Chapter Twenty-Four #2
She reaches out instead, grabbing the cuff of Van’s sleeve.
The part of her that knows this is a terrible idea is getting quieter and quieter under the ringing in her ears, the thundering sound of her heartbeat, the rushing whoosh of everything she wants rising up from her toes to overwhelm her.
It’s like Van’s very presence has pressed the mute button on all of Alice’s higher-level thinking—or maybe just her anxiety—and all she can do now is exist. Is do what she so desperately wants to.
“Don’t go,” she says, and Van steps into her.
Van doesn’t kiss her like she’s drowning, or like she’s oxygen.
She doesn’t kiss her like she’s dying, or like this is the last kiss before the world explodes.
That’s how they had kissed in the hospital bathroom, like it was their only chance, like they knew it was a moment snatched out of a different life.
Fleeting, temporary, secret and furtive and desperate.
But today, in this small kitchen, Van kisses Alice like she has time.
Like she has hours and years to spend exploring Alice’s mouth, like this is the first of countless millions of moments they’ll spend pressed together like this.
She kisses Alice not like she needs her to survive but like she’s going to savor her forever.
One arm wraps low around Alice’s back, and the other cups her head so gently and tenderly that Alice has to bite down on Van’s lip to keep from crying.
Van’s mouth is working smoothly against Alice’s, full and warm and caring, and when she sucks on Alice’s tongue, Alice feels her knees buckle.
Every shuddering breath Alice takes smells like Van, tastes like her, and she doesn’t realize her own hands are moving until Van’s shirt is halfway unbuttoned and her fingers find the warm, impossibly smooth skin of her chest. Van gasps into Alice’s mouth, and Alice immediately digs her fingers in to make Van do it again and again.
She’s not sure how long they stay there, kissing and trying to fuse together next to the coffeemaker, but eventually Van starts to take steps backward, pulling Alice along with her. They back out of the kitchen, still attached in every possible way, and then Alice takes the lead.
This is the worst idea anyone has ever had, but also already the best thing that’s ever happened.
She walks backward, pulling Van along with lips and grasping fingers, both of Van’s hands hot and gentle on her cheeks, not stopping until the backs of her legs hit her bed, grateful for once for her tiny studio apartment, for how few steps it requires to go from the kitchen to the comforter.
Alice wordlessly lays herself down, trusting Van to follow her.
She opens her eyes enough to see the look on Van’s face as she plants her knees on the bed, crawling slowly up to where Alice is. It’s the hottest thing Alice has ever seen, and she’s reaching out to pull Van down on top of her before Van’s even made it all the way.
“Please,” she hears herself say, and she’s not sure what she’s asking for until she has it. Until Van’s lips are back on hers, Van’s tongue brushing against hers, Van’s body coming to rest, heavy and perfect, on top of hers.
Alice feels like all of her skin is too small, too hot.
She needs to get all of her clothes off, and all of Van’s, but she also needs both of them to never, ever move from this perfect position, this perfect moment.
She licks into Van’s mouth, and Van makes a moaning sound that has Alice curling her toes and clenching her thighs.
She probably should have assumed Van would be a slow, careful, thoughtful, incredibly generous lover, but she’d been trying so hard not to think about Van in this context that every movement of Van’s feels like a surprise.
How long Van kisses her before sitting up enough to pull Alice’s shirt off, how meticulously her hands map out Alice’s chest and stomach and back before even reaching for her breasts.
How deeply she kisses Alice while Alice is trying to unbutton the rest of Van’s shirt, how she finally shrugs it off her shoulders like they have all the time in the world, like building Alice’s pleasure one tiny movement at a time is all that matters.
Alice tries to be patient, she really does.
She tries to distract herself, but every centimeter of exposed skin, every breath and blink and kiss only spirals her need up higher and higher.
She scratches lightly at the red marks on Van’s back where her sports bra has dug into her skin, and then Van sits up, pulling Alice to straddle her lap and kissing her for what feels like hours, wet and a little messy and so devastatingly hot that Alice thinks she might die.
Sitting topless on Van fucking Altman’s lap, in nothing but her sleep shorts, Van’s hands grasping at her back and hips, Van’s mouth hot under hers—this is the pinnacle of Alice’s short, relatively shitty life.
She’s never been so happy to be alive, to have a body, to be a person, than she is here, right now, holding on to Van’s jaw, licking into her mouth and grinding down on her.
Although, of course, the summit keeps getting higher and higher, every second replacing the last as the best Alice has ever experienced.
Because now Van’s peeling off her own bra, then wrapping her arms around Alice and toppling her gently onto her back, pulling off Alice’s shorts and Alice is unbuttoning Van’s jeans, and then Van is lying back down on top of her, naked this time, and that’s better than anything that’s happened before.
Finally Van touches her, easing first her fingers and then her mouth down between Alice’s legs, and Alice has clearly transcended to a higher plane of existence.
She comes twice before Van crawls back up, and a third time along with her, Alice’s fingers deep inside Van and Van’s lips hot against hers, her hands insistent but so, so gentle on Alice’s cheeks.
Van somehow manages to pull a blanket up over them, and Alice drifts off, more than halfway on top of her, their sweaty skin sticking together, warmer and happier than she’s ever been in her life.
—
Alice has always woken up pretty quickly.
Even the few times she’d woken up in someone else’s apartment, she’d always known right where she was.
Probably from all of those years of waking up in a hospital room, or listening to her dad coughing and making sure he was still breathing.
So tonight, she wakes up, and she knows exactly whose head is on her chest, whose arm is heavy across her stomach, whose leg is thrown over hers.
She cranes her neck to look at her clock. It’s almost seven in the evening, and it’s dark as sin outside. She has two hours before she has to clock in at work. She needs to shower and eat something before she heads to the bus stop.
And she has to deal with the fact that she just slept with Van.
That she just had the best sex of her life with Van, and then fell asleep with her. That she’s woken up feeling better than she has in recent memory, if not ever.
She looks down at Van, at her perfect, handsome face.
She looks younger in sleep, some of her worry lines eased, her lips open, each of her breaths warm and soft against the naked skin of Alice’s chest. Alice feels a rush of tenderness, so strong and fierce that it brings tears to her eyes.
This woman, this gorgeous, incredible, strong person, sleeping so bonelessly on top of Alice—god. Alice loves her.
Alice loves her.
But in the harsh, stark-naked reality of the evening, Alice knows her choice isn’t a lifetime of this—of mind-blowing, tender, loving sex—or a lifetime of emptiness.
“This” doesn’t exist: a life where the lie doesn’t matter, where Van isn’t sick, where no one cares how Alice ended up in the family in the first place.
No, the choice is a lifetime of wanting Van and watching her slip away as she gets sicker and sicker—cut off from her family because of Alice’s lie—or a lifetime of not having her at all.
Alice wants to grab onto Van with both hands and keep her close forever, but she can’t. That’s not a real option. The only options are to lose her slowly or lose her quickly, and Alice has never found herself to be particularly brave.
She eases herself out from underneath Van. She gets dressed as quickly as she can, and she leaves her apartment two hours early. She can shower at the gym in the basement of the office building. She can buy herself something to eat from one of the fast-food places off the bus line.
She sends Van a text from the bus, something bland about being sorry for leaving, something that says absolutely nothing about how Alice feels, about what it meant to her, about how stupid and beautiful it was, and then she lets herself cry all the way across the river.