11. Alana
Hudson had celebratedhis last day of work by coming home and taking a nap, which seemed both anticlimactic and also incredibly appropriate, considering that he had spent the last few days working double shifts. It seemed as though Cafe Kaffe was trying to punish him on the way out, but he didn’t mind.
“I’m leaving regardless,” he had told Alana the night before. “This just means I’ll shittalk them to anyone who asks me about working there.”
“Fuck those people and their inferior coffee,” Alana had replied, which made him laugh, and hadn’t that been a rush for her. “You sleep for like, a month and a half, and then we’ll go do a something in celebration of you making art full time.”
“Well, I’ll be celebrating by packing up Patreon orders, because I’m a little behind on that.”
“Sure,” Alana had replied. “We can do that.”
Hudson looked vaguely horrified. “I didn’t say we–that’s my responsibility.”
“And I’m offering to help you.”
“If you wouldn’t mind. And I’d pay you, obviously.”
Alana rolled her eyes. “I’m already getting paid in hysterectomies, Hudson. I can also just help as a friendly gesture of friendship.”
“You can’t use that as a bargaining tool forever.”
“Why not?” Alana had countered. “You can use the health insurance card in arguments, you just choose not to.”
“That would necessitate us having an argument,” Hudson had replied, and he wasn’t wrong. They didn’t argue. Like, not at all.
There were polite discussions, and as much as Alana had said she was going to be herself and she wasn’t going to let living with Hudson change her, she lied. Of course she’d let living with Hudson change her. Granted, it was more about wearing a bra when she walked around the apartment and doing more cleaning then maybe she would have otherwise, and having to remember to close the bathroom door the whole time when she was showering, but that was about it.
And maybe she was taking a little more time in getting ready in the mornings, in case she saw Hudson before she went to work, and made sure that she wasn’t wearing her rattiest pajamas on weekends. She was always that flawless and glamorous, and definitely wasn’t perpetually sweaty and overthinking every interaction with him. That was someone else.
It wasn’t like he would care. They were just roommates who happened to be legally married. It wasn’t like she was trying to get him to notice her or anything, because this relationship had always been platonic (minus that one oversight), and why would she care what her platonic friends thought about her pajamas or the state of her hair on a Monday morning before she got ready for work?
And yet, here she was. Caring.
“Would it be that bad?” Alana blurted out. “If we had an argument?”
“I mean, I’d like to avoid them if we can,” Hudson replied. “Why, is there anything specific that you wanted to argue about?”
“Why would you think I had something I wanted to argue about? Do you?”
“Why would you think I would?”
“You’re the one who started this conversation,” Alana pointed out.
“No, you were the one who did. I was just the one to ask a question.”
“Which is a thing someone with a grievance to air would do.”
“Or, alternatively, a person who thinks the other person might be insinuating that they did,” Hudson responded.
Alana pursed her lips. “Seems suspect.”
“I dunno, this whole conversation has gone sideways.” Hudson rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Okay, I’m holding the invisible truth highlighter, because you don’t have an actual one.”
“What the hell is the invisible truth highlighter?”
“Whoever is holding the highlighter has to tell the whole truth and nobody can get upset. You can maybe get upset at the consequences or whatever, but not about telling the truth.” Hudson paused. “This may be only a thing my family did, now that I think of it.”
“Well, mine certainly didn’t. If we had, maybe my parents would have gotten divorced earlier.” Alana reached for her purse, and rummaged through it. “Does a truth eyeliner pencil also work?”
“Sure.” Hudson took the purple pencil Alana passed to him. “I have no grievances to air out. Everything is great. Living with you is nice. I would appreciate the Patreon packing help, but I’d feel bad not paying you or anything.”
“Can I have the truth eyeliner please?”
Hudson passed her the pencil.
“I have no issues, everything is great, I’m a little stressed because I’ve had some questionable roommates who lied about things being great when they very much were not and I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would do that, but just so it’s on the table and everything.”
And now she was going to throw up. Being vulnerable, even just a little, was the worst.
“Thanks for letting me know,” Hudson replied. “Residual shit leftover from other people sucks. But I swear I would tell you if I had an issue with you, but you have to agree to not just say everything’s fine if it’s not. Deal?”
“Deal,” Alana said, eyeing her eyeliner. “The truth highlighter thing is so dumb, but it works.”
“Isn’t that always how things go?”
“I feel like that’s a principle of sorts, but I don’t remember which one.”
“Occam’s razor?”
“Oh, right, that one.” Alana held out the pencil. “Anything else we want to get off our chests while the pencil’s out?”
“No,” Hudson said. “I’m all good. You?”
“Everything’s great,” Alana lied. In front of the eyeliner of truth and everything. Was she going to hell? Probably.
The universe had a very sick sense of humor. Or maybe the universe really was a bitch who kept an eye out for Alana, because she obviously could not keep an eye out for herself.
She had managed to get a solid five hours of sleep before she was woken up by her body, specifically her entire reproductive system, deciding to wage war against her.
Alana had once seen someone describe the process of having their period as the uterus deciding it was getting pregnant, going all out and decorating the proverbial nursery for growing a baby, and then finding out that it actually wasn’t getting pregnant, throwing a temper tantrum, and ripping the whole room apart.
A temper tantrum was quite possibly the calmest way to describe what happened to Alana’s body once her uterus realized there was going to be no baby.
That little bitch went nuclear. There was no sitting quietly in disappointment. No. She set a fire and burned down everything in her path, and then a whole bunch of shit that was not. The kind of situation where everyone else in the vicinity would have found a way to quietly vanish into anywhere but nearby, minus the intrepid few who were filming it for social media.
Alana was hit with a bolt of pain so bad she would have crumpled over if she wasn’t already in bed. Her uterus would do incredibly well in any reality show.
She would be an excellent housewife.
But laughing made everything worse, and so Alana filed the thought away to text Shannon about when she wasn’t cursing the fact her TENS unit was slightly out of reach.
At least she was married now. She tried to breathe through the pain. The doctor couldn’t say no now that she had a husband. And if he did, she was going to find some way to hire a bunch of people to kidnap a doctor, and she was going to force that motherfucker to take out as much of her reproductive system as he possibly could.
The pro about waking up in excruciating pain was that after Alana threw up the first time, there wasn’t anything left to throw up.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t a pro. But like, aesthetically, it was, and at this stage of pain, all she could do was grasp at straws. And the straws were very few and extremely far between.
Actual pro: it was Sunday, which meant less PTO that Alana would have to use than if her period had started on a weekday.
Alana slowly inched her way toward the bathroom, phone clutched in one hand. Con: Instead of Shannon being there to hold her hand, literally or metaphorically as her body dragged her through hell and back, Shannon was in Montana, trying not to get into fistfights with old ladies and hospital orderlies. And sure, Hudson was her legal husband, and yes, he had promised in sickness and in health, but it wasn’t like it had been real, and it wasn’t like she’d actually ask him for help.
Anyway, she was a strong independent lady.
Well, right now she was an extremely weak, but independent lady, who didn’t need a man, but definitely needed a hysterectomy.
Alana set her phone on top of the toilet seat (which was closed. She was never going to divorce Hudson.), turned on the tabs for the dishpan that cosplayed as a bathtub, and stripped down. It was times like this where she wished the apartment came with two bathrooms. Or at least a regular sized bathtub. She thought about the bathtub that she never used at the Ardsley Resort and shook her metaphorical fist at the sky.
When the bathtub was full enough for her to sit in and not flood the bathroom, Alana gingerly lowered herself in. She was miserable and bloated and felt like someone had shoved an electric rod up her vagina and had flipped ‘shock’ to the highest possible setting.
And her pain medication was in her bedroom. Sure, she had her pain patch on, but times like this, it wasn’t enough. She had moved it out of the medicine cabinet when Hudson had first moved in, because exactly how did one explain those kinds of narcotics without sounding like you were making excuses? And then, because she had been so wrapped up in making sure everything was nice and perfect and there would be no issues in the apartment, she hadn’t moved it back. Fuck.
Her head dropped back against the wall, and she started to cry.