Even years later, he still wouldn’t be able to pinpoint what it was about that night that had hit him so hard. Maybe it was just that, for the first time, he really understood the shape of things, what it all really meant. His stomach churned at the thought of the thousand or so half-baked, adolescent, lesbian sex fantasies he’d previously enjoyed. He’d never be able to think about it that way again. Well, not soberly anyway, and not for a very long time.
The bar that had once been home was tucked away by the river in the Warehouse District. Alice parked her car around the corner, cut off the engine, and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. She’d decided to give herself two minutes, two full minutes there in the car to collect herself, to make up her mind to take this step away from Jess and into the future.
It was the first time she’d ever passed up an opportunity like that. In fact, she’d spent the last five years mastering the art of making something out of almost nothing, going so far with so very little to go on. But now she just felt tired and homesick and thirsty. She lifted her head with a sigh, and felt for the keys, still dangling from the ignition. It would be so easy; just a twist of her wrist, and she could take it all back. Fight for her old life, for Jess, one more time. But the two minutes were up, and her car still sat parked on Constance Street, the decision made for her.
It was shocking how much of that last encounter she was still able to remember, given the amount of alcohol permeating her blood cells at the time. Catherine had only just left, which wasn’t saying much, considering she had never really moved all the way in, and already Alice was pinned against a wall, sweating gin and pulling Jess toward her by her belt loops. Her hand had unceremoniously slipped beneath the waistband of Jess’s jeans, and she’d delighted in the way Jess was laughing, panting, moaning into her ear.
And it was all happening so fast that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from gasping, “You have no idea how much I missed you.”
A few hours later, Alice found herself standing in her underwear in front of the full-length mirror she kept hidden at the back of her closet. For as long as she could remember, she’d been plagued by the slow-burning shame of not having been able to live up to anyone’s expectations for her. While everyone else had seemed to fixate on the whole gay thing (which had, to be fair, sparked its own private firestorm of anxiety within her in the years leading up to the big reveal), the source of Alice’s greatest disappointment with herself was her own uncooperative body.
It wasn’t so much that she’d thought of herself as unattractive really. It was just that she was so painfully average that most of the time it was just easier not to think of herself as having a body at all. Catherine had never been particularly impressed. In fact, she’d even once remarked that Alice had a body “only a feminist could love,” a comment Alice chose not to even try to decipher. And Jess had never seemed to give a damn about any of it, though Alice had never really known how to take that either.
There’d been remarks, over the years, about her eyes, or the softness of her skin. But the truth was, physically speaking, she knew she just wasn’t the kind of girl worth noticing, at least, not until the whole thing had happened with Nicole and the photographs…
Her face reddened at the thought of it, still.
There must have been a first moment, a first time he’d laid eyes on Alice Martin in all her indifferent, teenaged glory, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember it. Instead, it seemed to him that she had just always been there—hovering on the periphery of his life with her guitar and her rumpled notebooks—until one day, the light changed, and suddenly she was all he could see.
That day, he remembered.
When he comes home to find her lying on the couch in the dark in the middle of a weekday, the glow of some black-and-white movie on the television washing over her, he knows something’s gone terribly wrong. He’d seen her like this plenty in those first few months after he moved into the apartment, and it had scared him. He’d take a crying, raving, hysterical Alice any day over the girl who sat unmoving on the sofa, listening to Billie Holiday albums on repeat in the dying afternoon light.
