Her

Ade was standing very still, lips working in numerous frown variants. Bitter, to resigned, to exhausted, to disappointed, to confused, to alienated. She went and grabbed one of the sweat towels from the stack, muttering under her breath the whole time, and tossed it onto the floor where the spattered puddle started. "It's fine," she said, colorlessly. "Don't worry about me."

"You?" Frankie cried. "My foot hurts!"

"Yeah, because you kicked a bottle full of water," Ade replied. "My bottle, not that it matters. Don't know what you thought was going to happen, but foot pain was pretty much a destined outcome." Then, after a breath, she added, "Along with me cleaning up your mess."

"I didn't ask you to clean it up!" she shouted.

"Of course you didn't. You just... expected it. You made a mess, and then you stood there waiting for it to get resolved. By me."

Frankie shrieked, and grabbed her hair in her fists. "What the ffffffuck is your problem?!"

"You," Ade said, as she squatted easily and ran the towel around on the floor to mop up the water. "Apparently, you're my problem. I get to handle you, and make excuses for you, and accompany you fucking everywhere. You didn't used to need a fucking chaperone to go pick up lunch, for fuck's sake."

She felt cold all over, and her stomach was sinking down into some heretofore unknown region of the body that simultaneously defied both anatomy and physics. "If it's that much of a burden, then don't."

"You have no idea," Ade said, head whipping around. "You have no idea what an imposition you've been on everyone around you, do you? Ever since you got dumped, you've been stumbling around in this self-pitying fog, and... you know what? Fuck it. I'm tired of being your babysitter."

There was no way to respond to any of that in a dignified way, she realized, and so Frankie simply turned and hobbled out of the room. She jumped at a heavy thunk against the door behind her, and saw, through the window in the door, that Ade had hurled the largest piece of her broken plastic bottle across the room. Ade was shouting something at her too, but between the door and the blood pumping in her ears, Frankie couldn't hear it.

She made no effort to, either. She left.

It seemed to her, as she stormed out to her car and turned the key, that this was all terribly unfair. Every time her world seemed like it had completely crashed down around her ears, some new catastrophe would come along to show her how much further yet she had to fall. Between the constant panic of organizing a wedding more or less alone, and the pandemic (which was its own cluster of fucking nightmares), and her ex-fiance leaving her just weeks before the intricately planned and socially distanced festivities, and the difficulties Madam Castillo's studio was having keeping its head above water, Frankie had suffered more than her fair share of being kicked around.

"...does she get off thinking she's the victim? I mean, what the fuck?" Frankie said, half-mumbling to herself and half-asking the air around her, as she got out of her car. "This is all happening to m-m-me, not her!" She tried to stick her key in the lock, and stared at it dumbly when the key didn't fit. She tried again, turning the key upside down, even though she knew the key was supposed to go in teeth-up. Something about the whole mess was wrong, but somehow this made perfect sense given the kind of day/week/month/year she was having.

"Fucking perfect," she cried, nearly hysterical, as she quickly flipped through her keyring. There weren't many keys, enough that she could simply lay the whole thing in the palm of one hand and stare at it while she pounded on the door with her other hand.

And then she froze, whole body going numb. Footsteps inside the door. In that moment, there on the doorstep of the place she used to live, Frankie's definition of the word panic was forever redefined. She'd thought she'd known what it meant, but she'd been wrong. It was in those agonizing seconds that she truly understood fight or flight in the pure sense.

The door opened with a familiar squeal, hinges creaking in a way that was both comforting and irritating, to reveal Mark, her ex, in a generic-looking t-shirt and pajama pants that pooled around his bare feet.

"This is a surprise," he said, evenly. "You look like hell."

"Why?" Frankie whimpered, more to herself than as a question she necessarily wanted answers to, but her ex-fiance interpreted the latter and reluctantly gestured for her to come inside.

She found herself on their old couch, in her old spot, with, a few minutes later, a cup of tea in her hands. She couldn't smell it at all, despite the constant sniffling, but the steam bathed her face in warmth. That was something.

"Tough day?" Mark asked, as he settled into the armchair diagonal to her.

Frankie said nothing. She tried to take a sip of the tea, but it was under-steeped and under-sweetened, tasting like not much of anything.

"It's the chamomile rose blend," Mark offered.

Frankie smacked her lips and frowned. It did taste familiar. Faintly.

"We got it at that farmer's market?"

"My tea phase," Frankie said, softly. "You still have all my teas?" When he nodded, she said, "I'm ss-ssurprised you didn't just throw them all out."

Mark just smiled and swirled his own mug a little. "So what's going on?"

"I got in a fight with Ade," she said, somberly.

Mark chuckled, mirthlessly, and muttered, "Of course."

She looked up at him, and as soon as their eyes met he looked away. She asked, "What happened?"

He chuckled again, somehow managing to do so with even less energy, and looked down somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes. "We drifted apart."

"You told me you ssss-still love me," she said, brow furrowing deeply. "I don't understand!"

"I do," he said, shaking his head. "I still do. You are... the love of my life."

She tried to set the mug down gently and failed, ceramic banging sharply against the glass coffee table. "You left me," she cried. "How could you do that to me?"

"I did it for you," he said, quietly.

Frankie laughed, the sheer absurdity of it bending her mind near to the breaking points. "For me," she cried. "You did it f-f-for me. Drove me into a mmm...mental breakdown and broke my heart... for me."

Little by little, his features hardened, but in a way that did not close him off. He said, "When your aunt died last year, who was the first person you called?"

"You," she said, reflexively, though it pinged in the back of her mind that that wasn't correct.

He just stared at her.

"No. I called Ade first but, I mean, I'd j-ju-ju... just left her at the studio and we'd just been talking about a-uh, Aunt Marnie being in the hospital."

"Mmm," he said, flatly. "And when Jimmy told you he got promoted to supervisor at the plant?"

Frankie, not understanding what was being implied at all, just stared back at him.

"You don't see the pattern here?"

"What... ...pattern?"

"Who was the first person you told about Jimmy?"

"Ade," Frankie said, exasperated, "but we were... what... at the studio together?"

"In January, when we were down in the valley, and I tried to—"

"That's not fair," Frankie shouted. "Her dad is at a, at a, at a huge risk, and she'd just found out what COVID would mean for—"

"I could do this all day," Mark said, interrupting her. "Give you a thousand anecdotes, a hundred thousand, of you picking her over me, making her the priority—"

"—do you get off ...putting this on Ade? She didn't—

"—believe you can't see what's right in front of you, that she—"

"—ssss-so far out of line right now that I can't—"

"—every time, without fail, she would be the first—"

"—the one who got cold feet!"

Mark stood up abruptly, launching himself upright, and Frankie fell back into the couch. She had never before, in any of her eight years with him, feared his size, but he moved with such sudden ferocity that it was impossible to do otherwise.

He hadn't moved except to stand. When he saw that she'd flinched, he looked on the verge of tears. "Don't you get it?" he asked, voice quivering. "I didn't care. I wasn't the one having a meltdown. I was fine being the second most important person in your life." As he said this, the tears erupted over his cheeks. "I hated it, but I would have done it. For you.

"But you," he said, softly shaking his head. "You were a wreck. It was killing you, and you just... you just kept saying you were fine!"

"I w-was fine," she said, hoarsely.

"And the other stuff? In..." He trailed off with a nod, and Frankie had to follow his eyes over her shoulder, toward the bedroom, before she could understand what was being implied.

"I was under a lot of pressure!" she said, defensively.

"It started years ago," he said, head sliding back as he spoke. "Right about the time—"

"Stop b-blaming Ade for this," Frankie shouted, whirling around.

"I'm not blaming anyone," he said. "You have feelings for her."

"She's my friend!"

"I know I... I should have..." His voice cut out, choked up with tears, and when he caught his breath a moment later he continued, saying, "I know we should have had a conversation about this, but I was hurt."

"You made this decision without me," Frankie said, on the verge of tears herself.

"You just kept saying you were fine, and I was pretty sure you were gonna keep going no matter what, so... yeah. I did. I made the decision without you. For you."

Frankie exhaled, and it felt like she went a whole minute before her oxygen-deprived lungs got through to her brain to breathe in again.

"Did you even want to get married?" he asked. "Did you feel like saying no wasn't an option?"

Frankie couldn't hear any more. She made a show of putting her hands over and around her ears to block him out.

"I could be wrong," he said, sniffling loudly as he sat back down. "Maybe you'll find another guy. Maybe you'll have better chemis—"

"Stop," she said, cutting him off before he brought it up again. It only ever made her feel like shit to be reminded of how hard it was for him to make her orgasm.

Mark put his head in his hands, elbows resting on his knees. "I don't think I'm wrong though." After a long, painful silence, he said, "I'm gonna go take a shower. Don't... don't be here."

She watched him go, tears still pouring out, and waited until she heard the water running to try to stand up. It was difficult.

***

The drive home was agony. Her whole body ached, but that was barely on her radar.

Frankie had always, nominally, considered herself bi because she often found women attractive, but it was all theoretical. She'd been with Mark since she was sixteen and he was eighteen, and her life before that had not had much room for romantic entanglements. Her mother, her birth mother, had lost a protracted battle with colon cancer when she was twelve. To say there had been upheaval in the aftermath of that would be putting it lightly.

Three years later, her father had reluctantly remarried. Frankie rebelled, as teens are wont to do. When she thought about it too much, she sometimes felt like she'd been running from tragedy to tragedy her whole life, but she also thought that a lot of people, maybe even most people, felt like that. For a lot of them, it was probably even true. That realization had helped her put her life into some healthier shade of perspective, but she knew she was not immune to myopia.

That narrowing of her vision, that limiting of herself and her choices, had put her not on a life path so much as a track. She had been on rails heading toward something that she could see now maybe wasn't what she wanted. Not when she really thought about it.

It was embarrassing when she thought about how often, when the opportunity to watch porn with Mark had arisen, she'd sought out lesbian content and made it seem like it was for him. Like she was giving him a special little present. There had been no malice, no intentional misleading efforts, but there also hadn't been any sort of honest internal assessment of her motives. Had she been so obvious? So transparent? So oblivious?

Did everyone know?

The first step, she knew, was that she needed to apologize to Ade. Frankie had never been good at apologies, often being told she came across as disingenuous owing largely to her inability to understand why she did anything.

Figuring out why she did anything probably also deserved to be on any list of tasks to be completed, but it felt like the kind of thing that would take time. She had been reacting to other people and allowing circumstances beyond her control to dictate her life for far too long, and she was sick to death of it.

The second step was to get Ade to teach her again. This would probably be easier if the apology landed the way she hoped it would, but by no means was it a foregone conclusion.

The third step was to figure out how she felt about Ade, and whether or not Mark had been completely full of shit.

***

"I like Pop Tarts."

Frankie had allowed herself four days to grieve. She had spent the prior months in a state of perpetual pity, a constant 'woe is me'-ness, rather than mourning the end of something important. She set herself to the task with purpose; she sat on her couch, she watched sad movies and looked at old pictures, and she ate ice cream.

Frankie found the whole process alien. Her understanding of mourning was somehow stunted, and she took all of her cues for how to act in the wake of a break-up from television and movies. She wore baggy sweats, bathed infrequently and ordered a mountain of take-out food. She found, once she got to the part where she looked at old pictures, that the pajamas were warm. When she wept, the ice cream made her feel a little better. When she realized it was already four in the afternoon and she'd lost a whole day crying, she found that she had no desire to shower and clean herself up nor to cook, and relished her extra cartons of rice and broccoli, and orange chicken.

By the third day she pestered her older brother for pictures of their mother, and crammed a mountain, a lifetime, of grief into the smallest period she could manage. By the fifth day, she knew she had to stop, or risk falling into self-pity again. She made herself get up, and she made herself shower, and she made a phone call.

Two hours later, she found herself standing in front of a very skeptical Ade, at Ade's apartment, and Ade was looking at her very suspiciously.

She cleared her throat and repeated, "I like Pop Tarts."

"That's a Gilmore Girls reference." Ade narrowed her eyes and thought for a moment. "Is this your funny way of telling me that you've spent some time examining your life?"

Frankie nodded, blushing a little. "I was hoping you'd get that." When Ade straightened, neck extending, she rushed to add, "I'm sorry. I have been an asswipe, and you have been more patient with me than I deserve."

"I honestly expected you to show up days ago, " Ade said, "with vodka and tacos, or something equally trivial. What brought all this on?"

"I talked with Mark."

Ade cocked an eyebrow, leaned against the door frame, and waited.

"And my Dad. And my brother." She sniffed. "And a therapist, but that was just an informal get-to-know-me thing. My first real appointment is next week."

At this, Ade's dark eyebrows tried to meet in the middle. "You did?"

She nodded. "Just a quick Zoom call."

"What brought that on?"

Frankie took a deep breath. "A wise person pointed out to me that I've been leaning on my friends... my friend, singular... too much."

Ade's low, throaty, "Mmhm," sounded, somehow, both impressed and unimpressed, which made Frankie's stomach lurch.

"I wanted to be the victim," Frankie said, sadly. "Needed. Needed to be the victim. It was a drug. You told me 'don't worry about me' so many times that, yeah... yeah, I kind of did stop worrying about you. T-uh... t-uh, took you for granted" She followed that up with a drawn-out sigh and another, "I'm sorry."

"Okay," Ade said, and this time it felt like there was merely condensation on her words rather than a rime of frost.

"I have a lot of work to do. I know I do. I just-just... just hope it's not too late." As she said that, Frankie looked up, slowly.

Ade took a long, slow breath in through the nose, nostrils flaring, ribs expanding, before she let it all out in a rush. She reached for Frankie, and Frankie reached for her.

Ade didn't forgive her. She didn't say it was okay, which Frankie was glad for. It wasn't okay by a long shot. She was glad Ade hadn't simply handed her blanket immunity for all her shitty behavior. What she wanted was a second chance, a chance to do better, and it felt like she got it.

She was glad when she realized she wasn't the only one crying.

***

Frankie paced nervously behind her car early Tuesday morning the following week. It wasn't until she saw Ade's little Corolla coming through the intersection at the corner of the parking lot that she paused, even for a second, and even then she continued in fits and bursts.

"How did you find out about this place?" Ade said, as she stepped out of her car. "I didn't even know it was here!"

"Groupon," Frankie said. A bit too quickly? "I downloaded Groupon. I-I-I got us all ch-uh, ch-uh, che-checked in inside."

Ade looked past her, and Frankie turned to look as well. The old stone building that housed the Twin Feathers spa had been someone's house when Frankie was little, she was sure of it, but it had the kind of age and gravitas that befitted a building designed for comfort. It felt like it could be someone's grandmother's house, and probably had been, and that piqued a kind of childish nostalgia in her as she walked. She put on her mask, just as Ade did, and they headed inside.

"Just a moment," came an excited voice from behind the front counter. "Just a moment!" A woman, maybe a few years older than them, skipped out and around toward them, carrying a familiar infrared thermometer in her hand. "Welcome to Twin Feathers! Let me get a quick scan on you ladies."

They stood still, waiting patiently, and moved to the counter once they'd been cleared.

Ade gave her a tight nod while the woman's back was turned. "I'm glad to see you guys are open," she said. "Surprised, but glad."

The woman gave them an exhausted smile, which was a tough thing to pull off with a mask over her mouth and nose. It was all eyes, head tilt, and body posture, but it was there. "This area keeps going in and out of green, so we open up for a little bit, and then shut down, and open back up. It's like a yo-yo around here!" She looked right at Frankie for a second or two, and then added, "Honestly, we're just glad to get some people in the door. We've got a few girls on hand just in case we get some walk-ins. If that doesn't happen, we might be able to squeeze in a little something extra for you two."

She nodded enthusiastically, which made Ade smile. All Frankie could do was hope her mask was hiding her cheeks, which she knew were turning red. Had she always felt that heat whenever she made Ade smile? Had she missed that too?

"I know we're in for the facials and manicures," Frankie said, "but my friend here has been dealing with a really big pain in the neck."

Ade barked a laugh.

"And a pain in the ass," she added. The woman looked at her curiously, and Frankie couldn't be sure the joke was landing, so she said, "It's me. I'm the pain in the ass."