Sidechain

"Viv, hon, I want you to listen to me, okay?"

"Mmhm."

"I know I'm not your mom."

Vivian nodded. For a brief moment, she tried to imagine having this conversation with her own mother, and the thought made her stomach turn. "Mmhm."

"Talk to Delia. I didn't need you to tell me she's worried."

"Okay," Vivian said.

"She's a wonderful girl. I'm so glad you started bringing her around, and I'm happy for you two, but... you know, I..."

What Gladys wasn't saying, and that Vivian understood, was that Gladys had adopted her. Her and Lucia, anyway. A little part of her heart felt good at being included like that.

"Just talk to her, okay? When good people like that come into your life, sometimes you've just gotta hold on as tight as you can."

Vivian sniffed, and said, "Okay," as she got back out onto the sidewalk, and started walking home.

***

It was an unhip kind of bright when Vivian hopped out of the passenger seat of the box truck four days later, and throwing up her hand like a visor barely took the edge off.

"Am I backed in okay?"

Vivian hustled behind the truck, peeked around to the driver's side, and gave the driver, a woman whose name she kept forgetting, a thumbs up.

"Hella sweet!"

Vivian just shook her head, as the girl with the curly brown hair hopped out and strolled toward the front door. Instead of going in and socializing, which was not her way, Vivian unlatched the back door of the truck and climbed in to start unfastening everything.

"Hey."

Vivian's head whipped around. "Hey!"

Delia had on her rainbow and unicorn scrubs, but she didn't look like herself. She looked... unsettled. Vivian's heart ached to see her girlfriend nervous when it was just the two of them. She wanted to fix it, but didn't know how.

"Everything go okay at the pickups?" Delia asked, feigning a smile that carried none of her usual brightness.

Vivian nodded. "Yeah." Then, because she wanted to break the tension, she added, "Dr. Ashley's wife is a strange duck."

Delia smiled and gave Vivian a pointed look, but this time the smile made it a little further toward her eyes. Vivian counted that as a victory, and slid the pallet jack under the crate to shift it onto the hydraulic lift.

"She's sweet though," Delia said. "Like, really sweet, and a really good photographer. She offered to do our... you know..."

"Our wedding?" Vivian said, trying to be helpful, and there was a strange kind of alchemy that happened on Delia's face when she said that. Relief? Excitement? Reassurance? Suddenly the smile was a lot more genuine.

"Yeah. Right. Of course." Delia did that thing she did sometimes where she tucked non-existent stray hairs behind her ear, because she needed to do something with her hands when excited. She took a step to the side, to be able to look around the pallets Vivian was stacking, and said, "Thank you for helping with the donations."

"Of course," Vivian said, mechanically. She always said yes when Delia asked, and this time had been no different.

"Did Legacy Emmanual give you any trouble? They're always all smiles when we talk to them, then get all stinge-y when it's pickup time."

"No," Vivian said, grunting as she tugged one of the heavier pallets away from the wall, "but OHSU said they couldn't give us as much insulin as they'd promised. They said next week, they'll cover the difference."

"Did you get that in writing?" Delia said, wincing.

Vivian nodded, and when she had the pallet in place and could breathe again, she said, "It's all on the invoice."

"Okay," Delia said. "That's... not great, but... we'll make do. I'll let Dr. Ashley know."

Vivian hopped down to the asphalt, held in the button to lower the platform, and nodded toward the clinic. "How is it in there today?"

"Sounds like they had a rough week," Delia said, turning to look at the humble building. "I think Ash is gonna ask me to come on full time soon. Her and Dr. Oscar are swamped, and she's been hinting about needing the help."

"That's great," Vivian said, "right? I mean, this is where you wanna be once you finish up the RN stuff, right? Some little non-profit clinic, helping out?"

Delia bit her lip, and even though she was nodding it wasn't as enthusiastic as Vivian would have thought. "I'm not really sure if she can afford me. I mean, I know I'd probably have to take a pay cut if this is what I want, but there's pay cuts and then there's pay cuts."

Vivian frowned, and retreated in on herself. Despite her hustle, her income streams were not enough for them to live on. She didn't make as much as Delia did as an OR nurse, either. That was never something Delia had pressured her on, only been supportive of, but in the moment it felt like her lack of success was in the way of Delia pursuing her dreams. It wasn't a good feeling.

"You should do it," she said anyway, even as she felt her eyes begin to sting. "If she offers. We'll figure it out."

Delia looked like she was on the verge of tears too. "Are you sure?"

"No matter what." Vivian nodded emphatically. "Rhonda keeps trying to give me more patients. That's steadier than my sales have been. Shows are getting better, but it's not enough yet."

Her freckled girlfriend bit her lip. "Well..."

Vivian waited, eyes widening with every passing second.

"I was thinking... that... um..." She took a bracing breath, and stepped closer. "I want to have a baby. With you."

"You know I can't," Vivian said, reflexively putting both hands over herself, just below the belly button.

"No! Me! I want to carry!"

This did not quite compute, but Vivian's spirits rose. Her brain started racing toward things like space in their house, healthcare, appointments, and how amazingly cute Delia would be with a belly. "Wait, why did you say it like that?"

"Weeeell," she said, "I mean... with you... or, you know... as close as I can get."

Vivian just shook her head slowly, eyes out of focus. "I don't know what that means."

If she chewed any harder on her lip, Delia was going to put a hole in it. "Well.. the closest I can get to having a baby... with you... is if we..." She took a deep breath, and continued in a rush, saying, "if we ask your brother to donate semen. Sperm. Sperm!"

Vivian felt like she'd just been punched in the gut. Little by little she leaned forward, until her hands were braced on her knees, and her eyes refused to focus on anything.

"You two are so similar, on so many levels, and I just thought—"

"I have spent," Vivian wheezed, "my whole life trying to... differentiate myself from him, and none of it mattered. We're interchangeable."

"Of course you're not interchangeable," Delia said, worriedly. "Don't be silly. I don't love Darren. I like Darren fine, but, like, no. No thank you. I love you."

"You wanna have a baby with him," Vivian spat, voice still hoarse and ragged.

"I want to have a baby with you!"

"I can't do that!"

This time, Delia folded her arms and let her head tilt slightly to the side, and she gave Vivian an unimpressed eyebrow when Vivian finally looked up. Unimpressed, but also kind of angry. "I am aware of your physiology, Vivian."

"Why would you think this is a good idea?!"

She unfolded her arms, and held them both out, palms downward-ish, as she explained, "You two have been getting along really well for a long time now. I know he'd say yes, if it was for you. Plus, take one look at Tiffany! She's more you than him! I could carry someone like that inside me, and I..." She moved a little closer, and laid her hands on Vivian's shoulders. "I want that."

"If you want to fuck my brother that bad, we'll need to get you a blond wig. He's pretty particu—" Vivian did not see the slap coming, and her world rocked. She reached back wildly, just barely getting her hand on the back of the truck to catch herself, and her vision was still spinning when she tried to turn back around. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry."

"Fucking hell, Vivian!"

She couldn't bring herself to open her eyes. She just balled her hands into fists, grabbed at the front of her jeans, and pinched her face shut. The sting was ferocious.

"What the hell was that?"

Vivian shook her head, but she knew. She sorta knew. She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't find the right words so she shut her mouth again. "It Used To Be..." Her voice was shaking, badly, and she shook her head vigorously to try and compose herself.

"Okay," Delia said, stepping forward with a weary sigh. "Okay, calm down."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." It wasn't until Delia held her that she felt like she was getting her breathing back under control.

"Viv, why did you react like that?"

"I dunno!" she said, voice still shaking. Throat tight. "I just... it's complicated."

"I didn't think it was going to start a fight! I thought it was clever! I thought you would love it!"

"He's always been the good one," she said, now sobbing. "I've never been good enough. I've never been—"

"Babybabybaby," Delia said, in a rush, as she reached up to grab Vivian's cheeks. "You have, since the day you bought me that drink, been one of the most amazingly confident women I've ever known. Y-you're focused, and determined, and you take zero shit from anyone, and I love that about you! I've never seen you like this!"

Vivian shook her head. "Some Things Have Been..." She tried to cough to clear her throat. "Some things have been coming up. I think I started remembering the accident."

"Is that what your nightmares are?"

"Maybe," Vivian said. "It's all... sound, and lights, and screeching, and screaming, and...other stuff too, though. Stuff from when I was younger. Stuff I'd forgotten."

"Well," Delia said, in that way that she sometimes did when she said Well at the beginning of a sentence to give herself a moment to think, "that's what selective amnesia does sometimes, right? It... It locked away some things your brain didn't think you could handle." She sounded frustrated. "So what? Are you mad at your brother now? Does this mean no? Bad idea? You can't... you can't and won't be okay with this?"

Vivian opened her mouth to say that, to say it was a bad idea, and before she could get the words out she saw Delia looking up at her. Huge blue eyes. She couldn't say no to Delia. She couldn't say yes to this idea. She stammered, trying to say both, and came up with neither.

Delia sounded very disappointed, very hollow, when she said, "It's fine. We can talk about it later."

It wasn't fine. It wasn't fine at all.

***

They didn't talk about it later.

***

Vivian arrived early at Thirsty On Main, as she was wont to do, with Delia and Tiffany in tow for the first time since the first time. Tiffany had been asking to go to every show, but it hadn't been feasible. Once they arrived, Tiffany asked how long it would be until things started, and retreated to a booth in the corner as soon as she had her answer. Delia gave Vivian a blushworthy kiss before following her niece.

"I saw that," Lucia said, with a snicker, when Vivian hopped up onto the stage.

"Oh shut up," she fired back. "Come carry my heavy things."

Beanie gave them both a roll of his eyes, and went back to work on his kit.

"Is Gene here yet?" Vivian asked, as they moved through the back of the building.

"They'll both be here soon. Ten minutes maybe?"

"Both?" Vivian asked.

"Him and Taylor. She's not ready to play yet, but she needed to get out of the house and wanted to see how it went leaving their kid with her mom."

"Was it a boy or a girl?"

Lucia just shook her head as she popped open the trunk of Delia's Jeep. "Oh... shit. I can't remember. Boy, maybe?"

"Oh," Vivian said, grabbing her guitar case, "I'm getting closer to something for my next album, but it's complicated."

"Oh yeah?"

"It's, like, I wanna try for something between, like, melodic black metal and thrash."

Lucia gave her a look as she pulled out the bag with all of Vivian's pedals and effects. "When you told me you wanted to do disco way back when, I thought for sure that you were done with that kind of energy."

"Bison is pretty heavy," Vivian said, as she held the door open.

"Yeah, but..." Lucia huffed thoughtfully as she waited on the other side. "Bison is slower. It's got that Doom-Stoner vibe. It rocks, but it's not the same. "

"Yeah, this is gonna be different. I don't know how it's gonna work, reach possibly exceeding grasp and all that, but... yeah."

"Oh shit," Lucia laughed, "it's that complicated? Can you even play it?"

Vivian frowned and shook her head. "I'm working on it. I can splice a lot of it together, but I'd rather get it in one take if I could."

She set the bag down and shook her head. "Really? Thrash?"

"Melodic Thrash, maybe. You know how Melodic Black can be really haunting and pretty?"

"Uh huh," Lucia said, squinting into the distance.

"Something like that, but more... painfully beautiful rather than haunting or sad."

"I honestly can't even picture that," Lucia said, laughing. "I have no doubt that I'll hear it and go Ooooh, but, like, my brain cannot compute that description."

Vivian blinked, feeling a pause in herself that Lucia didn't seem to notice, and set to work on her setup.

"Pretty thrash," Lucia said, sounding far away. "Almost sounds like an oxymoron."

"It makes sense in my head," Vivian said, halfway to defensively, and this time Lucia seemed to notice.

A slight narrowing of her eyes, before she said, brightly, "Can't wait to hear it."

When the time came, Tiffany was front and center ready to volunteer for sound check duty, though the first words out of her mouth were to ask if she was going to have help again. Vivian saw something in the way her niece was looking-without-looking toward the staircase at the back, and filed that away. When said help arrived, Tiffany was all cool disaffection, nearly too cool to be helping at all.

She only saw the start of this, however, because just as Lucia began messing with the soundboard, Vivian saw Delia heading toward the bathroom. Just as she started to pass out of sight down the hallway, Delia winked at her.

Vivian almost didn't follow her. The balance of probability was that Delia had blinked and Vivian just mistook it, because it would be very un-Delia-like for her to be so suggestive in public. Sure, they flirted when Vivian played at WOOD, but that was all compliments and coy plays on words. What tipped the scales was that, recently, Delia had been kind of suggestive in public, and Vivian caught up with her just inside the women's room.

The brunette was on her the second the door closed, pinning her back against the wall and kissing her. Aggressively. Almost furiously. Her hands moved under Vivian's shirt, across her abs, and grabbed at her sides. It had been a long time since Vivian had been so delightfully accosted, and she rose to the challenge like the morning sun.

Delia gave the most adorable little squeak when Vivian grabbed her and spun her around, until their positions were reversed. At first, Delia's eyes were wide and wild, but she eased into Vivian's grip with a slinky little move that had her straddling Vivian's thigh. Straddling, and ever so slightly grinding against it. Vivian kissed her with every ounce of her being.

As the blush was really starting to hit her, Vivian slid her hand down inside of Delia's waistband, and went right for the button. Right for the kill. Delia's breathy whispers were in her ear.

"Do it. I want you to do it. I want you to make me cum."

Despite their positions, and despite the indisputable facts of who was touching whom in that moment, Vivian felt such a powerful surge within her such as she had never experienced. It started at the top of her head and flowed downward. Her body dutifully kept up where it needed to, leg staying firm for Delia to straddle and fingers working their magic, but the rest of her slumped forward, in release, against the door. Around Delia.

On the one hand, there was a lot of tension between them. A lot of conversations left unfinished. Questions unasked. Answers that were not easy. On the other hand, there had been a lot of release in the last week. A lot of sex, and almost all of it breaking one or another of Delia's normal strictures. Vivian had jumped at the distraction, but at a certain point it had stopped being about that at all. They were both grasping at something. Grasping as hard as they could. Vivian could feel it, especially in the moment as she leaned against the bathroom door fingering her amazing soon-to-be wife to a delightfully suppressed orgasm; Delia just barely got her palm over her mouth, and groaned into it.

They leaned on each other, under the flickering fluorescents, and panted together. Sharing the same air.

"I love you," Vivian said, laughing breathlessly.

"Did you cum too?"

Vivian shook her head, but what she said was, "I don't know what I just did. It was something, though."

And then Delia giggled, as she did sometimes, and it was just about the most pure sound Vivian had ever heard.

What Vivian had wanted to say was Are we okay, because she really wanted to be reassured, but what came out was, "Are you okay?"

"Oh I'm goooood," Delia replied, "but I'm not worried about me. It's yoooour turn."

Vivian shook her head microscopically. Not only did she have to manage her setup, go over the setlist, and run through some of the lyrics in her head, but Tiffany was out there unsupervised, sorta kinda. Really, though, it was about Taylor. She needed to be perfect, so they didn't try to get Taylor to come back early. Perfect was asking a lot. "I don't think I can, right now."

"What? No!" Delia stood up more, no longer leaning on Vivian, and her brow was fully furrowed. "I didn't come back here for me, I came back here for you! What do you mean you can't?!"

Vivian's head was still swimming, and she tried to kiss her girlfriend's cheek, to let her know everything was alright, but Delia turned away from the effort.

"God damnit, Vivian."

And then she was gone, before Vivian understood any of it. The door opened and closed, almost hitting her in the process, and she was left alone and confused. And horny, though that was fading quickly the further Delia walked.

She couldn't just chase Delia down, as much as she wanted to. She had to finish getting ready. By the time she returned to the stage, Tiffany was doing an even worse job of hiding her fascination with Lucia's son. Vivian tried to make eye contact with Delia a few times, but the little brunette was sitting in the corner with her legs crossed and a body language that was about as unapproachable as possible.

Later, Vivian thought.

A few moments after that, Taylor and Gene arrived through the back. Lucia and Beanie went straight for them, hugging and talking and catching up, and Vivian picked up the slack getting everyone's gear assembled. No roadies when they play at Helen's bar. In her head, though, she was counting. Three more shows over the next couple weeks, Bumbershoot the week after that, and then... Vivian looked sideways. She wasn't sure after that, which was probably intentional.

That would be her last show. She could feel it. Much too soon.

***

Vivian looked over at the egg timer next to her. Three minutes to go.

"It itches," Tiffany said.

"Like, a bad itch, or just a regular itch?"

Tiffany twisted her head this way and that, causing the plastic bag on her head to make soft shuffling sounds. "Regular, but it's driving me nuts."