Soulmates: Chapter XXXI

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30)

In an empty church, beneath the steeple, the doors remained open for two broken hearts pretending to be people.

A true lady to her last breath, Catherine Grant went in her own time.

Kara was there with her, till the very end, and she made sure Catherine left as Catherine would want to leave. There was a little blush on her cheeks, highlighter across the bones, lipstick and a spritz of perfume. Cat opened her eyes, for the first time in days, beautiful as she always was. She looked at Kara, tired but determined, and Kara said the things she needed to say.

The things she would never tell Lena.

The things Lena knew, perfectly well, would have been said, and yet did not mind nor pry.

Then Cat closed her eyes in the most decisive way, smiling a little as she did, and she was gone minutes after.

Kara sat craned and hunched, jagged and heartbroken.

“I want to cancel the wedding.”

“Alright,” Lena didn’t hesitate.

“It’s not alright.” Kara shook her head vehemently. “We shouldn’t—we can’t be planning something happy. I don’t. I don’t think I can do that. I don’t want to marry you anymore.” She swiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“That's quite alright,” Lena said it slow and certain, she clasped her girlfriend’s fingers and Kara pulled them back quickly into her lap. Lena felt no resent. “Alright, my darling,” Lena didn't try to touch her this time. “Kara I don’t care about the wedding. If it's just the wedding, or if this is the relationship done for now or forever, then I am still sitting right here next to you because I care, and I love you very much, and I'm not going to stop doing those things. It requires no uptake or effort on your part.”

“You should care about the wedding! You should care about all of it!” Kara snatched her swollen eyes across to stare with hateful, boiling anger. “You should care that I have been awful to you for nearly two weeks! And horrible, and cold, and someone not worth signing-up for marriage with, and—and!” Kara shattered anew. “You should care that you deserve better. You should care that you did not sign-up for this the day we met, in your office, when I thought you were the cleaning lady—and despite asking you those awful questions—you took me to the second-best park in the whole city the very next day because you're a good person who deserves good things!”

“I know. I’m not saying you are being crazy or imagining things—you’re not. You have been impossible to be around these last two weeks. Not because you’re a bad person but just…grieving. It turns people inside out, unrecognisable, and so yeah, I’m walking on eggshells, but I'm not mad about it.” Lena hushed and brought Kara’s head into her shoulder. “I know I should care but I just…don’t. I love you. Turns out I love you so much that I don’t need to find new ways to fall in love with you every day. And if this is you? For a while, or for the rest of your life, then it’s us, and it’s me walking on eggshells for the rest of mine.” Lena pressed her lips to Kara’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” Lena wiped a tear with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry you are in so much pain and that I cannot make it better. But I’m here. I’m here if it never feels better—and I’m here if it does.”

Kara nodded.

“Can we go home?”

“Let’s go home, baby.” Lena cupped her cheek. “Let’s get you home.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXIII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22)

On the farm where she grew up, there were seldom good things to do with the time. Farm work, the rough kind that started before dawn, then went into the late-night bringing home the cows and rounding up the sheep, that was for her father, her brother, the boys on the land who held some priority when it came to all the purposeful ways to waste a summer.

So, she spent most summers doing the same as she had always done. She rode her bike. She peddled, lost herself, went as far as she could, until all the muscles were tight, her palms blistered on the handles, panting and dry for a sip of water from her backpack.

In all the directions she could go off from her home, only a few of them led somewhere that wasn’t same old. There was the old reservoir, that was her favourite, where she wasn’t supposed to play but she did anyway. It was nice for the view, for the danger that came with playing hopscotch along the side of a steep drop into certain death, but children don’t care about things like that. Not during the Summer when school is out, when boys are a distant thing, and all there is to wile through the long, doldrum week is church on Sundays.

Then magazines happened.

Brighter than books, shorter and more jam-packed. It was the Woman’s Weekly in the doctor’s office. That was her first. Even now, she remembered it perfectly. A bright red cover with a headshot picture of this beautiful woman, with gleaming teeth, her hands positioned in such a way that she looked like some kind of angelic creature.

Inside, there were too many stories and not enough stories. The kinds of clothes that girls in the city were wearing—though certainly not wearing by the time the magazine had reached her some six months post-issue.

And there were stories about regular people too, doing regular enough things, yet none of it felt regular when it was read from the thin column surrounded by an air of manicured drama. That kind of gossip had only ever been heard before on Sundays, after church, sitting in the packed Denny’s on the outskirts of town, surrounded by other families who lived exactly the same way they lived.

So, she would eat her pancakes, precocious and quiet and straining into the sound of it all, learning about the schoolteacher who had left her husband and ran off with a woman. The salacious gossip of a boring, plain town that wasn’t actually all that boring when you got underneath the surface.

On the advent of magazines, all of a sudden, the gossip didn’t have to be gleaned and worked for, it was there in black and white, digestible as and when she wanted to read it.

But the fashion was, indeed, what she liked the most.

She had never seen women dress quite that pretty before.

Woman’s Weekly turned into Vanity Fair. It was more expensive, and so she picked up a few hours riding around on Saturdays delivering food menus, just enough money if she saved everything over the month, to send off for a Vanity Fair and a Cosmopolitan with a little change to put in her piggy bank.

Through the shiny, expensive pages of glamour magazines she learned about the world in ways her mother and aunties didn’t even know. The demitasse was for coffee—the teaspoon for tea. The only good silks were navy or emerald. The darker the material—the less the wrinkles showed after a day of wear. A bottle of champagne wasn’t champagne unless it came from the region. Prosecco was just as good because it was fashionable at the time and also cheaper—if not a little sweeter.

Twelve years old and tiny, yet already a woman of the world, and far too big for a place like that.

No wonder she ran.

Kara listened to every word and felt as though Cat were telling her a shared story—one that she felt to be own too. There was a smile on her face the entire time, remembering, recalling the gossip from Denny’s and the time she nearly fell over the edge into the dry reservoir.

Kara couldn’t imagine it.

A rambunctious, rural, dungaree and checked shirt, little Catherine Grant.

“You look surprised?” Cat observed the shock.

“I am,” Kara admitted. “I am and I’m not.” Her eyebrows quirked.

“I didn’t like the city when I first got here. People think rural places—”

“Are quiet, but they’re not, just a different kind of loud,” Kara finished her words.

They looked at each other for a moment.

Cat sighed and pushed up out of the chair first. “It’s getting late.”

“Yeah, I should be going.”