Aware
Aware (Japanese) — the bittersweetness of a brief and fading moment of transcendental beauty.
Carol hated telemarketers. Everyone did, she knew — now more than ever though, there was this unfamiliar almost-rage that filled her every time her screen lit up, and it wasn’t Therese. Therese, who she knew would have been there for her last night as she sobbed. Therese, who had somehow managed to uproot everything in the twenty-one days (three weeks exactly, now, and the thought was strange) that they had known each other. It was adolescent, the time that it took the next idea to crash into her peripheral.
Why don’t I just call her?
She found the contact in her phone — Therese (bookshop) — thumbing in a new name in replacement of what struck her now as the details of an acquaintance, rather than the friend that Therese was showing herself to be. Friend. It was an easy lie. With a breath, Carol pressed the pad of her finger into the call button. A new contact, as her phone now rang. Therese <3. A platonic heart, she told herself — and a lie again.
“Hello?”
Therese’s voice.
“Therese, hey—”
“Carol! I missed you, hi.”
I missed you. Carol could hear the smile in the words, could almost see the dimples etched into Therese’s cheeks. Her heart ran through with warmth, her mind whirled. I missed you too.
“You’re certainly excited for a Tuesday.”
What was a Tuesday, anymore? December was a month of deceptively short days, hours twisting into each other in a fashion that may as well have rendered today a Saturday.
“Maybe — is it Tuesday? — but apparently there’s snow forecasted, later.”
Bloody Tuesdays. The word was beginning to sound foreign in Carol’s head, but before her mind was allowed a chance to wring it through until the syllables shrivelled into themselves, the second part of Therese’s sentence rose up off its haunches.
“Later as in… today, later?”
Thirty-five, and the idea of snow still exhilarated her as much as if she’d been a child faced with the prospect of missing a day of school.
“Today, later. I didn’t know if we’d get any this year at all.”
Snow. Butterflies? The excitement twirled across the miles between them, and Therese was almost breathless.
“Just before Christmas, too. We haven’t had a white Christmas in…”
Carol paused to count the years on her fingers. Did she even dare to think back to dates before this?
“—four years, I think.”
Therese finished her sentence — unexpectedly — but her voice was flat, this time, and Carol could imagine walking over to the window and watching the words tripping and stilling on the gravel below.
“Not a fan?”
The question could have been phrased better, in terms of context, but Therese seemed to understand, as she always did.
“Of Christmas? No. Not— not really. It’s strange.”
Carol waited for Therese to continue.
“Strange?”
A prompt.
“Sort of. God, I’m really not good at this, am I? People are supposed to be excited in the run-up.”
It was laughter that Carol let loose down the line now, the sentiment bizarre. Christmas, past adulthood, had become less of a festivity and more of an event to plan, a budget blown, an argument tossed. Always the uncles, too, starting rows at the family dinner. She looked forward to it less and less each year, and while there wasn’t necessarily anything particularly negative about the holiday season, there simply wasn’t enough will in her heart to be overjoyed about it.
“They are?”
Solidarity. It wasn’t new, but there was a developing fondness for things that both women had in common, as rare as they seemed to be. A garden, cultivated by the two.
“Maybe not, then. Christmas is fun and all — turkey, presents, the lot — but I’m usually alone. Which, you know, kind of defeats the point of the turkey, and the presents.”
The admission was quieter, more stilted than before, and Carol could have sketched parenthesis around the parts of the sentence that Therese was using as a method to stall. She waited, again. It was strange, these weak little facts that she was able to grasp hold of during their increasingly frequent calls, knotting them together with the rest of the portfolio she seemed to be building of the brunette. Silence, and then some more.
“Dannie usually goes off, to his Mama’s house — this huge great family gathering, and he invites me every year, but I just don’t really fare well with those kinds of things. That… magnitude.”
The idea of a family at all was what truly daunted Therese, although she held the fact back, that stereotypical extended Christmas which she’d only ever read about in Enid Blyton books. Family. The idea that a family could be so loving, so unconditionally, was ridiculously foreign to her. As was Christmas. Thus; she cowered.
“And parties?”
Therese was slightly miffed that Carol thought of her as the partying type, considering all the evidence she’d made sure to stack against that idea. Books, tea, quietude, calm.
“Oh, no. You’d never find me at one of those. Not to be a snob, or anything, I just…”
She didn’t finish the sentence — she didn’t need to finish the sentence, for Carol to understand. Just. Just existence. Just truth.
“You’re not a snob at all. I’ll be alone too, this year.”
And the next. And probably the next after that. There was a quietly dawning silence that stretched out between the two women, pulling taut in an attempt to wrap itself around the elephant in the room. Two people, both alone at Christmas, on the phone to each other as the revelations were thrown across enemy lines. What if we spend the day together? Neither dared to say it, but the idea was there. It sat, a lake, between them.
“What if…”
Therese stilled. Carol couldn’t even hear her breaths coming down the line.
“Would you want to come and pick out a tree with me?”
A smile. Invisible, audible. The blonde grinned back as if the brunette could see — the question asked wasn’t exactly the fish they’d both been lining for, but it was a start. A minnow in the search for a shark. Either way, the ball had been set rolling, and the undertone of the ask spoke volumes more.
“You haven’t got a tree yet?”
Incredulous half-laughter on Therese’s part — even she’d managed to find a tree. Its needles littered her already-cluttered living room floor, and their apartment reeked of pine to such an extent that air freshener companies would have been jealous, but it was there, and decorated, and the one reminder she had, that she had anything at all. Decorated with cracked candy canes and baubles she’d scraped off the shelves at a last minute sale, certainly, but it was there. It sat, leaked needles and scent, and spoke tales of Christmas she’d never heard before.
“Do you think there’ll be any left?”
Silence, now, and all that remained was for Therese to answer the original question.
“Yes. Definitely. We might have to hurry, though.”
Yes. Definitely. Carol breathed in, and the world sat back. It had done its job.
“I’ll pick you up at ten?”
Half an hour. Therese bit back another smile — she was seeing Carol again, and this soon.
“Perfect. See you then.”
The call ended, and both women clutched their respective phones to their chests, grinning like gods at the dawning of the world. This, the dawning of their world. Snow, and Carol, and Therese, and joy that thus diffused into the air like the smell of pine in Therese’s flat. The smell of Christmas, she thought now. It had never really struck her like this, before.
After ten too-long minutes worth of trying to pick an outfit, Therese had settled on something that looked vaguely Christmassy enough — a grey knit sweater that looked strikingly like the one Carol had been wearing the other week, black jeans and heeled boots that lifted her up another few inches from where she ordinarily stood. Tiny reindeer earrings that she’d picked up from some car boot sale a few years ago — and never worn, until now — dangled from her ears, their noses glinting red in her peripheral vision. The weather app on her mobile hadn’t changed but to forecast the likelihood of snow as 80% rather than the previous 60%, and just as she made a move to text Carol an update, a horn sounded outside. She started, peering down from her third floor window and catching a flash of blonde as a car door opened. It was, unmistakably, Carol — the way she walked, almost swaying, her posture, her nails (which were so bright a red that Therese could see them even from this far up) — and for the second time in just as many days, the younger woman pressed herself into the glass of her window, aching to see more.
The intercom buzzed, and Therese skittered across the apartment, her hands shaking with the energy of a thousand stars. Play it cool. As if she could ever play it cool around Carol.
“Hello?”
“Therese.”
Even through the rusty audio that the intercom allowed, her name on Carol’s lips was enough to silence Therese for the few seconds that passed.
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
With a last spritz of the perfume she’d been given as a birthday present from a university friend — three years ago, because the bottle was nice enough that she couldn’t afford to buy a new one and she was decidedly fond of this scent — Therese tugged open the door, scrawling a note for Dannie that started and ended with some variant of see you after Christmas, I’ll be okay. All she could hope for was anything but a repeat of last week.
She avoided the lift down — it stank perpetually of weed, and she’d rather not let that be the first thing Carol noticed about her — darting out of the stairwell at the bottom with the sound of her heels on the floor echoing behind her. A Tesla — because of course Carol had a Tesla — sat outside, gleaming cherry red against the black of its furnishings. The windows were tinted, but Therese could still see the faint outline of Carol inside, a manicured finger tapping against the steering wheel.
The older woman looked up as Therese tugged open the door, eyes creasing into a smile as she hopped in.
“Loving the earrings.”
Therese grinned back, her breaths condensing in the winter air until she pulled the door back shut behind her.
“Loving the nail polish.”
A verbal tennis game already, called to a halt almost immediately as Carol rested a hand on Therese’s thigh, squeezing once — platonically — watching out of the very corner of her eye as Therese stiffened into the cream leather of the seats. The sun flooded in through the car’s ridiculously huge windscreen onto Carol — her hair was a warm gold, today, each strand so lustrous it seemed lit from within.
“I missed you.”
Carol smirked.
“So you’ve said.”
A pause, and just before she moved to type directions into the SatNav—
“I missed you too.”
The drive to the tree lot was quiet, clouds swamping the sky with their promise of snow. Every so often Therese would steal a glance at Carol, at the way her hands grazed the steering wheel, the shift in her posture every time she pressed further down on the gas. Her moderate stillness versus the blur of the world as they both drove by; a battle Therese would watch through eternities should there be no victor.
“See something you like?”
Therese grinned sheepishly, drawing her gaze back up to meet Carol’s eyes though they had already flickered back onto the road. Yes. If she’d been a different person, the word would have tumbled from her lips.
“I barely get out of the city. This side of New York — it’s nice.”
Half a lie, but Carol seemed to entertain it well enough. They pulled off the highway into a stretch of greenery Therese had never thought much of in the few times she’d driven past it, grinning as they passed an aged red sign — Gopher Broke Farm. A significantly half-arsed Christmas tree was scrawled under the white font, and this place was so off-the-beaten-track that Carol could only know it through past experience.
“You’ve been here before?”
A sad smile touched the edge of the older woman’s cheeks, hidden as quickly as the sun behind the clouds above.
“With Rindy. And Harge — it was his tradition.”
Silence, and regret on Therese’s part. I’m sorry, she would have said, had she not the faint memory of Carol expressing just how much she hated hearing those words. There was a look on her face that spoke of expecting the exact phrase — a sort of ready stillness, like a martial artist before a fight — and it brightened when Therese veered away from the pity she so despised.
“Now it’s yours.”
Dappled sunlight filtered through the windscreen onto Carol’s teeth as she grinned, though the clouds were so heavy now that they had no texture, no steady roll, just weight.
“Now it’s mine.”
Ours? The word caught itself before either woman spoke it, before either woman could even begin to entertain the idea that there would be more Christmases, together, than this. It slipped itself under their tongues like a razor blade — just as hidden, just as dangerous.
“Carol?”
The name was treated with delicacy, as it always was, and the car pulled to a stop past the electric gate which had dragged itself along the ground. Carol. Rolling from the very back of her mouth right to the front where the ‘L’ dropped out, the syllables were lifted up just slightly at the end in a question.
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
Silence, again, and this time a vaguely bemused shift in countenance on Carol’s behalf.
“For driving you out here? Please — you’re the one who agreed to spend the day with me in the first place.”
It was casual; a casual avoidance, perhaps, of the genuine undertones of Therese’s gratitude — that wasn’t what she’d been thanking Carol for and they both knew it. Besides, the blonde had said agreed as if Therese had had any say in the matter at all — she was magnetised, and they both knew that, too. No part of her could ever plausibly have declined.
“Come with me?”
The joys found in the art of belated tree shopping were few and far between — this one? but too old; this one? but that thing has less branches than my family tree (a joke on Therese’s part that she knew wouldn’t quite go through to Carol and her abundant family, all those cousins twice-removed that someone would likely be in charge of keeping track of) — before Carol stopped at a tree that was very, very nearly perfect. Enough branches that the trunk wasn’t visible, foliage tinted a rich green, fewer needles littered around it — and the list went on, but—
“Please tell me you’re aware that this tree is smaller than me.”
Therese stood obstinately by it, the tip barely stretching past the shoulders of her 5’4” frame. Carol gestured at the tree behind them, tall in the way that an eleven year old boy entertaining an early growth spurt was tall — gangly, patchy, all angles and general disproportionality.
“There’s always… this one?”
A telling sweep through the heap of pine needles which had gathered in mountains beside the trunk said enough, and both turned back to the dwarfed tree in front of them. Carol laughed, briefly, a giving snort that she was quick to cover up with her left hand. Therese looked up at her, and then again — quickly — back down. There was an emotion in her gaze she couldn’t yet let Carol see.
“Can you run back and grab my purse? It’s in the glove compartment, I think.”
Therese turned to walk back to the car as Carol waved over the Christmas tree salesman, her sheepskin gloves catching the light with her hair. The Tesla was still unlocked and the brunette leaned in, fishing around for the wallet in amongst countless safety pamphlets and a few unopened packets of tissues. She glanced out of the windscreen, splayed almost horizontally across the front seat, and stared. There, as should likely have been expected, was Carol. The blonde was stood laughing at something the salesman — salesboy, more like — had said, a throw-your-head-back sort of laugh that still didn’t quite reach the edges of her eyes. Still, she looked divine, and the last rays of sunlight were splayed across her shoulders, casting the rest of the world into the shadow it seemed to deserve.
The image was one she would have taken a photo of, had she owned a good enough camera to do the scene justice — yet in her mind the shutters clicked anyway, a stamp pressed into wax seal that would remain imprinted in her mind. The red of Carol’s lipstick, the green of the trees, the white of the rest of the sky — the world wanted people to know it was Christmas, it seemed. She found herself caught now in Carol’s gaze, a piercing blue to stand against all which suddenly appeared dull. Drawn across the front of the car, her eyes wide and her mouth open, Therese knew she’d been caught staring. Carol’s smile, though — Carol’s smile, which stretched across the whole expanse of her face — and suddenly, she didn’t care. Are you done? The blonde mouthed it across the metres, and Therese felt the words as if they were a gust of wind. She shivered in response to it, brushing that off too and pulling herself out of the car.
“I got your purse.”
Carol’s grin stretched wider as she held out a hand for it, letting her fingers brush Therese’s as she grasped it.
“So I saw.”
She turned back to the salesboy, handing over the twenty — trees were on a discount, this late in December — and then, winking at Therese, fished out another forty dollars. It was a joking reference to their flustered first meeting, and a joy to watch the boy’s eyes gleam in the dying sunlight — still, it stung. Just a little bit. A consequential reminder to Therese, at least, of the way forty dollars meant nothing to Carol; of the way forty dollars meant way too much to herself. The tree was wrapped in netting, Carol was somewhat wrapped in that same obliviousness Therese was wondering whether or not to be wary of — and then.
“Therese!”
Her voice was threaded through with delirium, falling away as something close to a whisper — Therese was magnetised. Carol’s hand was outstretched, palm-up in the air and almost horizontal, her eyes childishly wide.
“Did you see that?”
Therese shook her head, eyebrows knitting together in joyous bewilderment.
“Hold on.”
The blonde reached for Therese’s own hand, positioning it in a way that mirrored hers. It was quiet, a gust of wind, the grunts of the salesboy pushing the tree into the boot behind them, two women holding their arms out to the sky as if in divine sacrifice. A knock, and an answer. Drifting, down and down, floating and twisting and whirling in those cyclonic patterns that the wind seemed to like — a snowflake. It landed on Therese’s thumb.
“Snow.”
She was as breathless as Carol, now, casting her eyes up in search of the rest of the onslaught. The two women locked eyes as another flake fell between them, giving Therese the excuse to look away before the heat between them melted away the white Christmas that suddenly seemed set to come.
“God, you must be cold. Your cheeks are glowing.”
Therese nodded, playing along with the idea that her face had been reddened by cold rather than blush.
“Oh, yeah — that’s my bad. Should’ve brought a jacket or something thicker than this.”
She pulled at a thread of the sweater she’d so painstakingly chosen before, realising only now the inherent idiocy of wearing a single layer through the forecasted 80% chance of snow. Carol only grinned and before Therese could stop her, was shrugging off her own coat — a dark beige trench coat, no less, something so startlingly Carol-esque that the brunette had barely even noticed it — and drawing it around Therese’s shoulders. In a meek form of protest, Therese half-stepped back, her mouth already open in dissent.
“Please, you don’t have to—”
Secretly (was it so secret? Carol was instigating this, after all) the younger woman bathed in the moment; in the sudden warmth that the coat supplied, in the closeness that they were rather abruptly shifted into, in the way Carol’s perfume rolled off the coat and into the air around her as if it could be a shield from all of the world’s deceptions.
“I grew up in Illinois, Therese. Honestly, the cold barely affects me anymore.”
She said the word Illinois as if it were Antarctica, and for a brief, useless moment, Therese couldn’t help but wonder if Carol and knew what it was to be truly cold. As in — we can’t pay for the heating this winter so you won’t be able to feel your fingers for about five months cold. The wealthier of the two probably only knew cold as a feeling rather than a time frame — the nip of a December morning before the fire was lit, getting into an unheated car before the sun was up, forgetting to wear gloves on a winter walk. Jealousy, and Therese hated it. Hated it. Of course it wasn’t Carol’s fault that she came from a richer background. How could it be? Both of them had gone through their fair share of struggles and Therese absolutely despised the part of herself which seemed so desperate to turn this into the oppression olympics no matter the cost.
“Are you sure?”
Carol scoffed.
“Absolutely.”
The coat’s sleeves hung slightly over the edge of Therese’s fingers and the blonde stooped to roll them up, the fog of her condensing breaths wrapping like a scarf around the younger woman’s neck. Proximity — this proximity, the way Carol only would have had to shift her lips just a few inches upwards to meet Therese’s — it ached.
“There. Fits like it was made for you.”
At this point, both laughed — Therese was considerably shorter than Carol, of course, and it draped off of her like an old curtain, its tail almost dragging along the ground — but it worked, and it was warm.
“Thank you.”
The second thank you today. It was sincere, as things always were between them. The car journey back was quiet: the air smelled like Christmas, the coat smelled like Carol, and there was a steadily increasing rush of snow against the windshield. This felt like home.
“Here we are then.”
Carol had pulled the Tesla to a stop outside Therese’s apartment, the flow of traffic humming around them. It was almost fitting, the way that seemed to work — the rest of the world working, shifting, moving; Carol and Therese, still at the centre of it all. How the constellations would spin around these two.
“Here we are.”
She made no move to get out. It was the heated seats, Therese told herself, they were just too comfortable to leave. And again:
“Here we are.”
An admission of something akin to defeat as she finally lifted a hand to pull open the door, her movement coinciding rather exactly with Carol’s next words. The blonde threw them into the air like confetti, and hoped. Hope. What a disastrous thing.
“You could spend Christmas with me. If you want. I mean, if you’re going to be alone, that is. Not — you don’t have to cancel plans or anything, or come at all, if you don’t want to. That’d be fine too.”
A plethora of sentences there, awkward in a way that Therese had never seen Carol be. Another jigsaw piece. Another square of the map she was so desperate to one day complete. A moment — a multitude of moments — passed, brief and transcendental, so fraught with all that lay between them that for a fading few seconds, the rest of the world seemed to just slip away. Slip — fall. Shatter. It collapsed around them, the rest of their universe, the set of some foreign play crumbling to the ground to reveal all that was backstage, hidden, lost. A mask unveiled, and the only things that remained were two women in a Tesla, as stripped bare as perhaps they could ever be. Christmas, together, alone. Even they couldn’t make this out to be a platonic thing.
“I don’t — um. I wouldn’t want to intrude. If you’re doing this out of courtesy, honestly, I’ll be alright.”
“Therese.”
Her voice was deep, tired, limping.
“I want you — here.”
The pause between the last two words had been just slightly too long to be ignorable. I want you versus I want you here. One wanting, one wanton. (Irrespectively.)
It was ignored. Here, as in, in general? In the Tesla? Simply by Carol’s side?
“You’re sure?”
Therese, always so very wary of overstepping boundaries. Maybe if I leaned across and kissed her, she’d know how sure I was. The thought didn’t shock Carol so much as it thrilled her, but the urge was restrained.
“Please.”
Please.
The world started moving around them again. The realisation came that they'd have to hurry, if they wanted to beat the snowstorm that was likely coming. If this was a they. Everything hung in the balance, and the balance — it was Therese.
“Okay.”
The word tipped the scales, entirely.