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“Do you think we’ll ever get to be like that?” Carson asks. She’s got stars in her eyes and a pink flush to her cheeks after emptying a few too many glasses. They’re watching Maybelle sway with some nameless soldier while they gossip, drink, and whisper about things that might just give Beverly an aneurysm if she overheard.
Greta looks at her with those big, beautiful eyes and gives her a smile- a real, toothy grin- not the bullshit she pulls for the crowds or the men in the street who she wants to steal cigarettes from. Carson comes to life for the thousandth time under her gaze- it’s as if the sun itself blooms inside her chest, as if Greta built it just for her, molding it with those soft, delicate hands, sticking her tongue out and smudging that cherry red lipstick as she tries to get the details just right .
Greta grabs Carson’s hand in her own, interlocking their fingers- Carson doesn’t think she’s ever felt as alive as she does with her- and she pulls her outside. They find somewhere- alone. They’re both drunk off their asses, stumbling and giggling, and they settle in a grassy park a few minutes from the bar. They’re sharing a laugh- neither of them really remembers what it was about- but they look into each other’s eyes, and there is something .
“You never answered my question,” Carson reminds her, and Greta smiles at her again. Her eyes flicker to Carson’s lips, and Carson feels her face heat up- it’s not just the alcohol. “Greta.”
“Remind me what it was again?” She giggles, and Carson chuckles softly. God, they’re both way too drunk for this, but she feels like her heart is floating. Like the red balloons her dad used to buy her at the fair when she was a kid- she could never hold onto the string for long. She’d get distracted, go running for something, forgetting what she was holding onto. It would float away, and she’d never notice until it was a few feet above her dad’s reach, becoming a little red dot in the sky she’d follow for as long as she could. She cried for hours, every single time.
The things that made her happy always seemed to get away from her.
“Do you think… we’ll ever have a chance?” She asks. “To be like any other couple. To dance, to hold hands on the street… to look at each other like we do. To want each other like we do.”
Greta gives her that sad smile, that one that just crushes her heart every time she sees it- but the words just keep coming up and out.
“It’s not even just us-” she adds. “People like us. Someday. Do you think… they’ll ever get to just be ? That someday, they won’t… they won’t have to hide like we do?”
She sounds like she’s begging. She doesn’t really know to whom anymore. God? Greta? Those two are practically interchangeable at this point , she thinks to herself.
“You know what, Cars?” Greta sighs. “I don’t… I don’t know. The world changes so slowly. I can hope, and dream, and pray as much as I want, but I can’t see how it’ll be for us. For anyone like us. It seems like… no matter how much things change, they still don’t want us. There’s always something they can find that just fucking ruins it.”
She sounds like she’s about to cry, and Carson moves a little closer, pulling in so that they’re just barely touching. Greta leans her head against Carson’s shoulder and swipes at her eyes, trying to wipe away the tears starting to collect there without smearing her pretty mascara.
Carson smiles sadly, even though nobody can see it in the dark. She links pinkies with Greta- feeling that they’re far away enough from anyone to make it okay. “You wanna know what I think?”
Greta lifts her head, looking curiously at Carson. “What do you think, Car?”
“I think,” she explains, a small smile playing out on her face as she looks up at the Rockford night sky. “That it’s absolutely crazy how far we can see right now.”
The stars reflect themselves in Carson’s pretty brown eyes, and Greta laughs, shoving against Carson’s shoulder. “You’re an idiot,” she teases.
“No! Look up, Greta. Look at the stars.” They both fall back, staring up at the sky. “Think about how much we know about them. We used to think that the sun revolved around us. Little kids tell their friends that the moon is made of cheese and they all believe that until someone tells them different. We look up and make stories with all the shiny little dots in the sky, and have done that since we were able to speak. And now… we know so much. We know what stars are made of. That there’s little bits of that inside of us. We’re made of fucking stardust , Greta, how cool is that?”
Greta laughs- Carson is just so unbelievably fucking earnest , unlike anyone else on earth. She has such a passion and love for being alive . When she said she’d never met anyone like Carson Shaw, she wasn’t lying. “I don’t see how this relates to your point.”
“Think about how much has changed,” she whispers. “It’s gonna keep changing. One day… Maybe twenty, forty, a hundred years from now, some girl is gonna find our newspaper articles. She’s gonna see our photos, she’ll see me, and you, and Jo, and Jess, and Lupe, and God knows who else, and she’ll know . She’ll know that we were like her. That we’ve always existed like this.” It’s Carson’s turn to cry now, and Greta wipes her tears away with her thumb.
“And then…” She continues. “And then, she’s gonna turn to her girlfriend, and they’re gonna smile. They’re gonna go outside, and they’ll hold hands, and kiss in the park without caring who sees. They’ll go to their parents house together and they’ll be themselves and nobody will tell them that they aren’t allowed. And they’ll think about those women from the newspaper, and they’ll smile. Because they’re gonna know . We aren’t… we aren’t the first of us, and we sure as hell won’t be the last.” She’s crying in full now, streams of hot tears running down her cheeks, definitely smearing the makeup that she just fucking hates . “We can’t be. It’s gotta get better. It’s gotta.”
Greta curls into her again, her body warm against Carson’s constantly freezing figure. “I like your hope, Shaw,” she whispers, pressing a soft kiss to Carson’s shoulder. “Don’t let anyone take that away from you.”
Don’t let anyone take that away from you.
Carson swears to herself, right then and there, that she won’t let anyone take any of this away from her. Not baseball, not the Peaches, not her hope. And most of all- Greta. Nobody, anywhere, is taking any of this away from her.