fiction: What Stories These Tears Could Tell

Title: What Stories These Tears Could Tell
WC: 1015
Characters: Ellie and her female lover
Notes: For vegawriters (@ eljay.com) who asked for: an understanding of bisexuality, a mention of Zoey’s kidnapping, a feather, fruit-fly boy. Not sure how well I fufilled the first, but I tried! I do hope it’s ok, dear.
Rating: um, she wanted at least some adultish, so I hope this qualifies …

( What Stories These Tears Could Tell )

The first time she came to you and cried was just after her father had been shot. You comforted her under the cheap cotton sheets, seeing her, perhaps for the first time, truly naked. It was not a week later when she broke it off with you, said she couldn’t date a girl while her father was getting better and you were left to understand why.

That was the first time. In and out of the next two years it got easier to see her on your doorstep, tears streaming down her face, asking a place to sleep for just one night. And that she was sorry to be a bother. You were never sorry to see her, you never felt she was a bother; no matter what your had each promised each other or promised yourselves, you always found a way under the cheap cotton sheets, finding ways to erase the tears.

Yes, and what stories these tears could tell, if you only let them. But you, you were the selfish one, hiding them to yourself, keeping them tucked in the small bed and under your fingertips. You wouldn’t let any one else hear of these stories and there is no other way she would have wanted it. She liked you as her security blanket, you as the one person she could trust in the night. It was you she came to with her tears.

Perhaps it was because you understood her, perhaps it was because there was no way you could possibly understand you. But you knew what was important, what it was like to be a woman in need of some comfort. Comfort that you could only get from one source. She picked you as her source for a time, not some boy, or man, or even her father. No, it was her father she misunderstood out of all of them.

When her father was shot, she sobbed of her childhood, of knowing she was never the favourite. When Zoey was taken, there was no way for you to comfort her under the cheap cotton sheets, no, you had to settle for the impersonalities of the phone, leaned up against your refrigerator, letting the purr comfort you as you comforted her. This time, she did not sob for her childhood, this time she sobbed for a little sister – the only little sister she had – and how gone she might be and how her father might have contributed to it. It was hard for you, wasn’t it, watching the telly on silent, symphathising with the leader of the free world, and all the while telling her that you understood – how could you possibly understand?

But you did, in the weeks afterward, as you tasted each other, as she lay still and quiet while you slowly sucked the juices from her. She did not make a sound. You asked her again and again if she was all right and every time she only smiled, said it was fine, stroked your hair, told you continue. She took from like a leech sucks from a human, she took your kindness, your fake understanding, she took your sex and she let it be a comfort to her. And you were all too happy to oblige, to strip her naked, roll her nipples through your fingertips, mark her with your tongue over every possibly inch of her body. And through it all, she remained still.

What was it that broke the ice, a simple blue-jay outside the window? Perched innocently on the sill, cocking his head to the side, watching? She had laughed, delighted to have an audience. Moved for him, gasped for him, came for him. He was there the next time as well, though you never saw him in the interim. How he knew to come to your window on the days you were making passionate love to the woman of your dreams, you will never know. But he knew, and that was all there was to that. He knew and he changed her, slowly, from her grief, from her anger. It is hard to remain angry when a blue-jay is addicted to your sex life.

The day she told you she had a new boyfriend was the day the blue-jay did not come, leaving in his wake only a small feather, trapped in the screen. She forbid you from going to get it, digging her nails in tightly under your skin. Something, something about this blue-jay’s feather meant it could not be disturbed. You had sex again that night, for she had come to your door in tears and there was no other way to comfort her. She sobbed of this man she was in love with, she sobbed of being in love with you, she sobbed because there was no way you could understand. You were free in your sex life, free as the blue-jay. She, she had to come and go in secret, the daughter of the President. She could not fuck a boy one night, fuck a girl the next. No, she had to fuck boys, over and over again, and be happy about the part of her she hid from the world.

The last time she came to you with tears, the last story she ever told you, was of your breakup, the last one, the one ‘for real’ this time. This last secret that you would not share with any of the world for any amount. No, you would be selfish in your grief after this night, would you not? You would keep her secrets as she faded from your life, faded into motherhood and marriage. For there was an unborn child, and a White House wedding to happen. You cried too that night, clung to her extra hard, kissed her over and over again (in lieu of fucking her over and over again), begged and pleaded with whatever god’s name came to your lips for her to stay, for you to not end. But she just rubbed her belly, slid deeper under those cheap cotton sheets, and smiled.