Turn to Me

By Wonko

Part 15

Olivia made a conscious decision not to think about what she had seen in Natalia's face for the rest of the evening. Surely she'd been wrong. It hardly seemed possible...and yet, she'd seen the darkening of lust in enough men's eyes to know what it looked like. Maybe it looked different on a woman's face. It must. This was Natalia, for crying out loud. Pure, innocent, practically virginal, terminally Catholic Natalia. My brain is even more screwed up than I thought, she decided, locking away the image of Natalia's face flushed with heat in a dark corner of her mind.

They managed to co-exist without further yelling for the rest of the night, but they accomplished that by not talking to each other. After dinner Olivia helped Emma with her homework while Natalia did the dishes. Then Natalia put Emma to bed while Olivia watched TV listlessly. Enough was enough. She needed to get back on speaking terms with Natalia before the next trip to the bathroom, she mused. That first trip had been pretty awkward.

She glanced up as Natalia slowly made her way downstairs. Her body was tense, Olivia realised as she watched her. She couldn't read the emotion on her face.

"Don't you dare ever do that again," Natalia hissed.

Oh. Anger, then. Well, anger she could deal with.

"Do what?"

"Speak to me like that where Emma might hear you," Natalia continued, speaking in a maddeningly calm and measured voice. Olivia rolled her eyes.

"Oh okay...so, what, I'm just supposed to accept my daughter being lured into your little Catholic cult?"

Natalia crossed her arms across her chest. "You could try trusting your own judgement," she said simply.

Olivia had had a retort all lined up, but that reply took a little of the wind out of her sails. "What?"

Natalia walked slowly across the room so that she was standing by Olivia's chair.

"You've been living here for four months," she began. "And surely even you could see how used to saying grace Emma is. You don't actually think we'd be doing that if you weren't okay with it, do you?"

Olivia paused, a response dying on her lips. She couldn't deny the logic of it...although she would have liked to. Her eyes strayed again to the cross on the wall, the Our Lady statue on the mantle, the rosary beads on the shelf. The idea that she had allowed Emma to be brought up in a house so full of religious iconography was difficult enough to stomach. But praying as well? She had been so careful to raise her daughter without any hint of religious input. After all, her one and only rule for parenting had always been to be as different from her own mother as she could possibly manage.

A memory swam to the front of her mind...her mother ranting and screaming at her in incandescent fury, telling her what a vile sinner she was, condemning both her and the unborn - and deeply, deeply unwanted - child in her womb to the depths of hell. "The wages of sin is death!" she'd shouted, practically spitting in her traumatised daughter's face. Olivia considered it the deepest of all ironies that the vile woman had dropped dead herself almost immediately afterwards.

She closed her eyes. All the memories she'd lost and that one had to stay there, clear as a bell. Typical.

"Are you okay?" Natalia's gentle voice intruded into the memory and she grabbed onto the sound gratefully, using it to pull herself back to the present.

"I'm not comfortable with all this," she said, gesturing to the religious paraphernalia around the room, but the sharpness had gone from her voice.

Natalia didn't respond for a long moment. "Okay," she said at last. "I'll move some of it into my bedroom."

Olivia managed a brief smile. "Thanks," she said. She paused, looking at her hands as she tried to find the words for what she needed to say next. "Look...I'm sorry about before. I handled it badly."

Natalia raised one eyebrow. She sounded almost...shy. "Okay. Apology accepted," she said.

Olivia flashed a grateful smile up at her which made her heart do a tiny little jump. "Bedtime," she murmured, hoping her feelings hadn't shown in her eyes. She'd given enough away for one day.

Natalia woke from a thick sleep sometime in the early hours of the morning. For a few moments she wasn't sure what had woken her, and she nearly fell asleep again. Her body curled round the pillow she'd fallen asleep holding as she rolled over, her eyes fluttering closed.

She had decided at the last moment that she wouldn't sleep on the couch that night. Their conversation had cleared the air somewhat, but getting Olivia ready for bed had thickened the atmosphere yet again. Natalia was sure Olivia must have guessed some of her feelings at dinner, and she'd seemed uncomfortable as Natalia had carefully taken off her T-shirt and dressed her in loose fitting flannel pyjamas. Natalia remembered the smooth skin and soft curves that had been revealed to her hungry eyes and thirsty fingers as she undressed her. Had Olivia sensed her desire? She squeezed her eyes shut tight, trying not to think about that possibility. Olivia was in no frame of mind to deal with all of that right now. She was barely able to accept that they'd been friends - surely she would never believe that they'd come so close to being so much more.

She turned over again, trying to settle and get comfortable. Then she heard it. A tiny whimper, so quiet that she wouldn't have caught it at all if she hadn't left her bedroom door slightly open that night. She listened hard and it came again, louder this time. "Olivia," she murmured, slipping out of bed immediately and finding her robe by touch alone.

The lamp by Olivia's bed was switched on. The woman herself was lying down with her leg elevated by a small tower of pillows and she was very pale, her face tight, her jaw clenching, beads of sweat forming at her temples. Her lips opened in a plaintive groan as Natalia approached, her hand reaching automatically to smooth over Olivia's brow. The other woman's eyes snapped open at her touch and Natalia realised that she'd been so lost in her own little world of pain that she hadn't even heard her approach.

"Hurts," Olivia ground out.

Natalia's fingers stroked rhythmically across her forehead and into her hair. "What can I do?" she asked gently.

Olivia's eyes squeezed shut. "Pills," she said. "I tried to take some but I dropped them. Couldn't pick them up."

Natalia looked down and saw Olivia's vicodin prescription strewn across the floor. She broke her contact with the other woman momentarily to scoop them all up and slip them back into the bottle. Then she slid an arm round Olivia's shoulders and made her sit up.

"All right," she whispered as Olivia greedily swallowed the pills and a generous gulp of water. "Sssh, sssh. Everything's all right. I'm here, everything's fine."

Olivia leaned against her almost without thinking about it; her body angling towards Natalia's on some kind of instinct. "Mmmm," she mumbled incoherently as Natalia retrieved the glass and sat it on the bedside table. She cupped Olivia's cheek tenderly with one hand, gently lowering her back onto the bed.

Olivia wrapped her hand round Natalia's forearm as she made to pull back, stopping her retreat. "Don't leave me," she mumbled.

"I'm just going to the sofa," she assured her, trying again to pull away. Olivia just shook her head and tightened her hold.

"Stay," she said.

Natalia hesitated, thinking again of dinner and bedtime and all the words simmering inside her that she was trying so hard not to say. But in the end she knew she could never say no to that voice and she relented, melting against Olivia who wrapped her good arm round her, her hand clawing at her back as she sought to pull her as close as possible.

It wasn't the most comfortable hug she'd ever experienced. The angle was all wrong and her back began to ache after just a few moments. But that didn't matter. Olivia needed her and Natalia knew she'd be happy to stay there all night long if she had to.

She'd be happy to stay there forever.