Photophobia (Irene/Kate, NC-17, 1/3)
Title: Photophobia
Pairing: Irene/Kate
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 11,580
Notes: Thanks and love to hechicera for the beta. <3 LJ refused to let me post this in two parts - I though the word limit was 10,000? Has it changed? Anyway, three parts seemed to do the trick in the end.
Warnings: this definitely pushes into dub-con territory in places.
Summary: Kate just does what she does best: pictures, not words.
PHOTOPHOBIA
Photophobia (from Greek φῶς - phōs, “light” and φόβος - phobos, “fear”): a symptom of abnormal intolerance to visual perception of light.
1. Kate meets Irene Adler for the first time without Irene Adler noticing, which will later, but not yet, seem strange. She's fixing someone's tie when Kate's eyes first fall on her: a curve of dress, a slightly different curve of back.
Kate, feeling a little uninvited, and not quite relishing the party-crashing she's resorting to, feels the strap of her camera bag cutting into her shoulder. It's only a matter of time before they're thrown out; she can feel it in the looks from the people around them.
“Irene Adler,” Giovanni says, smirking suggestively, sliding his fingers over the condensate on his wine glass. “Do you know her?” The question is loaded, because they're both there for pictures, and beneath a veneer of friendship there is always competition.
“I wouldn't be much of a lifestyle photographer if I didn't,” Kate says, irritably.
Hello, she thinks.
6. “Come live here,” Irene says, looking at her wine glass as though it's a revelation.
Kate blinks - two, three times. “Why?” she asks.
“Because,” Irene says, and for a second it seems that's all she will say. She finally looks away from her glass, and her eyes are alight. “Because no glass of wine will ever be this good ever again,” she says, mouth corners quirking. “It's perfect. The complexity. The freshness, the fruit. The acidity. The temperature. A hint of darkness at the end that you rarely find in rosé. And you're here. Nothing else will do. Come live here.”
“Is this your idea of romance?” Kate asks, gripping her glass tightly, feeling a shocked sort of happiness bubbling up in her gut.
“Yes,” Irene says, and she's not being fair, which is not a surprise. The light, subdued, plays in her glass.
“You're serious,” Kate says, and with the words comes the realisation.
“You could take all the pictures you want,” Irene says. “All of the scandals up close. You'll know everything!” She's grinning. “You could be my...” She waits, picking out a word. “Second in command,” she finally says, and it's a soft-edged world, this is, with Irene sitting there with the light of the room between her fingers, a jewel with her lips on it, and her words, and their truths. Kate has to close her eyes against it.
“Your maid, you mean,” she says, unable to suppress the smile tugging at her mouth.
“God, how boring,” Irene says. “You'll pour me rosé. I'll tell you all of the gossip. You'll take all of the incriminating photos. You'll open the door to let people in, I'll open others to let you in. You can come and go as you please. Especially the coming, of course.” She's sly and obvious: playful.
As Kate watches her, Irene looks away and holds her glass with her hand like a flower closing, and Kate thinks, with a small jolt, wait, no, she's nervous.
“Have you thought about this?” she asks, reeling a little.
“Not at all,” Irene says boldly, and then, contradictory in a way that Kate doesn't understand yet, she says, quietly, soft-edged: “It's a big house.”
19. Irene comes home one morning as not a ghost, not yet. She's carrying her shoes by their heels on her fingertips and she smells of sex in such a different way than Kate is used to that she has to fight an impulse to ask what Irene's been doing.
“Politics are delicious,” she tells Kate, smiling a smile that is more eyes than mouth. “This will make your career, I promise. Not yet, though.”
“Eggs?” Kate asks casually, gripping the handle of the pan tightly.
“Benedict,” Irene confirms, and stretches, like a cat in a ray of sunshine.
20. “Not bad,” Kate says, a struggling laugh lodged in her throat like a bitter brick.
“That's an understatement,” Irene says, then, into the phone: “No, not talking to you, pet. Do carry on.”
She looks up at Kate with the tip of her tongue in her mouth corner, eyes full of a secret smile. She's holding one phone to her left ear delicately, and angling the other away from her face. Like she's the secret midway passage for the people talking to her; husband and wife, unaware that they're in different rooms, talking to the same person, sharing the same shameful secret that makes their own sex life energetic for the first time in years.
Irene tells the phone: “A moment, sweet, I've got to take another call,” and switches conversations. Slips into slightly different expectations, a lightly differing version of herself.
Kate swallows around the chunk of aborted laughter in her throat. Irene never stops looking at her, holding three conversations at once. She's been getting more complicated lately, chasing things with a new energy that Kate is hesitant to enquire about. She has five phones now, though she still only takes the one to bed, still only takes pictures with the one. It's unsettling to remember that Irene told her once, though she can't remember when, that the key to survival is keeping one's secrets in one place so they can be easily leafed through and disposed of.
Kate doesn't know what it is that expands in her chest, a painful sort of pride, maybe; either way it is there, jagged and bursting.
21. Irene is sprawled on the sofa, laughing with a paperback novel lying open over her face. Her voice is distorted by it, by the flexibility of words and paper.
Kate plucks it off her.
“Read the dedication,” Irene says gleefully, blinking against the sudden light.
Kate flips to the front. To I, because: me, not mine.
“It was the height of his pillow talk. I'm dedicating this novel to you. You brought me back to life. Thought he was being reckless and mysterious.” She laughs, generously, as though it's a blessing. “He must've been too late to change it,” she says then, with a happy sigh.
Kate looks at the words, and quietly thinks that he might not have been.
“They're reconciling, did you know?” Irene continues, closing her eyes. “It's hard to be angry with someone for making your own mistakes.”
Sometimes Irene is wrong. Rarely, but not never. Kate closes the novel and caresses its spine, tracing where Irene snapped it.
-3. Kate is thirteen and twirls a lock of bright red hair around her finger, scowling at her reflection in the mirror of her mother's bedroom.
All she wants is hair like Jessie Poole's. Dark and bouncy with subdued waves when she undoes her long, single braid in class. Kate, still thirteen, sitting behind her, tuning out Ms. Lawrence's exposé on the conjugation of mare, always watches how the dark waterfall comes loose bit by bit and how Jessie Poole's long, thin fingers thread through the shiny locks with ease. Knotting is something that happens only to lesser hair.
Jessie re-braids, lazily, with fingers that slip through the hair as if it were butter. Her hair is so slippery-shiny Kate can see how the tightness of the braid starts relaxing immediately, like threads of silk sliding over each other, too light and flighty to have any hold. Slippery-silky-soft, or that's what Kate imagines, and looks down to find that she's pushed her pen through her notes, dotting an i with a tiny window to words underneath.
One time, as if feeling the weight of Kate's stare, Jessie turns around, fingers pausing, sliding down the strands that remain.
Kate, leaning forward in her seat, starts to whisper something and doesn't know what; only when the Can I comes out does she hear her own voice.
Jessie's eyes are as dark as her hair. She throws the half-done braid over her shoulder and balances on the hind legs of her chair; she only can because Ms. Lawrence's back is turned.
Kate runs her fingers down the line of hair that is coming loose at the bottom without Jessie's fingers to keep it in place. The braid unfastens slowly with Kate's caress, and she pushes her index finger through one of the twists, feeling something inside her turn into hot liquid as the hair accommodates her and opens up around her touch.
Jessie's chair falls forward with a controlled clank; Ms Lawrence calls out her name, annoyed. Jessie's shoulders are hunched, and her hair fans out over them, a thin sheen of protection that Kate wants to destroy.
13. “I want your hair,” Irene hisses at Kate, and yanks on the lock she's curled carefully around her thumb so Kate's head falls back. The pain is sharp and short, a surge of electricity on Kate's scalp that shocks her nerves to awareness, and she shivers.
“You have it,” she responds with a sigh, feeling the tension generated by days of boredom bleed out of her muscles, replaced gradually with a growing sense of blessed unifocal awareness: just her body, the growing pain in her ankles as she balances on her heels, the prickle of the chilly air on the warmest, most naked parts of her, the whiny discomfort of her neck muscles, bent backwards in an unnatural angle.
“I have everything I want of you, don't I?” Irene asks, and she sounds pleased, and a little bemused, as though she doesn't know already. She never sounds this surprised outside of sessions, which Kate isn't sure she entirely understands.
“Yes,” Kate says, her voice breaking on the word, because her throat is bent and too full of a deep trust to properly speak.
“I know you never wanted your hair,” Irene says, and twists her wrist further, rolling up the lock of hair around her fingers. “But I do.”
Kate's eyes slip closed, unasked, and unpunished, because Irene doesn't mind if she doesn't look. She seems to understand, when she wants to, that she's hard to look at this way, trapping all of the light and all of the want in the room, reflecting it back like a dark prism. There's just a little too much love gathering in the labouring point of Kate's throat to risk looking at Irene right now.
“It's yours,” Kate manages. Irene doesn't kiss her, but brings her lips so close that Kate can taste the inside of her.
11. “Look,” Kate says, the corners of her mouth taut and painful with held-back words.
Irene is looking out the sitting room window, hand with phone in it curled strangely around the back of her neck.
“I need to go see her.”
“You don't want to,” says Irene, fingernails like bright vertebrae emerging blood-red from her skin.
Kate turns the words over in her mouth before saying them, because she's not sure. “That doesn't really mean anything.”
Irene is angry; it's clear in the line of her shoulder. Irene is often angry for Kate, because Kate doesn't know what to be angry about.
“She's my mother,” Kate tries, though she can't be sure that that means anything, either.
Irene is not a ghost. Not yet. She sends a text facing away, typed blindly, sent with the gestures of ingrained motor habit, her hand in that strange place on her neck. “You've tried to get away all your life,” she says, voice low. “It's not necessary for you to go back now.”
Irene isn't like most people, she really isn't. “You don't understand,” Kate says, and feels the warning of tears prickling in her throat, because it's too true.
“In all these years -” Irene begins, stops. In the silence she sends another text, the click of the keys audible, and Kate wants to take that phone and step on it, splinter its screen with the point of her shoe. She would if it weren't so clearly Irene's external memory, brain waves distorted into pixels.
“I'm going,” Kate says, because there is hardly anything else to say.
Just before she steps outside the door, the leather handle of her purse warm and sticky in her hand, Irene echoes her: “Look.”
Words have a strange power with Irene. Kate tries to look but it's hard. Irene isn't wearing mascara today.
They kiss, twice, like Irene's taking it back as soon as she's given it.
In the cab, Kate sees the text, Irene broadcasting from across a room, having two conversations at once. You deserve to not go xx it says and Kate exhales steadily, as though shedding an old thought.
-2. At home, it's hard to say whether her mother can't stop crying for fear or anger. As Kate watches, her mother sucks on her hair instead of eating, dampening the ends into the colour of a fire going out, contrasting with the bright flame of the rest of it.
“Pass me the salt, Kate,” her father says, gruff, spoonful of soup suspended between bowl and mouth.
Her mother, a twitchy creature of sinew and nerve and quivering flame in her own darkness, eats her sobs. Her father, knuckles white where he grips his spoon, times the tapping of his feet to the rhythm of the tears dripping off his wife's chin.
Kate, thirteen, twists her hair around her thumb and yanks on it, hard. There's hair in her soup, like spun blood in a murky river.
14. “So how long has she been there?” Irene says, and it isn't demanding. Her voice pulls Kate back from the threshold of sleep, and in Kate's chest there is a spark of sudden alertness, a flint of fear. Irene, seeming to sense some of her vulnerability, tightens her arms around Kate's shoulders, and the firmness of their voluntary imprisonment in each other is enough to soothe, and to bring back some of the boneless relaxation of almost-sleep.
“For...” Kate slurs, then counts, fighting through murky exhaustion clouding in her brain. “Erm. Thirteen years... Christ.”
“You were sixteen,” Irene says softly, and she slides a hand up to Kate's nape, a gentle, intimate touch over skin and vertebrae.
“Hmm.” Kate's eyes slip closed, but then open again as slight wakeful tension restores itself to her muscles, and unbidden images of her mother rise up from the slow dark froth of night-time thoughts. “She, erm... She used to come home for the holidays. Then even that stopped.” It helped - that it stopped. It was easier to separate things that way. Her dad: something like home; the living room, with pictures; the kitchen, with soup; the car, with the scent of his shoes. Her dad: trying to fill the spaces by being too large, by speaking too loudly some times and too quietly at others. Her mum: something not like home. Her mum: sitting slumped at a white table with a plastic flower in a vase, trying so hard to eat a pancake from a paper plate. Her mum: trembling so hard a nurse with a kindly voice came to wheel her away, apologetic; not today, it's not a good day, sorry, she'll be better in the morning. Her mum: off-white walls with patients' paintings on them, often so shockingly beautiful Kate's eyes watered looking at them. Her mum: sitting under halogen light, looking at Kate, seeing someone else. Her mum: sucking on the ends of her hair, and smiling, strained, a smile of teeth with hair between them.
Kate sighs deeply. “It's funny,” she says, though she sort of means the opposite. “She tried so hard to die, and they always stopped her, and now she'll do it anyway, slowly and painfully.”
“Would you have wanted it to be more on her terms?” Irene sounds interested in a way that would set Kate's teeth on edge if it weren't her, but it is her, and her fingers are playing a soft little game on Kate's neck.
“I dunno.” Kate stretches, enjoys the way Irene shifts her legs to accommodate her, and pushes her face a little deeper into the warm, damp junction of Irene's shoulder and neck. “Yes. Though, you know... Maybe this is her final fuck you and she wants it this way,” she mumbles into Irene's skin.
Irene hums, a light sound. A beat of silence. “I like that,” Irene says.
I don't, Kate thinks, because it shouldn't be, none of it. Her mother: stretched so thinly in a life she so clearly didn't want, poured full of profane potions tethering her to existence, until she was so riddled with holes that the cancer didn't even have to try very hard to slip inside. Either she should have died already or she shouldn't this way, now. It's someone's fuck you, that's for sure - Kate just isn't sure whose.
“I'd have you kill me,” Irene says confidently, invisible, but not a ghost, not yet - warm and moist and smelling of sex where Kate's nose is pressed against her collarbone.
Kate shivers; a deep tingling of hot ice that runs slowly down to her tailbone. “I'd do it,” she finally says, tongue suddenly in her mouth like a dry sponge, throat like sand with sun on it.
“I know,” Irene whispers. “I know.”
-1. Kate is sixteen and Jessie Poole grinds up against her in uncontrolled want.
Kate claws at her hair, long and heavy and unacceptably beautiful, dragging her head back on her neck, and Jessie gasps, half in indignation, half in arousal. Her thigh, long and lean and covered in a skirt that is far too short for uniform regulations, presses hard between Kate's with a lovely pressured friction that makes Kate flatten her even more against the wall.
“Oh my God,” Jessie groans, pressing her hips forward even as her eyes flit up and down the deserted corridor, “they'll - Ms Conway - she'll come looking for us - we shouldn't -” Interrupting herself, she yanks Kate towards her by her tie and kisses upwards sloppily.
“Let her,” Kate says, breathless, after dragging her mouth away, and slips a hand between their thighs.
Jessie swears when she comes, and it's beautiful, because she never does so otherwise. Kate bites Jessie's hair as she spasms and gasps fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, pressing down on Kate's thigh and her fingers, and later, during Biology, Kate draws a spit-sleek dark hair from her mouth and lays it out on her notepad to dry.
----
Part 2.
Pairing: Irene/Kate
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 11,580
Notes: Thanks and love to hechicera for the beta. <3 LJ refused to let me post this in two parts - I though the word limit was 10,000? Has it changed? Anyway, three parts seemed to do the trick in the end.
Warnings: this definitely pushes into dub-con territory in places.
Summary: Kate just does what she does best: pictures, not words.
PHOTOPHOBIA
Photophobia (from Greek φῶς - phōs, “light” and φόβος - phobos, “fear”): a symptom of abnormal intolerance to visual perception of light.
1. Kate meets Irene Adler for the first time without Irene Adler noticing, which will later, but not yet, seem strange. She's fixing someone's tie when Kate's eyes first fall on her: a curve of dress, a slightly different curve of back.
Kate, feeling a little uninvited, and not quite relishing the party-crashing she's resorting to, feels the strap of her camera bag cutting into her shoulder. It's only a matter of time before they're thrown out; she can feel it in the looks from the people around them.
“Irene Adler,” Giovanni says, smirking suggestively, sliding his fingers over the condensate on his wine glass. “Do you know her?” The question is loaded, because they're both there for pictures, and beneath a veneer of friendship there is always competition.
“I wouldn't be much of a lifestyle photographer if I didn't,” Kate says, irritably.
Hello, she thinks.
6. “Come live here,” Irene says, looking at her wine glass as though it's a revelation.
Kate blinks - two, three times. “Why?” she asks.
“Because,” Irene says, and for a second it seems that's all she will say. She finally looks away from her glass, and her eyes are alight. “Because no glass of wine will ever be this good ever again,” she says, mouth corners quirking. “It's perfect. The complexity. The freshness, the fruit. The acidity. The temperature. A hint of darkness at the end that you rarely find in rosé. And you're here. Nothing else will do. Come live here.”
“Is this your idea of romance?” Kate asks, gripping her glass tightly, feeling a shocked sort of happiness bubbling up in her gut.
“Yes,” Irene says, and she's not being fair, which is not a surprise. The light, subdued, plays in her glass.
“You're serious,” Kate says, and with the words comes the realisation.
“You could take all the pictures you want,” Irene says. “All of the scandals up close. You'll know everything!” She's grinning. “You could be my...” She waits, picking out a word. “Second in command,” she finally says, and it's a soft-edged world, this is, with Irene sitting there with the light of the room between her fingers, a jewel with her lips on it, and her words, and their truths. Kate has to close her eyes against it.
“Your maid, you mean,” she says, unable to suppress the smile tugging at her mouth.
“God, how boring,” Irene says. “You'll pour me rosé. I'll tell you all of the gossip. You'll take all of the incriminating photos. You'll open the door to let people in, I'll open others to let you in. You can come and go as you please. Especially the coming, of course.” She's sly and obvious: playful.
As Kate watches her, Irene looks away and holds her glass with her hand like a flower closing, and Kate thinks, with a small jolt, wait, no, she's nervous.
“Have you thought about this?” she asks, reeling a little.
“Not at all,” Irene says boldly, and then, contradictory in a way that Kate doesn't understand yet, she says, quietly, soft-edged: “It's a big house.”
19. Irene comes home one morning as not a ghost, not yet. She's carrying her shoes by their heels on her fingertips and she smells of sex in such a different way than Kate is used to that she has to fight an impulse to ask what Irene's been doing.
“Politics are delicious,” she tells Kate, smiling a smile that is more eyes than mouth. “This will make your career, I promise. Not yet, though.”
“Eggs?” Kate asks casually, gripping the handle of the pan tightly.
“Benedict,” Irene confirms, and stretches, like a cat in a ray of sunshine.
20. “Not bad,” Kate says, a struggling laugh lodged in her throat like a bitter brick.
“That's an understatement,” Irene says, then, into the phone: “No, not talking to you, pet. Do carry on.”
She looks up at Kate with the tip of her tongue in her mouth corner, eyes full of a secret smile. She's holding one phone to her left ear delicately, and angling the other away from her face. Like she's the secret midway passage for the people talking to her; husband and wife, unaware that they're in different rooms, talking to the same person, sharing the same shameful secret that makes their own sex life energetic for the first time in years.
Irene tells the phone: “A moment, sweet, I've got to take another call,” and switches conversations. Slips into slightly different expectations, a lightly differing version of herself.
Kate swallows around the chunk of aborted laughter in her throat. Irene never stops looking at her, holding three conversations at once. She's been getting more complicated lately, chasing things with a new energy that Kate is hesitant to enquire about. She has five phones now, though she still only takes the one to bed, still only takes pictures with the one. It's unsettling to remember that Irene told her once, though she can't remember when, that the key to survival is keeping one's secrets in one place so they can be easily leafed through and disposed of.
Kate doesn't know what it is that expands in her chest, a painful sort of pride, maybe; either way it is there, jagged and bursting.
21. Irene is sprawled on the sofa, laughing with a paperback novel lying open over her face. Her voice is distorted by it, by the flexibility of words and paper.
Kate plucks it off her.
“Read the dedication,” Irene says gleefully, blinking against the sudden light.
Kate flips to the front. To I, because: me, not mine.
“It was the height of his pillow talk. I'm dedicating this novel to you. You brought me back to life. Thought he was being reckless and mysterious.” She laughs, generously, as though it's a blessing. “He must've been too late to change it,” she says then, with a happy sigh.
Kate looks at the words, and quietly thinks that he might not have been.
“They're reconciling, did you know?” Irene continues, closing her eyes. “It's hard to be angry with someone for making your own mistakes.”
Sometimes Irene is wrong. Rarely, but not never. Kate closes the novel and caresses its spine, tracing where Irene snapped it.
-3. Kate is thirteen and twirls a lock of bright red hair around her finger, scowling at her reflection in the mirror of her mother's bedroom.
All she wants is hair like Jessie Poole's. Dark and bouncy with subdued waves when she undoes her long, single braid in class. Kate, still thirteen, sitting behind her, tuning out Ms. Lawrence's exposé on the conjugation of mare, always watches how the dark waterfall comes loose bit by bit and how Jessie Poole's long, thin fingers thread through the shiny locks with ease. Knotting is something that happens only to lesser hair.
Jessie re-braids, lazily, with fingers that slip through the hair as if it were butter. Her hair is so slippery-shiny Kate can see how the tightness of the braid starts relaxing immediately, like threads of silk sliding over each other, too light and flighty to have any hold. Slippery-silky-soft, or that's what Kate imagines, and looks down to find that she's pushed her pen through her notes, dotting an i with a tiny window to words underneath.
One time, as if feeling the weight of Kate's stare, Jessie turns around, fingers pausing, sliding down the strands that remain.
Kate, leaning forward in her seat, starts to whisper something and doesn't know what; only when the Can I comes out does she hear her own voice.
Jessie's eyes are as dark as her hair. She throws the half-done braid over her shoulder and balances on the hind legs of her chair; she only can because Ms. Lawrence's back is turned.
Kate runs her fingers down the line of hair that is coming loose at the bottom without Jessie's fingers to keep it in place. The braid unfastens slowly with Kate's caress, and she pushes her index finger through one of the twists, feeling something inside her turn into hot liquid as the hair accommodates her and opens up around her touch.
Jessie's chair falls forward with a controlled clank; Ms Lawrence calls out her name, annoyed. Jessie's shoulders are hunched, and her hair fans out over them, a thin sheen of protection that Kate wants to destroy.
13. “I want your hair,” Irene hisses at Kate, and yanks on the lock she's curled carefully around her thumb so Kate's head falls back. The pain is sharp and short, a surge of electricity on Kate's scalp that shocks her nerves to awareness, and she shivers.
“You have it,” she responds with a sigh, feeling the tension generated by days of boredom bleed out of her muscles, replaced gradually with a growing sense of blessed unifocal awareness: just her body, the growing pain in her ankles as she balances on her heels, the prickle of the chilly air on the warmest, most naked parts of her, the whiny discomfort of her neck muscles, bent backwards in an unnatural angle.
“I have everything I want of you, don't I?” Irene asks, and she sounds pleased, and a little bemused, as though she doesn't know already. She never sounds this surprised outside of sessions, which Kate isn't sure she entirely understands.
“Yes,” Kate says, her voice breaking on the word, because her throat is bent and too full of a deep trust to properly speak.
“I know you never wanted your hair,” Irene says, and twists her wrist further, rolling up the lock of hair around her fingers. “But I do.”
Kate's eyes slip closed, unasked, and unpunished, because Irene doesn't mind if she doesn't look. She seems to understand, when she wants to, that she's hard to look at this way, trapping all of the light and all of the want in the room, reflecting it back like a dark prism. There's just a little too much love gathering in the labouring point of Kate's throat to risk looking at Irene right now.
“It's yours,” Kate manages. Irene doesn't kiss her, but brings her lips so close that Kate can taste the inside of her.
11. “Look,” Kate says, the corners of her mouth taut and painful with held-back words.
Irene is looking out the sitting room window, hand with phone in it curled strangely around the back of her neck.
“I need to go see her.”
“You don't want to,” says Irene, fingernails like bright vertebrae emerging blood-red from her skin.
Kate turns the words over in her mouth before saying them, because she's not sure. “That doesn't really mean anything.”
Irene is angry; it's clear in the line of her shoulder. Irene is often angry for Kate, because Kate doesn't know what to be angry about.
“She's my mother,” Kate tries, though she can't be sure that that means anything, either.
Irene is not a ghost. Not yet. She sends a text facing away, typed blindly, sent with the gestures of ingrained motor habit, her hand in that strange place on her neck. “You've tried to get away all your life,” she says, voice low. “It's not necessary for you to go back now.”
Irene isn't like most people, she really isn't. “You don't understand,” Kate says, and feels the warning of tears prickling in her throat, because it's too true.
“In all these years -” Irene begins, stops. In the silence she sends another text, the click of the keys audible, and Kate wants to take that phone and step on it, splinter its screen with the point of her shoe. She would if it weren't so clearly Irene's external memory, brain waves distorted into pixels.
“I'm going,” Kate says, because there is hardly anything else to say.
Just before she steps outside the door, the leather handle of her purse warm and sticky in her hand, Irene echoes her: “Look.”
Words have a strange power with Irene. Kate tries to look but it's hard. Irene isn't wearing mascara today.
They kiss, twice, like Irene's taking it back as soon as she's given it.
In the cab, Kate sees the text, Irene broadcasting from across a room, having two conversations at once. You deserve to not go xx it says and Kate exhales steadily, as though shedding an old thought.
-2. At home, it's hard to say whether her mother can't stop crying for fear or anger. As Kate watches, her mother sucks on her hair instead of eating, dampening the ends into the colour of a fire going out, contrasting with the bright flame of the rest of it.
“Pass me the salt, Kate,” her father says, gruff, spoonful of soup suspended between bowl and mouth.
Her mother, a twitchy creature of sinew and nerve and quivering flame in her own darkness, eats her sobs. Her father, knuckles white where he grips his spoon, times the tapping of his feet to the rhythm of the tears dripping off his wife's chin.
Kate, thirteen, twists her hair around her thumb and yanks on it, hard. There's hair in her soup, like spun blood in a murky river.
14. “So how long has she been there?” Irene says, and it isn't demanding. Her voice pulls Kate back from the threshold of sleep, and in Kate's chest there is a spark of sudden alertness, a flint of fear. Irene, seeming to sense some of her vulnerability, tightens her arms around Kate's shoulders, and the firmness of their voluntary imprisonment in each other is enough to soothe, and to bring back some of the boneless relaxation of almost-sleep.
“For...” Kate slurs, then counts, fighting through murky exhaustion clouding in her brain. “Erm. Thirteen years... Christ.”
“You were sixteen,” Irene says softly, and she slides a hand up to Kate's nape, a gentle, intimate touch over skin and vertebrae.
“Hmm.” Kate's eyes slip closed, but then open again as slight wakeful tension restores itself to her muscles, and unbidden images of her mother rise up from the slow dark froth of night-time thoughts. “She, erm... She used to come home for the holidays. Then even that stopped.” It helped - that it stopped. It was easier to separate things that way. Her dad: something like home; the living room, with pictures; the kitchen, with soup; the car, with the scent of his shoes. Her dad: trying to fill the spaces by being too large, by speaking too loudly some times and too quietly at others. Her mum: something not like home. Her mum: sitting slumped at a white table with a plastic flower in a vase, trying so hard to eat a pancake from a paper plate. Her mum: trembling so hard a nurse with a kindly voice came to wheel her away, apologetic; not today, it's not a good day, sorry, she'll be better in the morning. Her mum: off-white walls with patients' paintings on them, often so shockingly beautiful Kate's eyes watered looking at them. Her mum: sitting under halogen light, looking at Kate, seeing someone else. Her mum: sucking on the ends of her hair, and smiling, strained, a smile of teeth with hair between them.
Kate sighs deeply. “It's funny,” she says, though she sort of means the opposite. “She tried so hard to die, and they always stopped her, and now she'll do it anyway, slowly and painfully.”
“Would you have wanted it to be more on her terms?” Irene sounds interested in a way that would set Kate's teeth on edge if it weren't her, but it is her, and her fingers are playing a soft little game on Kate's neck.
“I dunno.” Kate stretches, enjoys the way Irene shifts her legs to accommodate her, and pushes her face a little deeper into the warm, damp junction of Irene's shoulder and neck. “Yes. Though, you know... Maybe this is her final fuck you and she wants it this way,” she mumbles into Irene's skin.
Irene hums, a light sound. A beat of silence. “I like that,” Irene says.
I don't, Kate thinks, because it shouldn't be, none of it. Her mother: stretched so thinly in a life she so clearly didn't want, poured full of profane potions tethering her to existence, until she was so riddled with holes that the cancer didn't even have to try very hard to slip inside. Either she should have died already or she shouldn't this way, now. It's someone's fuck you, that's for sure - Kate just isn't sure whose.
“I'd have you kill me,” Irene says confidently, invisible, but not a ghost, not yet - warm and moist and smelling of sex where Kate's nose is pressed against her collarbone.
Kate shivers; a deep tingling of hot ice that runs slowly down to her tailbone. “I'd do it,” she finally says, tongue suddenly in her mouth like a dry sponge, throat like sand with sun on it.
“I know,” Irene whispers. “I know.”
-1. Kate is sixteen and Jessie Poole grinds up against her in uncontrolled want.
Kate claws at her hair, long and heavy and unacceptably beautiful, dragging her head back on her neck, and Jessie gasps, half in indignation, half in arousal. Her thigh, long and lean and covered in a skirt that is far too short for uniform regulations, presses hard between Kate's with a lovely pressured friction that makes Kate flatten her even more against the wall.
“Oh my God,” Jessie groans, pressing her hips forward even as her eyes flit up and down the deserted corridor, “they'll - Ms Conway - she'll come looking for us - we shouldn't -” Interrupting herself, she yanks Kate towards her by her tie and kisses upwards sloppily.
“Let her,” Kate says, breathless, after dragging her mouth away, and slips a hand between their thighs.
Jessie swears when she comes, and it's beautiful, because she never does so otherwise. Kate bites Jessie's hair as she spasms and gasps fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, pressing down on Kate's thigh and her fingers, and later, during Biology, Kate draws a spit-sleek dark hair from her mouth and lays it out on her notepad to dry.
----
Part 2.