Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Alice is trying her hardest to sleep, even though it’s early afternoon, but someone won’t stop knocking on her front door. It’s the middle of the night for her, and while she hasn’t totally reacclimated to her new night-shift schedule, her body desperately wants to be turned off right now.
“I don’t have weed,” she yells from bed, her eye mask still firmly in place. She can’t afford blackout curtains, so the eye mask is a godsend. “He’s next door.”
“I’m not looking for weed,” says a voice that makes Alice sit straight up in bed, ripping off the eye mask. She’s groggy, and the voice was coming through the door, but still. That sounded like…
“Alice?”
Alice skids across the studio, hardly noticing the way the floor is freezing under her bare feet. She opens the door, and her heart stops beating.
It’s Van.
She’s standing right there, tall and sturdy like an oak tree, a frown on her face and water dripping from her jacket.
Alice opens and closes her mouth a few times, but the words don’t come. The sun is up but it’s the middle of the night, and she’s so lonely that she’s been nauseous for the last week, and now Van is here. At her apartment. Looking serious and focused and a little disappointed.
“Can I come in?” Van finally says when it’s clear Alice isn’t quite capable of forming words yet.
“I—sorry, yes. Of course.” Alice nods too many times, belatedly backing up and making space for Van to come in. Alice is wearing only her sleep shirt and a pair of soft shorts, no bra, and she wonders how weird it would be to go get dressed before another word is said.
Van seems to be opting for bulldozing through the awkwardness.
She takes off her jacket and steps out of her boots like she’s expecting to stay, and Alice blinks a few times, trying to wake herself up.
She’s had more than one dirty daydream that started this way, but she’s pretty sure this is real life and Alice is not in fact a character in a low-budget porno who is about to pay for a pizza by dropping to her knees.
Van comes to stand in the middle of the apartment, one hand on the breakfast bar that also serves as kitchen counter and dining room table.
Alice goes to the other side of it, planting herself firmly in the kitchen like eighteen inches of peeling laminate countertop will protect her from whatever is coming.
“What…” It comes out as a bit of a croak, so Alice clears her throat and tries again.
“What are you doing here?” Van swallows heavily, and Alice realizes how that sounded.
“No,” Alice says as quickly as she can, reaching her hands out.
“I didn’t mean…” She takes another breath, tries to reset herself.
To be slow and measured and careful, like Van always is. “It’s always good to see you.”
The side of Van’s mouth twitches up, and Alice knows they’re both thinking about the last two times they saw each other, in those two parks, when it was distinctly not good at all.
“I just mean…hi, I guess,” Alice says, feeling like an idiot.
Van dips her head but doesn’t take her eyes off Alice’s face for several beats too long. “Hi.”
Alice doesn’t know what to say, or do with her hands.
Her floor feels like an ice rink against her bare feet, and she only slept for, like, three hours.
She decides to make some coffee to have a task to accomplish, something to do with her hands.
She wishes her mind were racing, trying to figure out what’s going on here, but it feels like every one of her thoughts keeps getting caught in a tangled cobweb of exhaustion.
“I want to apologize,” Van finally says. Alice freezes, her back to Van while she measures the coffee grounds. “For how I acted at Christmas.”
Well, that’s not right. If anyone should be apologizing here, it’s Alice.
Van hasn’t done anything except be perfect and irresistible and have morals.
Alice is the lying asshole here. She turns to Van, a full scoop of coffee in her hand.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” she says as vehemently as she can muster in her exhausted state, but Van shakes her head.
“I knew the situation,” Van says, and Alice sets the scoop down on the counter, sure her hand is going to start shaking and not at all in the mood to clean coffee grounds off her floor.
“I knew you were with my brother, and I pushed it anyway. I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you for being in the position I knew you were in. ”
Alice shakes her head. “I shouldn’t have done that kiss with him.
” It’s nearly a whisper, her voice almost hoarse.
“I shouldn’t have gotten under his blanket.
It wasn’t…” She lets out a puff of air. She’s so tired and lonely and Van is right here.
Standing in her kitchen/dining/living room, looking beautiful and strong and sad.
“I think the only person who wanted any of that to happen was your mom,” Alice adds. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
Van holds Alice’s gaze as she moves around the counter in the deliberate and careful way she so often does, stepping into the narrow kitchen with Alice, close enough to touch, her strong body blocking Alice in.
“I don’t understand what changed,” Van says.
The air between them becomes thick, every breath humid inside Alice’s lungs.
Alice watches as Van blinks, the way her long, delicate eyelashes sweep against her cheeks.
The constant want inside Alice’s body starts to change from a tug she can resist into something that will sweep her off her feet and directly into Van’s chest. “You—you kissed me at the hospital. Why?”
Alice isn’t quite sure what to say. Her brain isn’t moving quickly enough; she can’t think right. “I don’t know,” she finally says, her eyes slipping closed. “I just…I couldn’t not, anymore.”
“You…couldn’t not?” Van asks, and Alice opens her eyes, almost laughing at the look on Van’s face. Something hopeful but confused, still torn. “I—help me out with that double negative.”
“I had to,” Alice whispers into the electric, crackling space between them, and she sees the way Van almost shudders. “I couldn’t go another second without having kissed you.”
Van is so close now. Almost looming over Alice, and Alice can smell her hair and her skin and she remembers with perfect clarity what it was like to kiss her, to press her body into Van’s, to feel Van’s hands slide up her back.
Alice feels mesmerized, like her body and mind are out of her control, and all she can do is stare, unblinking, and move closer and closer until the space between them would have to be measured in atoms instead of inches.
“And now?” Van asks, her voice a whisper too. “What about now?”
Alice swallows. She’s never wanted a person this badly in her life, never felt this desperate need for someone else’s body and affection before, but there’s something sticky between them.
Well, several dozen sticky things. An entire syrup factory of complications and lies, but their chests are almost touching now, and all Alice can think to say is, “Aren’t you with Sarah? ”
Van blinks. “Not any more than you’re with Nolan.”
Alice huffs out a breath. It’s a point well taken.
Van is scarred from Alice being with Nolan, even though it wasn’t ever real, and now Alice will never heal from how deeply the image of Van holding on to Sarah is gouged in her brain.
Regardless of what’s happening between Van and Sarah—if that was one weak moment, or if Van is seriously considering trying again with her—neither of their hands are clean here.
Although Van’s hands are lightly dusted and Alice’s are caked with mud, so it’s not the same.
It’s all so entirely messed up, she knows that, but Van doesn’t step back, and neither does Alice.
She’s fully wrapped up in the hypnotic haze of Van’s presence now, what Van so clearly wants, and it looks like she may have hypnotized Van herself.
It’s all both of them can do to stand here in this tiny, molding kitchen, only electrons between them, and breathe the same air.
Want the same thing, which they still absolutely cannot have.
“It won’t change anything,” Alice manages to say, because it won’t.
Throwing herself at Van now, sleeping together, letting Van devour her, doing everything Alice wants and more…
it won’t change a thing. Van is still sick, and Alice is still a coward, and Babs is still a homophobe, and Nolan is still awake.
Nothing is different, except Alice is back on the night shift and her life is over. “It’ll still be…this.”
“And what is this?” Van asks, but she’s almost smiling.
“Fucked,” Alice says, and Van laughs.
“So,” Van says after a beat, taking another step closer, even though Alice would have sworn there already wasn’t any space left. “If we don’t do this, it’ll all be fucked. And if we do, also, still fucked.”
Alice sucks in a deep breath, which is a huge mistake because all she smells is Van—it’s like she’s buried her nose in Van’s neck and inhaled.
Maybe it’s the cologne in the air, maybe the electricity jumping between them, but it almost sounds like Van is making a good point.
If her life is going to suck either way, why not give herself this?
Some part of her knows that this is incredibly shaky logic, that sleeping with the person you’re desperately pining for but can’t have has literally never made a situation better, but it’s surprisingly easy to squash that part down underneath the weight of how badly she wants this.
“Tell me to go,” Van finally says, and Alice should.
The fact that Van’s devastatingly sexy and smells delicious doesn’t change the lie or the MS or Alice’s trauma.
Literally nothing is different now from when Van walked out on Christmas, except this time Van is saying, “Tell me to go and I will,” and Alice can’t.
She won’t.