back in surprise, but she followed him, her fingers gripping his arms. Stephen tasted her tears, desperation in her hot breath. And in that moment, it seemed that her desperation was his desperation and her actions were a result of his thoughts. Why had they left him? Had he done anything to deserve this isolation?

  For too long, he had been drifting. His parents died and he was released into the atmosphere, an untethered balloon. A lost kite. But when he found Rille, he thought she would be his anchor. A connection to the world of feeling and security and family. But no.

  “No.” Sara chased him with her body, clinging and kissing. Her mouth clumsy on his. Body shaking and the harsh breath, the no no no clutch of her hands on his ass, pulling him between her legs, and her biting at his mouth and sobbing.

  Sobbing. It infected him too, and his choked tears rose up. The powerful flexing of some internal muscle of sadness that nearly doubled him over in the bed, sent his forehead cracking into hers. She cried out in pain and flinched into him as he held onto her arms, pinning her quiet and away from him. His cock was ready. And he could bury his thoughts and grief and uncertainties this way, but even with his swimming thoughts and the warm gift of her body against his, some part of him knew that she would despise them both before the sweat dried.

  He held her down. Held her tight. Tears and teeth sinking into his shoulder. Wetness hot against his face and in the curve of her neck where a frantic pulse hammered. Then slowed.

  *

  She woke next to a deeply sleeping Stephen. On his back, he lay sprawled across his side of the bed and Rill
e’s, sheets shoved away to bunch at his feet. The bedroom lay shrouded in shades of gray. And her thoughts, crystalline for the first time in nearly two weeks, prodded her to her feet where she dressed, quietly left the bedroom, walked down the stairs, and out the front door.

  The air stung her face, and she breathed in the sugary scent of spring. She walked through the mist-shrouded early morning, hands buried in the pockets of her jacket, shoulders hunched against the cooling breeze. It wasn’t lost on Sara how this walk echoed the one she’d taken two weeks ago after Rille told her about the girl. A hard smile flattened her face. It felt like a lifetime ago. The emotions that swirled in that damp evening—jealousy, anger, fear of losing what she had—seemed so far away and irrelevant.

  Ahead, the dark gray line of the street stretched out, curved along the lawns of her neighbors, leading through and away from the life she’d known for the past six years. The houses, most with a single light burning on the front porch, were mindlessly alike even though the styles of architecture differed. Tudor. Craftsman. Three-story colonial. Prison. Prison. Prison. Sara drew the crisp air deeply into her lungs, padded on sneakered feet along the sidewalk, felt the concrete through the rubber soles like the first and last time. A thick-leafed tree brushed her face, leaving dew behind.

  Syrus’s death had created this moment. Just as his death had created every moment she’d lived since that afternoon she watched pieces of his plane float on the television screen in her mother’s kitchen. Sometimes she imagined Syrus still alive, and one day he would walk into her house—no matter where it was—and sweep her up into a brother-sized hug with that big puffy hair of his moving in its own breeze as he grinned and said, “Sara! I’m back. You wouldn’t believe where I’ve been.”

  She wanted to be brave, like she had imagined him to be, and so she lived her life in this way. And in the damp pre-dawn morning, Sara realized that Syrus had simply been living his life. He wasn’t being brave. He was just being himself. In Stephen’s arms she understood she didn’t have to hold on to bravery. It had been as simple as letting go of that need and wailing for the brother she’d lost, and for the life she could have had. She was ready to let go. In the fog-speckled air, she did.

  Stephen would stay. Rille could die, or she could live. Sara absolved herself.

  Sara felt light. The weight pressing against her chest disappeared.

  She floated back to the house, up the front steps, and through the door. In the bedroom, Stephen still lay asleep. She sat on the bed’s edge, her knee nudging his hip.

  In the growing dawn, she finally saw what had both repulsed and attracted her to having Stephen in her home. His thick, African bush hair. The dark face, pale teeth, strong neck. The very image of a brother. She put her hand on his back and he slowly woke, blinking through sleep to look at her. His eyes were clear, too.

  “It’s time,” she said softly. Joyful and sad. “I’m ready to leave now.”

  About the Author

  Jamaican-born Fiona Zedde currently lives and writes in Miami, Florida. She is the author of several novellas and novels of lesbian love and desire, including the Lambda Literary Award finalists Bliss and Every Dark Desire. Her novel, Dangerous Pleasures, was winner of the About.com Readers’ Choice Award for Best Lesbian Novel or Memoir of 2012. Find out more at www.fionazedde.com.

  What Reviewers Say About Fiona Zedde’s Work

  “Zedde’s explicit erotic scenes keep no secrets, and her tender, masterful storytelling will keep readers spellbound and squirming.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Fiona Zedde is a culinary artist with words, cooking up spicy, flavorful tales [to] satisfy the appetite of a malnourished audience.”—Washington Blade

  “Fiona Zedde conveys the helter-skelter speed of [her character’s] chic lifestyle with sharp prose, fast-moving actions, and erotic interludes that are intense, shocking and arousing.”—Erotica-readers.com

  “Fiona Zedde’s portrayal of a black lesbian love affair is exquisitely written and described.”—Femininezone.com

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