Cracks
Hi, so I've lost my phone where all of my social media accounts were log into. Thankfully, I remember my two twitter @'s and my wattpad so yeah... Hence the much overdue update.
Sorry.
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Lisa paused and looked at the coffee cup on the counter top. It had a floral pattern, delicate blue flowers traced around the rim. It was in some ways symbolic of their new, and disparate, approaches to shared living. Jennie had insisted on buying a whole new set of cups because nothing said 'grown up' like matching crockery, and then, having done so, was happy to leave them laying around the apartment, unwashed, half-full, covered in lipstick. Lisa on the other hand couldn't care less about whether the cups matched, but her new drive for tidiness required that they spent their lives lined up against the wall in military formation, handles pointing to the right for maximum efficiency. She sighed, and minutely adjusted it to match the others.
It hadn't been easy. When they'd lived together in L.A. it had been in a flurry of emotion, her discovery of her attraction to Jennie, the fallout from Nana, the rawness of their new-found relationship. They hadn't cared to think about anything much, because they'd lived in the present, every day a new chapter, a new revelation. The world had welcomed them and indulged them as lovers. But here it was different. When the brunette had said that it was a conservative town, she hadn't fully appreciated what that meant.
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She'd been terrified, that first day. Not by the idea of starting a new course, but by the fact she was going to have to meet people, by the prospect that she might find herself in the same position she had at her old school, disliked and shunned, only this time there'd be no escape from it. She couldn't run away to see Jennie because the said girl was just down the hall, and this place was now her life.
She'd dressed conservatively but professionally, sporting a pair of plain glasses and a ponytail, to try to avoid the aura of confrontation that she's assumed had got her off on the wrong foot once before, but she couldn't entirely escape the nagging suspicion that it wasn't the way she acted or dressed that people took exception to, it was just her, that for whatever reason, people just didn't like her.
She'd reached down to take Jennie's hand, looking for reassurance, but Jennie had moved it away, instead opting for a friendly hug, and sent Lisa on her way feeling distinctly uneasy.
In the end her morning hadn't been too bad. She'd done all the right things, shaken hands, flipped her hair flirtatiously, pretended to be interested in other people's opinions, dismissed her own achievements with a demure shrug and a self-deprecating smile. She'd even laughed at their terrible jokes. In short, done her best to be a people person. And it had worked to a degree - she'd been invited to a couple of parties, had an interesting if baffling discussion on the Belgian electro-grunge scene, and narrowly swerved a box social with the young Christian association.
But it was exhausting. She wondered how her lover managed to keep this up the whole time. By the time they'd met for lunch she'd been ready to lose the glasses, rip out the ponytail, and shred a couple of passing freshmen just for old-time's sake.
So..?"
"Awful."
Jennie looked crestfallen. "You don't like the course?"
"The course is fine. It's the people."
"What's wrong with them?"
"Nothing. They're very nice."
"So what's the problem?"
"The problem, Nini, is that I have to be nice back."
"Ah."
"I mean, I could stand a morning of it, but I don't think I can take the strain for a whole year."
The brunette laughed. "Poor you," she said. "I'll tell you what, when we get home you can be as nasty as you like to me, just to make up for it."
"Really?"
"Really. I'll even make you some cold coffee to dump on my head."
"Aww," the blonde smiled indulgently. "That's so sweet of you."
"I'm all heart."
Lisa reached out to give Jennie's hand a squeeze, and felt the other girl stiffen at the touch, her eyes flickering warily around the room. She withdrew her hand. "Oh."
"I'm sorry," Jennie said. "I'm just not used to... you know, here."
"Great," Lisa sighed, glumly. "Well, this is going to be a blast then, isn't it?"
"Oh, come on," Jennie said. "It's not a big deal. We just have to be cool in school. Hey! 'Cool in school'. That rhymes."
"Eat your heart out, Walt Whitman."
"Don't be such a grouch. Look, I promise, as soon as we get out of here, you can grope me as much as you want."
"I don't want to grope you, Kim, I just want to be able to hold your hand."
"You don't want to grope me?"
"Well..."
"Then race you to the car. We'll be back in time for class."
So Lisa had reluctantly accepted that things were going to be that way, that to the rest of the school they were just friends. And that had its compensations - partly because it allowed her to pull pranks on Jennie that should have earned her a stern look from a real-life girlfriend, and partly because it was nice to re-live their schooldays as they might have been, as two friends hanging out without the animosity that had plagued them at Hollywood Arts.
And in some ways the subterfuge appealed to her, and made their return to privacy in the evenings more of an event - so eventful, sometimes, that they never made it out of bed to eat dinner.
But it had its downside too, in her having to stand there grinding her teeth as Jennie politely turned down unwanted advances from guys trying to hit on her, whilst at the same time counting on the thumbs of one hand the number of guys who tried to hit on her, and wondering whether the idea of geek chic was somewhat overrated.
One day, she promised herself, she'd lose the glasses and come into college in all her swag glory, and then we'd see who got hit on and who didn't. Not that she was interested, but a girl likes to know she still has it.
As it was, she had to save her 'glory' for the evenings. It was a conservative town, but that only lead its more liberal members to find other ways to party - this wasn't, after all, the nineteen-fifties, and there were places you could go, a small but thriving LGBT subculture bubbling just beneath the surface, mixing happily with a thriving underground music scene, and if you knew where to look you could find places that gave the L.A. clubs a run for their money.
No problem.
Except there was a problem.
The problem was that the places they could go, like the Green Door club, which demurely closed its doors to the public at ten o'clock only to reopen them at midnight for a 'private function', were also the places Nana was likely to be, and so, like it or not, Nana was now a weekly fixture in their lives.
This wouldn't matter so much if they ignored each other, but from the moment Jennie entered there would be a constant game of cat and mouse between her and the Japanese girl, as Nana sought to catch her eye with a smirk, and Jennie ostentatiously ignored her, while still casting backward glances when she thought Nana wasn't looking.
Lisa got tired of this pretty quickly, and announced her intention to go over and reduce Nana to a hank of hair and a pile of teeth, but much to her annoyance, her girl wouldn't let her.
And so the game continued, Nana watching like a hawk, waiting for Jennie to look her way, Jennie equally determined to catch her unawares.
And after a while, Lisa began to wonder if the smaller girl wasn't enjoying it in some way, that she wanted the attention, wanted Nana to look, wanted to make her jealous.
She told herself it was stupid, that Jennie wouldn't do that, but her brain hadn't lost any of its malice towards her, and kept clearing its throat, and nudging her, and saying things like that's a nice dress, I wonder who she's wearing it for? and generally making a nuisance of itself.
The lowest point was when she'd come home one day and seen Nana on the street, walking away from the apartment.
There was no reason, no reason at all, to suspect she'd actually been in it, but just the sight of her had fired up all kinds of rage that she'd had to take out on the steering wheel, followed by a trip to the repair shop to have the airbag replaced.
It had to stop. This is exactly the kind of shit you used to pull on Bobby, she told herself. The kind that actually drove him to do it, for fuck's sake. Jennie wouldn't do that. And so she'd reigned in her jealousy, given herself a stern talking to, and for a while all was well.
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There was one cup missing. She knew which one it was, of course. It was her cup. She rooted around in a cupboard, and found it hidden behind a cereal box.
She retrieved it and set it on the counter. It wasn't a pretty cup. It didn't match the others. It was a cup of quite remarkable ugliness, a cup that looked as though it had been crafted by a potter who hated the world.
It was, in every sense of the word, hideous, and she didn't blame Jennie for hating it. But it was hers. She'd found it in a junk shop, sitting alone on a shelf as though shunned by the items around it, and it had felt like the perfect parallel to how she'd felt at the time.
So she'd bought it and brought it home to the Closet, and used it every day of her life from then on. In Jennie's eyes, it was an abomination, and she done everything she could to subtly remove it from their lives, and so Lisa was constantly finding it in a drawer, or a cupboard, or under the sink, or any one of a dozen places where the Korean girl could claim she'd absent-mindedly put it but secretly hoped it would be lost.
And she had repeatedly retrieved it without a word and put it back in its place.
Lisa had lived alone for a long time, and was used to pleasing herself, to organizing her life the way she wanted it, to having the final say on a committee of one.
Jennie on the other hand had lived almost continually in someone else's shadow - her parents, Seolhyun, Nana - and now she was flushed with the first taste of freedom, and Lisa didn't really want to stomp all over it.
She sometimes wondered whether she was going too far, whether her determination not to trample on Jennie was making her come across as weak, or obsequious. Not to Jennie, but to the beast that lay within - she had an awful feeling that old Lisa was looking down on new Lisa, and despising her.
Well, the old Lisa could go fuck herself, she'd decided. Old Lisa had nothing, old Lisa had driven everyone away and sat sulking in her shell.
New Lisa - new Lisa had everything. New Lisa had love and respect, even a family of sorts - it turned out that, despite everything she believed about herself, Jennie's parents quite liked her - but more than that, she had the greatest girl that God sent to her - Jennie Kim.
And old Lisa could never have had that, would never have known what it was like to be the cause of her smile, to see her face light up at a compliment.
Old Lisa would never have felt the texture of her skin, or the touch of her hand.
Old Lisa would never have seen her step from the shower, naked as the day she was born, would never have heard the beautiful, perfect little whimper as she came, toes curling, on the sofa in the heat of a Sunday afternoon.
No, old Lisa would never have had any of that. So screw old Lisa.
Because she loved Jennie. And that made everything different, made the world a better place. And it didn't matter that her walls were crumbling, that her domain, once so secure, was now open to invasion. Because it was worth it.
But now Jennie was up to something. Lisa could tell. She was secretive and easily startled, whispered conversation, phone calls ended the moment she would entered the room.
The phone itself, once left unlocked in a spirit of openness and honestly had now become locked again, a constant companion as Jennie moved from room to room. And It left the Thai girl in turmoil.
Have it out with her, her brain said. But have what out? She had no proof, and accusing her of anything would leave a unpleasant stain on their relationship.
In some ways, the worse the crime that she suspected Jennie of, the more she didn't want to know, the more she couldn't face the reality.
She'd rather play the piano as the ship went down, pretending it wasn't happening, than make a dash for the lifeboats and watch.
And what was it she suspected, anyway? What could Jennie possibly be doing that she didn't want her to know about? It was probably just Jennie's mom, asking if they wanted to come for dinner, and Jennie was trying to put her off without making Lisa feel guilty for not wanting to go.
Or maybe Jennie was trying to find a way to get round the 'no-pets' rule in the apartment, a rule declared on the lease and enforced by Lisa.
All of these things were ridiculous, of course, but concentrating on them kept her mind off the real nightmare that lurked somewhere in the restless 3 a.m. slot of her mind..
She looked at the cup. She knew her lover would never break it deliberately, and loved her for it, but the fact remained that this cup wouldn't be long for this world, a deep crack ran across the top of the handle, and it wouldn't be long before it fell off and dumped hot coffee in her lap.
But for now it was still alive, so she placed it carefully next to its step-sisters on the counter, like the ugly duckling in a line-up of swans.
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It was her birthday. She wasn't normally one for celebrating, especially since the disaster of her first, and only, party, but she'd always thought of Jennie as a fan of birthdays, and so she'd expected to be have to reluctantly accept a day of pampering and presents, and all-round jolliness.
In fact, she'd secretly been looking forward to it, to eradicating the memories of previous birthdays by letting the brunette force her to have a good time.
But Jennie seemed strangely distracted, uninvolved, and on the few occasions Lisa had raised the subject, she'd handwaved it away with a promise of dinner or something, before wandering off, staring vaguely at her phone.
Even when the day itself arrived, there was a card, and breakfast in bed - and then other things in bed that left her week-kneed and panting as Jennie emerged grinning from under the covers - but no talk of a present or dinner or plans, just a cheery goodbye at the college gate.
It didn't matter, she told herself, they were adults, she didn't need ribbons and candy and a badge with her age on it or any of that stuff, but it left her feeling a little hollow.
A couple of days earlier she'd received a gift from her dad, a handsomely bound copy of Plato's 'Republic', which made her wonder if he'd taken leave of his senses until she opened it up to find it actually contained a small bottle of Scotch and a check for five hundred dollars. But other than that, there was no one else to care.
She had two classes, then realized she'd left her assignment at home, so she decided to skip back and get it - Jennie had said she had a tutorial over lunch, so she wouldn't be seeing her anyway, and she could come back in time for her afternoon workshop, sparing the time-dilating tedium of eating on her own. She drove back to the apartment.
She was just about to put her key in the door when she heard a sound, the scrape of a chair, maybe, or a cupboard closing, any one of a million sounds that go unnoticed every day, that signify nothing but the presence of a human being. There was someone in the apartment.
She stood, debating what to do. She wasn't sure if she was up to tackling intruders - there was a big difference between cat-fights and scaring freshmen, and taking on a six-foot burglar. Maybe she should call the police.
And then she heard the giggle. She froze, straining to hear.
It was unmistakably Jennie's, a low, seductive, secretive sound she'd hear a thousand times before.
The question of what Jennie was doing home in the middle of the afternoon sniggering to herself was one she didn't have time to contemplate before she heard another giggle. Female, but not from her girlfriend this time.
There was someone else there.
She backed away, feeling the blood draining from her face. She'd never been so lost, so helplessly unsure of what to do. She should go in there and find out what was going on, but somehow she couldn't, couldn't open the box, collapse the wave, reduce the probability to a single truth.
She backed away, further and further down the corridor, until she was running, faster, down the stairs, through the lobby, out of the building into the harsh sun. It wasn't until she was in the car, driving towards nowhere, that she caught a hold of herself.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn't Nana, just a friend. There were thousands of people in this town, and common sense said that half of them were women.
It could be anyone. Maybe Jennie had come home to collect her own assignment, and been waylaid by someone collecting for charity, or the building agent. A neighbor. Anyone. Maybe she'd arranged to have the apartment fumigated.
But the laughter struck the wrong note. It wasn't a polite laugh, the kind you might muster when an old lady tells a slightly off-color joke, or the barista gives you the same old patter he uses every day.
It was a giggle, deep and dirty, the kind you only share with someone you know well. The kind that means you understand one another.
The kind you share when you have a secret to keep.
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It preyed on her mind all afternoon as she tried to rationalize it away, but the one question that kept rolling around in her brain was, what would she do?
If the Korean girl was cheating on her, what did that mean? Was Jennie planning to leave her? Or was this just a fling on the side?
A treacherous part of her said, you don't want to know, if you ignore it, maybe it'll pass, and you can carry on as if nothing had happened.
And it was true that the thought of having it out with her, of the tears and recriminations, of either living with the thorn in her side for the rest of her life or packing her bags and leaving, was too much.
But she knew she could never do that, never be the cuckold, turn a blind eye, know that they were laughing at her behind her back.
And then another, less vicious part of her brain said - would Jennie do that? Jennie knew first-hand how it felt to be cheated on, and even if she hadn't, did she really have it in her?
Jennie had always been open and honest with her, it was the very basis of her personality. The only thing the brunette had ever lied to Lisa about was the fact that she'd been in love with her at school, for Christ's sake.
Would she really turn around and do something so cruel, so out of character? And then the familiar backwash of self-loathing came crashing in - how could you, Lisa? How could you doubt her after everything that's happened? How low, how despicable a human being would you have to be to think she'd want to hurt you with the one person who'd caused you both so much pain? Do you think so little of her? Or do you just want it to be true because you can't bring yourself to believe someone so perfect could love you?
Fuck. She needed to see her. She need that badly - just to see her face, look into her eyes, see the truth and know that everything was going to be okay.
But where was she now?
Whatever Jennie was up to, she'd have to head back to college in time for Lisa to pick her up, and she couldn't risk leaving her stranded.
As if on cue, her phone buzzed.
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Hi babe - don't wait for me, class was cancelled this afternoon (yay!), so taking the bus. See you at home xxxxxxxx
P.S. Happy Birthday!
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She stared at it. Maybe that explained everything. If Jennie had gone home early, and the message had sent late, then there could be a perfectly innocent reason for her to be back at the apartment, no subterfuge intended.
But then who had she been talking to? She peered more intently at the characters on the screen, trying to glean any hidden meaning.
Were there more kisses than usual? Or fewer? Was that better, or worse? Was she covering up by trying to be more effusive? Should there be more exclamation marks if she really meant it?
Or - and this was just a possibility - was Lisa just sitting at a desk like an idiot, ignoring a lecture she was paying good money for, trying to decipher a hidden meaning that wasn't there?
She slammed the phone down on her book in frustration, causing a few sidelong glances, and drummed her fingers. Her new college-friendly persona wouldn't let her disrupt the lesson, but luckily old Lisa was still there just below the surface, ready for action.
She stood up. "Gotta go," she announced loudly. "Move it," she hissed to the student blocking her way. "Now."
By the time she reached the apartment, she'd taken out a lot of her frustration on other drivers, leaving a trail of abuse ringing in the ears of the cross-town traffic. She bounded up the stairs, trying not to give herself time to think. Just go with it. She put the key in the lock, and opened the door.
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So, is Lisa in for an unpleasant surprise?
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