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Her dreams of flying didn’t go away all at once. She stopped being able to feel the weight of her wings, metal and heavy and so freeing, very slowly. A few hundred thousand heartbeats before she found herself sinking a little more beneath the cloud cover. Every new morning she’d become more grounded to the Earth, gravity reclaiming her at last.
They can’t see me , she’d thought, even as she’d danced through the sky, her shadow chasing and chasing and never quite catching up to her, poor things. They cycled down to the beach because they’d heard I’d built a flying machine and they can’t even see me.
But then they could. They began to see her. They'd learnt how to, from her. She'd taught them.
They began to look up, shielding their eyes against the sunlight, watching her shadow chase her and they saw her. Saw everything.
And just like that the wings began to fade, faded till they'd disappeared.
Foxglove lifts her mouth away from Hazel’s skin in startlement. Her lipstick clings stubbornly to Hazel’s inner thigh, tribute to her worship. It’s a messy smear of rose, dusty and dull in comparison to the red she prefers. It covers Hazel’s skin like a blush.
Her voice sounds scratchy and unpolished, hollow with static and angry, so angry. Hearing it blare through the radio is an unpleasant shock.
Foxglove exhales shakily and Hazel flinches away a little at the phantom touch of her breath.
Alvie’s still asleep in his room, thankfully. Midmorning light turns the room golden and warm. Foxglove was flying again for those precious few minutes she’d managed to steal. Sweat beads the back of her neck but she could have sworn she’d felt the cold dig of metal against her body.
“Why’d you stop?” Hazel asks, voice low, muffled by her pillow. She’d always been the louder of them both. The walls of their apartment in New York had been far too thin for anyone’s comfort. The first few nights after they’d moved into their Los Angeles home, Foxglove’s ears had strained instinctively for the sound of Wanda’s knock-off Versace boots stamping on the ceiling, her shouting at them to get quiet or get lost (they’d never gotten quiet. She’d make Hazel louder, on purpose, just because she could).
“Turn the radio off”, she rasps back, and it feels utterly ridiculous, listening to her teen angst while her kid is sound asleep in the room next to theirs.
“Okay”, Hazel obliges, and then, because she’s the only person Foxglove has met who’s as stubborn as she is, “why’d you stop?”
It wasn’t always metal wings. It had been butterflies, one time. Soft, living, breathing tissue. All she’d really wanted to do was fly. The wings had just been a means to an end.
The volume dial on the radio is turned all the way down to zero, but Foxglove can still hear the sound of it, her wailing, her screaming. Her voice, begging to be heard, to be seen.
And it had been.
And now she doesn’t know what to do about it anymore.
Hazel begins to sit up in their bed. The lipstick transfers to the sheets as she shifts her legs. Her skin smells like roses. Like the salt of sweat and the tang of smoke even though it’s been months since they’d both had their last cigarette, but it’s mostly roses. She’d come home from her first tour to find that scent on Hazel’s skin. She’s searched their bathroom cabinet religiously, from top to bottom, trying and failing to locate its source.
There had been a bottle of perfume on her dressing stand at one of her stops, during the London leg of it. It had cost a fortune, but not for her. It was a gift from the stage manager, a little bit of gratitude for filling up the seats to full capacity and then some. Even that hadn’t captured the essence of Hazel’s scent. What had she done with the bottle? Thrown it away? Given it away? Left it on the tabletop, most probably. It was of no use to her.
“I’m leaving”, she hears herself say, the sound of her pulse in her ears, and it's a sluggish rhythm, as though it were meandering to a stop.
Hazel blinks up at her, then down at herself. At herself sprawled across their bed, the sheets twisting around her ankles, Foxglove’s lipstick claiming her skin as its own. There’s probably an imprint on the back of her neck. A bruise, too. She’d never thought herself to be possessive, but she’d never tired of marking Hazel, sinking her teeth into her and begging to let her have everything, all of it.
“Right now?” She asks. The location, they have both long since found out, doesn’t matter. Three hundred miles isn’t any better than three thousand. She reaches out to wipe the lipstick stains off and Hazel pulls away. Not physically, at first. More like she folds up into herself, her eyes hardening and telling her to stay back, to stay away.
Everything , Foxglove had pleaded, devotee seeking a boon, greedy and eager, give me everything.
She’d written George’s Tongue like this. When Hazel had shied away from her, from her touch. When she’d looked at her from across the kitchen counter and she couldn’t quite tell if she loved her or hated her.
She’d written all her songs like that. Most of The Poetry Inspector is just that, just her observing Hazel, observing Hazel observing her. Hazel is her worst kept secret.
This is how she looks at me when I’m wearing her favourite shade of blue , she’d sung without saying, and everyone had lapped it up, had wanted more, sipping on her love, feasting like parasites, this is how she looks at me when she wants me to ruin her. This is what it feels like when she tells me to come back to her, to stop leaving her behind. This is what it feels like when I’m saying goodbye.
Why the label bothers asking her to write music anymore she doesn’t know. She’s been breaking Hazel open and stealing all her songs from her ribs, from her flesh. There is nothing to write without her.
“Not right now”, she says, and that’s something they’ve both figured out as well. That ‘not right now’ isn’t good enough anymore. They’re living off of borrowed time. Stolen time.
They’re all watching me , she thinks now, as she dreams. Normal dreams. Dreams where she walks down the street, walks along the beach, walks everywhere because she can’t fly any longer. Everyone seems to turn to face her. Everyone seems to want a piece. They reach out and ask for an autograph, and then a picture, and then something else, something more, they’re all watching me.
Hazel doesn’t say anything. The room is liquid amber, the curtains doing absolutely nothing at all to stop the light from flooding into the room. They’re supposed to stop long-range cameras, allegedly. Had she bought them, or had Hazel?
Neither of them. The house agent. He’d been catering to A-list clientele. selling to celebrities his whole life. The house hadn’t even had a welcome card, just a list of numbers for various lawyers pinned to the fridge, with a copy tucked under a fruit bowl for good measure.
Hazel had scribbled some more numbers onto the list, in her clumsy, looping handwriting. For the allergist, for emergency services, for their paediatrician and their gynec.
“Why?”
Does it matter?
She’s tired of the question. She’s heard it so many times, from so many different mouths. All those reporters with their mics, shoving a camera in her face and asking her why she’s still single, why there’s no clear answer as to who George might be.
“There’s this movie”, she explains, which sounds wrong, which doesn’t sound like enough, not a good justification for putting them through this all over again, so she adds, “and this photoshoot”
Her first headshots are ugly as sin. She loves the hair she’d had back then regardless, untouched by product, only styled after Hazel’s hands had tugged at it, run through it. She’d cut it herself back then, sometimes allowing Barbie to try. It hadn’t really mattered what she had looked like, either to herself or to Hazel. Her label had changed all that, of course.
Mostly, I just want to fly , she’d told the first interviewer, and then her designer, and her PR agent, can you make me look like that? Can you remind me of that?
They couldn’t. They hadn’t.
Sitting here on their bed, half naked, watching Hazel go brittle, turn into steel, fills her lungs with water, with fear. Like she’s stopped gliding, stopped descending, streaking down towards the ground like a comet, swallowing down all the clouds, unable to stop.
It’s been awhile since they’ve eaten ice cream together at two in the morning. She’s been looking at her from across the kitchen island all week long and it’s been getting harder and harder to tell whether she loves her. Whether she hates her.
Hazel nods towards the silent radio, and Foxglove can tell without having to turn the volume back up that they’re still running through Slits Of Love. All those confessions, all those arguments, the betrayals, the forgiveness, and she’d condensed it all, she’d let other people tune in whenever they wanted.
“Just remember”, Hazel tells her, “you broke my heart first”