Peronel climbed out over limbs still marked from last night. A murmur of protest rose from her still-sleeping lover, but Peronel could not stop. She muttered an apology and pulled herself to the mirror, barely able to look ahead.
There, she stood, amid clothes hurriedly and less hurriedly pulled off from last night. Unmarked, but for the usual bruises. Still dreadfully without.
Quickly, she must pull on her clothes quickly. The buttons of her shirt tremble with her fingers as she tries, tries, tries to fit plastic disks into small holes in soft, white cotton. Next week. She’ll try again next Friday and next Saturday, maybe someone else -- maybe then. It’s times like this that she’s most grateful for her dark skin -- the blue veins of desire would not have shown well anyway, and she needs only to wear a sheer top and long pants to hide her lack over the years.
Why this particular emotion? The nebulous thing romcoms were based on, the clear-cut yes or no children alternatingly hid or showed off and learned about in health class, that thing her parents told her would burn inside her, that desire. Biologists worked so, so hard to try to uncover its secrets -- all she wanted to know was how to live without.
She stretches out, fully awake now. It's her house - she always insists - and she knows where to find things. Breakfast after nights like these, nights spent with strangers in the dark because it hurt too much to lose acquaintances, were somehow always easier.
It wasn't as easy at twenty, when she first moved out on her own. For one, her cooking just plain sucked. Oh, people were always so polite about it, but even she could tell. Practice, however, seemed to give her an edge in morning meals, and now she could cook foods that were not only edible but divine.
Soft morning sunlight streamed through the window and touched her skin like countless strangers’ hands. It left her unsteady, gripping at the counter and her stomach. Half an hour more.
A groan comes from the bedroom. (“Lights off,” she said last night.) Peronel takes the eggs (over easy) off the oven and strolls back into the bedroom. (Advantage of working at home: irregular hours and nobody to gossip about her at the water cooler, nobody to see her without.)
“Rise and shine,” she says. “I made eggs. You said you had to get to work by…?” Peronel wants this to be pleasant. It feels a little less like using their bodies when it is pleasant, some almost-apology, some remuneration. It’s easier for everyone to overlook things, when it is pleasant.
“Thanks. Eight thirty. Mmm, what time is it?”
“Seven forty.”
“Damn. Sorry, I’ll get out of your hair.”.
It’s easy, like this, to know what to say. It’s like with breakfast -- enough practice and you learn how to get it just right.
Peronel looks as her lover rises, beautiful blue stretching over skin. She is jealous -- wishes this could be like a movie, one of those she watched so much as a teen the DVDs’ colored coatings all flaked off (whose titles she re-wrote in acrid black sharpie), where she’ll find the right person, where she’ll find her skin lined with blue, where she’ll be alright, normal, functional.
(At fourteen, when her Brianne, who would marry the best friend of her husband and move in next door, they had this all planned out, told her, in whispers, that she’d gone blue for Tommy Hill, Peronel shrugged and wished her luck. Up until sixteen her parents had been so, so glad that she never had any blue lines, but then they started worrying, silently. At seventeen, Brianne stopped being her friend, after a shouting match about trust and telling me things, Peronel. She chose a college that was far away and cultivated, well, a presence. Kids used to whisper in the hallways of her school, wondering if she was natural or simply like they used to say about dark girls, so dyed in blue that you couldn’t tell that difference.)
In the kitchen, her lover writes something on a napkin before passing it across the tiny table. The plates are lined in blue, like her mirror -- Erosite, like her skin should be. If she does -- if she isn’t without, she needs to be sure, and her mother liked them, helped her pick them out when she’d moved in. It’d taken four stores and half a day.
“Here.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Geez, would you look at it? I’m giving you my number.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“I -- look, you don’t have to use it, if you don’t want to. But, you know, last night was fun. All of it. So, you know, if you ever want to -- well, just send something over.
Peronel smiles and wants this person to be the one, if only so she can stop looking. She remembers the bruises from last month, from someone who noticed, and fights to keep her lips upturned, eyes soft. She doesn’t get to reply before an exclamation catches her attention, and she looks up at her lover again.
“Shit, what do you put into this? It’s delicious!”
Peronel laughs, surprising herself when it isn’t another lie. This lover is quite likeable, more’s the shame. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. Milk?” she asks, pocketing the napkin.
“Yes, please.”
Setting a glass on the table, Peronel walks to the fridge to get the milk. It’s seven fifty. Her hands still quiver, almost imperceptibly. It’s not fair -- she cannot get to know this lover or any of the others or her neighbours well enough for them to start asking. Her hands want to shake, want to grip themselves in her hair and pull, want lines to appear in her skin even if she has to scratch them there herself. Her vision is blurring, though she’s sure she’s not crying, yet. It’s why she’s clumsy enough to spill it, onto her lover’s steadying hand.
She turns to get a towel, but not before noticing the table cloth stain blue, lines melting off her lover’s hands to reveal --
“I’ll get going,” comes a shaky voice, but not before Peronel’s hand clamps down on her lover’s wrist, another rolling up her own sleeves
(“Can’t leave too many marks,” she remembers, from last night. Another statement, another acquiescence she was more than glad to take at face value.)
I’m the same, she wants to say, but she’s crying, crying into warm, open arms that feel like warm blankets and not like iron brands for the first time. She remembers last night, in a bar full of lined people waiting, wanting, and remembers being approached by her lover, skin full of blue lines. It was dark, when they had been together, and her lover had retreated afterwards, to the bathroom. Dye, she thinks, giddy.
“Is it -- it is true?”
“Peronel -- but --”
The clock beeps, her eight o’clock alarm. She sets it to remind herself to get going, before someone notices the office hidden away (it’s easier for Peronel to work at home, to avoid the questions and the abundance of blue lines, half-hidden, and it’s easier for Peronel to pretend she doesn’t, to her lovers, because it’s not normal and people notice what isn’t normal and what-if-they-start-asking).
“Come over when you get out. I work from home,” Peronel replies, cheeks heating. Oh, gods, it’s like she can say anything right now.
Her lover nods. “I get off at five, with a twenty minute bus ride.” The city, Peronel recalls, is always easier to hide in. It’s why she chose it, after all.
Peronel smiles, closing the door as her lover runs out of view. One warm -- not searing -- shower is in order, then a day of waiting for something better than losing the feeling of hands upon her skin. It’s like -- she looks out as her lover, maybe something more, runs off to the subway -- twilight, half-dreaming. But she’s past pinching herself, is too old for those kinds of things for all that she’s twenty four.
Her hands reach into her pocket, pulling the napkin out, trembling with someone other than pain. She looks down at it.
“XXX-XXX-XXXX
“-- Morgan. Want to go get some coffee?”