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CAILURE EXCHANGE 2021
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2021-08-21
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The Santa Ana Winds Blew Knowingly

Summary:

Audra Levine blows knowingly into Rebecca's life when she's at her lowest. What does she know? No one knew. Or maybe they did know. I don't know.

Notes:

For #5, for loving Rebecca at her worst.

Thank you so much to alliuminary for helping me rework this into something readable. All remaining mistakes and questionable decisions are my own.

Work Text:

It happened like this:

Today Rebecca was feeling reinvented, like a person who had paid several thousand dollars for a life-changing makeover, and this gave her the confidence to walk around in public for the first time since the whole crazy lady 911 incident. But then a strand of very expensive fake hair came loose at work, so she pranced down the street to buy some hair glue or something, platinum locks bouncing with every step, when - you’re not going to believe this - she bumped into Audra Esther Jewish American Overachiever Size Two Jeans Problems Levine.

Right there, in the middle of a sidewalk in West Covina.

She wasn’t dressed like a lawyer. To be fair, neither was Rebecca (she did a casual shoulder roll in her skintight denim jumpsuit, knowing it made her cleavage pop and knowing Audra had always been jealous of her ample bosom), but Rebecca lived here. What was Audra doing here, in her flowy embroidered skirt and knit top, on Rebecca’s turf, in the aftermath of the most publicly humiliating series of breakups Rebecca had weathered since college? It was categorically suspicious.

But Audra didn’t say anything cutting. Her eyes honed right in on the curve of Rebecca’s chest the way Rebecca wanted, but then she glanced up at her face and gave an awkward, apologetic little smile. "Sorry ma’am," she said, "I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going." And just like that, she made as if to keep moving.

"Audra!" she shouted after her, beginning to question if this really was Audra and not her eerily bohemian west coast doppelganger. "What the hell?"

Audra came to a screeching halt and flipped around.

"Rebecca?" She bounded back over, looking Rebecca up and down with a mix of awe and what seemed like a nearly manic anticipation. "Rebecca Bunch?!"

"Um, yeah," Rebecca said, trying to pull her breezy California Girl And Future Miss Douche voice back up over her discomfort. She was a whole new unflappable Rebecca, and Audra Levine of all people wasn’t going to flap her now. "I live here." She narrowed her eyes. "But you knew that."

"Of course I knew that!" Audra gushed. "I moved here because of you!" She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Like, because you inspired me, I mean. After I saw you at that trial where you didn’t even care that you’d totally beefed it, I knew there had to be something magic in the air here. And I decided I wanted it on it!" Audra beamed; the expression lacked any hint of snobbery or underlying evil, but it also sort of looked like a bodysnatcher was making her face muscles stretch in ways the host body was still trying to reject. "Anyway, I’ve been meaning to see if I could find anyone who has your number without interacting with a single lawyer, because obvs I wanted to look you up ASAP but I’m no longer about that life, but the thing is I’ve just been having so much fun here already. I’m learning to surf because it only takes two hours to drive to the beach and have you seen how big the pretzels are here?? Times Square vendors would charge 40 bucks plus tax for those portion sizes, but not the pride of the Inland Empire. People are literally nice here!"

Audra paused to gulp in air, and Rebecca seized her opening. "So what you’re saying is, you moved here because you finally beat me in court? You totally upended your life and moved across the country for... me, your lifelong rival? Oh yeah, totally not suspicious at all."

"No no no, I moved here for me!" Audra declared with no small amount of conviction. "I learned about West Covina and how, like, happy it can make you from you, but I didn’t move here for you. You get how those things are different, right?"

Did Rebecca notice the sweltering press of deja vu this whole conversation was giving her? Sure she did, but it was drowned out by bitterness that Audra was getting her season one West Covina awakening while Rebecca was stuck in the season two doldrums. (And by season, obviously she meant the glow of a person’s first California spring, versus the summer when everything became less "temperate" and more "muggy, and four hours from the beach," and your new friends and coworkers had gone from thinking you were the bee’s knees to knowing you’d gotten double-dumped, and everyone had opinions about that which did not account for how confident and reinvented you obviously actually were… point is, a lot could change in a season.) Of all the people in the world, why did Audra Levine get to swan around town following her bliss while Rebecca felt like an old penny whose shine had been rubbed down to pewter?

Then again, Rebecca didn’t actually know how long Audra had been here. Maybe her penny’s shine would wear off soon, too, and they could be grimy and green together, like old times. Rebecca breathed out some tension at the thought. "Sure, yeah, makes sense. So Audra, how long have you been in town, anyway?"

"Oh, it was totes a recent change. I had to let how I was feeling after Greater City Water vs. San Gabriel Valley really marinate before I could understand what was going on inside me… David and I didn’t even formalize our divorce til last month. I’ve only been here for a week and a half, so I promise I haven’t been hiding from you or anything sneaky like that!"

"Wait. You... divorced your husband? David, who you’ve been with since eighth grade? Audra, what the fuck?"

Audra’s sunny demeanor dimmed just slightly, and her eyes grew a little challenging. The opening chords of a victory march swelled inside Rebecca's head. Familiar territory! Finally.

"So what if I did?" Audra replied carefully. "You said it yourself, he’s a rotten lay."

"Uh, yeah, but I’m not the one who fought like an 80s movie on steroids to beat out all the shiksas in Scarsdale for junior prom queen, homecoming queen, and senior prom queen, with the same skinny nerd on my arm. You two have major history. Besides, if you didn’t dump him for cheating on you with your buxom nemesis in law school," Rebecca did another incredibly subtle shoulder roll, "why now?"

Now Audra was looking outright shifty. Good.

"It was, you know. All part of becoming my authentic self. See, Rebecca… the thing is…"

Rebecca unconsciously stepped a little closer, eager to get that vindicating glimpse of same-ol’-Audra behind the weird new mask.

"I’m... well… " Audra was staring at her feet, but she seemed to think of something that perked her back up. "Y'know how you just had that big meltdown over Josh and Greg dumping you, so you dumped into your own shoe, and your neighbor took a picture, and now the recording of your 911 call has seventy thousand youtube views and is even more devastating than the last time you burnt down a house over a breakup and - "

"Of course you saw that." Of course the shoe pooping (aka "shooping" aka "the event one most wishes one could digitally edit out of reality") had brought Audra new pep and vigor.

"Duh. I have been here a whole week. But my point is that you took that humiliating trainwreck and just like you always do, trash-compacted it down into one teensy little stepping stone on the shame-repellant road that is your life. I mean, look at you, dressed up like a hot milf, headed to what, a costume party? In the middle of the work day? Rebecca, you are amazing. So free! - "

"You said you had a point?"

"Yes, right!" Audra giggled. Rebecca tried to be gratified by how nervous it sounded. "Well, I myself did a Rebecca, where, like, I burnt down kinda just my whole life, in a way, like the David thing, and some other stuff too. But instead of there being ash and sulfur on the other side, there was a whole new me! A realer me. A… a happier me. And that’s when I realized - "

"Oh em gee Audra, hold that thought." Rebecca said. She had heard enough. More than enough. This is what happy looks like. "I juuuust realized it’s the middle of the work day and I’ve wasted my entire lunch break on our little hang. We’ll have to finish catching up some other time!"

"But I didn’t get to the most important part - "

"Aw, that’s very sad for you, but contrary to your insulting assumptions I have a job to get back to so," Rebecca bowed with a little flourish, "I will, how they say, a-smell you later…" (Audra smelled like the beach. Like sand and salt and something uniquely west coast. She’d been here a week.)

"Okay but if I could just tell you the key thing - "

"Good day Audra." Rebecca spun around and started clip-clopping away on her oversized wedges. Who decided these shoes were a good idea? Her next makeover artist would definitely get a talk re: preparing your client for conversations she might need to escape from quickly.

"I’M GAY!" Audra shouted before Rebecca had made it safely out of earshot. "I’m a giant lesbian!! That was the realization, the one that changed everything!"

Rebecca tried to pretend she hadn’t heard and just keep walking, she really did. Audra’s life was Audra’s life and Rebecca needed to get back to hers; it was never her hair extensions that really needed gluing back in place, after all. But, well, she’d been raised on the theater and loved a dramatic reveal, and Audra and David had been one of the most aggressively heterosexual couples she’d ever met, and she wanted to see if new Audra made more sense in this new light. And okay, maybe she expected to finally get a peek at a chink in Audra’s peppy new armor. Some "my mother rejected me after I blew up my life so I flew across the country to escape her" melancholy, some "I’m trying to fit into a whole new scene in my late 20s and all the cool queer Socal hipsters can tell I have no idea what I'm doing" self-consciousness. Something.

Instead, it was like all the earlier frantic energy had drained out of Audra, and in its place was a butter-commercial-worthy contentment. She was smiling, a private little smile that felt truer than anything she’d said or done yet. There was something weird about her posture, too, and then Rebecca realized it was that her shoulders had relaxed, that there was a genuine ease, a stillness about her. Audra was an oasis, glistening and serene, and perfectly unreachable.

Rebecca had never felt quite so much like a sexy cactus stranded in the desert, parched and alone. Not since the first time she’d watched Josh Chan walking away on a Manhattan street corner.

"I said good day," she forced out through a too-dry throat, turned around, and didn’t let herself look back again as she walked away.

*

Rebecca didn’t come back to work that day. She knew she needed to go home and think.

Home was currently the Davis residence, but Heather’s super nice parents saw that she wasn’t in a mood to talk, and gave her their bedroom and slept on the couch so she could be alone with her thoughts. Heather probably would have protested this, but she wasn’t home and Rebecca was.

So think Rebecca did. She thought and she thought, and she researched and she researched. She did the kind of masturbating that helps you think, and watched the kind of porn that bolsters one’s research. When the thoughts got too overwhelming, she did some unrelated research on stingrays to take her mind off it, and when her research findings got too confusing, she did the kind of masturbating that helps you nap, and slept for a few hours, but everything was in the interest of thinking and research and processing her thoughts and research.

Rebecca returned to work the next day feeling reinvented, again. She was certain everyone would be able to tell she was a whole new person, for realz this time.

"Oh, honey," Paula said when she walked in. Pitying? Yes. But also an instant reaction, which was more than Rebecca had gotten from her yesterday. She was turning heads!

"What happened to your hair?" asked Darryl. "Is there some hip new trend I don’t know about? Oh gosh, should I shave my moustache? But I love my moustache…" All right, Rebecca had been counting on Darryl to explain her new look to everyone else, but had forgotten he was very old and very uncool. A minor miscalculation.

"Good morning! I’m George!" said someone whose opinion didn’t really matter much.

"Yasssssss Rebecca! Go off!" cheered Karen. "Oh oh oh, will you be the new ambassador for my clitsucker line? I’ve heard that vibes sell like hot cakes as soon as you get that queer influencer seal of approval."

"Wait, this is a queer thing? I’m queer!!" Darryl reminded.

"Women only want coital aids endorsed by hot young gay men, not weird old bisexuals, Darryl."

"Ugh Karen I mean is Rebecca’s haircut a queer thing. I don’t want to help you sell sex toys, gross!"

Rebecca seized this generous opening. "Yes! Thank you Karen, Darryl. Paula. I am indeed sporting The Lesbian Haircut," according to google, cross-referenced with nine forums and 25 works of porn, a whopping six of them made by and for the lesbian community, "because I am finally embracing my authentic self, and I am proud to say that authentic Rebecca is a gay woman."

She waited, smiling, for the warm and congratulatory embrace of her friends and coworkers that such a pronouncement was sure to bring.

Instead there were questions. So many questions.

"What’s lesbian sex like????" demanded Karen. "I’ve always wondered. Is scissoring actually possible in real life?"

"I second that question!" said Tim.

"Thirded," said Jim.

"Is there a bisexual haircut too?" Darryl asked, nimbly demonstrating the right way to have no boundaries in the workplace. "Is there someone you can ask for me, Rebecca? I love my moustache but I’m all in on being out…"

"Are you wearing flannel, or would you say that’s more of a plaid chamois?" Maya asked, eyes glowing. "Love it, either way. Overdressing in summertime is the way to flaunt your repudiation of societal norms!!"

"Maya, the adults were talking," snapped Darryl. "My question was really important, too! Rebecca, tell her."

"Everyone, stop." Paula snapped, more snappishly than Darryl. "Just stop this. Honey…" she turned to Rebecca, and her expression gentled. "You can’t be gay. You talk and think about men literally constantly. Your day-to-day is more heterosexually active than my honeymoon was. Whatever you’re going through, we can help, but lying to yourself and everybody else isn’t the answer."

And Rebecca had prepared for this. She’d read a million articles on compulsory heteresexuality, and internalized homophobia manifesting as hypersexuality, and the differences between the act of having sex and the feelings of desire and connection behind it. But hearing her best friend say it in that sympathetic tone was just…

For the second time in two days, Rebecca simply walked away.

(As she went, she could hear Darryl saying "Well… she could be bisexual, you know," and Maya’s enthusiastic "uh huh! uh huh!" but she didn’t stay and wait to hear Paula shoot that down too.)

*

Obviously, she went back home, for more thinking and research. She wondered if Audra Levine ever dealt with people telling her she couldn’t be a lesbian because she had fucked too many men, and liked it, and was considering fucking a man right now to calm down, but then reminded herself this wasn’t about Audra, who she otherwise hadn’t thought about once since yesterday thank you very much. This was about Rebecca.

Heather was back from her senior (?) retreat, and Rebecca had to lock herself in Heather’s parents’ bedroom to hold herself back from just going and asking what her coolest friend thought about every frenzied question she was having. Heather was so chill and laid back, and always had answers to everything, but these were answers Rebecca needed to find for herself. And also, if Heather agreed with Paula, Rebecca would just have to give up. Probably find a new place to move to and start over. Somewhere right between the coasts this time. Maybe Chicago.

But she wasn’t there yet. She was a Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer who knew how to construct a watertight argument from boxes of disconnected evidence in a single afternoon. She wasn’t going to collapse in the face of one mother figure slash friend’s cross-examination. She just needed more time to think.

And research, of course.

So that’s what she did, gently letting Heather’s parents down when they invited her for dinner, and pretending to be asleep the next three times they tried to tempt her out of their bedroom.

Tonight her research led her deep into her own memories, and then deep into masturbating and dream journaling (sex dream journaling had to be a breakthrough therapeutic method of some kind; she’d bring it up with Dr. Akopian next time she saw her), which carried her from her deep subconscious into the early hours of the morning. The sun was starting to rise when she realized exactly who she needed to talk to.

*

"Valencia!" she bellowed when the apartment door didn’t swing open at her insistent knocking. "It’s an emergency, Valencia!! Open up please!!"

"It’s six in the morning, Rebecca," Valencia hissed, yanking her inside. "What the hell? You’re going to get a noise complaint filed against me."

"Valencia! Valencia, Valencia - wait, is that an entire plate of fruit salad? Why are you eating dessert before breakfast?" Valencia had this thing about saving fruits for "special occasion splurges" because sugar was addictive or something. What special occasion was she celebrating at 6 in the morning?

"I’m not. Well, I am, but it’s none of your business. Anyway you’re the one who’s being weird. I don’t like you and I didn’t invite you so explain yourself and then get out!"

"Right! Okay, so remember when I first moved here and I met you and we became like, instant besties?"

"So you could get close to my ex. Obviously I remember that, but if you’re here to talk about him you can just leave right now."

"No nonono, I’m not here about Josh I promise. I’m here about you! About us."

"Us."

"Yes, us! Honestly, Valencia, has anyone ever told you that you could do comedy? Your deadpan is just - " Rebecca mimed swooning into her hands. Valencia was glaring in a way that said get to the point or I’ll stab you with it but her cheeks were also a little pink. It was cute.

But! It was not why Rebecca was here, so. "Anyway, what I wanted to ask you about is that time I kissed you. Do you remember that?"

Valencia’s expression burned hotter; lethal, like a laser to the temple. "That’s why you’re here?"

Rebecca knew she was asking to be shot or stabbed or some other dangerous metaphor, but she plowed forward like an intrepid super-spy. "Yes! I am doing some research, some very important field research, into, well let us call it girl on girl action, and so I just wanted to find out how that, like, was for you."

"You are such a freak. How that ‘was’ for me? It was awful. I thought you were my friend and then you stuck your tongue down my throat. Usually other girls betray me by stabbing me in the back, not in the mouth!"

"Okay, okay, so I’m hearing predatory lesbian vibes, I’m hearing harassment and objectification, that’s not great, but what I’m not hearing is that you felt like a straight girl was kissing you."

"What."

"Right? Like you said my whole tongue was in your mouth. That is not the hesitant hetero behavior of a woman who wants to lock lips or hips with men exclusively."

"This is beyond inappropriate. You need to leave."

Valencia started pushing Rebecca towards the door with her deceptively strong yoga muscles.

"I’m going, I’m going!" Rebecca promised. "Just one last thing!"

"Rebecca, I swear to god…"

"Was it a good kiss? More specifically, did it feel like you were being tongue kissed by someone who wanted to snog you, as opposed to someone who just wanted male attention, or maybe wanted to be you but not be with you - "

"GET OUT!" Valencia shrieked, physically womanhandling Rebecca out her front door. "And don’t come back until you learn how to flirt respectfully! Or at least coherently! Fuck!"

Rebecca considered, her heart thumping with peculiar excitement as the door slammed shut behind her, that she had never heard Valencia drop an f-bomb before.

*

Rebecca knew it was time to regroup. She should go home, think about everything she’d just learned, maybe finally talk to Heather and ask for advice. It was definitely weird that getting yelled at and pushed around by someone who hated her guts left Rebecca’s blood pounding and her adrenaline pumping this way, and she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly because of it.

But what she wanted to do was act. She felt like she was close, close to answers, to finally getting some clarity. Talking to Valencia had absolutely been the right move. She couldn’t say what it was she learned, but she knew this trip hadn’t been a waste.

And she may not like it, but she knew precisely who she had to find next.

*

"Paula, I need your help."

"Jesus, honey. I stayed up til 4am trying to finish a paper and you look like you got less sleep than me. Are you sure you should have come into work today?"

"I won’t be staying, don’t worry." (A disappointed "aw" could be heard from the direction of Darryl, technically her employer’s, office.) "I just need your help on something real quick."

"Okay…"

"My friend from Scarsdale is in town and the last time I saw her I kind of yelled at her so I wanted to surprise her with apology coffee. Can you help me figure out where she’s staying?"

"Rebecca, this sounds an awful lot like hijinks."

"It’s Audra Levine, Paula! She invented hijinks."

"Audra -- oh god. Is that why you’ve been so…" Paula waved a hand at Rebecca, gesturing to her haircut and the same flannel shirt she’d worn the day before. "I’m sorry for what I said yesterday. You just surprised me. I can’t tell you what you are or aren’t, and - "

"There’s no time for this, Paula!" Rebecca shouted, too amped up to remember how much she'd wanted this apology less than a day ago. "If you’re really sorry, help me find Audra!!"

Paula frowned, but dutifully typed a few things into her computer, grinned, and printed out an address.

Rebecca snatched the address out of her waiting hand. "You found her already? You’re the best, Paula!"

"Her contact information on facebook is set to public, honey. You could have done this yourself."

"Cool beans, you’re a peach, alright everybody, I am having a feminine emergency and will have to take the day. See you tomorrow!"

"Does she listen to even half the things I say?" Paula asked as Rebecca twirled away.

"Come back soon!" Darryl called after Rebecca. "I miss you."

*

Audra’s cottage was cute as hell. So cute Rebecca could probably lose an hour just wandering its perimeter, admiring the Eastlake architecture and gingerbread trim. But that would be dawdling, and even if some of her adrenaline had worn off on the way over, Rebecca was still here to act.

So she walked right up to the second home of a woman who strongly disliked her in as many hours and gave a single, confident rap on its front door.

She heard footsteps scurrying forward and then the door swung wide open. Like ten different expressions seemed to pass over Audra’s face before she settled onto a twitchy sort of disdain.

"Bunch," she said venomously. Oh yeah, she hated Rebecca.

"Audra." Rebecca gazed coolly back, then brushed past the soft cotton of Audra’s peasant dress into the house. This was going to be a conversation they should have inside, she knew that much.

"Are you here to apologize?" Audra demanded, following her in. "For your undisguised homophobia? Honestly, Rebecca, I expected better from you."

Rebecca was momentarily thrown. "Homophobia? I can’t be homophobic."

"Uh, I think you can," Audra snapped, voice thick with all the sarcasm Rebecca had been missing two days ago. "I came out to you and you just walked away without saying anything. Even my mother said something! It wasn’t nice, actually it was probably the meanest she’s ever been to me in my life, but at least I knew she was listening!"

"Damn, I can’t believe I wanted that for you. That’s brutal."

"You what?"

"Ahem, nothing. Audra, can we talk about all of this later? I promise I just left because you seemed really happy and I was jealous, not because I have a problem with lesbians, but I came here for something else."

"You were jealous of my happiness? Seriously?"

"Ugh, yes, don’t get a big head about it. Can we talk about my thing now?"

Audra visibly deflated a little, but in this giddy way that seemed more for show than anything. (Performative deflation. Only Audra Levine.) "What’s your thing?"

"In order to talk to you about it, we have to be in a bathroom." Rebecca said.

"You are the weirdest person I have ever competed with," Audra said. But she led Rebecca to a door down the hall and they walked inside a picturesque room, complete with a bowl of rocks and decorative soaps. "Okay, seriously, what is it."

Rebecca closed her eyes. Alright. Okay. It was go time.

She opened her eyes, elbowed the bathroom door closed, and pushed Audra up against it.

"What the -- whoa! I thought you said you wanted to talk, not fight."

Rebecca imagined all of the women from all of the lesbian porn she had watched the past two nights, and tried to make her face look like those faces.

"I don’t want to fight, Audra," she said, gazing at Audra with her best lesbian porn eyes. "But honestly, I don’t want to talk either."

"Um?" Audra didn’t seem to have anything more to say than that. Her eyes were really big too, actually, and they kept flicking down to Rebecca’s lips.

"I want to show you what I did to your little loser ex-husband. That was in a bathroom too. Think you can handle it? Huh, Audra?" She jostled her a little. "Think you can handle me?"

Audra made a strangled noise, and before Rebecca could deliver her planned "Fuck you! I bet you taste like chocolate!" line, Audra was surging against her. Her lips swooped in on Rebecca’s with a swift, hot certainty, and she pressed up against her with a little moan, one hand tangled sweetly into Rebecca’s hair, the other just kind of cradling her chin, stroking behind her jaw. Rebecca had the wherewithal to think SHE’S kissing ME! This was so much easier than I expected! and then she was lost in it, pulling Audra up into her arms, hiking Audra’s dress up so Audra could wrap her legs tight around Rebecca’s waist, and kissing, kissing, kissing.

It felt like beating Audra in every academic standoff they’d ever had, mixed with an imagined parental voice saying "I'm so proud of you, sweetie" - like vicious triumph twisted up against a relief, the undreamed-of "yes" to a question she’d tried so hard to stop asking.

It also just felt… good? Like actually just really good. Rebecca realized some part of her really hadn’t thought it would, and she tried to pull back for a second, to drink in the sight of Audra Levine with her hair all messy, gasping and panting like a horny teenager for her, Rebecca Bunch, but Audra chased after her with her lips and her tongue and Rebecca was lost in sensations again, engulfed.

At some point they stumbled out of the bathroom and Audra dragged them onto a bed, and it was Rebecca’s turn to get her hands in Audra’s hair, hot-ironed so prim and straight the entire time they’d known each other but now fanning out around them both in wild tumbles. Rebecca discovered if she wrapped her fingers into those brown tangles and tugged just so, Audra would jutter against her like an exposed wire. Rebecca had had a lot of great sex but she’d never had someone try to hump her thigh just because she’d kissed them and pulled their hair.

By the time she was the one squirming against Audra’s thigh, and soon after, Audra’s fingers, Rebecca had forgotten why she had come here. She had forgotten that she had actually thought there was a way to "win" at wanting or having another woman, that if she could prove she was better at it than Audra that she’d prove she was... happier? Wholer? More evolved? Who knows what had been going through Rebecca’s mind an hour ago. Who knows what had been going through Rebecca’s mind a second ago; all she knew was need, and heat, and teeth against that spot behind her jaw as she shuddered through her very first lesbian orgasm.

"I can see why you would move across the country for this," she told Audra, lying there, shocky and stunned in the afterglow.

Audra laughed. "For what? Pussy?"

"For what happy feels like," Rebecca told her. "I think I get it now."

"Mmm," Audra hummed against her cheek, rolling over and curling into Rebecca like a languorous sloth. "I didn’t move here to be happy," she mumbled, voice halfway to sleep. "I thought I did, but I was just following you." She yawned, and snuggled in closer. "Following you… ‘s the only thing I’ve ever been good at." Rebecca could feel her smile against her cheek. "Just feels right. Like magnets."

Like magnets, Rebecca thought. That makes no sense whatsoever. But somehow, as she let her own breathing slow, and dropped into sleep at 11am in the arms of a woman she had been chaotically propelled both towards and against her whole life, who she now wanted to stay slotted up next to, tight and close, more than she wanted anything else in the world, she felt like she understood.

*

Days later, she would tell the office how it happened.

"Yeah, I’m definitely bisexual, guys. Bisexual and sooooooo into my new girlfriend! Sorry for any confusion."

Duhs fell and swirled.