Now you finally see how terrible of an updater I am... two months? Ridiculous. I am terribly sorry - I won't bore you with stupid excuses and let you read! readreadread


T:

I woke up to the glare of light, filtering into a room that wasn't mine. It didn't faze me, and instead I rolled over, aching for more sleep. My bones were heavy, and my body ached with some kind of sick reverb that I couldn't trace.

Her legs tangled in mine, the smoothness of her skin.

Hands clenching bedspreads, her name on my lips, scraping against the rough edges of my throat until her name alone rubbed it raw.

I bit into my lip, cursing myself for getting so affected by a damned dream – yeah, it had to be a dream, it had to be. And despite the minutes I spent mulling over this, when I felt movement beside me, I felt the familiar panic set in, closing the walls around me.

There was a groan, rendered hoarse from the night before, and the brush of skin against fabric.

I prayed that the voice wouldn't be familiar. That maybe, just maybe, I had slept with a random stranger in some kind of drunken delirium.

Anyone but her, please please please-

But there was a sharp intake of breath, and a string of harsh obscenities that sounded almost foreign in her sweet voice. She shifted around for a moment, groaning under her breath about some fucking hangover, and I could almost picture her hands in her hair, tearing at the roots.

She whispered my name once, so quietly that I was sure that I imagined it. She cleared her throat like my name in itself was a sin, and tried again.

"Tegan."

She said it with some kind of ironic hope, hoping that I'd turn over any be someone else. She was hoping I'd be Emy, I was sure, and it made turning over to face her that much harder.

Sara looked disheveled, at best. To be honest, she looked as if she had just seen a ghost, with the sheets tangled almost maniacally around her shoulders to shield any piece of exposed skin. She looked at me blankly, with some kind of dull throbbing in her eyes that, if I was an idealist, I would have thought was love. But I knew better than that, I knew her better than that. It was fear; it was like looking into the eyes of a desperate, starved man. It pricked goosebumps on my bare skin, and I let the silence smooth them out until my fears were just another part of my numb skin.

"I'm going to take a shower." She mumbled, more to herself then me, grabbing the bottle of aspirin from the counter as she went. She was still covered in the bed sheets, leaving me cold and exposed as she left.

I didn't care enough to more.

I didn't care enough to think.

Instead I laid haphazardly, my naked skin matching the naked bed, praying to some questionably existent being that I could wake up from this damned nightmare and go on living my life.


Sara spent nearly an hour in the bathroom, running the shower so long that the water was ice cold by the time I skittered into the tub. I washed quickly, the water shaking away any lingering desire from the previous night until I was numb all over, running a towel hastily over already dry skin. I threw on the same clothes from the night before, ignoring how Sara's smell lingered all over them like some kind of perfume. I took a shaky breath and walked out into the foyer.

Sara was laying on the cough with her feet propped. There were old cartoons flashing across the television, but she was gazing through the blinds, her mind obviously elsewhere.

I let myself wonder, just for a moment, that maybe she was thinking of me. But I shook my head, reminding myself that the majority of last night was spent correcting her, telling her that I was making love to her, not Emy. I grit my teeth and cursed myself for letting her take me so easily, when she obviously didn't want me.

She didn't want me one damn bit.

"Sara," She lifted her head off after she muted the television. "You want to go out to breakfast? My treat."

She stared at the muted television for at least a minute, pursing her lips as she scraped up the inevitable list of excuses she had prepared over the years. But she sighed and nodded so reluctantly that I nearly took back my offer.

I felt insignificant, like some ant crawling on her wall that she could smash with her gaze alone.

"Let me grab my sweater." She whispered, her hip brushing mine as she walked by. I ignored the way my toes curled in my shoes and shot down to my car before she had even locked up.


Sara didn't talk during the car ride, only when I reminded her that I had no fucking clue where anything was in Montreal. She gave me monotone directions, and turned the radio up two notches.

She led me to a small coffee shop on the outskirts of town, slipping out of the car before I had even put in park. She sat at a table by the window with a wordless invitation for me to join. I followed and sat adjacent to her.

A waitress came by and she hastily ordered two coffees without even bothering to paint on a smile, even for decency's sake. It made me feel outrageously guilty, though I knew I shouldn't have been, and I let my hand dash out across the grab hers. She dropped my grasp almost immediately, and pushed her hair out of her face.

"Sara." I breathed her name like a secret; she turned to me like a stranger.

"Can we talk? Please?" My voice sounded desperate, even in my own ears, but I had no strength to change it.

"About what, Tegan?" Her voice came out slow and tired, and she spent the time fiddling with the salt shaker in some futile attempt to avoid my eye. I grabbed her hands again and tightened my grasp when she tried to weasel her way out of it.

"Let go, Tegan." I nearly flinched at the sound of tears brushing on the edges of her vocal chords, but I simply shook my head and twined my fingers with hers. She grimaced and shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

"Can we talk now-"

"If you want to talk, Tegan, then fucking talk."

I shook of the bitter aftertaste of her words and cleared my throat.

"It doesn't have to be big thing Sara." I found myself absently playing with her fingers, and that set her anxious and uncomfortable, crossing and uncrossing her legs beneath the table. I stopped immediately and instead let my fingers tear holes in my jeans. "We can just forget it, we don't have to think about it again-"

"I can't remember any of it." She sounded fragile, and managed to rip her hand from my grasp and let it sit cold in her lap. "I can't remember a damned thing."

I couldn't speak, so I let her thoughts run rampant for another five minutes before she was able to verbalize them.

"I thought you were Emy." Her words came out strangled and twisted, as if they sounded as harsh to her teeth as they did to my ears; I should have cried, I should have left, but instead I stayed like some silent statue and let her thrash around in her own mind.

The waitress finally brought the coffee, her smile almost faltering when she realized that they would lay untouched.

Sara was silent for longer than I expected. I merely watched her, watched flashes of pain and confusion flit across her face like a broken movie projector, with the reels spinning and spinning and screaming and screaming, but no one cared enough to stop them.

I should have whispered incoherent lullabies in her ear, I should have told her that it was okay.

I should have lied and told her I was fine, but I couldn't.

She bit down on her lip hard enough to draw blood and I watched with some kind of strange fascination as her nails dug into the side of the coffee table.

She looked up at me, eyes drawn in and bloodshot. "Can we go?" She whispered with a gaze so intense that it took me a few moments to find the words.

"We just got here."

"I know… I j-just…" She fumbled with her words again, and notion that she may start crying was motivation enough for me to wave down the waitress and pay for our neglected coffee. I grabbed Sara's hand and, this time, she didn't resist.

We walked along the sidewalk on some street I had never seen. It made me feel like a tourist, and I spent the majority of the silent walk adjusting my coat again and again, as if every passerby was scrutinizing me. Sara occasionally dipped her head into my arm, trying to subtly disguise her sniffling without realizing that I knew all of her tricks by heart.

I hated that she was crying – that she was hurting – but my own pain was enough to strangle my concern until we lapsed into a rhythmic silence, matching the cadence of our feet on the pavement.

The road dead-ended in a parking lot. We sat down on the hood of a car, testing it twice to make sure the alarm didn't go off. She wouldn't let go of my hand now and continued to cry for several minutes before clearing her throat and straightening up.

Sara was obviously embarrassed; she had always hated crying in front of me. She hated showing any sort of weakness in front of anyone, but there was only so much strength that could sink into a skeleton of a 5'2" girl, still shaking against me.

"This isn't fair." Her words reverberated through the fabric of my jacket until I could feel their warmth on my skin.

"What isn't fair?" The amount of exhaustion in my voice made me sound like a stranger, a voice foreign to my ears.

"Everything. Life."

I smiled wryly. I wanted to tell her life isn't fair, or pull up some other cliché from the dirt and make myself sound confident and proud, like I knew something she didn't. But instead my infinite wisdom was dried up and I found myself tracing over her words in my head, over and over again, stuck on repeat.

"What do you want, Sara, honestly?" On paper, my words would have sounded harsh and expecting. But she knew me better and knew I was desperate for an answer, a real answer. Because I was at a loss. A complete loss.

She drew in her breath slowly, like she was testing the air, before mumbling through her teeth:

"I don't know, Tegan."

The way she said my name sounded so formal that I craved for her to pull me close and whisper Teetee in my hair like she did when we were young, although now, I'm sure the act would have a different connotation. She was staring down at her feet and let them swing back and forth above the ground; she was still too short to touch the ground, although she had vehemently insisted months before that a damned growth spurt is coming, it better be.

"You love Emy."

She nodded without hesitation, and I hated the way my ribcage ached in response. I let the air turn stale before I finally let slip the question that had been lingering on my tongue for the last hour:

"Do you love me?"

I could hear her breath stall in her throat. She knew I was going to ask it, I knew she knew. And I knew she wouldn't be able to answer it, at least not in the way I wanted her to.

Sara finally turned to me, lips parted slightly.

"Do you love me?" She retorted, the sunlight playing tricks with her eyes that made it hard to look away.

"I…." I took in a shaky breath and let her hand slip from mine. "I asked you first."

She stared at me for a moment longer before letting a grin play at her lips, darting down to grab my hand again.

"Real mature, Teetee."

Before I could control myself, I grabbed her face in my hands and kissed her, hard and slow. She trembled at the touch but let me press up against her all the same; she was warm and sweet and taste pure, not tainted and stained by alcohol like the night before. She couldn't suppress the tiniest of moans as my finger traced around her waistline, prying at the cotton edges of her t-shirt.

She was too entangled to notice her phone vibrating vehemently against her thigh, screaming out a name of a girl she longed to hear from; and yet I had turned her deaf, just for a moment – a moment long enough to let Emy fade to missed call, only until Sara could hear again.