wat i wrote a thing last night!
i'm posting it here because i'd like to keep it locked for now. it's mostly kara/laura, with kara/leoben and kara/helena but not in a rightship sort of way. other characters that show up: hmmm, kendra and lee.
warnings for: underage, sexual violence, general unhappiness, references to drug abuse
it's 4700 words. it is rated MA.
ty to clare who doesn't hate me, so she says :P
I watch Laura’s face as she comes, my fingers inside of her and the heel of my palm against her clit. I’m not sure where the Old Laura’s gone, the one from a few weeks ago who shyly bit back moans and asked me in a whisper if this was truly what I wanted, embarrassed when I reached for her knickers and found them soaked.
This Laura fucks me outright, begs me deeper and harder, crying out faster in the voice that makes me ache. The way she grinds her hips-gets herself off using my fingers like a toy-makes me so wet. She pulls my neck down so that we can kiss. Her lips are softer than any other lips.
I feel her moans before I hear them, and the vibrations makes me shiver. I murmur into her ear, “I want to eat your pussy,” and I lick her neck, briny with sweat. Her face flushes rose, and I knot up because I forgot not to be crude, again, and I wonder what’s the politest way to say I want to shove my tongue inside you and feel your come damp on my cheeks. I want her on the edge of the bed, naked, so I can see her breasts and her stomach and her thighs and the dark hair that eventually yields to wet, pink skin. I want to be on my knees for her. I want her to spread wide. I want her to fingerfuck herself and let me watch, her head thrown back and her body aquiver. Every sentence that I think or utter in relation to her starts with, I want.
*
I’m good with secrets. Should anybody ever need me to hold on to something for them, something tender and big and fat and tumultuous, I will clutch it to my chest and keep it safe. It will stay there, and I’ll let it be my burden for as long as need be.
Laura’s the same way. She’s speaking in muted tones on the phone. There is something terrifying happening to someone who is not her, and she is listening, and she is sporting her rage-face, and she is making metaphorical notes in a metaphorical tablet about how she will handle this, because she is going to handle it.
“Where’s the soya sauce?” I ask her, and she covers her mouth so I can’t hear what she’s saying, and points to a cabinet. I’m preparing her the only meal I know how to make, which is pork stir-fry with ginger, scallions, and chili peppers. Grease pops on my skin. When the metal spatula heats up, I keep it firmly in my palm, let myself get scalded. You can’t be a Viper pilot if you mind getting burned, because that is how many of us will die, in a thunderhead of flame.
I throw the minced garlic and crushed ginger into the pan, the scents strong and pressed under my fingernails. The smell won’t rub off with soap, the way most things don’t rub off with soap. Heat rushes my face. I turn the fire up as high as it will go, so blue and orange swirls of light rise up over the sides of the frying pan. Kendra once said I had a death wish. She was ironing one of her shirts, spraying starch onto the already crisp fabric, pressing the collar straight. I told her-at least I wasn’t the one doing junk on the regular. But she had secrets, too, ones she could not tell even me-Helena’s secrets. She was Cain’s favourite and so she knew things, did things.
“Sorry about that, problem at work,” Laura says, coming into the kitchen. It’s a lie. I don’t care.
“You want rice with this?” I ask.
She nods and shows me the canister where it is. “You staying over tonight?” she says, not looking at my face. She’s started to set the table, sticks a bottle of Pinot in the freezer to cool.
“I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t know why I don’t know, because the answer to that question should always be no. I have places to be. But I imagine my head on her chest, and her fingers in my hair, both of us a little buzzed from too much wine. She’d nibble my ear, lick the lobe, laugh quietly and sweetly.
“Well, whatever you’d like,” says Laura.
*
I tell Lee that I’m a twisted fuck because I’ve been sucking cock since I was thirteen, and did he want me to suck his. He says, tilting the last sip of whisky down his throat, “I wish you’d stop saying things like that. And whatever, none of it makes you twisted. Being in sexual situations doesn’-”
and I interrupt him, “Not sexual situations, Lee: cock sucking. As one example. You want to know what else I did?”
Lee’s lips form a thin, tight line. “Regardless, I don’t think it makes you ill,” he says, concern showing in his stupid blue eyes, which, truthfully, never impressed me much. Not as much as his father’s eyes did, which were deep, strange, and diaphanous, and reminded me of my father’s. And I want to know what went so wrong when the gods concocted me that I came out the type of woman that wants Bill more than Lee, even though sometimes the thought of it makes me cry, even though I don’t cry. Like all those women who’ve been fucked by their fathers, who never want to be fucked by their fathers again, but who can’t get off unless they’re being fucked by their fathers.
“Kara? Talk to me. You brought it up,” says Lee.
I’m not usually a confessional drunk, but I know people, and I know they get hot and bothered when I tell them about being fifteen years old, in Temple, sitting on Leoben’s cock, outward-facing so his chest was against my back, one hand reaching around up my shirt, the other rubbing my clit in slow, teasing circles, the first man to ever make me wet, the first man that drove into me slow, made me climax, shot come inside me because he wasn’t worried about getting caught because he knew I wouldn’t tell a soul because he understood I was naughty and I liked it and that I was going to sob when he ended it because, because it’s wrong, Kara, I wish-I wish I’d thought of your needs before I thought of mine, and I’d go back to Cain, knowing full well she’d punish me for having ever run away, but not caring because fuck Leoben and fuck ever going to Temple again, and when Cain tied me to the chair, looked intently into my eyes as she shoved three fingers into my cunt (tight little snatch, she called it), and I squirmed-I’d like that, too, a fifteen year old dirty whore. And in her home again, I’d remember I missed this, the way she liked to push me onto all fours and whip my ass with a belt, then lick me off from behind.
I say all this out loud to Lee, and my eyes shift to his crotch. His hard-on’s visible through his jeans. People are all the same, even the good ones.
We are at a pretty nice pub, not the sort where you can fuck in the open, against a wall, music pounding in time to your thrusts, or vice versa. I don’t know why Lee agreed to come out with me. He knows what I’m like. He should realise by now that no matter how many times he admonishes, “Kara,” that I won’t fucking stop because mostly I don’t want to, and even I did, I couldn’t because because.
“I’m going to help you to a taxi,” he says, then asks the bartender to close out the tab. Shelves of liquor beckon me to stay. I am not ready for home.
“I was kidding, frak, calm down,” I say. “Don’t take everything I say so seriously.”
His face lights up with a smile, and he slides a fifty-cubit note to the bartender. Lee says, “You mean the offer to suck me off wasn’t real? Well, shit. There goes my plans for the next hour or so.”
I know he’s only joking, so I don’t tell him how I want nothing more than to go into the toilets, pull down his trousers, and swallow his dick, and his come. “I’m sure you’ll find some way to pass the time.” I smile at him, and it’s real. I love him because he’s one of my oldest friends. He’s a stuck-up prick but he’s never not had my back.
“What about Laura, anyhow?” Lee asks.
“Who?”
He looks at me like-come the fuck on.
I shrug my shoulders, slide off the barstool. For a Thursday night, it’s pretty quiet. Shouldn’t be too bad to catch a cab, go somewhere with a better scene.
“Me and her are over,” I say. Finding my brown leather jacket on a hook, I slide it on, fasten up the diagonal, double-breasted zipper.
“Over? Were you ever, you know, under?”
I roll my eyes at him. But yeah, I was under her, one time, when I coaxed her up my body, to sit on my face.
“I got what I wanted out of it,” I tell Lee. “It’s done.” I knock back the rest of my scotch, glad I ordered a double.
The night I left Laura’s place for the last time, sneaking out of her bed a few months after we’d started fooling around, her wallet lay on the coffee table, edging out her purse.
Out of habit, I grabbed it. Wallets mean everything to me: a hot meal, a motel room, a shower, soap, shampoo, shoes that fit, a hit when I needed one most. It’d been years since I needed to pickpocket, but it was like-it’s how I finish every meal, scrape the plate clean even when I’m not hungry, until I feel so full I’m sick, sometimes. It’s just something I got to do because food is survival, and wallets are survival.
I fished out most of the cash and a couple of credit cards, arranging it so she wouldn’t notice anything was missing at first. Part of me thought she’d come track me down, confront me. She never did. What was that, three weeks ago, now?
“I thought you actually liked her,” says Lee. His hair has grown out, and it’s unruly. The soldier in me wants to slice it off with the knife I keep in the sheath on my boot-run that blade across his stubble, too.
“Well, you thought wrong. That’s what you get for thinking so godsdamn much,” I say. Laura was a frak. I have lots of fraks. And now I was done with her, so moving on.
*
Laura has a scar on her neck, peach-coloured and an inch long. I never asked her how she got it because I know how she got it. Someone pressed a knife against her throat, pushed and pushed until it broke skin, probably on accident, a threat that was never meant to meet fruition. The scar is clean, thin, perfectly straight, well-healed but not keloidal, nothing like a stab or true-cut wound. I know that scar, because when you have a mama like mine, you have scars like that.
One morning, I saw Laura in the bathroom, rubbing concealer over the mark, blending it out with her powder foundation. She’s nothing like Helena, who would’ve worn the scar proudly, showed it off even, exacerbated it with her own razor.
“It’s nothing,” said Laura, smiling, readying herself in front the mirror, her sink covered with little bottles and little jars and little tubes.
“If I knew who did that to you, I’d slit their fucking throat,” I said. I was sitting on the toilet, clothes on. I don’t know why. I liked watching her. I liked her face. I liked the words that came out her mouth.
“Maybe I already did,” said Laura, combing her wet hair and slicking it into a bun. The room was all steamy still, from the shower we’d taken together. I’d fucked up and let my head rest on her shoulder whilst the water streamed over us, her arms wrapping around me and squeezing me as she said these sweet little things in my ear that made me go hot. Then all I could do was grab the soap and clean myself off, even though she’d already washed me, and I’d already washed her. I squeezed a fistful of shampoo into my palm, enough so it dripped into my eyes and stung, into my mouth and burned. I scrubbed myself with her exfoliating sponge, and she grabbed my wrist, said, you’re clean, and took it away.
“I mean it,” I said, watching her pull her hair back. I stood up from the toilet seat, leaned against the sink cabinet. “Tell me who did that.”
I have killed men before. When I saw Laura’s scar, I knew I was capable of doing it again.
*
Temple is hard for me because I think of Leoben, and our first time. He was a deacon at St. Hephaestus, a loner who kept to himself, well-known amongst the congregation because it was rumoured he had visions. People called him the Mystic.
I liked him because he fixed me. I had to sneak to services, away from Helena, and showed up to Mass in skimpy shorts and even skimpier tanks, body exposed. He asked to take me to a doctor, and I said no. So he poured hydrogen peroxide on me, bandaged me, rubbed antiseptic cream here and there.
For weeks, I visited, and he was my teacher. He taught me maths, and science, but mostly about the gods and the cosmos and the way that when you close your eyes, it’s easier to understand that the truth is a lie, that the only certain thing was what was inside ourselves, and that there was something very powerful inside of me, powerful enough to freeze time. And I asked him, “Powerful enough to kill somebody, if I want them dead?”
He shut his little brown notebook, scattered with notes in a language I couldn’t read. “Powerful enough not to kill them,” he said.
I unbuttoned my shirt after a long silence, but he didn’t stiffen when he saw me, didn’t reach under my bra to squeeze my breasts. He watched me. I saw him swallow. I heard him intake breath. I unzipped his trousers because I wanted to taste his cock and make him orgasm and feel his come on my tongue and on my lips, salty, because that’s what dirty whores like, or because Helena taught me that was what true power was, or because I was already the slut my mother always knew I’d become.
After a while, people become mad for you. Mad with lust, I mean. They have to have you and possess you. I know about this because I am the same way. This is how I am with Laura. This is why I had to leave her. This was how Leoben was with me.
Let me be frank: I never said no. But I would come to him crying, sometimes. He kissed away my tears when I didn’t want them kissed away. He slid his cock inside me when all I could think was, “I want to go home. I want my mom.” I think sometimes we are all just very selfish. I think sometimes we are weak. I think sometimes we cannot see what we are doing with our own bodies.
*
The Priestess sings the invocation. I close my eyes and I pray: for my mother, for Lee, for Kendra, for Kat, for Leoben, for Helena, for everyone I’ve ever known, and lastly for Laura. I pray that she is happy.
*
My first night with Laura was-before that, the very beginning:
I met her because I run JROTC at her school-well, I don’t really run it, just help get the programs up and going. She hated me because she hated Fleet, and I hated her because I hate stuck-up bitches, as a rule (and then I always come around on them, like with Kendra, and eventually Kat and obviously, Laura.). There was this girl who was having a hard time. Laura saw it. I saw it. But I happened to spend more time with this student from setting up ROTC stuff, so I was the one to intervene first. I took her aside. I said, “Something’s going on. Don’t bullshit me and pretend nothing’s going on. What is it? Is there someone hurting you? If there’s someone hurting you, you can tell me.” I have to remember that when I’m wearing the uniform, I can’t say shit like, Whoever’s hurting you, I’ll cut off his testicles and fry them up and make him eat them.
Laura must’ve seen me because she comes up. “I’m handling it,” I said.
But we take it somewhere more private all the same. She said, “I’ve got this, Captain,” when we reached her office. But there was no way I was leaving.
I won’t talk about the kid because that’s her life, but me and Laura, I guess we called a truce after dealing with what was happening to the girl. We did coffee, platonic coffee. Then we ran into each other at a few places. It was after this particularly volatile school board meeting that things picked up. She was arguing that charter schools shouldn’t need to instate JROTC programs to get full local Colonial funding, that the programs were a detriment to their education, and took away focus from academic pursuits and the Arts. I was there along with a couple of other Fleet advocates, talking about how ROTC builds character and self-esteem, even though I really don’t know if it does that because I never did it. I joined up because I couldn’t figure out any other way to make money shooting guns and stuff like that-nothing to do with character. My character is shoddy at best.
Afterwards, I asked to buy her a drink, to make up for how the other Fleet people treated her. It was late, after 9, and she had that look about her, the one that said it’d been a long day and all she wanted was a foot rub and a back massage and 2 lbs of dark chocolate.
She turned down the drink, but said I could walk her home. When we got to her flat, I sat for a bit on her stoop. She said, “I’m thinking of a number between one and ten, if you guess it right, you win.”
“Win what?” I said.
“Life.”
I smiled. She was funny sometimes. “Okay-is it six?”
“How in the hell?” she asked.
I looked at her, watched her eyes spring awake. Under the porch light, they were sea green and pale. They reminded me of the oceans in Picon, teal water so clear you could see your feet and the fish and the coral. “I’m good at that game,” I said.
After a while, I asked her if I could come inside to use the head. But I knew then I wanted to fuck her, had to know what she tasted like and memorise the intricacies of her body.
We drank wine. She asked me what I was thinking, and I told her the truth, that I thought she was extraordinary. I didn’t know I thought it until I said it out loud. I kissed her, and she kissed me back, at first. Then:
“Bad idea,” she said, pulling away. “A really bad idea.”
“You want me to go?” I asked.
Her eyes flickered away from mine.
“Or you want me to keep kissing you? And touching you?”
We didn’t do much. I fingered her through the fabric of her underwear, came grinding myself into her thigh.
*
I like to imagine the gods as people with inflated egos. If I say, “I’m invincible,” enough times, it will become true. I am Spartacus and Hippolyta and Ching Shih and Deborah and Boudicca and Grace O’Malley and the Devil Himself.
Lee researches me. I am his project. He explains, those who’ve survived trauma may try to recreate the trauma, to redo it the way they wish they’d done it the first time around. They regain agency by reconstructing the traumatic situation. But it ultimately increases feelings of worthlessness. Though it feels good in the moment, the survivor is constantly re-victimising herself, making feelings of lost personhood less easy to heal and combat.
I tell Lee to suck my dick, then to get me a bag of Cheetos.
*
Laura’s school takes up a whole block in the part of town that’s not quite rough, not quite ritzy either. It’s industrial. The nearby train rumbles loudly at all hours. I know she sticks around until at least 18-hundred hours. Her office light is on when I walk into the building, passing a custodian who waves and smiles. I nod my head at him.
I’m about to knock her door, but then I don’t. I leave the paper bag I brought with me there, her cards and cash inside of it, none of it I ever touched. “Make sure she gets this?” I tell the custodian.
He removes his earbuds, then I repeat myself, and he says, “No problem.”
Waiting in my truck is just a way to pass the time, maybe gauge her mood, see how happy her face looks under the parking lot lamps before I drive off and never see her again. But I hear knocking on my window, and realise I’d fallen asleep. It’s her. She leans her head in after I roll the glass down. “Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she repeats. There’ no give in her face, little warmth. Her hair’s down today, softening her narrow features, but I see her lip tremble and the way she sets her jaw tight. “Why are you here, Kara? You didn’t have enough fun with me the first time around?”
I never bother with sorry’s because I know from experience they are meaningless. How do you apologise for complete and utter disaster? What words mend catastrophe?
“Is this how you fill your spare time? By finding women like me to-”
“Women like you?” I say, meeting her eyes, which gaze back at me unblinkingly. “There aren’t women like you.” She is special and good and hard and kind.
“I don’t expect an apology from you, or decency at all,” says Laura. I suck my bottom lip into my mouth and turn away, fiddle with the buttons on my dashboard. “Perhaps it was my fault. I knew from the beginning that I was being foolish. But you can’t treat people that way. Maybe I deserve it, but someone else might not.” She keeps speaking, but now it’s her scar I’m paying attention to, the one on her neck, the makeup having faded away. I reach out and drag my index finger along it. She shudders and startles back. She has more of them-a jagged, raised one on her right breast, a curved, surgical scar on her tummy. I want to kiss all of them.
“You okay?” I ask, noticing her eyes close, her frame wilt.
“Tired. I missed my bus.” Greyish blue crescents mar the undersides of her eyes.
I say to her, “Need a lift?”
“Not with you,” she says.
“Look. It was stupid, to do that to you. I don’t know what came over me. It wasn’t personal.”
“Ah, well, at least it wasn’t personal,” she says.
I bite my lip, tap the steering wheel. The parking lot’s empty. The streetlamps are brighter than the stars. “Let me give you a ride home? Please?”
She stands outside my car door, contemplating, finally says, “I’m saying yes only because I have no other options.”
“Well, I just gave you your cash back. You could call a cab, I say, as she hops into the other side of my truck. She fumbles with the seatbelt, which only works 50% of the time. I reach over to her, jangle it a bit, until it clicks into place, my fingers brushing her thighs.
“I’m going to go ahead and say it’s too soon for you to joke about how you used and conned me.” She means it, I can tell, but I feel her thawing, too. The best thing I ever did was learn how to shut up, so I don’t say anything the rest of the way to her flat.
*
“Have you tried explaining?” asks Lee. I hate him sometimes.
“I don’t know how to explain anything,” I say. It feels good to be at his place, instead of a bar. We are under the blankets, marathoning horror films, drinking hot toddies not because we’re sick, but because we like the taste, and Lee makes them so godsdamn good.
I take his advice because it’s been a month and she’s still all I think about. People have this way of haunting you after they’ve done. I dig up her email address and write to her:
laura,
i wasn’t planning to take that stuff from you. i was never playing with you or trying to use you or anything like that. i did it out of habit. or maybe if i was a shrink i’d say i was trying to sabotage our relationship because i was afraid of how strong my feelings were for you, or some bullshit. look the truth is i’ve had some bad shit go down in my life and there was a time someone else’s credit card was the difference between life and death for me. i’m not asking you to forgive me just to give me another chance. i will never be perfect but i can be better than how i treated you. the last time we saw each other you said something stupid about maybe you deserved it. no.
kara
*
At our lunch date she doesn’t ask me anything about what I mentioned in the email, and when I realise she’s not going to, all my joints unlock and I remember to tell her I think that she’s beautiful and that I like her outfit and her hair.
She’s smart, so frakking smart. I don’t know what to do with that, so there’s lots of smiling and nodding on my part. Her smile widens as she talks about her job, and her voice raises.
“Am I making a mistake?” she asks, out of nowhere. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to be here. I was harsh before, and maybe I realise now that you were trying to cut yourself off from me for a good reason. Did I push things? Maybe you should be with someone-better or more fit, or younger.”
I tell her she’s got it all twisted, that she’s the one who deserves someone better.
*
She tells me one night, about the scar, how she got it. I hold her hand. She squeezes hard. The bones in my fingers numb out. Her voices doesn’t shake as the explains the details of that night.
I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her that I kill rapists. I tell her that I don’t mean that figuratively. I tell her I will never hurt her like that. I tell her that her body is her body.
Laura turns away and flips out the lamp. I wake up and my chest is wet and her face is streaked with half-dried tears. I take my shirt and wipe them off. She’s sleeping, so I kiss her eyelids. I kiss the scar. I have tattoos over my scars. I have tattoos everywhere.
*
We are both of us bundles of quiet need. We are both of us unhealed. I think of our first meeting, how I hated her and she hated me, and how hurt sometimes turns into not-hurt.