The Art of Us

by KL Hughes

  “Us?” Gabby winces as the vase wobbles, then eventually settles back into place.

  Alex rubs at her eyes, no doubt smearing whatever makeup is left. “Me and Charlee.” Her voice cracks, begins to crumble. She’s helpless to stop it. She’s been falling apart for years.

  “Alex, you don’t ha—”

  “Everything is blurry,” she says again, shaking her head. She doesn’t care about her broken voice or her wet cheeks, the tremble in her bottom lip. She needs to say this to someone, needs someone to hear it and understand it. Maybe she just needs to say it out loud, the bits and pieces she keeps buried so deep.

  “It’s been blurry for years, like I’m only seeing a warped version of the world. All the edges are fuzzy, and nothing ever fully defines. It’s like that all the time, every day, but then I come back here. I come back here, Gabby, and I see her, and, God, it’s like my entire world…it’s like everything just snaps back into focus. Everything’s clear. Everything’s beautiful, even when it’s ugly, even when it hurts.” She rubs small circles over her heart. “And I don’t feel like I’m two seconds away from falling off the edge of the earth anymore.”

  Putting the feeling, or at least part of the feeling, into words and saying those words out loud lifts a massive weight from her shoulders. There’s a sadness to it, a soreness left behind, but being able to explain to someone she knows will not only listen but also understand—it’s exactly what she needed.

  There are tears in Gabby’s eyes. “That’s the first time you’ve talked about her in a long time,” she says. “Like that, at least.”

  A wet laugh bubbles through Alex’s lips, humorless. She shrugs a shoulder. “Must be the alcohol.”

  Gabby pins her with a knowing stare that makes Alex’s insides squirm. “You should tell her.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “We’ve been tiptoeing around the subject of you and Charlee for years, Alex, but now you’re back. And you’re talking about her again like you used to. You’re talking about her like you want to. That means something.”

  “It means I’m fucked.”

  Gabby lets out a loud bark of laughter, wipes a tear from the corner of her eye, and reaches over to pat Alex’s leg. “It means it’s time, honey.”

  “Time?”

  “There is so little clarity in this life. But Charlee, she’s your clarity, and you’re hers. You shouldn’t let that pass you by.”

  Alex runs her fingers through her hair, wincing when they snag on tangles and messy braids. “It already has.”

  Gabby’s lips purse together as she continues to stare Alex down.

  “Things are complicated,” Alex says, propping her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. “I can’t just—we can’t. It’s complicated.”

  “So uncomplicate it. Life is too short to let complicated stop you. It’s too short to let little things get in the way. You know that.”

  “I don’t think thousands of miles and years of separation and both of us being with other people count as little things, Mom.”

  A smile slowly works its way across Gabby’s lips. “It’s been a long time since you called me that.”

  “It’s been a long time since a lot of things.” Alex’s lip trembles as her voice drops to a whisper, like she is afraid to continue the conversation aloud. She is. She’s afraid to say the things brewing in her chest, afraid to ask how late is too late. Afraid to even think it. She’s afraid of the way she feels, of the way she knows those feelings will only hurt her, hurt everyone. She hasn’t stopped being afraid since the moment she walked into that gallery and saw that painting. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “People are already hurt, honey.” Gabby scoots across the couch to wrap an arm around Alex’s shoulders. “You are hurting. Charlee’s hurting.” She rests her cheek against her head as Alex leans into her. “People get hurt, and then we heal, and then we get hurt again. That’s the way of it. You can’t always throw your heart aside because you’re afraid of hurting other people. Sometimes you have to put yourself first.”

  “At Kari’s expense?” Alex swipes almost angrily through her tears. “At Chris’s?” A hard huff jumps up from her aching chest, and Alex shakes her head, takes a deep breath, and lets it slowly back out. “I can’t. We can’t do that.”

  Gabby is silent a long time before she tightens her arm around Alex and says, “Okay.” She stands and holds out a hand. “I think it’s time to put you to bed. Come on.”

  Once on her feet, Alex only wobbles a bit before shuffling down the hall behind Gabby, their hands still clasped. Gabby leads her into Charlee’s old room, and Alex has to fight off a fresh wave of tears. It’s a fight she barely manages to endure when Gabby pulls one of Charlee’s old T-shirts, long enough to be worn as a nightgown, from the dresser and hands it to Alex.

  “Go ahead and change so you’ll be more comfortable,” she says. “I’m going to get you some water and something for the headache you’re bound to have when you wake up.”

  When Gabby leaves the room, Alex lifts the old T-shirt up to her nose and breathes in the faint but lingering scent of Charlee, of home. It drains the last bit of fight from her, and her eyes well up against the material. She glances around the room in the early-morning light coming through Charlee’s window and tries not to let her gaze linger too long on the bits and pieces of them, of who they used to be together, strewn about the place: strips of snapshot photos tacked to a corkboard so Charlee could have pictures of them both at the loft and at her childhood home; the hole in the closet door from a disastrous but memorable game of Twister after too much Christmas eggnog and too much encouragement from both Cam and Vinny; their initials etched into the bed’s wooden headboard and the heart carved between them. She tries not to linger on those pieces. But she does. Of course she does.

  Alex curses her drunken self for being so weak and quickly removes her clothes to replace them with Charlee’s T-shirt. It hangs loosely on her, just down to midthigh. She then crawls onto Charlee’s bed and under the covers, breathes in the same familiar scent on the same familiar pillow she occasionally shared years ago, and hopes sleep will finally come easy.

  “Here we go,” Gabby says, walking in a moment later. She places a glass of water on the bedside table along with two small pills and then settles down on the edge of the bed. “You need anything else?”

  Alex shakes her head against the pillow, clutching the blanket tucked under her chin.

  “Okay.” Gabby brushes the hair out of Alex’s face. “You get some sleep.”

  “You always knew, didn’t you?” Alex whispers the words, catching Gabby’s gentle eyes in the morning light. Chestnut. Not Charlee’s color, but they shared her kindness. Her caring.

  “Knew what?”

  “About us. Charlee and me.”

  Gabby tucks another wild strand of hair behind Alex’s ear. “What about you?”

  “That we were, you know—” Alex shrugs a shoulder and sniffles, wipes at her runny nose, “—us.”

  “Yes,” Gabby says after a moment. “Yes, Alex. I knew that you were you and Charlee was Charlee, and together you were—”

  “Us.”

  Gabby’s answer is a gentle nod before she pats Alex’s cheek. She stands. “Try to get some sleep.”

  Without another word, she exits into the hall and closes the door behind her. Alex stares at the wood and wonders when the ache in her chest will pass. Part of her is certain it never will.

  Charlee wakes with an entire construction site inside her head. Saws whir between her ears, and hammers pound away at her skull. Someone must have even gutted the place and rewired her entire system, because the lights are suddenly too bright, and they won’t stop flickering behind her eyelids.

  “Oh God, no,” she groans, slinging one hand over her eyes and the other over her stomach. Nausea spreads
beneath her fingers like a plague, adding to the torment of the power tools inside her brain. “No.”

  She tastes the bitter film of bile and leftover whiskey as she smacks her lips and runs her tongue over her teeth. That, paired with the strain in her stomach muscles and throat, tells her she must have gotten sick at some point. The realization only adds to her misery. “No,” she whines to herself again. “Why?”

  A muffled shushing sound from behind her makes her jump so hard she smacks the top of her head on the wall her bed is situated against. She lets out a loud squawk of both surprise and pain and rolls quickly over to find nothing but a pile of blankets and a flood of dark hair.

  Charlee’s eyes blow wide, and her heart stutters into a panic. What she last remembers is Alex’s palms on her cheeks, Alex’s arm wrapped around her waist as they left the bar, the ache in her chest, and the sticky heat between her legs as she and Alex sat nearly on top of one another in the backseat of a cab on the way to Charlee’s loft.

  She racks her aching brain trying to remember what came after, how she ended up in her bed. How this happened. But there’s nothing. Everything’s blank beyond the nearly unbearable tension of the cab ride home and Alex’s cologne filling the small space like an intoxicating, dizzying haze.

  Pulse racing, Charlee rubs her eyes and blinks rapidly before focusing again on the hair. With a second, clearer look, she realizes it’s too dark to be Alex’s, and far too straight. Alex’s hair is a bush of curls, and her bedhead? It’s a wild, thorny thicket only the bravest of souls dare venture into.

  Charlee tries not to dwell on the wave of disappointment that washes through her. She tries not to hate herself for the parts of her that so desperately, selfishly yearned to find her ex-lover in her bed. The guilt builds like a prickly lump in her throat, though, and Charlee can do little more than swallow it down to add to her preexisting nausea.

  Slinking one hand out under the covers, she pokes the lump beside her.

  “Chris?”

  “Guess again, Drunky,” comes the ragged reply, and a rush of relief spills through Charlee’s cells.

  “Oh, thank God.” Charlee quickly shuffles over in the bed and wraps tightly around Cam.

  “You’re making me hot. Get off.”

  “I’m making a Camila burrito,” Charlee says, burying her face in Cam’s hair. It still smells like smoke from the bar. “Burritos are supposed to be hot.”

  “I’m going to shove a burrito up your ass if you don’t get off me.”

  “Why are the lights on?”

  “Too tired.”

  “Why did you let me drink so much?”

  “Why did you let me drink so much?” Cam uses her ass to try to bump Charlee away from her. “I’m seriously going to throw up if you don’t get off me. I’m so hot.”

  “Then why are you under a mountain of covers?”

  “Stop asking me reasonable questions,” Cam growls, bumping Charlee with her ass again and wrapping the blankets more tightly around herself. “I have a hangover, or I might still be drunk. I don’t know. Logic fails me when there are tiny people with tiny jackhammers inside my brain.”

  Charlee laughs, then immediately frowns when the action makes her head hurt, and she rolls away from Cam to put her pillow over her head. The cool underside is a relief against her skin. She breathes in the smell of laundry detergent and her own familiar perfume.

  “What time is it?”

  “Time to go back to sleep.”

  Something thuds against the pillow covering Charlee’s face, and she gropes around for it. Her fingers collide with the cool face of her phone, and she lifts the pillow just long enough to check the time. 5:19 a.m. blinks back at her. She covers her face again. “Why am I awake?” She couldn’t have been asleep more than a couple of hours. “How did we even get here?”

  “You don’t remember?” Cam rolls over and pushes the pillow off Charlee’s face. “You’re going to suffocate yourself.”

  Charlee stares up at the concrete ceiling and frowns. “The last thing I remember is being in a cab with Alex.”

  “Yeah, we were all in that cab, Charlee. But of course you’d only remember Alex.”

  Charlee’s cheeks heat with a blush she uses her hands to hide, playing it off like she needs to rub the crust from her eyes. “So, you came home with me? Did Alex go back to Vinny’s?”

  “I don’t know where Alex went,” Cam says through a bitter-smelling yawn that makes Charlee’s stomach hurt. “And, no, I didn’t come home with you. I went to my place after the cab dropped you off, and then you called me an hour later. You said you couldn’t do ‘this’ anymore.” She makes a mock quotation mark with one hand that is only partially visible at the top of the blankets. “You never actually explained what ‘this’ was, but you told me to come over before you did something stupid, so I called another cab and brought my drunk ass over here.”

  “And?”

  “And then I had to use my spare key to get in because your drunk ass was passed out on the couch when I got here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Naked.”

  “Oh.”

  “Exactly. Your hair was wet, and there was a towel on the floor, so I guess you took a shower. I don’t know. I had to wake you up to get you to put a shirt and some underwear on, and we barely managed that. Then you threw up, which I didn’t clean up by the way, because I love myself, and then you dragged me over here and said it was nap time.”

  “Um.”

  “Yeah, I don’t wanna know why you decided to call me and then wait for me naked.”

  “I couldn’t tell you anyway. I don’t remember.”

  “Life is merciful that way sometimes.” Cam draws a snort of laughter from Charlee. “I need bacon or maybe a burger. Or a bacon burger. And ten more hours of sleep.”

  “I didn’t say anything else?”

  “Only that you love my face and that Alex still has a nice ass.”

  “I did not say that.”

  “It’s true, though.”

  “No argument here,” Charlee says, rubbing at her eyes again. “Roll over. Your breath smells like tequila and nightmares. It’s making my stomach hurt.”

  Cam remains firmly in place. “Right, because that’s so much worse than your vomit breath. You’ve been breathing the seventh circle of hell on me since you passed out, so stop complaining.”

  “We’re tragic.”

  “Right now, I agree with you. Later, I’ll argue that we’re awesome.”

  “Why are we awake?”

  “Because you woke us up.” Cam smacks her lips and grimaces like she has just smelled her own breath for the first time. “You owe me bacon.”

  “I’m sorry if I freaked you out, Cam,” Charlee says. “With the call, I mean.”

  Despite her claim of being overheated, Cam slips her arm around Charlee’s waist under the covers. “You sounded pretty upset. You don’t remember why?”

  Charlee closes her eyes and tries to drag the memories up from the murky haze of last night’s intoxication. They come back to her in fuzzy fragments that never quite form a solid sequence but are recognizable enough for her to piece some of it together. She remembers being in the cab with Alex, and now that some of the blanks have been filled in, Charlee can recall Cam squished under her on her other side. She thinks she remembers saying goodbye to everyone, and Alex’s hand clinging to hers until Charlee finally had to let go to close the car door.

  The rest comes in fast flashes—the wobbly walk to the elevator inside her building, her key in the door, water on her back, her hand between her le—

  “Oh.”

  “I take it you just had a lightbulb moment?”

  “You could say that,” Charlee says. “I think I’m having a lightbulb year, honestly.”

  “Care to share with the rest of the class?�
� Cam snuggles in closer, one leg thrown over Charlee’s knees and her residual limb, or what Cam refers to as her “nubby,” pressed warmly against Charlee’s thigh. “What was the stupid thing you so desperately needed me to save you from doing?”

  “I almost kissed Alex last night.”

  Cam actually sits up at those words. Her eyebrows inch toward her hairline as she stares down at Charlee. “And?”

  “I almost kissed her and I—I wanted…” Charlee covers her eyes with her fingers and tries to rub away the sudden burning sensation but somehow only makes it worse. “God, I wanted so much more than that.”

  “So, the stupid thing you needed saving from was your own libido?”

  Charlee can tell Cam is trying lighten the moment, to keep her from falling into the despair they can both hear creeping into the edges of her voice. “I don’t know,” she says, trying her best to give Cam even a hint of a laugh, but it only comes out as a breathy sigh. “I don’t know what I was afraid of—myself, I guess. Maybe I was afraid I would call her. Or Chris. I don’t know. I think I just needed to not be alone.”

  “I get that.”

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t really think you have a choice in the matter. You’re just going to want who you want.”

  “No, I mean I don’t think I can keep pretending like I don’t want her anymore.” Charlee shakes her head. Her hair makes a quiet swooshing sound against the mattress. “I don’t think I can keep pretending like I’ve moved on.”

  “You’re going to tell her you still love her?”

  “No. God no, Cam. I can’t do that. She’s with Kari.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m not going to put that kind of pressure on her. I’m not going to make her feel like she has to choose between us. I just, I know I can’t keep doing this to myself and to Chris. I can’t keep lying.”

  “So?”

  “So, I have to end things with him.” When Cam doesn’t say anything, Charlee looks at her expectantly. “Well,” she says, “what do you think?”