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Tai wanted nothing more than to get in Van’s car and drive. They could stop at an IHOP for shitty pancakes, and just keep driving until they forgot all of this. They could drive until this night disappeared in the rear-view mirror, drive until they ran out of road and could maybe, finally, be free.
Instead, they were too drunk to drive.
Instead, Van paled and trembled; too sick to even stand, much less drive. A poison of trauma, guilt, and cancer coursing through her veins. A combination so virulent, the oxycodone living in every crevice of her car couldn’t even touch it.
Instead, Tai held her by the arm. Wordlessly guiding her behind the traumatised purple-hued woman who showed them to an empty room.
Tai wanted nothing more than to get in Van’s car and drive.
Drive back in time to when it had just been them.
When Natalie was still alive, and they were figuring out a life after what was supposed to be the worst thing that would ever happen to them.
When Van wasn’t dying, and they were still each other’s soulmate.
The woman opened the door to a sparsely furnished room, entering only to switch on the bedside lamp before returning to the doorway.
“Do you need anything? We have spare clothes, towels?” the woman asked, lightly smiling despite her tear stained cheeks.
“No,” Tai shook her head forcefully before she added, “Thank you.”
She couldn’t stand to see another shade of purple, much less dress up as one of Lottie’s acolytes.
The woman bowed her head and closed the door behind them, just as Tai guided Van to one of the two single beds furnishing the room.
Her heart sank at the idea of two tiny single beds set across the room from one another. There was already such a divide between them and she would have given anything for the forced proximity of a double bed. Any excuse to reach across the gap created by two decades of separation and change and marriage, and feel her.
If they had lain together in one bed, she would be only a touch away.
If they had lain together in one bed, they would have been as close as they had been when they had kissed only a few hours before.
If there had been one bed, she could create any semblance of plausible deniability.
Van sighed as she sat down, her face scrunching with pain. As she sat, she fell away from Tai’s hold, and Tai kept her hands out for a second too long, mourning the loss. She watched as Van leaned back on her hands and kicked off her boots.
Tai took a step back, the back of her legs meeting the second of the two beds but her body refusing to let her sit down. If she sat, she would be accepting this space between them and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She wanted nothing more than to sit down next to Van, but the logical part of her brain fought with her heart.
She felt like a vampire, waiting to be allowed across the threshold.
She needed to know it was okay.
Van shrugged off her jacket and threw it over the end of the bed before she leant down to pull at her socks, wincing with pain at the change in pressure within her skull as she bent forward. Tai watched, frozen in space.
Van looked up at her, tilting her head slightly and breaking the trance that she was in.
Tai shook her head, moving to tug her – Van’s – sweater over her head. She instantly missed the warmth it had offered, and the smell of Van which had permeated the fibres. She wanted to hold it up to her face, breathe in that scent and let it suffocate her, but she followed Van’s lead and tossed it over the bed frame before looking down at her feet, avoiding Van’s gaze.
Once she felt her stare fade away, Tai looked up, desperately pretending she wasn’t engrossed in watching Van unbutton her jeans and slide them down her legs. Abandoning them in a crumpled heap on the floor next to her shoes and socks. Tai tried to keep her eyes trained on the fabric, but found herself pulled to the pale expanse of skin it had exposed. Each leg was crowned in a golden halo of soft hair curling against her skin. A sight at once so familiar yet painfully foreign.
Once upon a time, Van’s legs had been more known to Taissa than her own. Caressed, kissed, and observed through soccer games and stolen moments in a transiently empty locker room, tangled against her own in the lake or at night in the cabin, one of the only safe places when it came to redefining normalcy after the wilderness. Those legs had once slipped between her own as they slept, cradled her head as she kneeled between them and pinned her down in fits of giggles. Those legs had once been hers to know, and love, and feel, and now, somehow, she had lost that right.
She finally sat herself down on the bed opposite Van’s. Attempting equality and attempting to break down their walls by joining Van on her level, but the tiny room still gaped wide between their two single beds. Time stretched and Van didn’t look back to her, beginning to unbutton her corduroy shirt with an effortful calmness.
They had undressed in front of each other so many times before.
They had undressed each other perhaps even more.
Their bodies had once felt shared and understood, and yet now there was a creeping anxiety.
It wasn’t like undressing in front of a stranger, nor a friend, nor a lover. There was no embarrassment or nonchalance. There was an intangible, undefined buzz. An expired intimacy that still flickered like an ember threatening to spark and consume.
Tai felt her breath quicken, watching Van pull her turtleneck over her head and add it to the collection on the floor.
“Are you just going to watch me?” Van asked, looking intently at her.
There was a glimmer of a sixteen year old Van’s twinkle in her exhausted eyes, and Tai could almost hear the teenage smirk and the playful accusation of ‘Perv!’. However it fell away almost as soon as it emerged, leaving behind only the sadness and fragility of an adult overburdened with the life she had never deserved.
“N…no, I,” she stuttered and trailed off, distractedly moving down to remove her shoes and pull her attention away from the spectre before her.
The strong, pale arms she had glimpsed played over in her mind, the deep neckline of the grey tank top and the exposed skin it teased. She neatly arranged her shoes at the end of the bed, looking at them for too long before she returned her attention to her feet, slowly pulling off the thick woollen socks that Van had offered her that morning and folding them carefully one by one.
Feeling once more free from Van’s questioning stare, she dared to glance up at the woman. Her eyes focused on fan of errant red waves which followed the curve of her breast, covering but not hiding the subtle prominence of a nipple beneath two layers of fabric.
She stamped down the desire to hold out a hand to her chest, to trace the exposed flesh and seek her hands beneath the fabric in search of more.
Once upon a time she might have placed an affectionate kiss to both subtle prominences and kissed every inch of bare flesh.
Once upon a time Van would have let her.
It hit her that one day she had mapped out every inch of pale skin for the last time and somehow they had arrived here. Two decades of physical and emotional distance that kept them across a room and bound to their own single beds.
She wanted nothing more than for it to all fade away.
If she was brave enough to close that gap and move across the room, they could dissipate into their twenties. She could hold Van in her arms again and relearn every freckle and dimple. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, willing herself to move, but remaining fixed in place.
She moved only to unbutton her borrowed trousers, leaving herself in her underwear and a Van’s old Sleater Kinney tour t-shirt. She recognised the outfit as one she had worn so many times before, a younger version of herself who had the love of her life, and everything still to live for.
She remembered herself then. Pouring a glass of orange juice in a run-down kitchen the size of her now closet, tossing back the sweet liquid as hands wrapped around her waist. One hand moving to cup her breast while the other toyed at the waistband of her boy shorts. She had leaned into the touch and placed the glass down on the counter, reaching a hand behind her head to tangle in fire-red hair as Van whispered in her ear and dragged a teasing finger through her centre.
She would give anything to go back there.
She watched as Van tucked herself beneath the thin blanket of the bed, placing her head down on the pillow and grimacing at the hardness of the bed.
“Goodnight,” Tai whispered, barely audible despite the silence of the room.
A beat of silence.
She felt so incredibly stupid.
The past few weeks had been the sequel to a nightmare she had never expected.
Natalie, one of her closest and most devastatingly broken friends was dead. Murdered by a woman who had never had any right to exist in their periphery, in a stupid game they were too old to play. Her son was sleeping at her in-laws who refused to let her speak to him, and his mother, her wife, lay unconscious and alone in a high dependency ward a hundred miles away all because of her. Lottie, the person perhaps most like her, was being readmitted to a psychiatric hospital that she might never be allowed to leave while she was free to spiral out of control. The body of an innocent man she had helped bury had been found and would likely send them all to prison. Her career, despite being exactly where she had always wanted it to be, hovered on a precipice, ready to crumble down around her. Her ex-everything was dying and there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it.
And despite all of this loss, the thing she mourned more than anything else in this moment was the woman in front of her.
“Goodnight Tai.”
The loss of her love.
The loss of her touch.
The loss of their everything.
The loss of them.
She unhooked her bra beneath the aged t-shirt and pulled it out through an arm hole, placing it beneath her sweater in her neat pile of clothes. She leaned towards the lamp which sat on the rattan bedside table between their two beds and switched it off.
The room descended into darkness and complete silence.
She lay back in her bed and pulled the thin sheet over her body, devastatingly aware of the vastness between them.
She lay staring at the sky, willing her body to move and to shatter the icy coldness of the silent, separate room.
Minutes passed.
She couldn’t sleep like this.
“Van?” she whispered.
A schoolgirl at a sleepover.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Van said sharply. Images of Lottie, and Misty, and Natalie, flitting through her skull like a tortuous slideshow.
“I don’t wanna talk,” Tai said, swallowing hard. Her honesty surprising her as she spoke into the darkness.
Van didn’t respond.
A decision.
Her brain fighting with her heart as she moved to sit up.
She brought herself down onto her knees at the edge of Van’s bed. As close to prayer as she would ever get.
“I can’t be…” she trailed off.
Far from you.
Alone tonight.
Fighting with you.
Not madly in love with you.
Not mad.
Her hand reached out, softly stroking back the familiarly soft hair and following the strands round to find and cup Van’s cheek.
“Tai,” Van’s voice was quiet, nervous, sympathetic.
She ran a thumb over Van’s face to rest on her bottom lip, using her finger as a guide to press her lips to Van’s.
Please.
Van returned the kiss. Softer than earlier. Each of them finding solace in the simple and known in order to distract from the night. She brought tentative fingers out to hold Tai’s face, pulling her closer.
This was easier than thinking.
Van tugged at her and she quickly hauled herself onto the bed, keeping their faces close. She had to press close to Van to fit them both on the tiny bed, and Van clung to her desperately.
Their bodies were so close and they found a way to press closer, erasing every space between them. The gap they had both been drowning in, avoiding and hating, fully closed as they both fell into the abyss together.
They had survived the worst together before. They had lived through a plane crash and the harshest of winters. They had watched their home burn to the ground and had survived every bad dream and alter ego. They had avoided every unlucky draw of the cards and they had stayed alive.
It was no sacrifice to the wilderness that kept them alive.
It was them and them alone.
The only way to stop this new madness; the death, the Other, the sickness, was to simply return to them.
Her leg fell between Van’s in effort to stabilise herself and her stomach sparked at the sound Van gasped against her lips.
That sound was all she would ever need.
It had been almost thirty years since they had first explored making each other come undone. Thighs, and fingers, and lips, and tongues. They had once been so vulnerable, but it hadn’t ever felt wrong. She trusted Van with her entire life; her pleasure, her pain, her secrets, her mistakes. It had been the most confident she had ever felt.
They had been designed to do this. Designed to do this with each other for eternity.
Van’s hands sought out her hips, and her skin seared where her warm hands made contact. In a swift move, she pulled Tai on top of her to keep her safe from falling, in doing so securing their bodies together. Tai, her skin ablaze, sat back on her knees, pulling her t-shirt over her head before pulling desperately at Van’s tank top and casting it out into the darkness. She instantly pressed her naked chest against Van’s, her hands in the way as she clumsily tried to feel Van with every part of her.
“Wait,” Van breathed, her hands on Tai’s shoulders. Her chest heaved and Tai reluctantly removed her hands.
Tai opened her mouth to complain but Van sat up, holding Tai steady as she righted herself with a groan before letting go to pull off her sports bra. She instantly pulled Tai back to her, her mouth on her neck, her collarbone, her breasts.
Tai gasped, leaning her head forward over Van’s and placing desperate kisses to the top of her head. She began to rock her hips, Van’s thigh pressed against her centre and her knee still between Van’s legs. They moved together frantically in a desperate unchoreographed lust. A frantic attempt to feel everything, all at once. Their hands grabbed at everything they could find; Van’s hands on her waist, in her hair, down her back. Her hands cupping Van’s breasts, cradling her skull, guiding her hips through every motion.
They kissed open mouthed, punctuated with moans and heavy breaths. Decades of lost moments to be made up for in a single touch.
Tai thought for a moment of all the times that she had turned Van down; too stressed, too tired, too bloody, or uncomfortable in her own skin and she regretted it with a crashing wave.
At some point in her life she had been so secure in having everything that she could dare to refuse this. She had been so confidently sure of other moments: late nights and later mornings; spontaneity in the shower, the kitchen, the hallway; back roads on long road trips. She had once been so sure of a future unchanged, that she could say no to this.
Until one day, those times had run out.
And here she was, decades later wishing she had more of those moments. Desire burning to make more. Desire to make up for those painfully lost years, and the future they’d now never have.
Her teeth scraped at Van’s ear as Van’s mouth captured her nipple, her tongue enveloping the hard bud before she tugged it further into her mouth. Van’s moans vibrated on her skin and sent shockwaves throughout her body, causing lightening to flicker across her waist and pool as wetness between her legs. She rocked down on Van’s bare thigh and pulled at Van’s chin, pressing their lips together in a messy, thankful kiss.
She could feel the damp heat of Van through her boxer shorts, felt it grow with each roll of her hips and she wanted nothing more than to rip them down her pale thighs and reacquaint her fingers and tongue with the soft pink flesh beneath.
She tangled her hands in Van’s hair at the nape of her neck, cradling her skull as she pushed Van down until her head met the pillow. She leant over her, kissing blindly at the corners of her mouth before she sat back on her heels.
She ran her fingers down Van’s neck, feeling her arteries pulse beneath her fingertips, she danced her fingers over the length of her collarbones, tracing a line from her shoulders, around the outline of each breast before covering them with her splayed hands. Her heart beat strong and alive beneath them. She ran her hands down Van’s stomach, feeling it tense with anticipation and looped her fingers in the waistband of her shorts. She adjusted her seat so she could drag them down uninterrupted, her fingers grazing the soft skin of her legs as she pulled urgently on the fabric.
In the darkness, she could barely see her. Her imagination in overdrive as she pieced together images of the past and tried to translate them to the woman that Van was now. She leant over Van’s naked body, fumbling for the light switch and whispering in her ear.
“I have to see you,” she said, her voice hoarse and full of want.
She found the switch and instantly surrounded them in a hazy yellow glow, sitting back on her knees almost instantly so she could take in all of her.
I’ve got to see and memorise every last inch of you. I’ve got to burn you into my eyes until you’re all I see. I’ve got to learn every bit of you so that even when you’re gone you’ll still be here.
Van squeezed her eyes shut in the sudden light, scrunching her nose as she tentatively opened one eye and then the other.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” Tai breathed.
A moment, 25 years ago, crashing back to them.
“Tai,” Van whined, squeezing her thighs together.
Her chest and cheeks were flushed red, her red hair tangled behind her head, her eyes black and sparkling.
All at once she was the 43 year old almost stranger who threatened to die and take Tai’s whole heart with her, the 23 year old with a broken heart who had wished her everything, the 18 year old best friend and lover who had defied death and kept her grounded, and the 16 year first love who had flirted unabashed until Tai had first kissed her and left her speechless.
Van was her past, her present.
Van made her feel it.
She lunged forward to kiss her, overwhelmed. One hand moved to cup Van’s cheek, the other resting at her hipbone. Van’s hips canted upwards, trying to seek out anything to grind against now that Tai had moved from between her legs; her hands pulled at her thighs, her fingertips dancing beneath the fabric of Tai’s underwear at her hips and her thumbs reaching out to stroke teasingly close to where Tai wanted them. Tai pushed against her hip to keep it still before straddling Van, pressing her clothed centre to Van’s naked one and rolling her hips down.
Van moaned, throwing her head back and Tai took the opportunity to pepper kisses along her jaw, moving down her neck to suck at her pulse point. She shifted down to kiss between her breasts, tasting the sweat there as she nipped red marks with her teeth. She savoured her mouth on her breast, making languid circles with her tongue around her nipple and feeling Van’s hands encourage her by pressing her further into her chest.
She wanted to take her time and make this last hours; she wanted to press her mouth to every inch of skin and commit every sense to memory. She wanted Van to be a mess before she even put her mouth on her. And yet, at the same time, she was so desperate to press her fingers and tongue into the wet heat and watch Van unravel. She wanted to remember what it was like to see her in ecstasy, wanted to bring her crashing over the edge again and again until her body forgot about the bad, and the sickness and the grief and only remembered her.
She moved down, pressing a line of kisses to her stomach, feeling the way it quivered with every brush of her lips. Her leg’s parted and Tai smiled.
I can feel how much you want me.
She kissed at each hip bone, trailing a hand down lazily across the thick curls before pressing her palm gently into Van’s clit and cupping her mound. Van’s hips bucked and she made a sound akin to a whimper.
“Fuck, Tai.”
Tai moaned at the warmth and wetness that coated her palm and began to move her hand in time with Van’s hips. She nipped at the soft warmth of the inside of her thighs and teased her mouth close to her heat. Van’s sounds were intoxicating.
“You might actually kill me,” Van joked breathlessly. Her voice shaky and low.
It might be fitting. The girl who couldn’t be killed, the woman diagnosed with terminal cancer, dead at the hands of her beautiful married ex-girlfriend.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Tai teased, moving to press her fingers up and down the length of her. She parted her fingers to encompass her clit and moved down, teasing just close to her entrance and coating her fingertips. Van’s hands balled at the sheets, her chest arching off the bed and her hips attempting to guide Tai to where she wanted her.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She could feel Van’s pulse between her legs. Breathed in the heady scent that made her want to devour her. Her own stomach burned with such an intense desire she felt she could split in half.
Tai kissed once more at Van’s inner thighs before placing her mouth over her swollen clit and placing her tongue flat against her. Van moaned and her thighs began to tremble, her heels digging into the mattress as she tried to restrain her hips from bucking desperately against Taissa’s mouth.
“Please Tai,” Van begged.
She smiled against her and began to move her tongue, pressing her fingers to her entrance teasingly. She could feel Van clench beneath her fingertips, desperate to feel Tai inside her, anchoring her in the nebulous, overwhelming pleasure coursing through their bodies.
Tai slowly pushed two fingers inside of her allowing Van to savour the feeling of being stretched and alighting every tiny nerve fibre in her core. Tai moaned at the encompassing heat and felt Van tense around her fingers. She withdrew her fingers with the same slow pace and matched it with a slow circle of her tongue as she sucked Van’s clit into her mouth. She plunged her fingers back inside and was ignited by the torrent of sounds that escaped Van’s swollen lips.
She looked up to watch her writhe; her head back and eyes closed, her mouth fallen open and a hand dragging nail marks into her chest. Tai’s clit throbbed and she reached up with her free hand to grab the hand on Van’s chest, locking their fingers together.
Van came in a wave of moans and expletives, her body thrashing as she clenched down on Tai’s fingers and soaked the sheets beneath them. Tai kissed her gently through the aftershocks, her fingers stalling inside her; feeling every wave of pleasure that rippled through her. Once Van stilled, she removed her fingers, mindlessly placing them in her mouth to lick them clean.
Van watched, her cheeks a deep rosy hue and her lips parted, before she broke from her reverie and held her hands up to hide her face. Peering down at Tai through the gaps in her fingers.
“I haven’t…” she started, and quickly dissolved into laughter.
Tai chuckled. She felt it.
Tai kissed her still trembling flesh, her tongue darting out to capture every last taste. Her tongue moved easily against the soft wetness, and she found herself drawing light circles against Van’s clit once more. She heard Van’s breathing skip, and she looked up to her, their eyes meeting.
It took little time to bring Van over the edge again; Tai’s name falling in breathy moans from her lips as her head fell back.
Tai smiled and pressed a swift kiss to her centre before moving up her body to plant a wet kiss to her lips. Van moaned at the taste of herself on Tai’s lips, a once luxuriously erotic surprise that had become a mainstay of their sex before fading to what until now, was nothing more than a distant memory.
Van’s hands pulled at her waist, pressing her tightly to her. Her hands slipping underneath her underwear to grab her ass.
“Let me,” Tai said, leaning back.
“You’re really fucking hot,” Van grinned, propping herself up slowly on her elbows and watching dazed as Tai stood up to slip the soaked underwear down her legs.
Tai tilted her head, grinning. She stepped out of the fabric and gave an unashamed pose, descending into laughter.
It was so easy.
It felt like being young again.
“I want to taste you,” Van said matter-of-factly, “But, I don’t think I can do that tonight.”
Van gestured between her legs where Tai had been moments before. Tai looked panicked, and felt the pang of rejection.
“I… I wouldn’t ask you to,” she stammered.
“No silly,” Van chuckled. “I feel like shit, and you, made me feel incredible. But I, literally don’t think I can move. So, I want you, to sit on my face.”
Van smirked playfully, brimming with her teenage confidence and charm.
Tai thought of the Van she had guided to the room; frail and weak and broken. She had forgotten her entirely.
“Are you sure? We could just sleep?” Tai worried.
“Dude, after that?” Van raised her eyebrows. “I can’t sleep without returning the favour, at least once.”
“And tomorrow,” Van continued, “I’ll remind you exactly what I can do.”
Cancer or no cancer.