Chapter Text
This was a really bad idea and she knew that. It was impulsive and it was selfish and it was bad. She shouldn’t be doing this right now, not here, not today, but she’d wasted all of her time and this was all she had left. She’d picked a hell of a time to finally get her priorities straight, because she thought it might be too late.
No, she was sure it was too late.
It was too late.
But she knocked on the dressing room door anyway even as her heart tried to crawl up her throat. The face that greeted her when the door swung open wasn’t the one she wanted to see, but it was the one she’d expected she would have to fight her way past.
Barbie looked surprised to see her, but it was fleeting, because the next second her eyes hardened over with mistrust and dislike. It was odd to see such a look on her face. It was unsettling too. Barbie didn’t often wear a look like that unless she had damn good reason to. Unfortunately, she had damn good reason to.
“Summer, you shouldn’t -”
“I know,” Summer cut in, not having the patience for a lecture. “I shouldn’t be here, but… I need to talk to her. I have to.”
Barbie didn’t look like she cared what Summer needed. In fact, she looked like she was about to throw the door completely open and step out to deck Summer in the face. Summer knew she would deserve it, but she didn’t have time to deal with Barbie’s anger towards her right now. It wasn’t her anger that was important.
“Oh, do you?” Barbie bit out. “Did you stop to consider she doesn’t want to talk to you? Probably not, because you never consider -”
“Barbie, it’s okay. Let her in.”
Summer’s stomach flipped at the new voice. It had been six months since she’d last heard Midge’s voice, but it might as well have been an eternity that slipped by. Barbie glanced over her shoulder, likely giving Midge a look full of skepticism, but after a few seconds she turned back with a sigh and stepped away so that Summer could enter the room.
Summer wasn’t prepared for what she saw. She thought she was. She thought she had conjured up enough images in her mind’s eye that she would be prepared for whatever the real thing actually looked like.
But she was absolutely not prepared for this.
Midge, standing on the other side of the room, wearing a white dress that must have cost a small fortune. Her auburn hair was pulled back to expose her shoulders, and it fell down her back in subtle waves that were intricately woven with tiny white flowers. Summer couldn’t stop staring at her, at that white dress, not only because she was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, but because of what it meant.
It meant this was real. It meant Midge had moved on. It meant it was too late.
“Barbie, will you… will you give us a few minutes?” Midge whispered.
“Are you sure?” Barbie asked, her voice tight. It was plain she didn’t want to leave.
Midge nodded and offered her friend a shaky smile. Barbie lingered a moment longer, glancing between Summer and Midge, before she reluctantly left the room. As soon as the door was closed, a heavy, suffocating silence filled the air. Summer had thought of a thousand things to say on her rush over here, but now she found that she couldn’t remember a single one of them, and they all seemed like less than Midge deserved to hear.
She swallowed and cleared her throat, but it didn’t help. The words were dead on her tongue.
Midge was the first to break the silence. She regarded Summer with a long look, but Summer was having trouble meeting her eyes.
“Why are you here?”
Summer flinched. The way Midge asked the question wasn’t how she had expected. It was tired and defeated, instead of the accusatory anger that she expected. She at least had to answer the question.
“Midge, I… I-I’m here….”
Then she decided to say the dumbest thing she could have said. It was the one thing she had told herself she wouldn’t say, no matter how frustrated or desperate she felt.
“You can’t marry Allan.”
Midge stared at her for several seconds with an unreadable expression that Summer grew antsy under. Then she laughed, quiet and humorless. Disbelieving.
“Why not? Because I should marry you?”
Summer felt her cheeks flush with shame as she looked away. That was definitely a rhetorical question, because Midge already knew how she would answer. She was just making a bigger mess of things by the second. This wasn’t what she had hoped for at all, and now that she was here, standing in front of Midge while she was wearing that fucking dress, all she could think about saying were the things she had already told herself she wouldn’t.
She should stop talking. She should leave. It was too late. But she kept talking anyway.
“You’re not happy with him.”
Midge frowned and it was clear she was upset with Summer’s accusation. She shook her head.
“How would you know anything about my happiness?”
Summer swallowed roughly. There was a million ways she could answer that, she knew there was, but none of them would do much to sway Midge. They were all from the past, before Summer had revealed that she wasn’t willing to commit. Before she had made the biggest mistake of her life, though she hadn’t even guessed it to be a mistake at the time. But still, Midge expected an answer from her, no matter how lame it might be.
“Because… b-because….”
Fuck. She hated stuttering. That kind of weakness wouldn’t do her any good right now.
“Because I used to make you happy.”
Midge nodded and pulled in a broken breath, then dropped her eyes down to watch her hands smooth nonexistent wrinkles out of the front of her dress. When she looked at Summer again, her eyes shined with tears.
“Right, you used to, Summer. You used to make me happy,” She pulled in another breath, but it was stronger and reinforced this time. “And you took it for granted. You thought I’d always be content with the relationship we had. Though I’d hardly call it a relationship. It was one long tryst.”
Summer opened her mouth to argue even though she knew deep down that Midge was right. Midge stopped her with a raised hand, and Summer figured it was best to just let her talk, so she bit her tongue.
“I embarrassed you, right? That’s why I never met your friends, or your family, and you never held my hand in public. The big hotshot athlete couldn’t be seen with some small town nobody, could she?”
“Midge -”
But Midge kept talking, raising her voice to drown out any protestations Summer tried to make.
“I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I thought maybe you just wanted to reveal our relationship at the right time, since it would be big news thanks to your celebrity status. But so many months went by and you were just as secretive as ever. I was patient and I waited. I waited so long for you, so you can’t blame me for getting tired.”
Summer clenched her jaw. She remembered what had happened after Midge’s patience ran out. She’d said awful things to Midge, and she’d admitted awful things about herself. Midge left and she let her go so easily. She hadn’t even attempted to fight for her, because Midge was right. She’d clung too tightly to the embarrassment. She’d thought Midge’s low status was a dealbreaker. She’d ignored just how much Midge actually meant to her, how deeply she’d actually come to love her. And then months passed and as Summer sank into a type of depression she’d never felt, she’d finally realized how badly she had fucked up.
But it was too late.
“I know I made mistakes. Everything I did was a mistake. I realize that now, I-I realize what you were to me and what I lost -”
“That’s just it, Summer! I didn’t want you to realize what you lost, I wanted you to realize what you already had!”
The silence that followed Midge’s outburst was so heavy and scary that Summer had the uncharacteristic urge to run away. Or maybe running away wasn’t quite so out of character for her. She stood helplessly, knowing that she didn’t have any way to respond to that, not even with the thousand things she had planned to say.
Midge heaved a sigh filled with defeat, and somehow Summer knew that the conversation was over.
“You should leave. I can’t wait for you anymore.”
“I’m sorry -”
“Please stop talking and leave. I have a wedding to get to.”
Summer lingered just for a moment, taking another long look at Midge and knowing she would never be able to get the image of her in her white dress out of her head, and not in the way that most people would remember the love of their life in their wedding attire. This would haunt her.
She left. She walked out of the room and down the hall and out of the church, knowing she passed Barbie at some point on the way but she was too numb to acknowledge her.
It was too late. It had always been too late.