The Art of Us

by KL Hughes

  Charlee’s tongue swirls around the slim straw in her drink like she’s playing with it—deliberate and undeniably sexy. “Yes, I did,” she says, her voice laced in both amusement and pride.

  “That’s mean.” Alex frowns, jutting out her bottom lip. She’s pouting, but she can’t help herself. Her body feels hot and floaty, and Charlee’s just as intoxicating as the liquor in Alex’s system. She always has been. “And that top too. That’s not a winter top, Charlee. That’s a mean, mean top.”

  “You have, like, two buttons fastened on your entire shirt, so you don’t get to talk about being mean.”

  “Yours is meaner.”

  “How is mine meaner?”

  “Because your boobs are bigger,” Alex says, trying not to look down as soon as she says it, but her gaze shoots straight to Charlee’s chest and then back up to find Charlee grinning at her. Evil, that woman. Evil. “And just better.” One more glance. “And, you know, right there.”

  Alex quickly downs one of two shots set in front of her, nearly choking herself. The liquid gurgles at the back of her throat when she speaks again. “So yeah, meaner.”

  “It’s only mean if you’re looking.” The words make Alex want to scream. “Are you looking?”

  She takes a deep breath through her nose, the bitter scent of her second shot wafting up into her nostrils. She uses it as a distraction, clearing her throat and kicking back her whiskey, letting the alcohol burn its way down her squirming insides. She doesn’t answer Charlee’s question, because they both know the damned answer anyway. Instead, she waves her hand at a passing server, holds up two fingers. One for her. One for Charlee.

  “Two more?” Charlee arches a brow at Alex. “Liquid courage. I guess you are looking.”

  “Stop, Charlee,” Alex says, staring her down.

  She laughs but nods. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I know.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Charlee stands and sways a bit on her feet.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bathroom,” she shouts over the noise of the packed bar, then smiles dangerously. “Wanna come?”

  Alex gapes at her. Her mouth closes and opens again, but no words come out. Charlee doesn’t wait for an answer. She just turns and starts toward the back of the bar.

  “Fuck.” Alex buries her face in her hands, her stomach curling into knots. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  When she slides out of the booth and takes off after Charlee, body hot with the alcohol coursing through her system, her legs shake with every step. She keeps moving, though, and not once does she consider going back.

  She finds Charlee near the front of a short line waiting for the bathroom. It’s a tiny room. One toilet. One sink. One door that thankfully locks. So there is always a line. She brushes past people, ignoring their protests, and steps in line beside Charlee. Her hand curls around Charlee’s waist as if it has a mind of its own, and Charlee is warm beneath her fingertips.

  She doesn’t say anything when Alex touches her, and she doesn’t pull away. When Alex looks over at her, Charlee only bites her bottom lip and keeps her eyes focused on the bathroom door.

  Once inside, Alex closes the door behind them, and Charlee stumbles over to the toilet. She drops her pants and lets out a raspy laugh as she sits down.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How long’s it been since you’ve had to listen to me pee?”

  Alex rolls her eyes but says nothing, her arms crossed over her chest and her body drawn tight with anticipation. She can barely breathe.

  Charlee nearly falls over when she stands again, and Alex shoots to her side. Her hands run down the length of Charlee’s legs and latch on to the top of her jeans and underwear before slowly tugging them up to Charlee’s waist again. The action’s too close and too intimate. It brings their chests together, their faces only inches apart.

  “Thanks,” Charlee says, but Alex can’t focus on anything but the proximity of Charlee’s mouth, the way her hands are still gripping Charlee’s hips. The way Charlee’s hands fold over her shoulders, thumbs rubbing along Alex’s collarbones.

  They breathe hotly together, unmoving, before Charlee abruptly lets go and slinks around Alex to get to the sink. She washes up and exits the bathroom, leaving Alex, scrambled and overheated, to follow. The long hallway at the back of the bar seems to stretch on forever as Alex chases after her, and when she catches up, Charlee looks over at her and smiles.

  Alex’s lips have barely begun to tilt up when Charlee suddenly grabs her and pins her against the wall. Her back hits the thin wood with a thud, and Alex sucks in a deep breath as Charlee slides up the length of her. Their chests rub together as Charlee runs one hand around the back of Alex’s neck and brings their lips barely an inch apart. Their noses brush. Static pops on their skin at the touch, but neither pulls away, and Charlee breathes heavily against Alex’s mouth.

  She mutters to herself, just loud enough for Alex to hear it. “I want this,” she says. “God, I want this. I want you.”

  Alex clamps her eyes closed and digs her fingers into Charlee’s waist. Tries to anchor herself so she doesn’t float away or fall, because she can’t breathe. She can’t think. It’s as if her face is going to catch fire, as if her bones are going to break from the pressure of clenching her thighs together. Her heart’s going to pound its way out of her chest any minute. She should push Charlee back, put a stop to this before it can begin. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move.

  The gap never closes, though. Charlee doesn’t press their lips together or ask Alex to, and when their noses brush again, Alex feels a trickle of wetness against her skin. Her eyes snap open, and she eases Charlee back just enough to see that she is crying. The sight stabs at her insides. It pulls her soul up to the surface so that she feels like she’s choking on it. She doesn’t have to ask why Charlee is crying. She already knows. Her own eyes sting with tears, and Alex knows it isn’t from the cigarette smoke clouding the air around them.

  This is too much. This. Them. Everything.

  Alex swipes her thumbs through the wet tracks on Charlee’s cheeks. She sighs. “Your eyes are always so blue when you cry.”

  The words draw a hard sob up from Charlee’s throat as she leans into Alex’s touch, shaking her head between her palms. “We fucked up, Alex,” she says, fresh tears falling free.

  Even in her drunken haze, Alex knows she doesn’t mean right here, right now but years ago, when she boarded that damned plane.

  Charlee’s head lolls as she leans heavily against her door. She blinks down at her keys, seeing double. They nearly fall to the floor when she fumbles, but she manages to catch them just in time. She stops, closes her eyes for a moment, and takes a deep breath to steady herself. When her hands stop shaking, she tries again and manages to insert the correct key into the lock with little trouble.

  Once inside, Charlee tosses her small purse to the floor, keys landing on top of the crumpled material. Her shoes fly as she kicks them off, stumbling through the loft, stripping as she goes. She pops open the button on her jeans and nearly falls over in her effort to keep walking as she shimmies them off. When she yanks her shirt over her head, she stops to breathe in the scent of Alex lingering on the material. It’s faint, mostly masked by the smell of smoke and sweat, but it’s there. It makes her eyes burn, sparks up a throbbing between her legs. Charlee throws the shirt toward her studio. She watches it smack against the locked door and drop to the floor before she turns toward the bathroom.

  Panties and bra hit the floor only seconds before Charlee trips over the side of the tub and into the shower. She pulls the curtain mostly closed behind her before turning on the water, hissing as the first blast of the cold spray smacks against her skin. It takes a few moments for the water to warm, and then it is steaming, so hot it beats Charlee’s
skin red in seconds, dizzying her. But she doesn’t adjust it. She doesn’t care.

  Bowing her head beneath the spray, she lets the water wash through her hair and pelt against the backs of her ears. She lets it drip down her cheeks and over her chin and neck. It rushes down the length of her flushed body as quickly as her own hands do, and she has to steady herself against the wall as the room spins and her fingers dip between her legs.

  “Alex.” She sighs the name into the roar of the shower.

  The water pounds against her flesh, and steam billows up around her until everything is a blur. In the haze, Charlee can almost convince herself that Alex is there, that it’s Alex’s hand rubbing against her clit, Alex’s fingers gliding into her.

  “Yes,” she says, melting down from the wall until she’s on her knees in the shower, one hand holding her up. The shower rain drums against her back as she braces her knees against the porcelain surface, thighs pressed against the edges, and pumps in and out of herself with three soaked fingers.

  Charlee’s eyes clamp down hard, and Alex’s face bursts into vivid color behind her eyelids like fireworks—all her little smiles and looks. She hears her voice. Soft laughter saved only for her. Her name curling across Alex’s tongue like it was born there.

  A moan rumbles up from her chest as she rides her hand harder, faster. Her back bows and her knees ache. Pain blends into pleasure. The heat makes it hard to breathe, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t stop, not when she can see Alex so clearly, can feel the ghosts of her kisses and of her teeth, the hot puffs of I love yous murmured against her clit.

  She comes with her own teeth digging into the side of her arm, a groan vibrating against the shower-soaked flesh. It will leave a mark, she knows, but right now, she doesn’t care. All she can think about is Alex—Alex’s fingers buried inside her, Alex’s hot breath at the back of her neck, Alex’s soothing hands running down her back and arms—and her voice, so soft, gently urging her, “Breathe, Charlee.”

  Blurry spots, little specks of black, dot her vision at the edge of passing out. She gasps in a shallow breath, trying to steady herself, and collapses onto the floor of the shower. The water has cooled a bit but is still warm. Tears rise and fall, disappear in the spray, and Charlee curls up as best she can against the hard floor of the shower. She shakes with every sob that rips up and out of her until her throat is shredded and the water is cold and she is utterly alone.

  When she finally forces herself up, she doesn’t bother with even a quick wash. She simply shuts off the freezing shower and climbs out. She barely even dries herself off before padding to the door, naked and dripping all the way, to grab her phone from her purse. The ringing sounds uncomfortably loud in her ear as she crawls onto the couch and wedges the phone between the cushion and her cheek.

  When the call connects with a murmured greeting, Charlee licks her lips in the dark and releases a shaky breath. Her voice is ragged but sure when she says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  The persistent buzzing of her phone under her pillow stirred Charlee from sleep. She blinked against the bright light of the screen, and when her eyes focused enough to read the name glaring up at her, she froze, her breath sticking in her throat. Her heart stopped for a split second before kicking into overdrive.

  Hesitant, she hovered her thumb just over the name, unsure of whether she should answer. After a moment, though, she swallowed down her nerves and swiped across the screen. When she was met with only silence but for a quick, inconsistent hiccup on the other end of the line, she said, “Alex?”

  “You picked up.”

  Alex’s voice spilled through, tired and heavy, and Charlee’s insides seemed to rattle at the sound of it. Her palms were sweaty, one clutching her phone against her ear and the other curling into the sheet wrapped around her.

  “Are you okay? It’s—” She pulled her phone away to look at the time before bringing it back to her ear, heart thundering all the while. “It’s four in the morning.”

  “I’m drunk.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence seeped in again, so thick Charlee was sure she could choke on it. But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything more. So she waited. She waited for Alex’s shaky, hiccup-riddled breathing to break open with words—anything, everything—or for the silence to lull them both back to sleep so they could wake the next morning and pretend this never happened. Go back to being separate and silent and so goddamned broken.

  Months had passed, months, since they last spoke, and Charlee wasn’t even sure how it happened. Everything had fallen apart, crumbled. They scrambled to collect the pieces, to put them all back together like a puzzle that just needed a bit of glue between the seams to remain clear and collected. But little chunks just kept falling away. The pieces wouldn’t hold. The distance, the time, the absence…it was too much. After a while, it just became easier to avoid it all than to try to face it head-on. It became easier to let go than to cling.

  “I’m tired.”

  Charlee closed her eyes at the quiet words, at the worn quality of Alex’s voice. She sounded as if there were centuries growing inside her soul. A soul far too young to hold them. “Then you should sleep,” Charlee said. “It’s late, and you’ll feel better if you get some rest.”

  “I won’t feel better,” Alex said. “I never do.”

  Tears pricked at Charlee’s sleepy eyes. She nodded against her pillow, despite the fact that she was lying in the dark alone. Alex was thousands of miles away, and she couldn’t see her. Still, Charlee nodded like she was there, an inch away, breathing the same still air and only seconds from curling into Charlee’s chest and letting sleep finally take her. She nodded as if the middle of the night and too much alcohol could make reality slip away, even if for only a moment, and two people who fell apart could be whole together again.

  “I know.” And she did. She did know.

  “It’s been a long time,” Alex said. “Months. I tried calling. I called you over and over, and you stopped answering.”

  “I know.” Her voice cracked. “You chose to stay, and we were fighting so much. I guess I just got tired of us hurting more than helping each other. It got too hard to hold on.”

  Alex sighed into the phone, and Charlee could imagine the weight of that sigh. The rise and fall of Alex’s chest. The scent of alcohol on her breath.

  “I know how hard it is to hold on,” she said. “I’m still doing it, even if you’ve let go.”

  “Alex.”

  “I didn’t call to bother you. I just—I want to know that you’re okay. I want you to tell me you’re okay. I need that.”

  Charlee wanted to tell her the truth, that she hadn’t been okay, still wasn’t okay, might never be okay again. She wanted to tell her that there was an Alex-sized hole in her bed, in her life, in her body, one that nothing and no one else could fill. Instead, she said, “Yeah, Alex,” and struggled to keep her voice steady. “I’m okay.”

  The line was silent for one long, dragging moment—nothing but the sound of Alex’s breathing coming through. And then, “Good. That’s good.”

  Charlee wasn’t sure how something could sound so forced yet so genuine at the same time, but those words did. They sounded like understanding and bitterness mashed together, like relief and sorrow tangled into one. They sounded like a prelude to the line going dead, to the end of the call. This one moment of connection out of thousands of missed attempts and thousands more deliberately avoided chances. It scared Charlee. It terrified her.

  So she swallowed, despite her constricted throat, and said, “How are you?” Because for the first time in months, she thought maybe forced, idle conversation was better than no conversation at all.

  Alex was silent so long Charlee thought she’d finally succumbed to her exhaustion. She checked that the call was still connected. It was, and Charlee couldn’t bring herself to hang up, even if Alex
had fallen asleep. She just held the phone to her ear and closed her eyes. She was nearly asleep herself when she heard Alex’s answer finally come through.

  “Still terribly in love with you.”

  Chapter 6

  The world trembles around her, pulses like the heavy organ in her chest, and Alex steps inside as quietly as possible. She drops her keys onto the small table by the door and messily strips off her coat, scarf, and gloves. She opts to leave her shoes on because trying to take them off would only result in her ass hitting the floor. Her legs are like jelly beneath her, her feet unreliable as she makes her way through her apartment. The walls are alive, pushing in toward her and back out—in and out and in and out and in again. She stumbles to a stop in the hallway and presses her cheek to the cool surface of the wall. Closing her eyes, she takes a deep breath and attempts to force the world to be still again.

  When she no longer feels like another step might send her tumbling to the floor, Alex puts one foot in front of the other again. The hallway seems like something out of a funhouse, miles and miles packed into a few feet of space, and she creeps along its length with her fingers braced on the wall. It keeps her grounded and balanced.

  Why she’d thought it a good idea to drink herself nearly into a coma, she doesn’t know, but she is paying dearly for it now. Her stomach writhes with every step, her liquid dinner sloshing around inside as she staggers through the bathroom door at the end of the hall. Her knees crack against the floor only seconds before she spills her stomach’s contents into the toilet.

  It’s silent but for the quiet gagging sounds at the back of her throat and the splash of liquid in the bowl. Unlike Vinny, who frequently sounds like a dying animal when vomiting, Alex has always been rather quiet when sick, and in this moment, she’s thankful. She can’t stand the thought of Kari waking to find her wasted and on her knees, vomiting up a night filled with far too many close encounters.

  Her arms keep her hair out of her face until she’s finished retching, and then Alex lets out a bitter sigh and slides down to rest her burning face atop the cold bathroom floor. It’s nice and sobering, and she’s tempted to close her eyes and drift away. But her bones and joints wouldn’t thank her for it in the morning, so after a few moments, she forces herself off the floor and over to the sink.