emma and janet have a sit down pt. 2
“If you don’t want it blown up, don’t offer it.” Janet took another sip of her coffee. It burned her tongue, which fortunately enough actually helped with the whole horrible taste issue. If her tongue was burned, she couldn’t taste it. Then it just felt hot.
Emma stared at her. “You don’t blow up the coffee.”
Janet met her eyes just over the top of her mug. “You don’t offer the coffee.”
“Then you should quit taking it.” Emma held out her hand again, as though to indicate that Janet should hand the mug over, but Janet ignored her.
There was the sound of something loud – a clang of some sort – in the background, followed by an immense silence that with anyone else might have been filled with angry yelling. But Whitney wasn’t like that. Janet knew her well enough to know that she was staring at her invention, not quite glaring at it the way Emma would in such a silence, but considering it, thinking about it, before finally tweaking it. At least, Janet assumed she would tweak it; Whitney often threw her out of her lab whenever she caught her watching. Emma would let her sit and watch. She wasn’t allowed to touch anything (and if there was any sort of electrical issue when she was in Whitney’s lab, it was always her fault, even when it wasn’t), but she could watch. Sometimes Emma even gave her something to do – mostly because Emma knew she wouldn’t screw with her stuff.
Whitney might be loud and obnoxious and brilliant, but for all the horrible things she could most definitely do to Janet, she wasn’t scary. Emma? She could be terrifying.
Janet took another sip of her coffee. Then she handed it over. “I don’t know how you drink this stuff.”
“I don’t,” Emma said, pouring what was left in Janet’s mug into her own. “I inhale it.”
“That’s even worse.” Janet leaned against the arm of her couch and stared at the tv. She wouldn’t turn it on; there wouldn’t be anything good right now. A bunch of sitcoms with shitty jokes, maybe the news, which would be a constant slam against the supers they considered villains, like themselves, which meant if she was lucky she could see them talking about her. Hey, Mom! I’m on tv! Only Janet didn’t have a mom to care about that sort of thing.
Not why she was in a bad mood.
Emma reached for the remote and turned the tv on anyway, muting it. She couldn’t hear it half of the time anyway; she just liked the background visual noise. “Was it Whitney this time or Rose?”
“Neither,” Janet said through gritted teeth.
“Rose, then.”
Janet took a deep breath.
“If it’s not Whitney, maybe don’t break her stuff.”
Janet raised her unscarred eyebrow. “I can break whatever I want.”
“Say that again in my lab. I dare you.”
Janet leaned forward, meeting Emma’s eyes. “I can break whatever I want.”
Emma held Janet’s gaze and took another sip of her coffee. “You don’t have to have sex with her if you don’t want to have sex with her.”
That was the wrong thing to say. All of a sudden, Janet could feel the static moving up and down her skin. It didn’t matter that the rings Emma and Whitney made for her helped ground her; they didn’t stop the static from existing, just from getting out unless she specifically called for it. She still felt it, still felt uncomfortable and on edge, and the caffeine probably didn’t help with this in the slightest.
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
Emma stared at her and smiled. “Your hair is standing on end. Want me to fix it?”
Janet ran a hand along her hair. It was not standing on end. In fact, it shouldn’t be able to do that at all anymore. The grounding rings helped ground her. That meant her hair should be fine when she wasn’t actively electrocuting anything. And it’d been long enough since she shocked and broke the other mug that it should have flattened back down by now. She glared at Emma. “You’re not funny.”
Emma shrugged. “Have you talked to Rose yet?”
“I shouldn’t have to talk to her. It shouldn’t matter.”
“It apparently matters to her.”
Janet leaned back against the sofa, crossing her arms. “I told her she could find someone else. I told her it didn’t matter.”
“You didn’t tell her any of that.”
I thought about it, Janet thought, although this, too, was a lie. She had thought no such thing. It was impossible to think about bringing it up with Rose at all. For the most part, she stayed in her room – because she had a separate room from Rose, unlike Emma and Whitney, who shared theirs. She thought perhaps it must have been meant this way, for her and Rose to be separate, even though it had seemed to her when she first moved in that their room was meant to be shared.
She’d spent months sharing a space with Rose. A bigger space. She didn’t want to share a room with her now if she didn’t have to. Not because she didn’t like Rose – or love her, although the word made her feel nauseous and sick and more uncomfortable than the little jolts of lightning running under her skin – but because sharing a space…wasn’t right.
Not not right because that sounded like a moral judgment and Janet didn’t care that much but not…not right.
Janet took a deep breath. “Like you and Whitney ever talk about it.”
“We did. Once. We only needed once.” Emma met her eyes. “You have to have the talk or it’s going to be like this forever.”
“No, it won’t.”
That wasn’t the way relationships worked. They weren’t even in a relationship. She didn’t want to be in a relationship.
She did.
Not with Rose.
She did.
She would never admit it to anybody, so don’t you dare ask.