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Chloe’s still up to her nose in bath water when Max comes home.
“Chlo?” Her keys clatter against the countertop. “You here?”
The only answer she’s able to manage is a little splash with her foot, watching the water as it ripples and waves, glossy where it smooths back out into itself. She hasn’t been able to move for the past hour, only been sitting here, soaking wet and useless, finding just the idea of reaching over to turn off the tap impossible. The suggestion of making herself stand up, and dry off, and get dressed, seems unbearable. She can’t even bring herself to look up once Max shows up at the door.
She only feels her presence at the threshold as she seems to process the scene, silent. There’s a pair of kicked-off boots near the sink. Chloe’s clothes have been left in a sad little crumple on the tile. Her phone is sat on the counter, untouched, and against the wall, submerged halfway underwater, sits her crazy girlfriend.
Even when trying her best to cram this shit into the blurriest corners of her brain, Chloe can still imagine exactly what’s running through her head. Oh, this again. Why the hell am I still here?
But she doesn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, she only crosses the floor, quiet, and kneels down so that her arms fold on the side of the tub. One hand reaches out, moving slow, and sure, and soft, as she loops a loose piece of hair around the curve of Chloe’s ear. Once their eyes both level, she asks, “What’s going on?”
Her voice is so safe. Chloe wants to respond. She imagines the motions of her mouth opening and closing, but can’t bring it to life- just the idea of it feels too heavy. She doesn’t want to set it loose, turn her thoughts into words and have them free to do whatever they want in the wild, make them prolong Max’s suffering for the sake of keeping Chloe’s doubts at bay.
All she’s able to get out is weak whimper, unable to find a place to start, much less one to finish. She just lets the leaden words speak for themselves, sighing, flattening and deflating, shoulders sinking in time with the sick feeling in her stomach. It seems like so much work for her to even lift her tongue, shape the words around her bolted teeth- she feels so small, and young, and she wants to go back to being invincible. Or invisible.
But Max doesn’t pry any further. Which, honestly, is a rarity. She just sits there, sweeping the pad of her thumb across the lobe of her ear, soft flesh in softer flesh as she says, “What can I do to help?”
And that’s the thing. Chloe doesn’t really know. It seems like there’s no bandage big enough, word, or kiss kind enough to keep her from hurting, from feeling every single pain humanly possible. Chloe feels like she’s wearing her skin in reverse, ugly nerves flipped inside-out so that the inside can see the outside, terrible and sensitive and on display for the whole world to witness. She feels like she’s lying to her. She feels like now, she’s seeing who she really is, seeing the age of her insides now seared onto her skin.
She finds herself scrambling between two extremes. Survival and defeat. Chloe’s either feeling everything or she’s feeling nothing. She’s reflecting every single color or none at all.
One side of her has completely shut itself down, accepted her tired, age-old desire to deconstruct, allow herself to crumble- meanwhile, the other has flipped itself back on into survival mode. Something naive in her is scrambling, trying to hold onto any good thing she can touch. Desperately, she keeps trying to replay the memories of this last week in her head- what they had for dinner last night, the name of the next-door neighbor that just moved in, Mom’s new address- and nothing. There’s nowhere for her to find purchase. Everything has grown sharp edges. Even the air is laced with something sour.
So, she doesn’t know what Max can do. Before, all she had to do was be there, hold her hand while they wait out the storm together. But why would she want to do that anymore?
So, Chloe doesn’t say anything.
Instead, she starts to cry.
Max tries to hush her once she does. She uses the whole flat of her hand so that it brushes across Chloe’s forehead, pushing back shaggy strands of blonde, and with the other, she reaches over, fetching a towel from where it sits on the rack.
“Okay,” Her voice bounces quietly off the water, the walls. “Sit up, babe.”
She shuts off the dripping faucet. She looks at Chloe in the eye, reaching out to take hold of her pruny hand, and even that first step is an ordeal- she feels sick just making herself stand up. But Max has always seemed to have a talent for making Chloe do the things that she really doesn’t want to do, only doing so because she likes to think she knows what’s good for her. Chloe’d probably be a little annoyed if it weren’t for the heaviness weighing her down.
Then for a few moments, Chloe’s whole world is kind, and helpful, and handling her with so much care. Her voice is so soft, asking, not telling her, to lift her arm, or to turn around, or to bow her head. It only makes Chloe want to cry more.
In the middle of drying her hair, the slick of her shoulders, Max asks, “Where’s your clothes?”
Chloe has a hard time not collapsing at the realization that she didn’t bring in any, yet another tiny, simple task that she failed to cross off the list. She forgot to do the dishes ane she meant to make the bed this morning, too.
“Okay,” She must notice the look on Chloe’s face. “Okay, I’ll go get them. Just stay here.”
Chloe does. She sits on the edge of the tub and stares, watching her own toes curl on cold tile. It’s all she can do, aside from feel a low thrum of worry in her stomach when Max turns her back. Like she’s walked out and has finally decided, spur of the moment, that she’d never come back in again.
This isn’t what Max wants to come home to. Having to pat her girlfriend dry like she’s a two year-old. She’s probably had a hard enough day even without this, anyway- her boss has been an asshole lately and she’s been having problems with her car and her headaches have only been getting worse.
She has to regret it. She wouldn’t call her, crying while she’s hiding in the bathroom during work if she didn’t. She wouldn’t keep her camera in the bottom drawer for days at a time. She wouldn’t have nightmares for half the week or look at Chloe like she doesn’t know where she is when she wakes up.
She wouldn’t deal with this shit with such normalcy. She wouldn’t have to do this dance again and again and again.
She shouldn’t have to.
But she’s still here, opening the door with a pair of sweats under her arm and the biggest, baggiest band shirt that Chloe owns. Chloe doesn’t have the strength to pry away the hands that come up to steady her as she dresses, that help her to loop the shirt over her head, that cuff her hair behind her ears as she stands.
Max leads her to the living room, doesn’t even gripe when Chloe leaves the wet towel on the floor, and looks at her, dressed, dry, spooning her cheek with her palm. Her skin is hot and human on her own.
“You should eat,” She says. “Go and lay down, I’m gonna make dinner, okay?”
She shouldn’t have to.
But Chloe nods, feeling selfish. She lays her sore body down on the sofa. She shuts her eyes and tries her best to hear nothing else but the gentle footfall on tile, the low curse Max gives when the lighter for the old-as-balls gas stove doesn’t ignite on the first try. She remembers that they have to jostle the handle of the fridge or else it sticks. She hears the cabinets close and the dishes clash. Slowly, she tries to find something to hold onto.
Her grip loosens, though, when Max comes back. Her head lifts. She looks at what she’s holding. And she starts crying again.
She made her favorite.
“Okay,” Max sits down, sets it aside on the coffee table. “Come here.”
Max loves her so much. Chloe has no idea why. She imagines she’s just made her so blind with guilt that she doesn’t realize what kind of danger she’s walking into. Chloe’s kept her from ever being able to lift the wool from over her eyes, from ever being able to look back, or chase her dreams.
All strength has been sucked out of her skin. A complete loss of serenity. Her body has gone soft and slack and Chloe has no other choice than to do as she says, head propped up in her lap. And like an old ritual, Max is ready for the resurrection of times passed, making preparations to send it off to sleep, bury it back down again.
She runs her hands through Chloe’s hair, over and over, letting the pain fall through her fingers like silk. She draws circles on her scalp like a crown while Chloe closes her palm, hard, over Max’s knee, and cries.
“Chloe,” She whispers. “Can you please tell me what’s going on?”
She just makes some pathetic sound into her thighs and wishes that this were anger. Something quick and hot and mad that she can get out with a shattered plate or a broken glass and have it be over with in a second- but instead it’s this slow, slogging, sluggish sadness, something she has to force herself to look in the face and feel. It’s exhausting. It’s humiliating.
There’s a second of quiet until Max squeezes the hand over her kneecap and whispers again, quietly, gently encouraging, “Chlo.” It’s just soft enough, has just enough give so that Chloe still has the option to say no, if she wants it.
She doesn’t.
“Everything.”
And Max understands. She always understands. Her arms loop snug around her and she brings her aching being closer to her own and she doesn’t talk, just understands.
Now that it’s out there, Chloe tries her best to expand on that single word. Everything, all of it, death and abandoned friends and more death and more death and almost-brushes-with-death- but all she’s able to get out is a sound that can only be described as dying-cat-adjacent.
“You don’t have to explain,” Max says when she succumbs to her tears mid-sentence. “It’s okay.”
Chloe settles herself on her chest, the width of which surprisingly small despite being able to hold so much love where her heart lies, and Max lets her. Her hands come up, around Chloe’s back, under her shirt with one set of fingers sat in the space between her shoulder blades, the other through the ruffled ends of her hair. She doesn’t complain when Chloe’s chin pokes into collar. She doesn’t complain when she cries a wet spot into her shirt or when she holds onto her, so tight that the feeling bites where nails meet flesh.
Chloe’s always hated how young she sounds when she cries. And she’s always hated that Max doesn’t hate her. And she hates now, that somehow, she’s still found a way to shovel all of her bullshit onto the one person she’s loved since the beginning of everything, who was the beginning of everything, and in return, she just sits there and takes it. She just sits there and handles Chloe like she’s made of glass even though she’s the one person that’s scraped and scuffed her soft edges rough, even though she’s the one person that’s ruined her. She’s ruined her- Chloe’s ruined her and she knows it because she’s fucked Max up so bad that she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and she’ll look at her like she’s a monster in their own bed.
Max has never been good at hiding her sadness. She couldn’t do it when she was a kid and she can’t do it now. She becomes so ashamed in the face of it, her worry, that she refuses to acknowledge its existence, but becomes consumed by it all the while. She blames herself for every little thing, thinks that she could’ve done more, that she’s not enough. But she has. And she is .
For a second, she feels the same sick in her stomach that she did years ago in a New Mexico motel room. It was November, it was at night, and she’d spent the whole day trying to talk her into eating something. All of that proved useless, though, because she’d ended the evening holding all that was left of her, a girl reduced to blood and bone as she continued, begging her to ’ Just eat something,’ sobbing, because ‘I can’t lose you, too,’ and her hands suddenly feel so, so dirty.
She did that to her.
Loving Chloe is a full-time job. Max should be a normal girl, with a normal life, with a normal girlfriend. She shouldn’t have to be a babysitter. She shouldn’t have to be a therapist. She sure as hell shouldn’t have Chloe holding her back.
But Max always does this.
Chloe remembers being fourteen, hearing her through her bedroom floor. Joyce wanted to do something normal and she’d met that request, playing house with her and baking Christmas cookies with her a month after Chloe’s dad had been pulverized by a semi-truck. A month before she would leave.
Max had let her be alone when she said she needed to be alone. She had come upstairs when she said she wanted her to come upstairs. She sat beside her on her bed with a plateful of cookies in the dark without her even having to ask, splitting them with her and and watching the same infomercial loop until 3 a.m. with her until Chloe finally fell asleep, holding her hand in her own the entire time.
Chloe remembers being nineteen on the night of the storm. They hadn’t had a single wink of sleep, spending hours on the lighthouse floor where Max had sat with her, keeping her close and keeping her safe and as sane as she could manage while trying to convince her, crying, that she is, as a matter of fact, not going to die, and is not supposed to.
And now here they are, at twenty-two. She’s holding her without an ounce of selfishness. She’s not trying to force-feed her comfort. She’s just there, doing what she does best as she carries her through the ugliness of honesty.
She always does this.
How is she not tired of it?
She just opts to ignore how selfish Chloe’s been, continuing to touch her like she’s not the world’s biggest, steamiest, most manipulative heap of garbage. Chloe gets the same feeling she got as a child when Max would braid her hair at recess, or when she was running a fever and her mother would feel her forehead as she stayed home from school. She feels safe, and protected.
And so, so, guilty.
“I’m sorry I’m such a bitch.” Chloe’s head hangs, heavy, hurting in her lap, and she is so, so tired. “You should hate me.”
Max stops, sudden. Chloe can imagine that painful look of disapproval on her face. “Why do you think that?”
“I’m a shitty girlfriend,” Shut up. “And I’m an all-around asshole person,” Shut up. “And you deserve better.” Shut up, shut up, shut up.
The silence that follows stretches out for few seconds longer than she anticipates, and then she’s really starting to think, Fuck, this is it, I’ve finally bled her dry, fucked her over, wiped her clean of all her options , until Max says:
“That’s bullshit.”
It’s so out of character that it nearly snaps Chloe out of her crying fit from shock. “What?”
“Chloe,” back to quiet, ripe with care. “You’re happy, right?”
Her mouth parts, red and puffy beneath her palm. “Well, not right now -”
“Well, yeah, I know that, dummy, but…” Her hand graces her forehead as she blinks, lashes like the points of a star. “On any other day. You’re happy, right?”
Something small and warm blooms in her chest when she thinks about it.
They got Chinese food last night. They did laundry and Steph called to ask them to come over to the apartment where she and Mikey split the rent. Max held her hand on the drive home after, and she wore her shirt to bed. She remembers getting kissed good night, cheek, chin, and mouth, like she always does, and then they slept, still and silent until sunrise. She remembers that that’s the average day, her new normal, and that the skin of the snake sheds when the skin of the snake wants to shed.
“Yeah.” She speaks with a rattle of her lungs, clean, hot cotton absorbing her words.
“Okay. So you’re having a bad day,” She says, like it’s simple. “But that’s all it is.”
It’d be so easy for Chloe to believe her. But it’s so easy for Chloe to not want to.
Her sadness, when it takes the reins, never seems to grow any older. It seems just as fresh as the day Dad died, whispering in her ear that it’s the end of the world, and that no amount of waiting will allow her to heal. But, now that she thinks about it, it always has. Always. And now she has so much more to fall back on.
Chloe isn’t just some angry punk girl she’s fucking to piss off her parents. She’s not a pedestal or a vessel for her to empty all of her guilt into. She isn’t repaying a debt. She does all this because it’s her choice to, loves all this craziness because it’s her choice to, even if that makes her insane. Max isn’t bound to her by a ball and chain, but a red cord that stretches between them, elastic and vibrant where it vibrates with life for ages, for eons, forever.
Of course she is.
“I really missed you.” Chloe tells her knee.
She can feel a small swell of breath from beneath her, a second of bare hesitation, a whirl of warm air. Through closed eyes, she hears her say, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t-” Chloe lifts her head, briefly, before the woozy bloodrush kicks in. “-apologize, I just.. you know.”
“I know.” Max’s thumb rubs whatever moisture that remains all the way into her skin, smooth and cool and good, filling in her empty spots completely. Damage control.
Max doesn't seem to care that Chloe’s smothered her again with all of her weepy, candyass, crybaby bullshit. Instead she just sweeps the sweat-stuck hair away from her forehead, face, draws the pad of her thumb down the dip of her chin, dragging cool, curved lines along her jaw, neck, over and over and over again. Her head rests on Max’s thigh, denim warm and just soft enough to feel good where it presses against cry-sore skin. The ache in Chloe’s temple is still pushing, pulsing on, though fading with each passing second.
Max kisses her when she tastes like a carton of cigarettes. Max loves her when she doesn’t want to be loved. Max has made unthinkable sacrifices, has put Chloe’s life before her own and everybody else’s, all because she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of her sorry ass. Because she loves her.
Not just anybody would do that. Nobody has done that. Chloe doesn’t know how to even process that because she’s never been loved like that before. Never loved like that before.
Chloe can feel herself slowly coming back. She can hear the water rushing through the pipes, the dryer beep from downstairs. She can hear the neighbor’s- Alex’s- dresser drawers rattling closed from next door, readying for sleep. Max is warming her hand, Max’s heartbeat is thumping against her ear. A ‘welcome back’ from the real world.
From above, Max whispers, “Hey.” And it’s just one word, one simple syllable, but it’s so familiar, so comfortable, that Chloe can feel herself sinking into it. “I love you.”
“I know.” Further and further.
She can hear her smile even in her silence, the tips of her fingers touching gently around the tender skin of her eyes, harsh and red and waxy, but treated with so much fondness.
“And..”
Chloe hums.
“Do you think you could take your pills?”
Oh.
Those.
In the kitchen cabinet.
All the way in the kitchen cabinet.
Chloe whines.
Max whines back. “What?”
“They’re just…” She reaches out, making a limp waving motion with her hand. “...So far away.”
“Chloe,” She says. When she doesn’t get an answer, she groans, already starting to get up. “You’re so lazy.”
Max’s attempt to peel her away proves fruitless, once a very persistent- and very cold- Chloe flops back down on her lap before she can escape.
“No.” She says, voice nasal and raw. “I’m freezing. And you’re warm.”
She looks up at her and they come head-to-head in a brief staring contest. She has an expression of stern warmth on her face, brows sharp but smile soft. What seems like a grin is starting to twitch at the corners of Chloe’s mouth, too, the feeling still far away, though welcome. Making it there.
“Chlo.” Her voice firms, though remains still in its stance of affection.
“Nuh-uh.”
“Know that I say this with love,” She begins. “But you’re going to go take them or I’m going to shove them down your throat.”
“Damn,” Chloe slides a hand up her thigh. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”
Max’s laugh is wonderful and bright and so, so alive. “Well at least I know you’re feeling better. Asshole.”
“How about,” Chloe stretches her arms up above her head, squinting in serious thought. “I’ll go take them if you get the ice cream out of the freezer.”
“Deal,” She pats her backside. “Come on. Let’s get up. Go.”
Chloe does as she’s told as Max gets a pint of the sweet, sweet and ambrosia that is Brownie Batter Core, along with two spoons and the blanket from their bed. They sit on the couch with their legs linked, hands held, binge-watching Saturday morning cartoons on a Wednesday night. And she’s starting to feel normal. Okay, even. Every few minutes she has a thought that she has to shove back down, like the most brutal game of Whack-A-Mole ever played.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. It definitely won’t be the last. But choppy seas sure as hell are a lot easier to sail with your first mate by your side.
At eleven o’clock, Chloe pokes her with her foot and says, “Thank you.”
Max kisses her knee in response. Simply, she says, “Of course.”
Of course.
There isn’t a battle in her brain by the time they go to bed. Even the sound of her breath is a marvelous thing, the rise and fall of her breast, a quiet taming of the beast. She’s really here, really real, really sitting there like a dream Chloe can reach out and touch, something safe to memorize the texture of and the taste.
Of course she is.
Max could get up and leave at any moment if she wanted to. But she never does. This is theirs, their shitty little home that they spend every single second filling with love and more life than Chloe could’ve ever dreamed of, before.
Of course they are.
Of course this is where she’d end up.
Of course.