It’s Stockholm syndrome, really. This thing that exists between them. It isn’t natural or beautiful or a thing of fairytales. Sometimes, Quinn almost begins to feel guilty. But control is her strong suit, and she knows how to wield it over her own head, knows how to ward off the serpent. It may tang salty in the back of her mouth when Rachel follows her, dead-eyed, but there is precision in her moves and she can not, will not let Rachel slip from between her fingers.
Often, she feels stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s too clear that Rachel needs some kind of guiding light, some sort of north star, but Quinn knows all too well that it can’t be Rachel’s mother— for this, she’s seen the consequences of. When she closes her eyes at night, she still has trouble forgetting. She’s seen many versions of Rachel, but Rachel on the wrong meds was, by far, the worst Rachel-variety. Rachel treated for depression was a zombie, treated for bi-polar was a bug, twitching beneath her mother’s magnifying glass.
(Quinn still remembers the night Rachel sat on her couch and asked her if she knew what it felt like to forget how to exist.)
(She tries to forget the way Rachel’s hands felt on her chest.)
(She can’t forget Rachel’s voice when she begged Quinn to help her remember.)
And it is here that Quinn struggles.
She is so many things, and so is Rachel. Together, she is sure, what they can create knows no bounds. And yet— and yet.
She can’t be Rachel’s mother because this is something else, and because she is selfish, and because mothers can’t be selfish.
She’d tried the mothering at first, when Rachel had been new and green and so wonderfully malleable. But while Quinn had been gently firm (a lurid paradox) with Rachel’s impressionable baby flesh, others had not been. There had been her (real) mother, and Jeremy, and bottles and bottles of little green pills.
And now this just felt like captivity. Rachel could squirm away all she wanted. She could kick and scream and tear herself out from under Quinn’s wing, but she could never survive on her own. She’s imprinted upon. Quinn wonders, sometimes, at what point Rachel became thoroughly dirtied, at what point she managed to mangle her beyond repair. And here, her guilt hears its cue, waltzes in across Quinn’s desk and crawls up her back, finding home in her bent spine.
But Quinn knows control like the back of her hand. On these nights, there is Chet. He’s an easy target, easy to keep under her thumb. Easy to distract herself with. On these nights, she knows she’s capricious, but she often forgets to care. On these nights, as well, it’s easy to close her eyes and pretend— pretend cologne is perfume, pretend stubble is soft. Pretending used to make her feel guilty as well, but she’s long since learned not to care at the hands of men.
Tonight, however, is calm. Last week, Rachel told her to fuck herself (she had), asked her why she was so obsessed, told her she was pathetic. But tonight it is calm.
When Quinn extends her hand to Rachel on the lawn chair next to her, the cigarette between her fingers glows hot orange. Her temples feel sticky even with the air cold as it is. She watches Rachel hug herself, watches her inhale, lips wrapping around leftover lipstick stains. Something inside Quinn clenches. It is endearment or pain, she is unsure which. Instinct tells her to grab hold of Rachel and kiss her hair and ask her if she’s been sleeping enough and eating well and thinking good thoughts. Years of practice tell her not to.
“Got any blow?” Rachel’s voice comes scratchy and premature. A crease tugs at the edge of her mouth when she turns to Quinn.
“Goldie.” The scold is half hearted.
Rachel on cocaine is second only to Rachel on no drugs at all. Quinn decided this long ago, but she often forgets it.
“Money, dick, power.”
Rachel is licking the tattoo on Quinn’s wrist. Somewhere, Quinn is laughing, but it is far away from here, where Quinn is grinding and panting.
The world never slows for them, and here how it hurries.
Quinn wonders briefly if they’ll be caught. She remembers even more briefly that her office door is locked, and that it’s so late the sun is threatening to rise.
She wonders how they got here, how they reached this point, but the world feels clunky and hollow. Bits of it are cracking, missing, tumbling from her grasp. She tries very hard to hold on. She grasps Rachel’s bicep, grasps her own orgasm, tears it from her own lungs.
It feels unfinished, but this is no fairytale. She could never ask for more.
Quinn holds to the moment for as long as she can, but dopamine is only a visitor here. She’s sure Rachel is crashing, too— she can feel it.
“I have more.”
There is a sweaty cheek pressed against her chest, now. When did they assume this position?
“Nah.” Rachel shifts.
It’s too difficult to accept that chemicals are what they need to find this rhythm. After all, its chemicals that ruined them in the first place