Archive of Our Own ^beta

Comemos con los ojos is what Letty is thinking, for some reason, and when was the last time she heard that one? Six years old, maybe, standing on the sidewalk on Sunset and staring in through the windows, but it’s in her head now, seventeen years and three thousand miles away. We eat with our eyes; can I eat with my eyes; she’s leaning back against the bar top with the bass pumping in her ears, with all the flashing lights washing over her. She might know the answer.

She might be looking for something. She might have found it. It’s hard to see with everybody pressed so close together, but if she waits long enough, it always comes to her.

This one’s voice is too high, but she has long model hair, glossy brown hair spilling over her shoulders. Letty wouldn’t want her in the daylight and she wouldn’t want her if she was sober, but it’s shadowed in the corners and when she straightens up, she stumbles a little over her feet.

In another world, which is how Letty thinks about California, she used to Iook at the soft, sleeping line of Mia’s mouth. There was something about it, the curve of her shoulder and her closed eyes, and even back then, she used to think: I could leave you. I could go out and do something so stupid that you couldn’t ever love me again.

She was twenty-three then, and she’s twenty-three now. She wonders about it sometimes: how was it that she didn’t know anything at all.

Letty is always telling herself she won’t do it. She’s telling herself she doesn’t need to do it. She won’t pick up the bottle; she won’t go out. If she goes out, she’ll stay under the lights.

She breathes out. She shakes her head to clear it. It doesn’t work, but she squares her shoulders and pushes her way into the crowd.

When Letty touches her arm, she turns around, blinking. It could work, Letty thinks. Her eyes could be brown with her pupils blown that big. In the dark, in the half-light, she’s almost there.

It can work. There are places like this in every club in Puerto Plata: bathrooms and back rooms and dimly lit hallways. Places where you can press a girl up against the wall and not think about it, about whether her hands are too rough in your hair.

She doesn’t ever take them home. It should count for something.

Comemos con las bocas. We eat with our mouths.

-

The thing, the thing that Letty can tell herself is: it isn’t like she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

She isn’t stupid. Dom isn’t either, but he’s probably in Cancún right now fucking a blonde, maybe even a blond with no e. That’s too far, maybe; she shouldn’t think that, not when he didn’t ever give her shit about Mia. Not when Mia was hanging on the payphone in Punta Cana, biting her nails over whether he knew that you couldn’t just cross the border and be done with it, not when the cops meet the chotas every week in Tijuana. 

The point is: he’s probably scanning for blue eyes, and it’s not like he knows why he’s doing it. Even Mia never said it out loud with the lights on. Letty was already half asleep, and Mia was tracing a line along her spine with one finger when she said, very quietly, do you think maybe-

Letty left her on the fourth night, in the third hotel room. She left her under the white sheets in Santo Domingo, with everything they’d brought with them and all the cash from the jobs. She has a duffel bag and the clothes on her back and she didn’t look back. She didn’t turn in the doorway, because Mia was sleeping on the left side of the bed with her hair tucked behind her ears, and Letty had done that.

She had done that. She had brushed Mia’s hair from her forehead and kissed her shoulders and purposely, carefully hadn’t fucked her, so that Mia would be a little frustrated, so that she would sleep with her back to her and Letty could slip out from under the covers and steal away. She had made up her mind back in Punta Cana, looking at Mia’s hand in her hand over the console: Mia’s soft fingers between her busted knuckles. Mia’s nails bitten bloody, her hand that hadn’t ever held the gun.

And Letty excises her demons in two ways, but in Santo Domingo, she crept down the stairs and slid behind the wheel and found that she couldn't remember how to drive. Something had disconnected inside her brain; her foot would rest on the pedal, but it wouldn’t press down.

She could walk. She could get on the bus to Bávaro and keep her head down, sitting in the back, slumped against the window. There she was, dark and blurred in the glass, but it wasn’t her, and she closed her eyes and felt the road go from paved to gravel to paved.

She couldn’t understand it at first. In the end, though, she thought, the problem was: she had spent her whole life behind that wheel. The problem was: her whole life, she had been driving home; she had been driving to the market and towards the finish, and there was Mia, leaning out onto the sidewalk. There was Mia - Letty could always pick her out even in the headlight haze, in the frenzy. Mia coming running to the driver’s-side door, laughing so Letty could see all her white teeth.

-

She can drive now. It took maybe two weeks to come back to her. She has a sleek little Maxima she picked up in La Vega – not the greatest, but a V6, and it handles all right. She’s been racing again, not at meetups, nothing formal, but she flashes her lights five times and waits for the reply. This car’s got no decals. They don’t expect anything. She doesn’t win big, but she wins every time.

She’s not picky. She takes pesos. The bars take pesos. Letty has gotten into something like a rhythm. She races and she goes to the beach sometimes and she cruises around after dark doing nothing, and every other night she goes out and gets blind drunk and makes a game of it, finding the right type of girl, that one kind of girl. She knows what to look for: the ones who haven’t done it before, the ones who want to. It’s there in the way their eyes linger on her.

Every town is the same, the same clubs, the same beaches, the same dark streets and the same liquor stores. In Letty’s head, Santo Domingo is La Vega is Puerto Plata; she doesn’t look up at the statues and she doesn’t go to any of the fucking tourist traps, so it all might as well be California, except that her Spanish is coming back to her.

Not smoothly – it catches in her throat. Her voice always comes out rough, like she hasn’t used it. She doesn’t use it for anything else but this.

She stays out until half past five in the morning. She sleeps until two in the afternoon. She wakes up in some motel room with a pulsing headache, and she never, ever remembers where she is.

In Puerto Plata, she wakes up with the sun in her eyes. It isn’t anything like that LA sunshine, that cool blue sunshine. It’s red and bloody. The ocean is like ten feet from her window; she can hear the kids shouting and the waves coming in.

She’s still in all her clothes from last night, her same little black skirt that she bought at nineteen, stained, something dried dark and sticky across the front. She gets her bikini on and goes out through the parking lot, because she can’t think of anything else to do.

She might mean to wade out into the water, but she stumbles down to the edge of the sand and falls, or maybe she just lies down in it. She feels it scorching hot against her back, and she passes out again.  

She wakes up with sand crusted at the corners of her mouth and an uneven red sunburn across her chest. She feels dried up. She’s been lying with her hand splayed across her stomach. It’s left a perfect outline, four fingers and thumb. 

How did you manage that, Mia would say. She would think that it was really funny. She would slot her palm over it and it wouldn’t fit; she has long, delicate fingers. Only you, Letty.

Letty blinks up into the light. The whole beach is crowded, every inch covered in striped towels and umbrellas and women lying on their stomachs, the strings of their bikini tops loose in the sand. Women picking their way out into the surf, jumping back when the tide comes in. Women with smooth, even tans and dark hair.

She could work, Letty thinks for an instant; she's about the right height; she has long legs and it doesn't matter that she's wearing the wrong kind of bathing suit. But a man comes wading into the water after her. He catches her by the hips when they're knee-deep. She laughs and lets him lift her up over the wave as it comes, and let her down into the undertow.

Are you wearing sunscreen, Mia would have said. Roll over, honey. You’re going to burn.

Sometimes, Letty feels kind of like a housecat that somebody let out into the wild. For all her - snarling, or whatever, she might be used to being taken care of.

Let me see, Mia said in the first hotel room, and led Letty into the bathroom, and guided her down onto the edge of the bathtub and slowly rolled up the hem of her tank top. She cleaned her cuts with the bar soap. Letty gritted her teeth and tried not to flinch at the sting.

You’re almost there, Mia was saying. I know, I know, and then she finished and brought Letty gently to her feet and took her to bed with her.

Letty still thought of it that way, for some reason. She'd only ever used to think of it as Mia’s bedroom. In a hotel room with one bed, Mia took her to bed with her. She laid her out on the mattress and told her quietly how in four weeks, all of the bruises on her ribs would have faded.

Mia called Letty thirty-four times before Letty dropped her cell out a third-floor window, before she went down and backed up over it, until it was twisted and flattened and the glass had shattered. Letty didn’t ever pick up. What she was waiting for was the call from the other number, from the landline, the call that meant Mia was back in California, safe and far away and out of reach, but it never came. She couldn’t use that phone for anything. Every time she flipped it open, it told her she had thirty-four unheard messages.

-

There are three rules that Letty follows. Number one: she’s done fucking guys. It’s nothing personal. Letty’s life has gone to hell in just about every conceivable way, but she isn’t knocked up. She wants to keep it that way.

Number two: she doesn’t fuck blondes. One of these days, she probably should. She thinks that it might be better for her.

Number three: she doesn’t dance, or she doesn’t dance unless she has to. She never has to. Letty is not the greatest dancer, but she has gotten this far in life because she knows what to do with her body in a way that a lot of women don’t. When she walks, she knows what to do with her hips.

Letty has gotten this far in life because she doesn’t think that she’s something she isn’t. She might not be the most gorgeous woman in the room, and maybe she doesn’t get dressed up, but it’s dark enough that it doesn’t really matter. She’s always drunk enough that it never really matters.

She doesn’t catch this one’s name, but she doesn’t want to. This one’s too drunk to understand or she isn’t even from here. She just stares when Letty says – nothing she used to say in California, no querida, just: tienes novio; nos vamos. It makes her giggle. She lets Letty tug her out into the alleyway.

She’s sloppy, but she isn’t so bad at it. She’s better than Letty expected her to be. She might even have done this before. Letty doesn’t have to tell her what to do; she can close her eyes and let her kiss along her jaw, and her teeth are too sharp, but close enough.

Letty doesn’t mean to say it. It just slips out.

She pulls away, and her eyes are narrowed. She’s not some tourist. She’s not that drunk, either.

“I’m not your anything,” she says. She kisses Letty hard on the mouth, sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, and then disappears through the half-open side door. Letty watches her dumbly as she leaves. She’s feeling something like numb, hollowed-out with the sting of blood in her mouth.

-

Letty drinks so that she has confused dreams. Blurred dreams, dreams that she barely remembers in the morning.

When she doesn’t drink, she dreams about sirens. Cruisers and the highway after the last job, the smoke curling up from the shoulder. A slick of something black and a slick of something red, and Mia kneeling in the front yard with her hands on Jesse’s chest, turning back to look at her.

Letty, Mia says, choked, wet, and Letty wakes up. It was so hard to find you, and Letty wakes up. You’re so pretty or harder, like that, breathless, and Letty wakes up. Where did you go? I was up all night waiting – and worst of all, it was only a dream, honey, murmuring, gentle. You were only dreaming. Go back to sleep.

She used to take Letty upstairs with her. In California, Letty was her – whatever. She kept her bed warm. Mia very occasionally called her her boyfriend, usually giggling, usually a little drunk, meaning it in kind of a playground way, but it got Letty’s hackles up.

Letty used to fuck her kind of lazily. It didn’t matter: all the time in the world on a Sunday afternoon, and sometimes she was thinking about something else, the jobs or what could be fucking up her spark plugs or how she was going to get out of going to the D-T. She used to shake Mia off sometimes, after, to duck out of her arms and push her away. It was too much. It was always too goddamn hot out, and if she could have her for one more night, in that shitty hotel room in Santo Domingo on a busted mattress with the A/C broken, she would want to be pressed so close to her that she couldn’t tell where Mia ended and she began.

In Santo Domingo, Mia could close her eyes and sleep. That was why Letty left her; it was why she could leave her. She hadn’t pulled the jobs. She didn’t have dreams where Letty told her: it was your fault, you held the gun, you fired the bullet-

Spear, Letty said, it was only a spear. She was so desperate to tell her. it was Dom’s idea; it was Vince’s fist -

She doesn’t think about the other part, which is: in California, Mia could never sleep if she didn’t have something warm in her bed.

“You’re pretty, honey,” says a dark-haired girl in Las Terrenas. She’s slurring her words, tipping forward, something sticky sloshing up from her plastic cup. In the pulsating light, with her eyes half closed, she doesn’t see Letty’s fist until it connects with her jaw.

-

Letty might be going crazy. She might be losing her mind. She can’t figure out where she left that fucking Maxima, but the fourth time she goes down the street, there it is, parallel-parked terribly right in front of the hotel.

Dom used to ask, usually leaning back against the hood, sometimes leaning out through the rolled-down window, what do we do when we don’t know what else to do?

He had things like that: the call-and-response. Letty kept her mouth shut and let Jesse have it: when we don’t know what else to do, we drive.

Letty doesn’t know what to do. She can drive, but there she is in the front seat. She keeps getting out of the car with herself, and even when she breaks a hundred, even when she breaks the beam, she’s still sitting there with her foot on the gas. What she wants is to leave herself behind on the sidewalk; she wants to leave herself sleeping in some hotel room.

She wants to wake up in California. When she’s stuck in traffic, men keep coming up to her hood. She always thinks that maybe they want to race, but they want to wipe a dirty rag across her windshield and try to charge her five dollars for it. They think she’s a tourist. They know that she doesn’t belong.

Letty doesn’t know what to do. She drives.

In Cabarete, the women are out along the boulevard. They’re all dressed like Letty, low-slung jeans and black halter tops. Some of them look like her, pissed-off, and Letty gets why; she knows there’s a kind of guy who likes that, having to work to coax a smile out of her.

Some of them don’t look like her at all. Letty is driving very slowly. Letty is thinking about doing something that, in California, she would have never, ever thought she would do.

This one is so close that it’s almost uncanny. She walks like her and she even has the right shirt, sheer and paisley-print and spaghetti-strap, something Mia would have worn to lean over the counter, to flirt back with some boy for tips, to make Letty jealous. Someone is watching Letty from above, sending the right kind of girl into her path.

Until Letty rolls her window down, she doesn’t know what she’s going to say. She doesn’t know what she says: something stupid, probably. What she needs to know is: would you get into my passenger seat; have you been with a chick; do you want to? She might want to know, can I call you whatever I want to call you.

She doesn’t think that that’s what she asks.

“Carmen,” the girl says, with one hand on the handle. She has a white grin. She has to push the seat back; nobody’s been in it. She sits with her knees a little pulled up, just like her.

“No, it’s not,” Letty says. She’s tired. She’s more tired than she’s ever been in her life.

-

She takes her to a random fucking restaurant, for some reason, some shitty place with six tables and the menu written over the counter. She buys her a hamburger and gets herself a beer, El Presidente in the green bottle. She thinks she’s trying to put off the rest of it. She isn’t sure whether she’s really going to go through with it.

Carmen, who has silently gone along with all of it, watching Letty with nothing more than mild interest, is chewing on the straw in her Coke. Letty knows what she’s doing; she recognizes the way she’s tapping her fingers against the table, the restlessness of someone who really just wants a cigarette.

If she asks, Letty’s going to tell her no. She’s kind of surprised she hasn’t picked it back up; they’re cheaper here, and there’s nobody to tell her she tastes like smoke.

Under the fluorescents, Letty gets a good look at her for the first time. She realizes with a sudden lurch in her stomach that she might actually be a girl. She’s not a kid, but she hasn’t lost all her baby fat. Her cheeks are still full.

“Jesus,” she says hoarsely. Carmen looks up, blinking. “Tell me you aren’t seventeen.”

 “I’m twenty,” Carmen says. If she’s lying, she’s good at it; she holds Letty’s gaze. She shrugs. “I can show you my license.”

Like that means anything. For five years, Letty’s said that she was born in ’73.

Letty drains the last of the beer, lukewarm and bitter, and says, “I’m not going to sleep with you.” She might be deciding it as she says it. She might be saying it to herself; it kind of feels like a weight lifted from her shoulders. She hasn’t sunk that low.

Or she has, because her mouth keeps moving. What comes out is, “I want you to come back with me.”

“Okay,” Carmen says. She sounds like she doesn’t really care, like this is a perfectly normal request and not crazy, like Letty is not throwing away three hundred dollars. It’s a great deal for her, Letty guesses, better than anything else she might have to do on a Thursday night. “Can I call my boyfriend?”

She wouldn’t ask that if Letty were a guy. There’s something in the way that she says it, like she thinks that Letty will understand.

Letty nods. She watches her go out onto the street, watches through the glass as she flips her phone open. She wonders briefly if she’s trying to make her escape, if someone will come by, a car for her to climb into, but when she finishes, she turns back. Letty doesn’t know what she says. She can’t read her lips.

The hotel is just a couple of minutes away. It’s just as shitty as all of the rest of them. For some reason, Letty kind of wants to tell her: I didn’t get this hotel room for this, but there’s no point. Anyway, maybe she did.

On the drive, she worked out what she was going to tell her, hands tight on the wheel, Carmen watching the lights through the window. Carmen stands with her arms crossed beside the bed, and for a moment, they’re just looking at each other. It’s just long enough for Letty to think about what she’s doing.

She puts it out of her head, and says, “I don’t want you to be here when I wake up.” She has cash in her pockets; she digs it out, enough, and sets it down on top of the dresser. Carmen’s eyes flick to it, a little hungry. “I don’t care when you leave, as long as you’re gone. If you’re going to rob me, I don’t have shit. Got it?”

Carmen nods. She glances at the television.

“You can watch TV,” Letty says wearily. “I don’t give a shit.”

Carmen flicks through every channel before she picks one. It’s some soap opera, a telenovela, Venezuelan or something with lots of crying. She hesitates, and then turns down the volume. It’s just a murmur, a woman asking angrily, how could you?

Letty lies down on the other side of the bed with her clothes on. She thinks about pulling the blankets up over her, and doesn’t. It’s hot enough already. She keeps waking up with her hair plastered sweaty to her neck.

She’s thinking about how fucking pathetic it would be to move closer, to ask: can I put my head in your lap, can you pet my hair. She’s thinking about how fucking pathetic it is to want someone to sit cross-legged in the bed beside her, so she can look up at her through half-closed eyes and it can be close enough.

She’s so tired. She’s hovering on the verge of sleep. The television turns off, and in the darkness, she feels someone slip underneath the sheets.

“Don’t,” Letty says sharply, but someone’s calf brushes softly against hers. Someone’s fingers are gentle on the back of her arm. A dark-haired shadow is coming closer: faint perfume and coconut shampoo, and someone’s lips ghosting over her cheek. Arms around her and someone who holds her like they love her, breathing out slowly against the top of her head.

“Mia,” Letty says, and closes her eyes. Mia, but how-

Yes, Mia says. It’s close to a murmur. Letty knows it’s a dream, but she’s melting into the warmth of her. Mia’s soft and hazy and immaterial, but her hand is running gently across Letty’s shoulders, back and forth, over and over and over. Mia’s all blurred around the edges but she’s there, saying, oh, babe. Saying: go to sleep, and you can tell me in the morning.

-

Letty wakes up alone. The cash on the dresser is gone; her duffel bag is lying unzipped beside the bed, and all her clothes have been rifled through. Carmen’s taken two shirts and her only nice bra. The rest of her money is still safely under the mattress.

Sloppy, Letty thinks. She didn’t know how.

She looks at the clothes spilling out of her bag. She’s been wearing the same four tank tops since Chula Vista. The rest were in there, folded neatly by Mia, packed by Mia while Letty was in the garage, cursing and painting over the airbrush on the Integra, changing the eights into threes on her plates. The rest were folded and still smelled like fabric softener, and now they’re in a crumpled heap on the floor.

With surprising clarity, Letty thinks: I am going crazy. This is how I go crazy.

She can see the colmado from the balcony. She has an idea of what she’s going to go and buy, how she’s going to spend the rest of the day. She’s going to start by getting very, very drunk. After that, she’s going to get behind the wheel.

-

They should cut her off at the bar, but they really don’t care if she can stay upright as long as she keeps sliding bills across the bar top. The glass has warmed up in the heat, in her hand. She can’t press it, cold, to her cheek, to her forehead, can’t let it wash away the bitter taste in her mouth. It’s weak and warm and she still drains the last of it and sets it down hard on the bar top. The next comes before she can ask for it, another five bucks scrawled on her tab.

It's stronger. She orders another one. She’s been drinking since ten in the morning and she’s still standing. She used to like that about herself, how she wasn’t one of those girls who couldn’t handle it.

(It’s like nail polish remover. I don’t know you can drink this.)

She’s in one of the booths, her thighs sticking to the vinyl. She keeps tipping sideways, keeps sliding down under the table every time she stops thinking about keeping herself straight-backed.

(Oh, you’re drunk, aren’t you? You’re drunk drunk. Oh, baby.)

There’s a girl in her lap. She hasn’t even spoken to her, or if she has, she doesn’t remember doing it. Letty can’t make out very much of her, just her black eyes and her low, drunken laugh, the sugar-and-curaçao taste of her mouth. She’s swimming in Letty’s vision; her hands are under Letty’s shirt, warm and wandering, and Letty is leaning back and letting her do it, not even really moving, not even trying to get her to where someone can’t see.

That’s her mistake.

“That’s enough,” someone says, quietly but clearly; her voice makes its way slowly to Letty in her haze. The girl is on top of her and then she isn’t, and someone’s hand is fisting in Letty’s shirt. Someone’s pulling her upright. Letty is blinking at Mia, who is looking coldly furious, standing in this bar in Cabarete, three thousand miles from where she should be.

“You’re in California,” Letty says stupidly. “You can’t be here.” She’s thinking: is it just that I’m so drunk; am I that drunk; could I be looking at someone else, or could there be nobody here at all, but Mia’s hand is real. It stings when she slaps Letty hard across the face.

Letty touches her cheek. Mia’s breathing hard, shoulders rising and falling, and Letty looks at her and wonders what she could do to make Mia hit her again. She’s leaning without meaning to towards Mia’s palm, her arm hanging loose at her side.

“Fuck you, Letty,” Mia says, bright-eyed. She draws her hand back. Letty turns her cheek towards her, but it doesn’t come. “I hate you. This is what you’ve been doing?”

“You’re in California,” Letty says. “You were supposed to-” and what she is thinking is, what was the point of all this, if Mia is here in Cabarete, looking out-of-place in her clean white sandals on the sand-crusted floor. The whole time, she has been telling herself: I had to do this; I have to do this so Mia can be in California, so she can be in school and back behind the counter and sleeping every night in her own bed again, without the cops looking for her, without having to look over her shoulder. Her voice sounds very small when she asks, “How did you find me?”

“You aren’t very good at this,” Mia says. “Do you know that? You piss off a lot of people, Letty.”

She says it evenly, her eyes narrowed and clear. She ices over like that. She used to stand at the sink with her back to her; Letty would have to go slowly across the tile and rest her head on her shoulder and try to talk to her softly until she thawed out, until she sighed and turned and put her arms around her.

“Mia,” Letty says, desperate. “Mia, querida-” but Mia just shakes her head.

“In California,” she says. “With what, Letty? What do you think I have there?”

The house, Letty thinks. Class on Monday morning, the market, and she opens her mouth and then shuts it again. Mia’s studying her. Letty’s fidgeting and feeling kind of like a little kid. The way she used to feel when she was sixteen, rolling down the window for a cop with the radar gun in his hand, before she was good enough to get away.

All Mia says is, “I knew you would fall apart.” She sounds something like disgusted. She turns around, and Letty thinks for one awful moment that she’s leaving her here, but then something is tugging her to her feet. Mia isn’t holding her hand. Her fingers are just tight around Letty’s wrist.

There’s a broken bottle on the pavement. Green glass. Mia is still driving that same Integra, Letty’s sloppy paint job coming off in streaks. The airbrush is there, faded, underneath. She has new plates, somehow - yellow plates, REP. DOMINICANA, because Mia always knows what to do.

Letty keeps her head down. She’s hoping that maybe if she does that, Mia will forget that she’s there, and then she’ll forget about being mad at her. She’s wondering if maybe, subtly, she can just rest her head on Mia’s shoulder, and maybe Mia won’t even notice, if she leans very slowly across the console.

“Get off of me,” Mia says, and elbows her almost hard enough to hurt. It catches Letty off-guard, sends her sprawling back against the door. “And don’t give me that look.” She looks like she might say more, but then she sighs, a hard, frustrated sigh, and turns back to the road.

Letty is trying hard to look away, but something keeps pulling her gaze back to Mia. She kind of can’t stop looking at her, her sharp profile, how the weak glow of each streetlight slides over her. The tense, rigid set of her shoulders, and how her hands have tightened around the wheel.

She kind of can’t really believe that it’s her, that she’s there, that she’s close enough to touch. She keeps thinking that if she looks away and looks back, there might not be anyone there at all. There might be some other girl in the driver’s seat, tall and dark-eyed and nothing like Mia at all.

Her whole hand is in Mia’s hair, then. She can’t help it, but Mia doesn’t even look at her. She just takes her wrist and moves it firmly back into Letty’s own lap, like Letty is four or five years old and not even worth getting really mad at. Letty remembers, then, how Mia never takes the bait when she wants her to. She just gets distant and icily calm. Letty wishes she could be hit again.

She keeps remembering how Mia hates her. She keeps wondering how, if Mia hates her, she’s going to climb into bed with her. If Mia hates her, how she can get her to hold her until she falls asleep.

-

It’s a walk-up, and Mia has to half-carry her up the stairs, has to keep one arm around her waist. She’s still leaning away from her. Blurrily, Letty is thinking about how she left everything she had in that Maxima, all her clothes and however much cash she had left, but Mia has money and Mia has clothes and Letty wants them, her jeans and her shoes and her tank top.

“I hate when you’re like this,” Mia says – she might mean drunk; she might mean clingy; she might mean all of it. Either way, Letty thinks maybe she can sleep it off, but she takes one uncertain step forwards, and Mia catches her wrist again. “Do you think you’re going to sleep with me?”

Letty looks at her, the hard set of her mouth. Slowly, she turns to the beat-up couch. She starts taking off her clothes, her skirt that’s still stained, her heavy boots. Mia isn’t even watching her. She can’t see her. She’s in the bathroom, running the faucet.

She looks at the couch. It has a rip down one armrest, the stuffing spilling out, and it looks just exactly like the couch in California, Mia comes out of the bathroom and pulls up short in the doorway. Incredulously, she asks, “Are you crying?”

Letty, who is not a crier, opens her mouth to say that she isn’t. Letty, who hasn’t cried since she was probably seven years old, since her wheel caught the curb and she went over the handlebars and tore up both knees and her palms on the asphalt, wants to ask Mia who she thinks she is.  

She’s crying big, hot tears, standing beside the couch in her underwear. She lies to herself all the time about everything. Mia is frozen in the doorway, looking torn, and for a moment, Letty thinks that she might give in. She might come over and gather her up.

“None of those girls would come to bed with you?” Mia asks. She’s being cruel. Part of Letty wants her to be cruel, but she kind of can’t handle it. She might still be crying a little, or when she touches her cheek, her fingers come away wet. “They wouldn’t hold you?” It might not come out as harsh as she wants it to.

“No,” Letty says miserably, and Mia might look a little surprised. She might soften the slightest bit, or she might not. Letty hesitates. “Do you hate me?”

Mia is quiet for a long time. She has shadows in the hollows of her eyes, the soft purple-blue of a faded bruise. She hasn’t been sleeping. Letty can’t look at her without feeling a kind of dull pain, something aching between her ribs.

“I’m glad you aren’t dead,” she says finally. “That’s kind of all I can say for you right now.”

It’s enough, Letty thinks. It’s enough for Mia to leave space for her. She won’t put her arms around her, but she lets Letty tuck herself up against her, every inch of her from her head to her feet.

“I’m never going to forgive you for this,” Mia says quietly. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life making this up to me.”

Letty hears it and doesn’t hear it. Only five words make their way to her. Blindly, she burrows deeper into Mia’s chest, into the warmth of her.

You can’t leave me, she’s trying to tell her. She opens her mouth against Mia’s shoulder: salt and the taste of her skin, and she could pick Mia out with her eyes closed and ears covered. In the still, silent dark, she would still know it was Mia: her heartbeat and blunt nails and coconut shampoo. You have to be here when I wake up, she’s trying to tell her. You can’t go.

“You don’t get to tell me that,” Mia says. Her voice is unsteady. “Do you hear yourself? You don’t get to say that to me.”

Letty can barely raise her head. She can raise it just enough to blink up at her, uncomprehending. Okay, but can I. But if I need to.

“Yes,” Mia says tiredly. She guides Letty down again; her fingers are soft when they brush across Letty’s cheeks. She might press a kiss into Letty's hair; she might not, but Letty feels her breathe out against the top of her head. Maybe it’s not soft, but she’s almost murmuring. “Go to sleep.”