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Chapter Text

“Does this feeling...ever go away?” The blonde woman questioned, gently tracing the thin rim of her glass with the pad of her finger. The three glasses of Chardonnay that she had already downed that evening weren’t providing the same warmth in her stomach the way that they used to. Blinking, her eyes felt sleepy, taking in the dim lights, casting a hazy blue glow overtop of the silhouettes of strangers.

New York night life was something Jan never thought she was capable of not admiring everytime she participated. There was something passionately intoxicating about streetlight lit pavement, bar hopping to set her friends up with pretty girls that would be forgotten within the next week and unto another. Searching for something sustainable in a city full of artificially sweetened sin and people with pretty masks to hide reality.

“I think it depends,” Brita spoke honestly. “On which specific feeling you’re encountering.”

Jan shrugged, pondering the tendrils of thoughts that were all tangled within one another inside her head. Her throat felt ever tightening, taking a sip of the remnants of her glass, savoring the acidity as she knew it would most likely take a bit for a bar server to be available to pour another. “This...this heaviness in my chest when I wake up every morning, like there’s a glass orb sitting on my heart with every moment of consciousness. And I have to tread so lightly… otherwise I remember it’s there,” she admitted, pushing back a strand of curled hair that had escaped from her hair barrette.

“When Aiden and I broke things off there was a lot of that similar sort of guilt,” Brita spoke, sipping on a sugary, tequila infused concoction between her words. “But I think it gets better over time, if that makes sense. Like I had to grow and realize that, I can’t only hold myself to blame for our problems. It takes two or more or tango.”

Despite her good intentions, Brita forcing Jan to join her alongside Blue and Rosie for a night out didn’t feel right. The other women had already paired off, having abandoned Brita and Jan at the bar for the overcrowded dance floor as soon as they strolled through the doors.

“I didn’t imagine it happening like this, let alone at all, not in a million years,” she simpered, feeling herself freeze for a moment. “I thought the word forever was the only one you couldn’t take back.”

It was a new feeling, going out without the presence of an arm already laying across your waist when you walked in, the absence of that little band around her finger. There was a certain security in walking into a room alongside someone, hand in hand.

Brita faltered, stirring around a paper straw in her glass with a thoughtful look settling on her face. “I’m sorry, Jan. I’m so sorry about everything, the ring, especially.”

An uncharacteristic scoff escaped her, smoothing down the tight fabric of her dress as she allowed her upset to leak into the conversation. “I don’t even know that she has it, maybe it’s just lost but… fuck I hate this feeling,” she laughed sadly, feeling like a fool. Yet another lost lesbian crying into her cocktail at the bar of Dianne’s corner club.

“Do you really think she would take it from you? After everything?” Brita questioned, placing her hand overtop of Jan’s, running her thumb over the skin of her palm.

Jan shrugged, eyes blurring with tears that she had been holding in each time she was forced into leaving the apartment. “I don’t think I know anything about what Jacqueline would or wouldn’t be willing to do to me at this point. We’ve never… we’ve never fought like that before.”

A playful jab about Jan’s cuddly clinginess in the night, rebuttled by a punch at Jackie’s cold energy towards her had led to an over exaggerated screaming match that lasted long into the early am hours. The end result was a stoic Jacqueline leaving the apartment and not returning, having felt more comfortable sleeping at her friend Gigi’s than under the same roof as her girlfriend of almost eight years.

“I think I’m gonna go check on dumb and dumber,” she teased, referencing to the bright haired girls they had lost sight of since entering the club. As Brita stepped down off of her barstool, she temporarily paused, looking back at her longtime blonde companion. The woman took a moment to smooth out her red skirt as she spoke. “Please, try to let yourself have a night off without thinking about what a bitch Jackie’s being. It’s the least that you owe yourself right now, Jannie,” she requested, leaving behind her empty, lipstick stained margarita glass as Jan pondered her words.

It had been two weeks since her fiancé of two years would say she thought some distance would be good for the pair of them, walking out of the apartment with several boxes on a dolly and a suitcase rolling behind her. There hadn’t been much time allotted for tears in the past weeks without her partners, jumping between voice lessons, auditions, classes at university, and shifts at her friend Shuga’s little coffee and bake shop. It was little things that served as gentle reminders of her ongoing lover’s quarrel. Rolling over to the empty side of the bed in the middle of the night, unused Star Trek mugs sitting in the cabinet above the coffee maker collecting light dust. Jackie’s toothbrush sitting on the sink untouched.

They were highschool sweethearts, a bright-shining freshman cheerleader and the residential Sophomore brainiac. Jan and Jackie didn’t fall into love, just sort of slipped from best friends to lovers with an unanticipated easiness. They spent holidays bouncing around between each other's families, each coming to adore the other’s partner quickly and strongly. Everything was mapped out to be picture perfect for the rest of their lives. Finish school, find a nice puppy to adopt once their lives began to slow down, get married after an elongated engagement, build up a family together…

Where did things go wrong?

“Hey, is this seat taken?”

Jan looked up from her white gel manicure, seeing a modelesque woman standing before her. Her slender torso and enticing curves were enhanced by the tight purple fabric of her dress, long sleeved to offer the modesty that was thrown out the window as Jan’s eyes were directed to the short length of it, hitting mid-thigh on the bronzed brunette woman. She was significantly taller than Jan, even without factoring her heels into the equation.

Jan shook her head, gesturing to Brita’s abandoned seat. “Feel free, as long as you don’t mind sitting next to an alcoholic,” she mumbled, referencing the empty glasses sitting in front of her.

The mystery woman smiled gently at her, easing into the bar stool. “Well firstly, I don’t think you’re an alcoholic at all, considering half of these are from whoever you came here with.”

“Oh really?” Jan questioned, leaning into her hand as she spoke curiously. “What makes you say that?”

She shrugged casually, looking at the remnants of Brita’s pink-cotton-candyland throw up she called a cocktail. “Because there’s a pretty big taste difference between whatever the hell this thing is, and all the wine you’re ingesting.”

Jan nodded. “I’m drinking away my problems until I get cut off, I didn’t even want to leave my couch tonight. I’m here with the girlies, against my will,” she ranted. “How about yourself?”

“Classes have been keeping me cooped up for a while, and I felt like getting out, doing some bar-hopping. Also, drinking my problems away,” she smiled easily. “I’m Jaida.”

For some reason the blonde felt warmth in her stomach for the first time in the last few weeks. “I’m Jan,” she smiled. “So, you mentioned classes? How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Jaida slid a black purse off of her shoulder, sitting the bag atop the bar as she spoke. Jan couldn’t help but notice the delicate gold hoops pierced through the cartilage skin of her ear, amongst a few other studs and statement earrings. “I’m 24, I’m a med student at NYU working towards my doctorate, but I work as an ER nurse with my pre-existing degrees. How about yourself?”

Jan blinked, feeling a little underwhelmed in herself as she sat beside someone like Jaida. She was gorgeous, and personable, and a doctor. “Um,” the blonde blushed a bit, feeling silly talking about her goal. “I’m 22, going to school for musical theatre and education. I want to be on Broadway but something tells me that won’t work out, so I’m studying to be a music teacher, just in case,” she rambled, twirling a loose curl around her index finger.

Frowning, Jaida turned to face the younger woman beside her. “What makes you say that?”

Jan shrugged, trying to explain her thought process. “Big city, easy to get forgotten about or overlooked, especially in the theater scene.”

Jaida shook her head in disagreement. “You don’t seem very forgettable to me.”

An easy quiet fell between the two of them, the bustling of the dance floor and booming music behind them serving as a buffer within the lack of conversation. Something about Jaida’s presence felt comforting, despite barely knowing her.

“Could I maybe get your phone number? I think you’d make for a nice coffee date,” Jaida spoke, smirking at the blush spreading across Jan’s cheeks.

“I can say yes to the phone number and definitely to the coffee date, but maybe just as friends,” she explained, fiddling with the little silver star ring on her middle finger, one that Crystal had gifted her for her birthday the year prior. “If that’s okay with you, because I’m kind of engaged to my longtime girlfriend but also not because she dumped me like two weeks ago without saying she was dumping me, so I don’t really know where I fall as far as single or taken at the moment,” she rambled, feeling her cheeks redden as she realized the assumption she had made. “Not that I think you’re into me, necessarily, I just-“

“Woah, chile, calm down,” Jaida reassured, laughing to herself at the blonde’s antics. “That’s okay with me, I just… think you’re nice and would like to be friends, if that’s okay with you?” She teased.

“Yeah,” Jan breathed in relief. “That’s more than okay with me.”

“And hey,” Jaida spoke softly, sliding her hand overtop of Jan’s and offering it a sympathetic squeeze. “I’m sorry about the whole girlfriend-fiancé situation.”

Chapter Text

Sometimes when you’re sad, time gets stuck. Blurry eyes attempt to make out the figures hidden in photographs behind broken glass frames, drinking a bottle of wine all by yourself in an almost grotesquely revealing cinched mini dress, body slumped against the unforgivingly cool metal of the refrigerator door on the kitchen floor. It feels like clocks slow, and eventually stop once hours shrink into fragmented minutes and seconds forming moments made to be forgotten. That little forgotten pit in your stomach only grows larger and larger, as if the feeling will grow overtop of you to consume yourself.

Jan was stuck.

She had let herself sink into the feeling of loneliness like an addictive bad habit to a point where she didn’t think she would ever come up from. If her girlfriend was there she would have looked at her with softened eyes and encouraged her not to drown her sorrows in drinking all. Jackie would have done that thing where she rubbed the pad of her thumb over the back of Jan’s palm, she knows it calms her down and lets her breathing slow down to catch up with the rest of her. Jackie would have unzipped her party dress for her and loaned her this specific Harvard sweatshirt of hers from highschool that Jan was obsessed with. Jackie would have let Jan fiddle with her dainty necklaces while she poured out her heart because she noticed Jan gets fidgety when she’s upset. She would have been a quiet kind of disappointed but she would have taken care of her.

Jan was stuck and Jackie was satisfied with leaving her to be stuck.

The blonde was overcome with anxieties she had never known before, and with such sluggishness that she felt exhausted by the thought of continuing to exist sometimes. Jan was a happy girl, someone who others constantly looked to due to her bubbly nature and kindheartedness. She couldn’t help but feel like a shell of herself, so, so constantly exhausted yet incapable of sleeping each night, spending her nights crying and staring up at the ceiling aimlessly, petrified of feeling this alone. For someone with so many friends and colleagues she felt isolated, in her mind and her thoughts. She didn’t have an appetite anymore, either, too sleepy and too sad to stomach anything that wasn’t coffee in the morning or wine in the evening before trying and failing to fall asleep.

Coming home from class felt so lonely when she knew she was going to be greeted with problems she wasn’t ready to face. Slipping under the covers each night with nobody to greet, framed pictures from graduation, prom, and different events throughout their shared lives to be found with a quick glance in any direction. Little potted succulents sitting in the windowsills because Jackie adored plants but her and her partner alike often got too caught up in hectic work schedules to remember watering the poor little things.

An untouched toothbrush sitting on the bathroom counter. All of Jackie’s stolen t-shirts sitting in a sad little pile at the foot of her bed, too in love to do anything but sleep in the worn fabric and hold onto this one tangible piece of reassurance that everything would be fine. That this was a one-time, argument that would end with complimentary kisses and cuddles and too many I’m Sorries from the two of them to count.

There had been no communication between either of them in the weeks of Jacqueline’s residence outside of the apartment. On the exterior Jan put up a good front, after all, she was a well practiced actress. But when she was forced to look back in the mirror at herself each night? Jan was scared.

Jackie’s fetish was communication. Talking things out, ironing any wrinkle before Jan’s eyes could even blink towards it. Jackie didn’t run away from things, she forced them to meet her mark.

“Fuck,” Jan groaned, wiping at her tired eyes with a balled up fist, too deep in the hole to care about the continued smearing of her glittery eye shadow. She reached for her phone, previously abandoned on the floor during her drunken antics from stumbling into the dark kitchen, swiping her way through the security set up of her purple cell phone until her fingers hovered over a familiar contact.

Realistically, she knew Jackie, whether she was still at Gigi’s apartment or not, was asleep. It was almost two in the morning and she knew in her gut that some part of her fiancé and their relationship was lost, missing in action and apparently quite nonchalant that Jan had been leaving her voicemails all week long.

The eventual death of the ringing tone only made Jan’s eyes water with more tears as she heard the Persian woman’s voice reciting that she was unavailable and to leave her a message in both English and her familiar home language of Farsi.

“Hey, Jacks,” she croaked, feeling her chest tighten with cords of anxiety. “I haven’t heard from you in...in a while. I just hope you’re doing okay, wherever you are.”

The blonde was getting more and more choked up as she failed at holding back the truth of the contents within her head. Weeks of fake smiles in front of her friends during their frequent get-togethers, pretending that sleeping alone hadn’t made her feel so scared for herself and her relationship because Jackie just left. She couldn’t even sustain the false confidence or heart to talk to Jan, so she walked away. She rolled two suitcases down the stairs and ubered away.

Janet Mantione was a well-versed, wonderfully practiced actress, one in refusal of letting anyone see the man behind the curtain. She was happy, bubbly, singing show-tunes Jan as usual, to the people in her daily life, and why mess that up by letting everyone see a picture of herself that wasn’t pretty? Why let them see a Jan that felt so, so small inside, a Jan that was struggling to find happiness and navigate the thought of life without a lover.

“Whatever I did- to make you not love me anymore,” she blubbered, shoulders shaking with her sobs. “I promise I’ll do anything to fix it. Just...please come home.” Her eyes were stinging from the mascara that had since smeared across her eyes, looking more raccoon-like than drunken heartbroken lesbian on the prowl for a good distraction as she was only hours ago.

Rolling her fingers over the hem of her dress she let out a shaky exhale. “It’s-it’s not like us, to not talk. Just… give me a call when you’re ready. I love-“

“Your voicemail message has exceeded the 60 second limit, if you would like to send a text message to, ‘Jacks’, press-“