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You realise you’ve fallen in love with Trish when you are both sixteen years old.
The two of you look after each other. You hold back the physical demons of the world – her abusive mother, her grabby cast-mates, her psycho stalkers. Trish takes care of everything else, charming everyone into treating you well and leaving you alone, mentioning you occasionally in her interviews so that Dorothy can’t get rid of you without PR blowback, making you laugh when you thought you would never laugh again.
In a way, it’s unfair. You can’t stop the demons in Trish’s mind even though she helps so much with yours. You can’t stop the words Dorothy says to her when you’re not there. Dorothy calls her fat, needy, stupid, ugly, pathetic. Physical power can do so little sometimes. You know she still throws up even if you’ve stopped her mother helping.
You kind of get it. Sometimes Trish’s life makes you want to throw up, too, and you don’t even have the memory of Dorothy brutally jamming fingers down your throat to help that along.
But you do your best anyway. You spend every night curled up in her bed with her, whispering and giggling and sharing secrets in the darkness. You hold Trish’s absurdly slender body in your sleep, breathing in the scent of her hair and nearly sobbing at the sharpness of her bones against her skin. You’re there. You hope it helps.
Tonight, though – tonight she’s not there. Trish had a date, fourth date with a guy she’s told you next to nothing about except that his name is Paul and Dorothy approves and he’s in his twenties and he’ll be so great for her career. She doesn’t smile when she talks about him. You hate him on that basis alone.
She walks through the door and you’re off the bed in an instant. Trish’s hair is half-wild, her make-up a smear that nearly glows in the dark, what looks like mascara tear stains down her face. She’s limping. You reach out to pull her to you. “Shit, Trish, what happened?”
She blinks as if the question’s confusing, eyes dilated – concussion? you wonder for a second before being distracted – then she raises a hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her hair and you go cold. You grab her wrist very gently and turn it over. Your hand is shaking.
Finger-shaped bruises dot her arms. You start to hear weird noises, panting and gasping, and raise your eyes to meet hers, expecting to find her weeping.
“Hey,” she says gently, and you realise the weird noises are actually coming from you, half-sobbing and hyperventilating. And of course she’s comforting you, because she’s Trish. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s fine.”
“Not it’s not,” you sound nearly hysterical. She was limping and she’s bruised and oh God. “What did he do? Did he -” Your voice is just angry now and you prefer that. More in control.
“No,” she says firmly. She drags a hand across her face, just smudging the mascara further. “He – listen, I just want to go to sleep, okay? I’m just… I’m really tired.” And now she just sounds defeated. She climbs into the bed without even undressing, hides under the blankets like she’s a kid again. You stand there, trying to force your breathing to slow, trying to control the rage. Her voice comes from under the covers, unexpectedly young. “I agreed,” she says softly and very quietly. “He was on something and I shouldn’t have, but I agreed. He didn’t rape me or anything.” There’s a pause, and then her voice is even softer and somehow lost. “He just… wasn’t very gentle.” And then there’s a noise a little like a sob.
And you are sixteen and you can’t breathe and everything hurts and you want to go outside and kill everyone in the city named Paul because one of them is the guy who held Trish Walker down so hard he bruised her. The guy who made her cry.
And that’s when you know you love her.
*****
Trish has a type, you find out over the next few years. Big, muscled guys, normally much older than her. They don’t hurt her like the first one, as far as you know, and you would splatter their blood on the ground like his if they dared to, but they certainly belong more to the Dorothy school of love than to anything healthier. They like to control her, tell her what to wear or what she should eat. Tell her what she should do. Tell her what she should drink.
Tell her what kinds of pills and powders she should try.
You beat up several of them, but at the end of the day it doesn’t mean anything at all.
You hate them all, and that means even less.
*****
You’re twenty-two and you and Trish have left Dorothy behind forever, and Patsy behind forever as well.
Except they still seem to have squatter’s rights in Trish’s head. While you have casual relationships with guys occasionally, trying out romance, Trish’s MO of emotionally abusive druggies has stayed fairly consistent. Gradually she stops calling any of them love, and the relationships become shorter, but from the sound of it the sex becomes even more unsafe and the drugs become much more plentiful.
She’s not okay. You know it. She seems to, sometimes, as well. But she doesn’t want to care.
Taking drugs off her is pointless, she finds them no matter what you do. You remove Xanax from her handbag and so she buys pills from the bartender while you’re in the bathroom when you’re out together. You go out grocery shopping and when you come back to the apartment her eyes are dilated and her nose is red. You drag her along to an NA meeting and she passes out in the middle, you don’t even know what she took or where she got it. She has money and she’s stubborn and rich people in New York have their own little druggie subculture and there’s nothing you can do.
So in the end you just go to parties with her as some sort of desperate attempt to discourage her by your very presence. As if while you’re there she won’t drink half a bottle of bourbon, take five unknown pills, and go home with the sasquatch in the corner. Of course, this doesn’t have much effect.
Then one night as it’s getting late she presses into you. “Hey,” she says, eyes too bright and movements too disjointed. The bar is busy and you’re pressed into a corner. When you turn to steady her, reaching out your arms, she kisses you hard and clumsily on the mouth. “Jess,” she says against it, like she’s tasting your name, and then she kisses you again.
It’s like the whole world slows and narrows at the same time, so that every touch is a tectonic shift in the world, a world that suddenly only consists of you and Trish. The only noise you can hear is your uneven breaths, the only thing you can see is the blaze of her blue eyes, and you can feel every inch of your body acutely – the parts where you’re touching are suddenly on fire and the parts where you aren’t are cold with the lack of it.
You’re gasping and your whole body is in shock, electricity running through your veins in place of blood, but you’re already pushing away anyway. “Hey, hey, Trish, come on…” you say coaxingly, trying to slow your breathing, thinking she must be even more off her head than you thought. You steady her automatically as she stumbles. “Let’s get you home.”
“Mm-hmm?” she says flirtatiously, leaning back into you. “I’ve always wondered, you know… all those nights curled around each other…” she breaks off into laughter, you’re not sure what at. God, she’s shit-faced. Just alcohol you think tonight though. Her body against you is distracting now and you swallow and you hate yourself for considering doing it.
Because Trish is beautiful. And you’d be lying if you said that you didn’t think about it sometimes too. Her pressed against you in the nights, still heartbreakingly slender and maddeningly perfect. Infinitely more beautiful than the plastic Patsy that she once pretended to be. And truthfully, you’re a little drunk too.
Instead you take her home, leaning against you all the way, and trade kisses for glasses of water. Then she falls asleep intertwined with you like normal, sobered up a little, and you let out a deep sigh of relief and regret and think that it’s over.
*****
You wake up to a gentle kiss from her. It’s four in the morning, maybe later, and you can see by her eyes she’s still a little tipsy but not drunk anymore, not really. “Jess?” she says, her voice a little croaky, and you suddenly realise she’s nervous. “Earlier, I… I mean… Do you want…?” Suddenly she swallows, moves back a little. Her face is pale, eyes too large against the thinness of her wan face. “Never mind. Sorry I woke you.”
You see it in her eyes. She was alone in the darkness and silence, and she wanted there to be someone there with her. Maybe you, maybe anyone. So she woke you up to face it with her. The way she looks at you right now, you can make yourself believe that you’re the only thing she wanted, that anyone else would just have been a substitute.
So you let yourself give in to the dream.
You pull her forward and kiss her then, the way you haven’t allowed yourself to all night. You hold the back of her head to press her against you until it seems like you’re one person, fist your hand lightly in her hair. Her surprised intake of air feels like she’s breathing for both of you, and her moan only seconds later rumbles through the two of you. She pushes against you, shifting so that she is lying on top of you fully, so that her terrifyingly-light weight is all on you, and your spare hand finds its way around her back to push her harder into you then even her weight is.
You break apart and stare at her for a frozen, wonderful second. She stares at you, wide-eyed and bright with something legal for once, her cheeks flushed even in the darkness. You reach up and move a strand of hair out of her face, then stroke down the warmth of her cheek, trace your thumb around her lower lip as if to prove she’s real. She kisses your thumb, closing her eyes for a second as if trying to fix the moment in her memory. Heat moves down your arm and warms your heart and then travels further south.
Then the second is over and you crash together again.
It’s the most gentle passion you’ve ever experienced, strangely enough, for as much as you strain at each other, and the mewing noise she makes, and your huffing breath, you won’t let it be furious. Every fibre of your being wants to tear off the old t-shirt she’s wearing as pyjamas, but the idea of somehow hurting her with your strength is such an anathema that you force yourself to caress where you would normally grab, kiss where you would normally bite. It’s better, too, somehow, because every movement is a tiny way of saying you’re precious, you’re perfect. You could be vicious. You will never be, not with her.
You ruck up the t-shirt as you press kisses into her neck. The indent where her neck meets her shoulders is some kind of erogenous zone for Trish, when you mouth it, she makes an impossibly desperate sound you’ve never heard before. Eight years and you’ve never heard it once, and you’ve never seen her with her eyes dazed and needy, with her lips so swollen with kisses. Eight years and you’re finally seeing the woman you love totally and she almost blinds you with her bright fragility. You can’t stop pressing your mouth there, sucking at it until she is moaning and rubbing herself against you, until her nails dig into your back and she is canting towards you mindlessly.
You roll so that you’re on top, her t-shirt pulled up fully, and move from her neck to her torso. You ignore her breasts for the moment, taking a minute to kiss every single rib, too hard and visible against the taut paper of her skin, like a sheet draped over a skeleton. The terrible strain of her bones pushing up against her skin, ongoing proof of the bulimia that she’s never really shaken. You remember when that was the biggest fear you had for Trish: now it seems less important, it’s only relevance as a tangible proof that something is broken in her and you can’t seem to fix it. It’s only one sign of what’s going on inside and you think drugs will kill her first.
It isn’t ugly, this thinness. Somehow, it’s beautiful even as it is painful, and while tears sting your eyes your heart expands foolishly. Because what it is, is proof that Trish is even more wrecked than you are, but is still somehow the most amazing person you know.
It feels like pressing hard against her exposed ribs would bruise her, break her further, so your kisses are so light they may be fairy kisses. An act of worship and reverence more than lust. She reminds you that’s not what she wants by curving her body, pulling your head upwards to her breasts, and you comply eagerly.
You spend a minute there, enjoying the blind way she closes her eyes and presses against you, the soft symphony of “shit” and “oh God” and “Jess, please, please!”. With one hand you yank open the drawstring of her short pyjama bottoms, then move your lips down to where they’ve always wanted to go.
She tastes like nothing you’ve ever tasted before, sour and sweet and alien all at once. She quivers and trembles against you and that’s even better than the taste. You can barely see but somehow you find her clit and when you lick it she jerks and lets out a half-scream that is the best sound you’ve ever heard, so you don’t leave it alone. She gasps and twists and you steady her hips with your hands, and lick against her again and again, circling and flicking. “Oh, oh, oh!” She’s left words behind entirely now, writhing underneath your mouth.
You don’t want this to end so quickly. You step it back a little, though all you want to do is lick and lick until you hear every sobbed curse that she can come up with, until she shakes herself to pieces beneath you. You want to taste every part of her. So you lick away from her clit, running your tongue up one side of her slit and then down the other, playing against the shallows and then pushing your tongue fully inside her to her muffled shriek. Your face is so against her that all you taste, smell, breathe, hear and know is Trish.
You tongue a place inside her that makes her yank away and for a second you think you’ve fucked up, but then she breathes “Don’t. Stop.” Her voice is half crazed and you realise she pulled away because you found the exact right place and it was too much. So you move your tongue back to her clit but you push two fingers inside of her, and find the same spot, and her moan is greedy and wanting, and then she stops moaning and starts making noises you’ve never heard before, so full of need and pleasure and desperation that there are no words to describe them.
She comes with her hand grabbing almost painfully at your hair, saying “Fuck, FUCK”, squirming up against you as you lick and lick and lick. Your own wetness has drenched your panties at this point, but that’s not important, not nearly as important as seeing her face as she comes, so you keep stroking that hotspot inside her but slide up her body and bite lightly into the place where her neck meets her shoulder and then pull back as you feel that tell-tale loss of rhythm hit her. So you have a perfect view as her second orgasm crosses her face, eyes slamming closed, mouth open and gasping, face flushed and needy.
You thought Trish was beautiful before. This is something else. Maybe nothing in the world will ever seem as beautiful, now that you’ve seen this. Or maybe everything will be beautiful forever now.
She returns the favour, afterwards. It has an element of unreality to it for you – Trish is between my legs. Trish is licking me. Trish is touching me. Like a fantasy as much as it’s reality, only the slick of sweat and need, and the heat soaking through your bones, changing it from pure fiction into something believable.
You don’t swear. You don’t even know how she thought of words, if she felt like this when you were doing this to her. You’ve been licked at by guys before, and that’s always just what it felt like – like them lapping, aimlessly but hopefully, between your legs. Like they were adding wetness but not really achieving anything else, like this was an opening move that could be replaced by the addition of some lube. In comparison Trish’s tongue twists and burrows, finds the exact right spots to wring a groan out of you, seems to know the exact pressure needed and when a change of pressure will drive you crazy. It’s like nothing else. The little hums of pleasure she makes against you thrum through your body and make you wild. She makes you wild. Your girl. Your Trish.
You are combusting. You are gone. You are fire and air, you are transcendental. You thought you knew orgasms, and you have had them, lots of lovely little orgasms before, but this isn’t a little uptick of pleasure that makes you lose your breath, this is a goddamn tsunami of ecstasy and it leaves you gasping and thrumming and more bare than you’ve ever been as you collapse naked next to her.
*****
You wake before her in the actual morning, and you wish you hadn’t. What seemed wonderful and beautiful in the half-light of before dawn, seems tacky and foolish in daytime. She’s beside you. Some make-up is still on her face, her mouth is slack in sleep, her t-shirt is still on but pulled up nearly to her neck.
She’s probably woken up like this besides dozens of guys, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but what’s wrong is why she’s doing it – searching for something to block out the world. You’ve let yourself be one of Trish’s alcohol-and-drug-fuelled mistakes, the ones she sighs at the next day, and now you feel sick.
“Hey,” she says sleepily, smile starting to dawn like the sun as she wakes, but you’re already pulling your half-dead arm out from under her with a barely concealed anxiety and her smile dies. You need to be out of here, now. “Jess?”
You flee. You’re off the bed, out the door, and into the street, before she can muster another sentence. One there you realise the foolishness of this plan – what plan? – but it can’t be helped now. So you wander the streets in your pyjamas for a couple of hours, trying to broadcast assurance that of course this is just a new style. To limited success, judging by the snickers.
Of course, the main flaw in this plan is you can’t actually just vanish on Trish. So then you return home and let yourself in. She’s not there. A hastily-written note is, however.
Jess, I’m so sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have put you in that position, especially with both of us drunk, please forgive me. I would hate for this to ruin our friendship. Please, Jess. I am so, so sorry. SO sorry. Love Trish.
You crumple it up, breathe deeply. Don’t let yourself cry.
You know where she is, she’s gone to buy something – whatever colour pill or powder she’s out of today. Sure enough, when she comes back she’s slightly more on edge than she should be, nervous and fluttery. She goes to burst into apologies and excuses and you cut her off before she can speak many words.
“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” You flash your devil-may-care smile. The smile you’ve been using to block out people who want to see your emotions since your family died. “It’s fine. It was just a… release, for both of us. A good time. Hey, means neither of us had to do a walk of shame or go to some shitty hotel room with some dude who thinks a goatee makes him Johnny Depp, I call that a win, don’t you?”
She blinks, like you’ve said something surprising. Does Trish of all people expect you to be overemotional? You won’t be. “Oh,” she says quietly. “Okay. Good.”
You decide you’ll never mention it again.
*****
You do it again the next week.
*****
And the week after. What the fuck is wrong with you?
You tell yourself it’s to stop her going home with any fuckwits who might treat her badly. If you don’t take her home, some lucky guy will, and then she’ll be calling you to take her to a clinic or something. Or she’ll keep taking things and the night will end even worse. When she goes home with you, you sober her up, you never even touch her until you’re sure her yes means something. Really, it’s out of love – but not that kind of love. Friend love.
But you wonder if what you’re doing is taking advantage of her anyway. You take her home when she’s drunk or drugged off her face, so by the time she’s sobered up, if she wants someone there while she’s coming down you’re basically the only option. Is that some kind of fucked-up power-play?
On the other hand, you argue to yourself that by this point she must know how the night’s going to play out, and that she also knows you’ll be there without any sex if she just wants company, and that sobering up is much better than the alternative.
One night you feel like the worst human ever though. Her mascara is still down her face and even though she seems absolutely compos mentis right now, you have the memory of her eight hours ago downing shots like they were going out of style. So you say no, but you say it in what later you realise is the worst possible way. “I’m not in the mood, Patsy,” you say, tired and stupid and cruel. “Stop being so fucking needy.” You want to take it back. But you don’t. And you wonder if she feels guilty for taking advantage of what seems like the most obvious thing in the world – that you’re in love with her.
She goes quiet and doesn’t reply, and at the next party, never approaches you at all. Goes back to a hotel with some married guy who is as high as she is. Her eyes are kaleidoscopic and her smile is shattered.
Three weeks later she’s nearly doubled her intake.
Four weeks later you come home and she doesn’t seem to be breathing.
******
You call the ambulance and later on you hope to shit there’s no recording of that call. Every second word you say is a curse, you’re blubbering and panicking like a child, and you repeat I love her, I fucking love her in every sentence as if it’s the primary reason she can’t die. As if your love is a rope tying people to the world, instead of exactly the opposite.
Dorothy’s still her next of kin, apparently – neither of you thought to change that when you left. So you’re reduced to skulking outside her hospital room, threatening and begging Dorothy for titbits of information.
Then Trish wakes up and bans Dorothy from the room and gets the nurses to bring you in. After hugging her until you leave bruises, you pull back and look at her properly. She’s waxen, half-dead, her excessive slenderness making her face cadaverous, and the smell of the hospital antiseptic overwhelms the scent you associate with her, but her eyes burn with blue fire. Like nearly dying has woken her up.
“Dorothy called me pathetic,” she says, voice weirdly calm.
“She’s a stupid bitch, Trish -”
“Yes. I know,” and the fierceness which has disappeared over the last couple of years is back, and your heart is so full it hurts. “She is a stupid bitch. But she’s not wrong. Letting her still hurt me after all this time, that’s pathetic. I want to stop it. I want to get curvier and better and richer and never let her have a penny of the cash.” Trish hesitates, adds softly, “And I want you to stop looking at me like you’re scared I’m going to collapse at any moment.” She gestures to a sheaf of paper next to her hospital meal. “Wanna help me fill these out?”
You pick them up. They’re forms to enter a rehab. You can barely breathe through the surge of happiness and hope.
******
You visit her on every visiting day for the three months she’s in there. At first she’s a mess, later on she gains a little weight but can’t stop crying, and then she seems to hit some kind of blankness and stares at the sky a lot. Finally she starts seeming like a human again.
Sometimes you talk like she’s not in rehab at all, she asks about fellow druggies and acts like they’re social acquaintances instead of guys who supplied her with pills. Other times she shares things about life in there – “My therapist thinks I have daddy issues,” she says one day with an ironic smile. “Like, that’s why I date older guys. Looking for the father I think could have protected me and stopped Dorothy.” She rolls her eyes expansively. You remember the line of controlling, bitter fuckwits she’s dated and can’t help but think her therapist might have a point.
One week she mentions they need to have visitor for Group. Someone to essentially help flagellate them for the hell they’ve put their family and friends through by being a druggy. “That doesn’t sound like therapy,” you say, “Sounds more like a bad break-up. With an audience.”
She gives a half-smile. “Addicts, we’re kind of self-involved. It’s a way to help point that out, I think.”
“You aren’t,” you protest, though a part of you remembers the last year of almost constant caretaking and wants to agree. Sure, she’s damaged, but she’s damaged you a bit too. But of course it’s Trish, if she wanted to smash you to pieces with a hammer, you’d agree.
Her smile is as bitter as it is lost. “Sure. Please, though, I’d like it if you came, the only other option is Mom.”
Put like that you agree immediately, horrified at the damage Dorothy could cause.
Turns out you’re maybe worse.
*****
It starts badly and goes downhill from there.
“So you were in a relationship with Trish?” The battle-axe who introduced herself as Doctor Schneider says. In front of the whole group.
You don’t blush, but it’s close. “Friends. We’re friends.”
Dr Schneider shakes her head. “Honesty’s important. Trish said you were in a sexual relationship?”
“Sexual, yes,” you snap, “Relationship, no.”
Trish isn’t supposed to say anything, presumably because otherwise most addicts would just yell denials continually through this process. The others can ask questions though. A plump guy in the circle, who might have a claim to cuteness if it weren’t for his ridiculously tiny eyes, narrows them further. “So you were just, what, using her for a good time?” His tiny eyes rake Trish’s body and yours like he has X-ray vision and is enjoying what he sees. In his mind, you know there is a porno playing.
Trish puts her head in her hands.
“No. She’s my friend. My best friend. Sometimes we – look, is this really relevant?”
The battle-axe shrugs, as if it’s out of her hands instead of at her direct instigation. A woman to your left wearing an unwise purple blouse pipes up. “Using someone when they’re on something and can’t really consent, doesn’t seem very friendly.” She bites her lip and you wonder what memories are playing in her mind.
“We didn’t sleep together while she was high,” you snap, angry at Trish both for inviting you and for telling them about your relationship – shit, now you’re calling it that too.
“But you went home together high, she said that,” says Tiny-eyes, looking at Trish with a faux-supportive look, as if he’s trying to communicate that of course he’s been listening to her when she speaks. She still has her face partially buried so it’s ineffective, but then, it would be anyway. “She came onto you high.” He says the words like they have a dirty thrill. If he gets a boner, you’re punching it. Full strength.
“And what, if I said no the night would end much better?” You say, patience gone. “She just would have gone home with someone else, at least with me she got to sober up a bit and sleep in her own bed. At least then she was with me.”
Trish raises her head from her hands then, looking at you like you’ve said something shocking, and you realise you’ve been even more obvious about your affection than usual. “Jess -” she starts to say, looking like she’s about to cry, but then Tiny-eyes interrupts asking for further details and the battle-axe yells at him and Purple Blouse starts to ask something about the Patsy show and thankfully, you move off the subject of your sex life. Off the subject of how much you’re in love with your best friend and how she must know it by now because you’re fucking transparent when it comes to her.
After that settles you move onto discussing Dorothy and Paul and all the times you’ve tried to throw away Trish’s drugs.
You hate everyone in the fucking rehab by the end of it, even Trish a little.
*****
She comes home and she’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. They’ve ordered her off drugs and alcohol forever and off sex for a year, they’ve counselled her thoroughly about overlapping addictions, they’ve taught her coping mechanisms for absolutely everything. She’s probably the most successful and beloved person to ever leave the rehab. Battle-axe cries when she goes. Tiny-eyes asks for a lock of hair and Trish politely refuses. Everyone hugs her and makes her promise to come to NA, AA, CA, basically everything ending in Anonymous that they can think of.
And once she’s back, she apologises. Endlessly. To the mailman for the time she threw up on him, to the doorman for the time he had to help her up to the apartment, to the girl who’s boyfriend she unwittingly slept with two years ago. Apparently it’s part of this rubbish.
She apologises to a radio announcer she was rude to, and buys the woman coffee to apologise further. And charms her so thoroughly, the radio announcer suggests her coming on the show to talk about addiction and its after-affects.
Patsy talking honestly and openly about addiction, emotional and physical abuse, and bulimia, becomes the highest rated show ever. She’s invited back two weeks later. A week after that she’s given a tiny quarter of an hour slot in the show, where she briefly interviews other people in her low-key, understanding way. Not just other addicts or traumatised people, but everyone – so genuinely interested that it seeps through to the listeners and they care too. About chefs and musicians and street artists and nurses. People who wouldn’t normally agree to a radio interview agree to talk to the beautiful blonde with the empathetic eyes.
That’s how Patsy turns into Trish Talks, and that’s how somehow you stagger through. She never so much as kisses you again. She never even sleeps besides you. When you watch movies, she doesn’t sit with you on the couch.
You try to pretend that’s all good news.
*****
A year on, she dates again. It lasts a while. He’s still big and muscled and older and a little controlling, but whenever he tries to back her into a corner she takes him down a peg and shuts him up. It’s a joy to listen to, in a way, after the too-obedient Trish in previous years, but you still hate him on principle. He’s gotten the best thing in the world, he can’t expect to get your approval too.
One night she swings down beside you on the couch, leans her head on your shoulder. You’re watching an old movie that you first watched three years ago, with you forcing water down her throat, and eventually she turned to you and smiled and said that she was sober-ish now and would you please fuck her already?
The memory makes you over-warm.
She doesn’t seem to remember it at all. “Could you do me a favour?” she says, and her eyes are shining and she is so close to you.
“Geez, Trish,” you say. It’s supposed to be a light joke but it comes out cutting. Nasty. “If your boyfriend isn’t satisfying you, get a vibrator.”
She pulls back sharply, red flooding her cheeks. Her painful thinness is gone, now, but she is still slender – instead of a dry twig that can be snapped, she is a sapling and she bends with the force of your verbal blows now. “That’s not what I was going to ask,” she says, constraint in her voice. “I would never do that to you again.”
“Thanks,” you say, and the sarcasm is somehow lost in the loneliness of it.
“I never even realised I was doing that to you, at the time,” she continues, a bit miserably, and you want to scream at her to shut up. To please just stop. “I never even thought how much I was – you know – basically forcing you into it.”
Your mind goes blank. It’s so far from what you thought she would say. You gape at her. “Forcing me into it?”
“Well, emotionally blackmailing you, then,” she says, and it looks like the words hurt her. “I thought – at the time – I don’t know – I guess I just -” Her voice peters out.
“Trish. What the fuck are you talking about?”
She meets your eyes, and you realise this is hard for her too. “Before that Group session at rehab, I never once thought you were going home with me – sleeping with me – because the alternative was letting me go take stupid risks with complete strangers. I never thought you were doing it just so you could take care of me and sober me up. I put you in a position where your choice was to promise me sex or send me off to go hurt myself, and I was too stupid and off my head to see it that way. To see that I was forcing you into that choice.” She curls into herself, moving a little way from you. “I’m so sorry. So unimaginable sorry.”
You don’t know quite what to say, except, “It wasn’t like that. Trish, it wasn’t -”
And the doorbell rings. You and Trish stare at each other for a long tense moment, then she stands and walks over to the door too quickly. “Hello?” she says, voice sharp. Her boyfriend’s voice booms through, cheerful and a little drunk, come to see her because he says a day without her is a day wasted.
You couldn’t agree more with the moron.
She buzzes him up. Before he gets there, you clear your throat and ask, “What was the favour you wanted?”
“I thought we could have a night,” Trish says blankly, hugging herself as if she’s cold. “One night a week for each other. You know? A movie night, or TV, or even going out together…” her voice trails off. “Stupid, really,” she concludes. “We’re both so busy these days.” Her as a new talk show host and with her boyfriend, you with your crappy service job and temporary bed-warmer.
“Thursday,” you say. “I’m free Thursday.” It’s the best night for her, you know that.
“I thought you had shifts on Thursdays.”
“No. I’m good.” You do, but you’ll change jobs if necessary to keep Trish as fully yours for one day a week.
“Thursdays,” she echoes, and you both grin at each other like fools until her tipsy boyfriend staggers in.
*****
As fate would have it, it’s a Thursday when it happens. All you want is to hurry home to Trish, who’s broken up with her latest guy and wants nothing more than you and ice cream, in that order. You’re going to watch something – she wants Grey’s Anatomy, you want Game of Thrones. Whoever wins, she’ll bury her face in your neck for horrifying bloody scenes, and you’ll tease her for her squeamishness, and you’ll breathe in the scent of her hair. She’ll say her complaints and protests into the side of your neck and the world will be so beautiful that you won’t even care that someone’s getting hacked to pieces onscreen, and that your latest bed-warmer has started to talk commitment, and that the store was out of the good flavours so your ice cream is just vanilla.
You were always Trish’s hero, always. Before you were even friends. Before you loved her. You were always Captain America in Trish’s eyes. She jokes with costumes and encouragement, but the truth is that she’s never believed in anyone the way she believes in you – sometimes you wonder if your love for her is partially based on the strength of that foolish belief. As if her believing you are a hero somehow makes you one.
It turns out, Kilgrave believing you are his actually makes you his. Mind, body, and fucking soul.
*****
Your time with him is like drowning in seaweed. Your time with him is like choking on every breath of air. His words scum your mind like mould. His touch stains your body like ink – or like fire, the bad kind of fire instead of the passion you once had with Trish. Third degree burns invisibly pattern your skin. You aren’t even allowed to flinch away from the pain.
“Smile, Jessica.”
And you smile. You smile foolishly, a plastic smile, a Patsy smile.
“Strip, Jessica.”
And you strip. Quickly and efficiently. It’s what Kilgrave wants. And in your head, his words echoing, it’s what you want too.
“Not like that, Jessica! You love me. Show me how much you love me.”
You love him. You need to show him love. You don’t know much about love, but your body remembers how to show it, how you used to show it, reaching up to trace a pathway down his face, to stroke his lower lip. Leaning in to kiss the place where his neck meets his shoulder.
The inner part of you screams. This is not Trish, it howls at the world, not her, not her.
You lavish him with the love that belongs to someone else, someone who earned it by being broken and lovely and loving you, and you smile while you do it.
He makes you call her regularly. You expound upon the fantastic time you’re having, ignore the hurt and loneliness in her voice. Even if he didn’t tell you to keep her from being suspicious, you would, because your worst nightmare is her tracking you down at whatever hotel you’re at and barging in.
The beautiful fury on her face turning to slack obedience. Kilgrave’s grin as he realises he’s truly found a prize, one even more valuable than you, for all your super-powers.
Sleeping in the same bed as Trish, but with Kilgrave between you, an arm around each of you. Touching each other, but at his order and for his pleasure. Having to watch Trish go through this rape, this torture, when she’s finally managed to piece her broken self together like Humpty Dumpty.
Turns out even people in hell can still have nightmares.
*****
“Take care of her.”
You crash through Trish’s doors, red-eyed, covered in dirt and blood and horror, and she holds you in her arms like you’re a child who someone hurt. Like there’s nothing you deserve more than care and love. Like you’re an innocent.
Your first words are that you killed someone, someone who was actually innocent, actually good, and she doesn’t shrink away for a second. She smooths back your hair and says “It’s okay, it’s okay,” words that you both have known were lies for decades, but which you value the intent of anyway. To calm you down.
“Take care of her.”
She runs you a hot bath and she takes care of everything and deals with your stained clothing and doesn’t ask you a single question. She shows no anger at how you disappeared on her, how you left her alone. When you beg for a drink she asks you to please, please stay, and then runs six blocks to buy some whiskey and bring it back. If she has trouble entering the store and buying liquor that she’ll never drink but dearly wants to, she never shows a sign of it.
You drink the whole bottle and she doesn’t say a word, just cooks you a meal and soothes you and keeps saying “It’s okay, it’s okay,” even though it never will be again.
“Take care of her.”
And drunkenly you tell her the whole story and she never expresses a second of disbelief. Just sympathy and surety – “It’s not your fault, Jessica, it’s not,” – and you bury yourself inside the comfort she provides even though you deserve precisely none of it.
She is horrified at the idea of Kilgrave, barely able to stop herself from pacing and exclaiming as she hears you out. She is thrilled he’s dead, bloodthirsty as you’ve never seen her. She’s amazed that you managed to walk away. In Trish’s eyes, you’re a hero.
In your eyes, you’ll never be a hero again.
*****
Trish gets you to go to Dr Schneider. She’s still as painful as ever, but she does her best. Street names, like that helps anything.
Well. A little, maybe. But she’s still full of shit.
You drink. You understand the Trish of your early twenties more clearly than you ever wanted to. By the fifth drink, you can’t quite remember why it’s all so serious. By the tenth – well, everyone’s a bit of sociopath after their tenth drink. By the twentieth, you sleep. There are dreams, and you wake early, and you throw up, but it’s still better than no sleep at all. Headaches the day after are nothing to the horror of being awake all night, thinking. If anything, the pain of the hangover blocks out the thoughts.
Trish doesn’t say anything about you keeping alcohol in the apartment, her apartment, her teetotaller apartment, though you catch the occasional longing look. Trish deals with vomit, broken walls and glasses and plates, handles kicking out the lowlifes you bring home sometimes to try and drown out the voices in your head. Trish doesn’t say anything about the months you were gone for, when her show moved up the rankings because without you there her life is better, all she says is that she’s sorry she didn’t come for you. Because Trish is basically goddamn fucking Jesus, and you’re scum.
Six months in you’re not drunk enough and you can’t sleep and you drag her to your room. “Please,” you plead, voice broken, “Sleep next to me. Please.”
And then when you can’t sleep, you kiss her.
She looks at you, uncertain. “Jess -” she starts, voice pacifying, trying to shut you down.
You kiss her again, harder. “Please,” you say indistinctly against her lips, “I need this. Please, Trish, fuck, you said you’d help me. I need it.”
She allows it, curling into you, but you can still feel the hesitation in her movements, her soft touch. You shove your hand down her pants and rub against her roughly, enjoying the little gasp she lets out. It’s practically a fucking decade at this point and you still haven’t lost your touch, still haven’t forgotten the right places, the ones that drive her crazy. Some obvious but some not so obvious.
“Jess,” she says softly, “You just…” she lets out another little gasp. You press harder. “You need to know, you’re a good person, and I love you, okay? I love you.” You can’t tell if she means as a best friend, or in the way that you love her, but that hardly matters right now.
You raise your right hand again, pulling it out of her pants to her whine of dismay, in order to move that one stray strand that always gets in her eyes away. Then you automatically start to stroke down her face. And then all you can hear is your own harsh, frenetic breathing. Because you did this with Kilgrave, gentle and loving. You stroked and you wanted and it was his voice in your head but there was screaming and even though his voice has stopped, the screaming never has.
You move your hand to grip her arm, to avoid the trap, but in your head, your fingers stroke down her face anyway, they trace her plump lower lip. You don’t lean in to taste that spot on her neck but in your mind you might as well have. Her gasp in response. His gasp in response. A moan, that could be either the best person you know, or the worst.
No. Stop. You can power through this.
Trish whimpers. Something’s wrong with it, though, higher-pitched and more sob-like than the old ones.
You look at her and realise it’s a whimper of pain.
Your back hits the other side of the room hard enough to damage the wall, but you barely notice. Your eyes are on the growing bruises where you gripped too tight. One on her hip. One on her upper arm. Already turning purple, that’s how hard you gripped her.
The one on her arm is in the exact position where a People’s Choice once slashed the skin open, red and raw.
Because Trish has a type, and that type is people who hurt her. You just never thought you’d be one of them.
“Hey… hey, Jess…” her voice is soft and quiet, trying to talk you down from your panic attack. In previous ones she has helped, with her comfort and sweetness; if that wasn’t the case, you know she wouldn’t speak at all. Because Trish would punish herself forever if she hurt you again, the way she unknowingly did before.
It doesn’t matter. You’re off the balcony before she even has time to move.
*****
You get your clothes while she’s at a live radio interview, listening to it on earphones as you pack up your stuff. Because you need to know she’s not going to turn up. Not going to say anything.
Turns out, Trish is the one person you can’t be around anymore. Because you care if you hurt her. Because you love her, and Kilgrave turned your love into a trigger. Because you might never know how to be gentle again.
You find a dead end job, a dead end apartment, a dead end life. You don’t listen to the radio but you notice Trish on the side of buses, on billboards, in client conversations. She is happy and successful and amazing.
Will you always be destined to do this dance, you wonder? Trish was miserable and abused while you were happy with your family. Then while you were miserable mourning your family you saved her and made her life better. Then when she helped you heal from their deaths she got full-on bulimia and drug addiction. When she fixed that, you got Kilgrave.
You can’t be happy at the same time, clearly. But you also can’t be happy without her. So you’re screwed whatever, unhappy because she’s unhappy or unhappy because you are. At least like this, she seems fine. It all makes sense to your scotch-fuelled brain.
Then the Shlottmans turn up and it all goes to hell and the screaming in your brain gets so loud you can’t hear anything at all.
Trish looks at you like you betrayed her this time, and you think maybe you did, but weren’t you also doing it for her? You have cash in your pocket and on your desk and her smile is still the sun. Everything’s messed up now. Trish isn’t bruised by Dorothy anymore, she’s bruised because she wants to be her own hero, and a part of you wonders if that’s because she’s given up on you as one. Luke is unbreakable. You wish you were unbreakable. You can be more vicious, more physical, with him than you could be with any other one night stand. You break a bed. You go insane.
And trailing around it all is Kilgrave, a slug on a window. Covering the whole thing with trails of slime until you can see nothing at all.
*****
She starts fucking Simpson and so you start fucking hating him. He’s every guy she’s ever dated, minus the drug problem. Patronising and overprotective, trying to be her father instead of her equal. Lying to her for her own good. Do you do that, you wonder? The thought makes you cold. You aren’t them. You don’t want to be them. Trish is no weakling, she’s the toughest person you know, and that’s including the person with unbreakable skin.
But she is physically vulnerable in a way you aren’t. And emotionally vulnerable in ways you don’t quite understand. She’s an addict, that’s not something that stops, no matter when you stop using. But you shove a needle under her skin. You tell her you want to buy drugs. You bruise her in ways you can’t even see.
You are so fucking triggering for her that it rips your heart up to think about it.
Whereas she tries so hard – she remembers that you stopping her access to drugs means nothing at all, so she stocks alcohol just in case. Her belief in you is in every line of her face, every sentence she says. She doesn’t react to your triggers. She’s so strong.
Then Simpson is even more triggering – turning physically abusive with an apology, a Dorothy move if there ever was one – and Trish hits her own triggers and takes a pill. But she is tougher than him and tougher than you and nothing, nothing stops Trish from being the hero everyone else wishes they could be. She’s Captain America in the body of Malibu Barbie, with about as much physical clout. All the goodness and none of the power.
She is so terribly weak and so amazingly strong and you are so very, very lost without her.
*****
You curl yourself around a damaged Luke and waffle about the future and you don’t know if you mean any of it. Has he really forgiven you? If he was awake, could you ever say this? Is this a real future or an illusion of one? A relationship based on the fact that the sex can get as rough as you like doesn’t seem like a promising one. A relationship where yours were the hands that killed your predecessor, where one’s an alcoholic and the other runs a bar, where one is unbreakable and all the other one does is break shit?
At best it’s a hope. At worst it’s a prayer. In the real world, it’s a stopgap. You could never be happy.
But the burbling helps so you burble on.
*****
You’re in shock once they release you. Head home, listen to messages, delete them. Endure Malcolm’s worried stares.
Trish picks you up that night, ignores your arguments and drive you to hers. “I’ll take the couch,” she says, her voice even more insistent than after you got hit by a fucking truck. You won that argument, her expression says you won’t win this one. “You take the bed.”
“Share it with me.” She hesitates, so you add, “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“I’m not worried about you fucking hurting me,” she snaps back furiously. “I’m worried about you taking off for another six months.”
You swallow. Okay, maybe you deserve that. “Right. Sorry. I promise not to do that again. Ever,” you add as she looks at you. “Promise.”
In your head you remember every single one of Kilgrave’s words about what he’d do to Trish. If he hadn’t fallen for your ploy, that would be reality. You would have sent the only person you’d loved since the death of your family off to the hell you barely lived through. You need her beside you, tonight. You need to press your skin against hers and know that you’re both okay.
So she acquiesces and you curl up together in her mammoth bed, with its silk sheets. But neither of you sleep. Eventually, she clears her throat. “Jess?”
“Yeah?”
“I just…” Trish clears her throat again. It’s very unlike her to be so nervous. “What I said before you left…” you don’t say anything, forcing her to continue. “That I love you. I meant it.”
You swallow hard. “Yeah?”
“Not like you love me,” her voice is wretched, now. “But still. I needed to tell you that. And I hope we’ll still be friends, best friends, forever. Despite all that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we will,” Your voice is choked too. It feels like torture, having this so bluntly confirmed, that your love is and forever will be unrequited. “Forever.”
She squeezes your hand in the darkness. “I’m sorry my feelings got in the way of that. I’m moving on, though, I promise. I don’t think about you that way anymore.”
There is a long, awkward pause. “What? What way?” Are you talking about different things?
You can feel her confusion in the darkness. “You know. Romantically. I’m over it. I’m absolutely fine with us just being friends.”
“I… there’s a time you didn’t want us to be friends? Romantically? You wanted us to be romantic?”
Another pause. “Jessica? Are you okay?”
“NO. You wanted us to be romantic?”
“Yes,” Trish says, voice cautious. “Sorry, I didn’t – I thought you knew this years ago. I mean, I came onto you, repeatedly, even though you left every time anything happened and made it really clear I was past the line, and I’m so sorry for that. I went home with you from every party, if you were willing, and I didn’t even realise you were just going along with it out of feeling responsible for me. I wanted to go after something when I was clean, but the things you said made it pretty clear that -”
“I have been in love with you since I was sixteen years old,” your voice cuts through the air like a knife.
“You… what?”
You roll over and you kiss her, hard. Then draw back, because it’s Trish. “Sorry,” you mutter into the darkness.
“For what?” Trish’s voice is breathless. You can’t see her face in this darkness.
“Rough. Sorry.”
“So be rough,” Trish says, “I’m fine.” She kisses you every bit as hard as you just kissed her.
“I could hurt you,” you say, pulling back again.
“Yes? Sure. You could hurt anyone,” Trish points out. “For that matter, so could I. So could anyone. No one is ever letting go fully with someone else, if we did we could hurt anyone we like. I could have broken Simpson’s nose in bed, you could have scrambled Luke’s brains. If we loved as hard as we wanted, we’d hug pets so fully that we’d break their ribs, fuck people so hard we’d break their pelvises, high five so enthusiastically we’d fucking shatter palms. We’re all holding back.” She kisses you, slow and sweet, the chastity of it contrasting her vulgar words. “So be a little rough. I trust you. More than anyone else, ever.”
You are lost and broken and stupid and a murderer and a survivor and a bitch and an alcoholic. Trish has never, ever acted like any of these are negative.
And she’s an addict and bulimic and a manipulator and a rich brat and an abuse survivor and, absolutely, the best person you know. You will fight anyone who ever acts like she doesn’t deserve the whole world for the shit she’d been through.
But if she doesn’t want the world… if she wants you… well, she doesn’t deserve that load of shit. But it’s what she wants. And her eyes are the whole world and the way she pulls you in and digs her nails into you and pulls you down…
Well, you love her.
You’ve never asked before, how she felt about you, if she was in love with you. But Trish isn’t stupid. Maybe it’s time to trust her opinion on the matter.
And it’s about time you taste happiness again.
So you move yourself down her body until your tongue is inside her and you glory in the desperate little noises she makes.