Chapter Text
In the grey light of the early morning, Ava dragged herself out of bed and went in search of the bathroom. The house was small but she still opened the door to a neatly kept closet before she found the right room. Sitting on the toilet, she looked around at the tiny signs of Beatrice living here: the toothbrush in its holder, the end of the toothpaste tube rolled up tightly, the washcloth by the sink. She wondered what Bea’s morning routine was, if she showered then or in the evening after a long day working, if she ate breakfast. Between her legs, she could feel the tug of the night before and she idly plotted talking Bea into another round before they got to work tomorrow.
When she emerged from the bathroom, Jude was awake and waiting by the front door. He pawed and whined at it and Ava smiled as she went to open it for him.
“You too, huh?” she asked, letting him out to pee.
She was still naked, and the cool air brought goosebumps up on her skin and made her shiver. Her house sat squat and dark by the lake, empty and lifeless without her there, and she supposed that was perhaps how it had appeared to Bea for the majority of the time she had lived here. It looked better now, of course, cleaned and repaired, but there was still some shadow over it that a fresh coat of paint could not cover. Ava wondered if it would always feel like that, like some lurking presence she might open a door to and see when she least wanted it.
There were three weeks left until she had to leave, leave the house and leave Beatrice. Her feelings sat too heavy and complicated in her chest for her to puzzle out just then.
Jude trotted back inside, his tail wagging happily, and Ava turned away from it, closed the door and pushed the thought of it from her mind. She patted Jude’s head instead as he settled himself back into his bed, and then opened the door again to Beatrice’s bedroom.
Bea was still asleep, her face smooth and peaceful, the blankets wrapped close around her. It was enough for Ava to let the house drift out of her mind, to climb back into bed as gently as possible.
It didn’t work. Beatrice half woke, her eyebrows furrowing but her eyes not fully opening.
“You’re cold,” she grumbled and pulled Ava closer, one strong arm wrapped around her hips. Ava had forgotten what this was like, to climb into bed with someone you liked so much, to feel the heat of their body envelop you, like sinking into a warm bath.
She fell asleep again to the steady, even lull of Beatrice’s breathing.
When she next woke, the bed next to her was empty, the sheets neatly pulled up, and she could hear the faint sounds of Bea moving through the house, getting ready for the day. Ava lay there for a moment to listen to it, the muffled sound of Beatrice’s voice as she spoke to Jude, the dull rush of the faucet running and then shutting off, a door opening and closing.
She dragged herself from the comfort of the bed at last, pulling on the flannel Bea had been wearing the night before in place of her own clothes, still heaped on the floor where they had been flung. The shirt was a little long on her, touching her mid-thigh, and it smelled like Beatrice; she buried her nose into the collar and inhaled.
When she stepped out of the room into the blinding light of the morning, she found Beatrice sitting at the tiny kitchen table holding a book she didn’t seem to be reading. Shamelessly, Ava took the opportunity to absorb the house properly, as she hadn’t been able to the night before. It was small and neatly kept, the kitchen and living room merging into one. In one corner was a faded, comfortable couch next to a wall lined with bookshelves, a landscape of a place Ava thought might be England hanging on one wall, a sturdy wooden coffee table she was sure Bea had built herself. It was nothing fancy, nothing much, but so distinctly Beatrice that Ava loved it immediately.
When she looked back, Bea was staring at her thighs.
“You’re wearing my shirt,” she said, as though she had just come to several startling realisations all at once.
Ava raised an eyebrow, sauntering closer to Bea much more slowly than was necessary.
“You know,” she said, “I’m starting to think you weren’t a very good nun.”
It was this that made Bea’s eyes flick upwards, indignant at the suggestion, “I was an extremely good nun.”
Gently, Ava pushed at Beatrice’s shoulder until she took the hint and moved her chair away from the table, and Ava climbed into her lap, her legs either side of Beatrice’s. Bea was fully dressed already and the rough denim of her jeans scraped against the soft skin of Ava’s inner thighs.
“Oh yeah?” she asked, “Then how did you deal with all the temptation?”
Beatrice shook her head, her gaze falling to the rise of Ava’s cleavage visible under the loosely buttoned shirt. “There wasn’t anyone quite like you in the convent.”
Ava smiled, pleased by that answer, and ducked her head down to press a kiss to Beatrice’s neck, the underside of her jaw.
“We have work we need to do,” Beatrice told her. The protest would have been more convincing if her hands weren’t on Ava’s ass.
“Okay,” Ava said agreeably, although she didn’t move and her lips were never more than a fraction of an inch away from Bea’s skin.
Beatrice’s hands slipped upwards, under her shirt, “Maybe it can wait an hour,” she suggested.
“Maybe it can,” Ava grinned.
Somewhere, outside the window, the house and the last of the work waited for them, but she wasn’t going to think about that just now.
*
“Where the hell have you been?” Michael demanded the second Ava set foot in his store.
Ava looked up in surprise from where she had been rifling through the mail she had collected: a package for her and a couple of letters for Beatrice, including one heavy, expensive white envelope that looked as though it could contain a wedding invitation.
“Uh,” she said stupidly, counting the days backwards in her head. She had been coming here a couple of times a week until recently, eating candy and arguing with him about which Fast and Furious characters they could take in a fight. In the six days since Beatrice had kissed her in the doorway, though, Ava had barely left her side for more than a bathroom break. Instead, she had spent the time growing intimately familiar with the noises Beatrice made when Ava licked her nipples, with the rhythm of her breathing as she slept, with the way the sky looked when Ava lay in the grass and held her hand.
“I thought Beatrice had gone full axe murderer and killed you,” Michael said.
“And so you ran right up there to come rescue me?” Ava scoffed, “No axe murdering… but I guess you could say she split me open.”
Michael’s face went through several emotions as he parsed what that meant, before finally landing on exasperation. “Gross - I mean, good for you - but seriously, Ava, I thought you left town.”
She looked at him properly then for the first time, leaning back in his chair behind the cash register as he always did, betrayed only by his left hand picking nervously at a loose thread on his jeans. Before this, she had only ever seen him jovial and relaxed, joking with her about movies and video games. It occurred to her, for the first time, that the people their age were few and far between around here, that maybe he looked forward to her coming into the store and shooting the shit with him.
“Sorry,” she said, “I just got caught up. It’s still two weeks until I go.”
“Right.” He nodded, giving half a smile, “It’s fine. I know you can’t wait to get the fuck out of here but - “
There was a pause, and the expression on Michael’s face told Ava that she was not going to like what he was about to say. She braced herself for it, tense and ready to react before he even opened his mouth again.
“Suzanne keeps asking me about you, you know? What you’re up to and when you’re leaving. I think if you’d talk to her you’d realise she’s not a bad person.”
“I never said she was a bad person,” Ava snapped, all emotion and no thought. The mention of Suzanne brought it out in her, the dread she tried to keep at bay overwhelming her all at once. “I just don’t know why she’s so fucking interested in me. She knew my mom, so what?”
Instantly, she knew she had toed the edge of a line she couldn’t cross with Michael. He adored his mom and stepmom, the two women who had broken their backs caring for him through his childhood illness - they might have been the only thing keeping him in town at all. Almost everyone else his age had left and never bothered coming back.
Pretty soon, Ava would join them.
“Look, I get it, you hate this town and everyone in it and you can’t wait to go back to LA. But not everyone does.” Michael shrugged helplessly, his face sad and tired. “Some people love it here, and they love the people here, and it really fucked them up when your mom died.”
“It’s not - that’s nothing to do with me,” Ava glanced over her shoulder, some part of her wanting to make sure the exit was still there, that she could get out of this. She wanted to go back to Beatrice, to holding her hand and kissing in the kitchen and thinking about nothing.
“So then why are you here?” Michael’s tone was searching, like he was trying so hard to understand. “Don’t tell me it’s the house because Beatrice would have probably fixed it up faster without you here. You could have left after a week, let her take care of it. Why even stay?”
Ava looked down, half-embarrassed by herself. The envelopes in her hands were growing creased and sweaty. “Is it stupid that I don’t have an answer for that?”
Michael laughed, exasperated all over again. “Yeah, Ava. Yeah. That’s really stupid.”
There was a pause for a moment as they looked at each other, then he said, “If you want, I can close up early and we can play Smash in the stockroom until you have to go back to Beatrice.”
The thought of going home to Beatrice swelled her insides, filled her with something so thrilled she was half tempted to turn around and go back right then. But Michael was offering her an olive branch, and he had been kind to her when not many people around here had. She owed him this much.
Shaking herself free of her self-induced stupor, she gave him a sly grin, “Only if you’re ready to get your ass kicked.”
*
It was dark by the time Ava made her way back to the house, a little buzzed from the three beers she had drank and eager to tell Beatrice just how thoroughly she had beaten Michael.
She found her way through the night by following the yellow glow from one window of her house, Beatrice’s comforting shadow occasionally passing across it. The rest of the windows were dark and empty but it was that light that Ava focused on, picking her way through the undergrowth and trying not to trip. If she fell and broke an ankle, she might have to stay here a few more weeks. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
She left the door open when she walked into the house, let the night air flow in, and flipped on the light in every room she passed through, lighting up the place. If she looked at it from the road now, she imagined it would look like a lighthouse, a beacon, nothing dark or scary about it.
Beatrice was painting the kitchen cabinets and Ava stood in the doorway for a moment to watch her. Although Bea had to know she was there - Ava had hardly been subtle or quiet about her entrance - she was engrossed in what she was doing, finishing this small section of painting with the thoroughness Ava had come to love about her.
Finally, she turned around, her lips turning instinctively upwards the second she saw Ava.
“Did you have fun with Michael?” She asked, wiping her hands clean on a damp rag.
“Kicked his ass.” Ava grinned. That wasn’t strictly true, she had lost a few rounds (fine, maybe more than a few) but she sort of wanted to impress Beatrice anyway.
Bea nodded agreeably, although she clearly had absolutely no idea what Ava was talking about. “I’m very proud of you.”
Ava handed over the mail she had brought back, and although she busied herself with opening her package, she watched Beatrice carefully from the corner of her eye for any sign of discomfort or upset when she saw the wedding invitation.
For a moment, Bea was silent, taking in the large white envelope and running her fingers over the pointed corners. Then, she took the pocketknife she carried with her and slit it open neatly, pulling the invitation out with the tips of her fingers as she tried not to get it dirty.
Ava waited. She was getting better at this, at knowing when Beatrice needed her to talk and needed her not to talk.
Finally, Beatrice said, as though Ava hadn’t guessed already, “It’s Shannon and Mary’s wedding invitation.”
Turning fully towards her, Ava tried to read her face for her reaction. It was blank though, Bea’s emotions pressed inwards. “Are you gonna go?”
“I need to RSVP quite soon,” Beatrice murmured, more to herself than anything, as though the impending decision was already weighing on her.
Ava got it. No, that wasn’t true, she didn’t get it, because she loved weddings, loved any excuse to get drunk and dance and meet a bunch of new people, but she understood that Beatrice didn’t feel that way. Being around big crowds made her nervous and this wedding, in particular, came loaded with the weight of everything that had led her up to this point, living alone in the woods.
Beatrice frowned down at the invitation then looked up at Ava with uncertain eyes, “Shannon will be upset if I don’t go.”
“Yeah, she will.” Ava nodded slowly, “But she’ll also understand.”
For a moment, Beatrice was quiet again, the indecision clear in her posture alone, until finally Ava grasped the hand holding the invitation gently, brushed her thumb over her knuckles.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” she told her, “Take a couple of days to think about it.”
Beatrice nodded, letting Ava take the invitation out of her hands and watching her put it down on the countertop.
“You think I should go,” she said, hovering somewhere between question and statement.
Ava wasn’t sure how to answer that - in truth, her concern wasn’t about attending a wedding or not attending, it was Bea, and what was best for her. In the end, she said the only thing she knew to be a fact, “I think you’ll be really mad at yourself if you don’t go.”
The nod Beatrice gave was small and sharp, as though she were already angry at herself for even considering staying home. Ava wrapped an arm around her waist and squeezed.
“C’mon,” she said, “Let’s go home and I’ll make you dinner. You’re working too late again.”
With Ava touching her, something of the tension in Bea ebbed away, and she nodded, let herself be pulled along obediently out of the house, although she insisted on turning all the lights off as they went.
They cooked together in Bea’s tiny, warm kitchen, the smell of spices surrounding them. Ava directed Bea to chop and stir with an authority she rarely got to exhibit, she was so used to Beatrice being terrifyingly competent in everything she did.
Jude sat nearby and watched them with longing and, although he was too well-trained to ever beg for food, Ava still sneaked him little pieces of meat when Beatrice wasn’t looking.
“You’re going to spoil my dog,” Bea said at one point with her back still turned.
Ava and Jude looked at each other guiltily, and then Ava gave him another piece of chicken from the cutting board. She couldn’t be sure, but from the way her shoulders shook it seemed like Beatrice might have been laughing.
Later, ensconced in Beatrice’s bedroom and Beatrice’s bed, Ava sank into her lap with a groan, the strap-on that had arrived in the mail that day stretching her deliciously open. Every time she moved it pressed against Bea’s clit and made her buck and gasp, the callouses on her palms rough against Ava’s back.
Ava pressed her lips against the sweaty edge of Bea’s hairline, chanted against her like a prayer, “You’re so good, God, you’re so good.”
Her hips were frantic against Beatrice’s stomach and when Bea pulled her down to kiss her it was messy, uncoordinated, their tongues and teeth clashing and jumping apart. The room was filled with the noise of their panting breaths and the slick, wet sound of Ava’s movements.
“Ava,” Beatrice said, her eyes screwed shut and her hands gripping Ava’s hips to move her faster, “Please, Ava.”
She was so beautiful when she came, her jaw slack and her back arched, that Ava had no choice: her hands cupped Bea’s face and her thighs tightened around her waist and she fell over the edge too, muscles clenching on the toy buried inside her.
“Fuck,” she said when something of her sense came back to her. Beatrice’s head was pressed against her breasts, her breathing heavy. Ava stroked her hair and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Remind me why we weren’t doing this the whole time.”
She felt Bea smile against her skin. “I think you were respecting my boundaries.”
“Oh yeah,” Ava agreed, her fingers toying with the baby hairs at the base of Beatrice’s neck, “I’m an idiot.”
Afterwards, when their legs began to function again and they had cleaned themselves up, they lay side by side in bed, silent but not sleeping. Ava could hear Bea’s thoughts ticking over next to her and no matter what she did, how she tried to push them away, her own kept drifting back to what Michael had said earlier.
Why are you here he had asked her, and she didn’t have an answer. She had told herself she had no choice, that when she left JC she had nowhere else to go. But that wasn’t really true, after all: there were couches she could have crashed on until she found an apartment, places she could go other than here. When she came back to his apartment and found him gone though, this was the first place she had run to. Why are you here?
In the darkness next to her, Beatrice whispered, “I’m going to go to the wedding.” A pause, a slow intake of breath. “I think, perhaps, I’ve let the past hold me back long enough.”
Ava fumbled to find her hand, held on to it and squeezed. Then she closed her eyes tight against the world. She knew what she had to do.
*
Beatrice had offered to come with her but Ava turned her down. She had begun this journey by herself and it seemed, somehow, that she had to do this alone too. Still, it felt as though some part of Bea was with her as she rode her bicycle past the familiar and into streets she had never been to before.
Michael had given Ava the address and the house where Suzanne and Jillian lived was not hard to find. It was one of only a handful of buildings on the street, a neatly kept ranch-style home with a sparklingly clean truck parked in the driveway. Out front, there was a meticulous vegetable garden growing, each of the plants neatly labelled and covered from the late summer sun, and she wondered if it belonged to Suzanne or Jillian.
She guessed Michael had told them she would be coming because Suzanne didn’t look surprised to open the door and find Ava standing on the other side. There was no greeting though, or welcome, the older woman only leant heavily on her cane and looked at Ava expectantly.
“Hi,” Ava said, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her shorts. She felt stupid. She should have brought Bea. “I was hoping…”
She didn’t have to finish that sentence, to articulate what she was hoping for, because Suzanne nodded once and moved aside to let her in.
Ava stepped into a living room lined with bookshelves, most of them about education or else scientific and too complicated for her to even understand the titles. On the wall there was a picture of Michael as a kid, grinning with his two front teeth missing. She’d have to make fun of him for it later.
For a moment, she stood awkwardly, unsure quite where to put herself in the small room, until Suzanne gestured for her to sit down in an armchair. Still, she perched herself on the edge, too uncomfortable to make herself at home.
Suzanne seated herself and watched her, waiting for something, until the silence pressed on Ava too heavily and the words burst out of her.
“I don’t know anything about her,” she said. The non-sequitur didn’t seem to confuse Suzanne. “She died when I was seven and you don’t know anything about your mom then, right? Just that she reads you stories and makes you brush your teeth. And I’ve never met anybody else that knew her either.”
For a moment, Suzanne regarded her contemplatively, and Ava thought that awful silence would continue again. In the end, though, she said, “I was her teacher. I’m the principal of the school she attended now but I was a teacher then - English and History, occasionally a little Math. There aren’t enough teachers to go around in a town like this. It meant I saw her often, anyway.”
“Right.” Ava nodded, picking thoughtlessly at the fabric of the armchair. “What was she like?”
This, at last, brought a small smile out of Suzanne. “She was very funny,” she said, “A little bit of a class clown - I was forever giving her detention. Wild too, and stubborn, but clever. From what Michael has told me, I don’t think you two are dissimilar.”
If Ava had expected to have any reaction to this, she would never have thought that she’d swell with pride at the thought of being just like her mom.
“Her parents were very strict though,” Suzanne continued as though she had already guessed Ava’s next question, her tone even and calm. “Traditional. They were proud of their legacy in this town. When she fell pregnant…”
“They kicked her out,” Ava supplied. She had already guessed as much: her mom was fifteen when she had her and the two of them ended up in a city miles from here. It didn’t take a genius.
Suzanne nodded, her fingers tight around her cane, “We didn’t know. If we had, Jillian and I, we would have taken her in. And when she died…”
For the first time, Ava heard a break in Suzanne’s voice, as though the words almost choked her. She felt guilty, Ava realised. All this time Ava had assumed she was a prying, nosy old woman, and instead she had felt the guilt of her mother’s death for all these years.
“I’m sorry, Ava. Your grandparents didn’t tell anyone. But we should have tried harder, should have tried to track her down, or done something. I wish we had.”
Ava looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in front of her now. “Why’d they leave me the house? My grandparents, I mean. If they hated her and me so much.”
Suzanne sighed, “I suppose I can only speculate, but if I had to guess it would be because you’re the only Silva left. The house, as I say, has been in the family for generations.”
Raising her chin, Ava issued one last challenge, one last test for Suzanne to prove she was not the ghoul Ava had thought her to be. “I’m going to sell it,” she told her bluntly, “It won’t be in the family for much longer.”
To her surprise, Suzanne’s face broke into a grin. It lit up her face, made her look younger and more beautiful than she ever had before. “You really are just like her, you know.”
Ava felt so many things all in one moment she thought her insides might burst open, right there on the living room floor. Suzanne got to her feet and made her way to a desk pushed into the corner of the room, rummaged in a drawer for a moment then pulled out a faded envelope and handed it to Ava.
Inside, there was a picture of a teenage girl who looked just like Ava - or rather, she supposed, Ava looked just like her. It was a school portrait, and the girl, Amelia Silva, stared down the camera with a blinding, familiar grin.
“Keep it,” Suzanne said, “It should be yours anyway.”
Later, at the front door, Ava turned before she left, scraping the toe of her shoe against the concrete and unsure quite what to say.
“Thanks,” she tried in the end. “Sorry I was kind of a jerk about it, before.”
Suzanne gave a small, one-shouldered shrug, “I think if there’s anything you’re allowed to be a jerk about, then perhaps it’s this.”
“Do you think I could call you, sometime?” Ava asked, “If I have any more questions, I mean.”
“You can call me about anything you would like, Ava,” Suzanne said, reaching out to touch her elbow, “Any time you would like.”
Ava didn’t cry then, although she felt like she could. She didn’t cry as she was cycling home, or as she locked her bike up against the wall.
She didn’t cry until she was standing in Bea’s living room, until her face was pressed into Bea’s chest, until Bea’s arms circled around her and held her still and safe. Then she sobbed, and Beatrice held her and soothed her until her insides were raw and scrubbed clean.
*
As her last week there wore on, Ava found herself spending more and more time replying to emails and on conference calls with Camila and her team. The next few months of her life were slipping into place: back in LA for initial production meetings and then on the road to scout locations and negotiate fees. She would book another job after that, she supposed, and then another one. Already there had been emails landing in her inbox asking for her availability.
She and Beatrice hadn’t talked about it. They danced around the subject, pretended that there was nothing to consider after Saturday came and went, that they would continue like this: working together in the day, eating together in the evenings, going to bed with each other every night.
It was hard to pretend when the house was almost entirely finished now, everything except the smallest bedroom painted and polished to perfection, but they found a way.
Four days before she was due to leave, Ava spent an afternoon on the phone with Camila arranging her travel schedule for the next few weeks. She sat out on Beatrice’s porch with the sun blazing on her shoulders, the cooler weather of a few weeks earlier pushed aside by one last, desperate gasp of summer. Bea was gone for most of the day and, although she was busy, Ava missed the steady comfort of her presence nearby, the sound of her turning the pages of a novel or humming to herself as she worked.
She was on hold with an airline when she heard the rumble of Bea’s truck making its way up the dirt road, and by the time Bea had disembarked, poured a fresh bowl of water for Jude and sat down next to Ava, the infuriating hold music hadn’t changed.
Ava rolled her eyes in mock irritation at Beatrice, pointing to her phone and mouthing airline. She reached down to ruffle Jude’s ears, shifted uncomfortably in the chair she had been sitting in for too many hours, and finally noticed what Bea was holding. It was the box for a new cell phone.
On the other end of the line, a smooth customer service voice said, “Good afternoon, thank you for calling - “
Ava interrupted, “Uh,” she said, confused. “Sorry, I’ll call you back.”
Beatrice frowned at her, as though she wasn’t the one doing something extremely strange here.
“You bought a cell phone?” Ava asked, although it was plainly obvious that she had. “You hate cell phones.”
“Well,” Beatrice said, looking down at the box in her hands. “Hate might be a strong word for my feelings on them.”
Ava stared at her stupidly. Beatrice had spent years living out here alone, didn’t even get her mail delivered directly to her house, had avoided writing her best friend back for so long that Shannon and Mary drove cross-country just to visit in person. Bea hated cell phones.
“I thought…” Beatrice tried slowly, as though she was unsure of the words herself, “I thought, maybe, we could stay in touch.”
“Oh.” The word was soft and choked in Ava’s throat. “Right.”
She pulled her chair closer and reached out to put a hand over Bea’s wrist, but when she did she found that she had nothing to say. For a moment, Beatrice stared at the box in her hands, and when she looked up, at last, her eyes were filled with something so soft and so longing that it was all Ava could do not to crawl into her lap and kiss her.
“If you would like that, of course,” she added, her voice small.
Ava tried to imagine what it would be like only hearing her voice through a tinny cell phone speaker, how she would try to explain her day through texts and video calls, see half of Bea’s face through a blurry viewfinder. They had been together every day for months, worked around each other until they were friends and then until they were more than that. In less than a week it would be gone.
“I could stay,” Ava said. When she first arrived here, she had asked Beatrice without thought or hesitation to help her fix up the house, and she blurted the words out with the same impulse now. Fuck the plans she had made, fuck the movies, fuck LA. She could stay, couldn’t she? There was nothing stopping her.
But Beatrice shook her head. “You can’t stay, Ava. From the moment you arrived here, you wanted to leave. You have your life to go back to, your career. If you stayed then you would only end up resenting me.”
“No,” Ava said immediately. The thought was unimaginable. “I couldn’t.”
“Ava,” Beatrice turned her hand to grasp Ava’s, still covering her own, and squeezed, “We’ve known each other for three months. I can’t ask you to give up your life for me and I won’t let you. You would miss the city too much - reading novels and hiking with me… it’s nothing in comparison. I would rather tell you to go now than have you hate me in the end.”
“But I don’t want to leave you,” Ava said. It sounded desperate in her own ears and even as the words left her mouth, she could hear the truth in what Beatrice was saying. They belonged in two different worlds, so far separate from each other that they wouldn’t ever touch. It was only the wildest of coincidences that had brought them together at all.
“You’ll meet someone else,” Beatrice told her, attempting a smile, “I’m sure of it.”
There wouldn’t be anyone who made her feel the way Bea did, Ava was more sure of that than anything else in her life. Beatrice’s face was serious though, as if she believed the exact opposite to be true.
“What if I don’t?” Ava asked, her mouth dry.
For a moment, Beatrice was quiet, lost in thought as she gazed across the distance between them. Far away, there was the sound of the lake water lapping at the shore. Jude rolled onto his back to feel the sun on his belly. A bird cawed in the nearby trees.
Beatrice said, “Then you know where to find me.”
The next day, Ava went into the smallest bedroom of her house for the first time in weeks. It had been untouched since then, Ava ignoring it and Beatrice tentatively working around it, and she half expected that it might have changed. Everything seemed to have shifted so fundamentally under her feet that it almost seemed like the walls of the building should have changed too.
They hadn’t though, obviously. The picture on the wall was still there: a little girl’s drawing of herself and the words “AMELIA AGED 7 NEARLY 8”.
Ava sat down on the floor, cross-legged next to it, the hardwood uncomfortable underneath her, and ran her finger over the faded pen marks. Her mother had been a little girl once, drawing on the walls, then a teenager who had laughed too loud and talked too much in class, then she had been hers, Ava’s mom, who read her stories at night and made her brush her teeth.
With a marker, Ava drew a smiling new stick figure, the lines dark and fresh next to the faded old ones. Next to that, she drew a taller figure with a frowny face, and a haphazard animal that should have been a dog but maybe looked more like a cat. Behind her, she heard Bea’s soft laugh and felt a hand on her shoulder.
Underneath the pictures, Ava wrote “AVA AGED 25 (NEARLY 26)” and “BEATRICE AGED 28” and “JUDE AGED 3”.
When she was done, they set to work on decorating. Although they had painted the rest of the house, Beatrice had bought wallpaper for this room, perhaps suspecting that Ava wouldn’t bring herself to paint over the picture. Ava was glad she had now though, she liked the idea that someone, years from now, would tear it down, and they would find the drawings underneath and know they had been there.
They moved around each other methodically, not needing to speak, well used now to each other’s silent cues and body language. Ava smothered paste over the back of each sheet of paper and Beatrice hung it neatly on the walls, taking time to make sure it was perfectly straight, covering the drawings piece by piece.
At the end of it, they walked through the house together, hand in hand, beginning at the very top and ending at the front door. They saw the places where the floors had been crumbling, where the roof had been in danger of caving in, where the windows had been boarded over. It was repaired now, swept clean and decorated and ready to be sold. When they stepped out into the late afternoon sun and Ava closed the door behind her, she knew that was it. They were done.
*
Beatrice offered her a ride to the airport but Ava refused. The ending hung fraught in the space between them and she didn’t think she could survive a truck ride thick with both anxiety and sadness. She would rather two long bus journeys than that.
It was stiflingly hot on the day she left, the air so heavy she could barely breathe, and Beatrice wore only a t-shirt as she hugged Ava by her front gate. Her arms were tanned and strong and Ava buried herself in them, held on longer than she had any right to.
Maybe she would have accepted the ride to the airport, though, if she’d known what her last sight of them would be: Beatrice, standing at the top of the hill, holding onto Jude’s collar to stop him from running after her. They watched her until the path curved away and she was out of sight.
*
Camila lived in an airy apartment overlooking the beach. Her upstairs neighbour played experimental jazz music until odd hours of the night and at six o’clock promptly every morning, the sound of rollerbladers could be heard making their way up and down the boulevard. The spare room that Ava crashed in had stills of black and white arthouse movies framed and hung on the wall.
On her first morning there, she woke to the sound of Camila’s terrifyingly hot goth girlfriend blasting heavy metal music from the kitchen.
“Want some tea?” Lilith asked when she stumbled out of bed.
Ava missed Beatrice so much she could barely breathe.
Camila was making a queer indie horror movie that she had described to Ava as “sort of a criticism of the essential incompatibility of our search for internal tranquillity and the pressures to be a cog in the machine of capitalism, you know?”
“Sure,” Ava had said, “Totally.”
Anyway, all of that meant she had been tasked with finding a secluded, serene house where the main characters could later be torn apart by demons - the demons which, in this case, symbolised the horrors of a late-stage capitalist society.
“Classic horror movie shit,” Camila said.
“Obviously,” Ava agreed.
She was on a flight to Canada only two days after landing back in LA, but in truth, she was glad to be free of the city. The noise of it felt oppressive after so long out in the woods, the experimental jazz that had been funny at first began to grow grating, and she was a little terrified that Lilith would murder her in her sleep for taking too long in the shower.
Her traipse through Vancouver proved to be just as frustrating though: every place she settled on was not quite right. A ramshackle cabin with damp in the walls was too rundown to ever work; a lovely cottage in a clearing in the woods would have been improved just a little by the ominous shadow of a vast lake nearby; a ranch house set back from the street far enough to look isolated would have been so much improved by plants and a low stone wall.
Beatrice called her, sometimes, or she called Beatrice, but it was harder than it should have been. Out in the wilds of Canada, Ava’s reception was rarely good, and Bea’s voice crackled and cut out so often that the sound of her distant “Hello? Can you hear me?” became more familiar than anything else. They tried to text, too, but there was nothing of the easy back and forth they’d had before: it felt stilted, awkward, as though neither of them quite knew what to say to each other. I miss you Ava wanted to tell her, but she didn’t. It didn’t seem fair.
The house, of course, her house that was, continued to nag at her like a rash. She had hired Adriel, the slimy realtor, to sell it for her, and he seemed to have forgotten he ever told her it wouldn’t sell because he admonished her for not involving him earlier.
“I would have suggested adding a skylight,” he said over the phone, “And the decor isn’t really set up to appeal to a family market.”
He emailed her the photographs he took for the online listing but she never bothered to open them. She never wanted to see the place again.
In her reply, she told him that she didn’t give a fuck about the price as long as he sold it to someone who seemed like a good neighbour. This had confused him, obviously, or else his commission was at the forefront of his mind because he kept showing it to wealthy couples looking for a vacation house. Once, terribly, he attempted to sell it to a property developer looking to demolish the whole thing and build a series of luxury lakeside rentals.
Ava turned down the offer for twenty thousand dollars over the list price and even Beatrice quietly scolded her for that one.
“Think of what you could have done with that money,” she told her.
Ava was in a generic hotel room staring at an abstract painting of shapes and colours. If she closed her eyes and squinted it sort of looked like Adriel.
“I don’t give a fuck about the money,” she said honestly. It was true, in a sense: she cared about money only as far as it let her live her life the way she wanted. “You can’t have a vacation resort on your doorstep, you’d go insane.”
Beatrice was quiet for a moment and Ava wondered where she was: on the porch of her house or in her bedroom or somewhere else, somewhere Ava didn’t know. Finally, Bea said, “Well. Thank you.”
September passed into October, as it always did, and eventually even Camila insisted that the deadline was looming and Ava would just have to settle. In the end, they chose a pretty, turn-of-the-century farmhouse by a freezing lake for the movie, one that would transform nicely into a scene of nightmarish horror. Camila loved it. Ava thought it was just fine.
She told all of this, every word of it, to the boom operator at the cast and crew party the night before filming started. They were in the city closest to the farmhouse, a place so small it could barely even be called a city: there were two bus routes and the mayor was sitting in a corner table of the bar they were in. It still felt too big, too sprawling to Ava, and she found herself longing to ride her bike along the dirt track from Beatrice’s house into town, to eat candy in Michael’s store and go back to Bea at night.
The boom operator was only listening to her as far as he thought he had to in order to have sex with her. He was tall and handsome and in another life, Ava would already have dragged him into the bathroom. Instead, she found herself talking as he bought her a beer, then another, then another.
It was fine when he kissed her. It didn’t turn her on or make her feel anything but she let him do it anyway. She wondered why he thought it was a good idea to pull her in so roughly by the small of her back, why anyone would prefer that to the feeling of strong hands on their hips. His tongue was messy in her mouth too, there was no sense of careful control. When he asked her if she wanted to go back to his hotel room, she turned him down.
She went back to her own room instead, buried her face in the cheap pillow and cried. If she had wanted to, she could have called Beatrice. It was late but she knew she would pick up her call. She didn’t think she could stand the electronic crackle in her voice though, not when the memory of her hands on her hips was so near and close.
*
She went to Arizona next, then Mexico, back to Canada, a short stop in LA.
“Why don’t you rent a place?” Camila asked. Maybe Lilith was sick of her taking up their spare bedroom. “Or buy somewhere, once your house sells. We could be neighbours!”
Camila was persuasive that way so they trudged through rental properties until it became clear Ava would hate every single one. If they weren’t too small then they were too big, the kitchens were too cramped, there was too much noise from the street, the view was too ocean-y.
In the end, even Camila gave up.
The next time she heard from Adriel, she was in New York, working for some sexed-up TV period drama, negotiating fees for a McMansion that looked like an English country manor if you squinted hard enough.
“You’ll have to drop the price,” Adriel told her irritably, “No one wants it.”
“Fine,” she said. She didn’t care, she wanted to say, didn’t care what it sold for as long as she never had to go back there. Every time she thought about it she was reminded of the insidious dread of the place, the sunshine through the windows that never seemed to reach the inside.
“Fine,” he snapped back and hung up the phone.
Vancouver, after that, Colorado then Las Vegas. She lost a thousand dollars at a blackjack table and got wasted on tequila, wound up in New York again, Seattle. She took every job that landed in her inbox no matter how shitty, Iowa - or was it Nebraska? She always got those two mixed up. She got sunstroke in Miami, lost her luggage in Toronto, forgot about the weed in her backpack when she took the train out of California and nearly got caught in Texas - that could have been fucked - smoked it in Austin with a woman she refused to let paint her naked. Then there was Chicago and a game the Cubs won, half a day in Tijuana - or was that before? - too cold to stay in Minnesota, too cold to stay in Maine, her bus broke down in San Diego and she waited three hours by the side of the road. If she kept moving, if she kept moving, if she kept moving then -
“Ava,” Camila said.
She was in her spare bedroom again, experimental jazz playing through the ceiling. Her head was pounding and her throat was dry; she thought she might be hungover but last night was a blur.
Camila sat down on the bed next to her, a soft weight jostling her when she least wanted to be moved. “I think you need to slow down. You’ve been travelling for months.”
“It’s my job,” Ava told her, “I’m fine.”
“It’s two in the afternoon and you have your head under a pillow,” Camila pointed out. Ava pulled the pillow tighter around her ears. “And you drank all of Lilith’s whiskey last night. You should probably replace that, by the way, she’s sort of pissed about it.”
At least that explained the headache.
“I’m fine,” she said again. She was so muffled that she doubted Camila even understood.
“Is this about Beatrice?” Camila asked.
Ava had a vague flashback to the night before, trying to describe the exact colour of Beatrice’s eyes to an amused Camila and an irritated Lilith, and she groaned. Her answer was mumbled so quietly into the mattress that Camila had to gently lift the pillow off her head. The sound of experimental jazz intensified.
“It’s Shannon and Mary’s wedding in two days,” Ava said, rolling reluctantly onto her back.
The fact that Camila did not ask who Shannon and Mary were suggested that Ava had probably talked about more than just Beatrice’s eyes last night.
“Okay.” Camila nudged her to one side and stretched her legs out on the bed next to her. “Are you going to go?”
Ava frowned. Of course she wasn’t going. “No?” she stated as though it was obvious, “But Bea is.”
“So? She can’t bring a date?”
“We’re not dating,” Ava groaned, trying to flop onto her front again. A firm hand on her shoulder stopped her.
“What’s the plan here, Ava?” Camila asked. Ava blinked up at her stupidly. “You’re going to pinball around the country forever?”
“No,” Ava said petulantly, “Just until I find somewhere I want to stay.”
“And if you’ve already found somewhere you want to stay?” Camila asked. Ava hated how fucking insightful she was sometimes.
She wanted to say I can’t. She wanted to say the house or my job or even my mom but she didn’t. They seemed smaller now than they had when she was there in the middle of them.
Camila swung her legs off the bed, “Think about it,” she told her gently. Then, calling over her shoulder before she left the room, she added, “And buy Lilith more whiskey or she’s going murder you.”
She did think about it. The thoughts fizzed in her head until she couldn’t stand it anymore, pulled the pillow back over her face and when that didn’t help she sat up, grabbed her laptop, booked a flight. A new job, somewhere new to crash land. Did it really matter where?
She was ready to go the next morning, bags packed and running on three hours sleep. Her flight was early, so she scribbled a note to leave for Camila and Lilith, said thank you, promised she’d text when she landed safely.
In line for security at the airport, she juggled her backpack and her carry-on as her phone buzzed in her pocket. She assumed it would be Camila, admonishing her for leaving without saying goodbye, and she rolled her eyes when she found it was Adriel instead.
“I suppose you’ll be happy,” he snapped out when she picked up the call. “You have an offer on the house. Ten thousand under the reduced asking price, which I have to assume you’re going to accept.”
“Yeah,” Ava said. The line moved in front of her and it took her a moment to realise it until a lady behind her told her we’re not standing here for the fucking pleasure of it. “Yeah,” she said, “Accept it. Tell them they can have it.”
There was a long-suffering sigh on the other end of the line. “Kristian Schaefer will be in touch with the paperwork.”
The call ended. The people ahead of her shuffled forward. After three seconds of her standing stock still, the woman behind Ava said, “Are you fucking stupid or something?”
Hurriedly, Ava ducked under the barrier and out of the line. She needed a minute to think, just a second to get her thoughts straight.
The house had sold. That was it, the end of it. She half thought it never would.
Sitting down heavily on the hard chairs of the airport, she wondered who she was supposed to call. Beatrice, maybe, or Camila. It didn’t feel like she thought it would though, she wasn’t overjoyed or relieved. She felt nothing.
For the first time, Ava looked back through her emails and found the photographs that Adriel had sent months before. She had spent all this time looking at houses and buildings, finding the perfect places for movies and TV shows, and she examined the pictures with the same eye now. The living room was spacious, the upper bedroom the best room of all, the kitchen a little small but certainly workable. She didn’t feel happy, or sad, or anxious.
It was just a house, after all.
Camila and Lilith were still sleeping when Ava got back to their apartment, and she crumpled up the note she had left and threw it in the trash. In the spare bedroom, she dug through the bag that hadn’t been fully unpacked since she left Beatrice’s place. At the bottom, there was the photograph of her mom that Suzanne had given her, kept safe in the same envelope as before.
Ava took it out carefully, propped it up against the lamp on the nightstand, and felt a little sad and a little better at the same time. She slept for a few more hours after that, peaceful and dreamless, and woke up in the early afternoon.
It was as cold as it ever got in LA, which meant it was still pleasant enough to walk down to the store in the winter sunshine. She bought two bottles of whiskey for Lilith and a bunch of flowers for Camila, and when she got back to their apartment, Camila said, “Are you leaving?”
“Yeah,” Ava said, “I’m booking a flight this afternoon.”
Camila eyed her carefully, “Where’s the job this time?”
Ava shook her head, “Not a job. I’ve got a wedding to go to.”
*
The plan had been to arrive early, grab a hotel room and breakfast then slide into the back of the ceremony surreptitiously. It didn’t work out like that, obviously, because none of Ava’s plans ever did. Instead, her flight was delayed by nine hours and she fought with fifty other angry people over the one working place she could charge her phone, then slept on the floor of the airport using her backpack as a pillow.
By the time she landed at the other end, there was no time for a hotel or breakfast or even a shower. She changed into her dress in the disgusting bathroom of the arrivals lounge and tried to apply makeup in the mirror while tired and irritable passengers pushed past her.
When, finally, she emerged, somewhat dressed and somewhat made up, she found herself staring at a bus timetable that went nowhere near where she was going any time soon, and even if she had wanted to wait for a cab, the line was endless with no taxis in sight.
She had almost decided that she would just fucking walk there - heels or no heels - when, in a far corner of the airport, she saw something that made her smile. A bored attendant was texting on his phone and, above him, a sign that said Bicycle Rentals.
Maybe something would go right today after all.
The hotel where Shannon and Mary were getting married was an understated boutique, nothing too fancy, but the receptionist still gave Ava an odd look when she arrived.
“You’re not a jealous ex trying to break them up, right?” the woman asked, leaning forward as though she would enjoy nothing more than the drama that would bring.
Ava glanced up and caught sight of herself in the mirror mounted behind the check-in desk. She was sweaty and red in the face, her hair everywhere. Fuck.
She swiped wildly at her hair to try and tame it, failed miserably, and said, “Uh, no. I mean - does that happen? How often? Wait, no, it doesn’t matter. Can you tell me where to find the wedding reception, please?”
The receptionist shrugged, losing interest the second it was clear there would be no dramatic scene, and gave a lazy gesture down a hallway.
Ava managed to clean herself up a little on the way there and at least she had stopped panting by the time she stepped into the party. She was hit by a wall of noise the moment she did, the music and chatter of the guests overwhelming. On a far wall were the words “Mary & Shannon” under an archway of flowers, and Shannon herself was in a flowing white dress, talking animatedly with someone who might have been her mom.
She couldn’t see Beatrice though, not in among the drunk dancers flailing out of time to the music, not at any of the tables where people were making their way steadily through bottles of champagne, not in the line for the bathroom where a bridesmaid was very seriously hitting on another.
For a horrible moment, Ava thought she hadn’t come, that she had changed her mind after everything and stayed at home. She felt the pinprick of nerves under her skin for the first time since she left Camila’s the day before, worried that things had changed between them, that leaving had too drastically altered them to ever go back.
And then their eyes met and everything was okay again.
Beatrice stood alone in a corner of the room clutching a sweating champagne glass and wearing a crisp white dress shirt. She was so beautiful Ava wondered how she had ever managed to leave her.
For a second, Bea’s eyes glanced away, then back again, and her eyebrows furrowed as she realised it was Ava, really Ava. They began to make their way towards each other in the same instant: pushing their way past dancers, stumbling over chairs, Ava knocked a drink off a table and barely even stopped to apologise.
Then Beatrice’s hand was on her elbow and she was shouting over the music, “What are you doing here? Ava?”
“Can we go somewhere?” Ava asked.
Bea nodded immediately and took her hand, warm and strong, and pulled her towards the exit.
In the elevator, there was silence at long last, and Beatrice turned towards Ava with plain astonishment in her eyes. For all that she had planned the flight, the hotel, the dress, Ava hadn’t thought about what she would say when she got here. Instead, they stared stupidly at each other.
“I missed you,” she said in the end. It was the only thing she could think to say.
“I shouldn’t have told you to go,” Beatrice frowned, “That was silly. I thought that - “
“No,” Ava interrupted, shaking her head hurriedly. “You should have. I think I had to leave, I had to figure out what I wanted.”
“Oh,” Beatrice said.
Ava took a deep breath, “Do you remember that day by the lake? You said that sometimes really good things come from really terrible things? Or something - you probably said it better than that. Well, I think that maybe you’re the good thing. Or we’re the good thing, you and me, together.”
The elevator doors opened at their floor but they stood still, their eyes never leaving each other.
“I still want to travel,” Ava said, “And do my job and everything. But I was hoping, at the end of every trip, I could come home to you.”
Beatrice stepped out of the elevator into the carpeted hallway and offered Ava her hand. Without hesitation, Ava took it.
“I would like that,” Beatrice said.
They were patient. They walked hand in hand down the long hallway to Beatrice’s room, waited as Bea unlocked the door so they could step inside and close it firmly behind them.
And then they were kissing and laughing and crying and kissing all over again.
“You look really hot in this, by the way,” Ava said, her hands on the collar of Bea’s shirt, “But I kind of miss the flannel.”
“I didn’t know I could miss someone so much,” Beatrice told her, pushing Ava’s back against the wall and pressing their bodies together.
“I love you,” Ava said into her open mouth, “Fuck. I love you.”
They never did make it back to the wedding.
*
Three years later
Ava hums to herself as she makes her way up the dirt track towards the house. There is a buzzing of life around her, the sunlight slanting through the trees and illuminating the winter, at last, turning into spring. Already she can see shoots of new flowers blooming by the path and the very beginning of new bird’s nests high up above her.
Beatrice always offers to pick her up from the airport after a work trip and she always refuses. If she gave up the long flights or the nauseating bus journey then she would have to give this part up too: the walk from town towards the house, the anticipation of knowing she’s almost there.
From ahead of her, two blurred figures on bikes race down the hill and past her, the breeze whipping Ava’s hair as they do.
“Hey, Ava!” one of the neighbour kids yells out as they pass.
She waves at them as they go, knowing that Michael is likely to have visitors in his store soon, on the hunt for candy and bubblegum.
She sees the roof of the house first as she climbs the hill, and then the walls, and finally the front yard comes into view. Beatrice is outside cutting wood while Jude suns himself on the porch and, for a moment, neither of them notice her approach. She gets to watch as Bea places a log in front of her and brings her axe down in one fluid motion. Ava feels the thud of it between her legs.
Then, Jude’s ears prick up at the sound of her footsteps, and he begins barking joyously, dashing towards the sound of her and jumping up with his front paws on the wall. When he does, Beatrice looks up too, and at the sight of Ava her face breaks into a smile, clouds parting to uncover the sun.
Ava steps through the gate and closes it behind her. It’s so good to be home.