#reginianwrites

[cdyssey]

One Bed

Summary: When Barbara and Melissa get to their conference hotel room, they're unduly shocked that there is only one bed. [Post-2.16]

CW: Alcohol, Drunkenness, Emotional Infidelity/Infidelity, Sexual Innuendo/References

AO3

—

It’s a mistake, of course.

A clerical error most likely.

Perfectly reasonable given all the administrative duress that the hotel must be under since it’s hosting PECSA.

When Barbara and Melissa get to their shared room, huffing and puffing and ready to park their tired asses down—having lugged their suitcases all the way down a long hallway that looks like it could have come straight from The Shining—they quickly realize that instead of two queens, there’s only one king-sized bed that’s clearly made for two. 

Barbara reacts as she’s supposed to, as is to be expected of her, a zealous woman of God—scandalized and righteously bewildered, stopping dead in the middle of the doorway, clenching the handle of her makeup bag far too tightly…

(… battling unsolicited images of Melissa’s beautiful hair splayed across a white pillow.)

(And she isn’t wearing a shirt in this vision for some inexplicable reason either, the contours of a black lace bra doing absolutely nothing to contain those creamy, voluptuous—)

“Oh, almighty God in Heaven,” she exhales with shuttered breath, blinking rapidly. Melissa nearly runs into her, the tip of her shoe clipping her heel as she also tries to teeter to an abrupt standstill with all her luggage.

It’s almost funny.

The way that Barbara barely feels the ensuing sting.

“What?” The younger woman grunts as she peers over her shoulder. “Is the room not clean yet or somethin’ because I swear to God, I ain’t carrying all this crap down aga—“

But she stops short, clearly sees the dilemma.

That one bed.

“Ah,” she only says, temporarily rendered speechless, which is a damn near feat for Melissa Schemmenti, who has strong opinions on pretty much everything, from the starting lineup of the Flyers to which Wawa hoagie is the best.

(The Gobbler obviously.)

“We should call downstairs,” Barbara suggests weakly, her throat strangely dry. Maybe it’s just the Allentown weather, and her sinuses are acting up, as they’re wont to do in strange environments.

Because surely, it’s not the prospect of sharing the same bed with her dearest friend in the entire world.

That would be ludicrous to be bothered about. 

Absurd even.

It’s merely a bed, and she’s a grown-ass woman who is perfectly capable of cohabiting a bed with another grown-ass woman.

If it has to come to that.

(She doesn’t think it would be a particularly good idea for it to come to that.)

“See if we can get it changed,” she continues, attempting a smile that stretches across her lips like rusted wire.

“What?” Melissa teases, having regained her composure far more quickly than Barbara. Her chin is nearly touching her shoulder, and that makes the kindergarten teacher feel some kind of way too, as though there’s a tightness coiled just behind her navel. She also blames this on her incredibly sensitive allergies, inwardly lamenting that she forgot to pack her Sudafed. 

“You scared to sleep in the same bed with me? ‘Fraid I have cooties?”

She receives an accompanying smirk and an elbow nudge at this, pinned down by twinkling eyes that remind her of both hearth and home, and Barbara can’t help it; she laughs in spite of herself. 

Because it never really matters in the end. 

Not with Melissa Schemmenti.

Whether she’s irritated about paperwork, stressed after a long few weeks of fearing that her husband has prostate cancer, or experiencing inconvenient sinus symptoms, the younger woman always knows how to tease a smile out of her. She’s a menace and one hell of a saint; she absolutely delights in doing so. 

Barbara used to hate that when she was a younger woman, loathed that there was apparently one person who could sneak past her well-constructed defenses and disarm them all with a sly wink and a shit-eating grin. She used to nag at Melissa all the time for being facetious.

It was utterly inappropriate.

All the jokes and games and innuendos that would make a preacher blush.

They were supposed to be adults. 

But now, nearly three decades down the line, she’s forever grateful to Melissa for continually reminding her of how to play.

“No, of course not,” she insists vigorously. “I just know that you and I would both be more comfortable if we had our own beds. Our backs are more twisted than those kids who won at the end of Footloose.”

“Pssh, that’s the moral you took at the end of Footloose, Barb?” Melissa snorts incredulously, shaking her fiery head. 

“Yes!”

No, it absolutely was not, but she isn’t going to admit to spending an inordinate amount of time admiring Lori Singer’s toned arms. 

As inspiration for her own exercise regiment, naturally. 

“God bless ya,” her friend chortles fondly, “but hell yeah, sure. We can grab our swag bags from the ballroom and swing by the front desk afterwards. And then it’s—“

“—pool time, baby,” Barbara finishes with delicious zeal, unable to contain herself, affecting a theatrical, little shoulder shimmy. 

She’s been looking forward to PECSA for at least a month now, anticipating all the best parts in advance: the long car ride with Melissa and the inevitable hours in the pool with her too, luxuriating in the sauna with Melissa, boozing it up with Melissa, staggering back to the room gloriously drunk at 2AM with Melissa, (wondering why life isn’t always as lovely as this in a tequila-soaked daze).

Waking up to Melissa as the first sight she sees in the morning.

Nursing a nasty hangover.

Thinking it’s an appropriate and welcome punishment for ever daring to be so perfectly happy.

(With Melissa.)

These are the traditions that they’ve threaded for themselves in all these years upon years—their rituals of unbecoming, of leaving school and family chaos and the consummate professionals that they always have to be behind. And, of course, what happens at the conference stays at the conference. That’s their maxim anyway—maybe even their chosen excuse—for the ways they tend to act when they’re alone.

“Well, I was gonna say booze time,” the younger woman grins, “but I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive the way we do it.”

“No,” Barbara easily returns the smile, affectionately knocking her hip against Melissa’s own. “Not at all.”

—

An hour later, they’re stretched out side-by-side on lounge chairs by the pool—pre-gaming for PECSA-geddon with piña coladas—when Melissa gets a call from the concierge; they’d stopped by the lobby before heading upstairs to change into their swimsuits and made the manager aware of the error, leaving with a promise that he’d look for another room and get back to them as soon as check-in rush was over.

But to no avail.

There are no doubles left in the inn.

“He said they’ll send us a complimentary bottle of champagne for the trouble, though,” the second-grade teacher shrugs as she tosses her phone into her beach bag again. “So that’s a plus. I’mma need copious amounts of alcohol to cope with seein’ my sister’s ugly mug.”

Barbara, who had been stuck on the fact that she is in fact going to have to share a bed with Melissa tonight—(again, not that it discomfits her at all! she’s a grown-ass woman!)—is a little late registering what she just said, but when it hits her, when she remembers that they’d run into Kristin Marie before leaving the vendor ballroom, she sharply recalls the way the two sisters had so viscerally sparred.

As they always do when they encounter each other in the wild—claws out, hackles raised, their words like sharp teeth at the edge of the other’s exposed throat.

Barbara frankly thinks that their estrangement has gone on for too damn long. She’s seen enough of their fights to know that beneath all the name calling and cooking-based insults, they clearly love and miss each other, even if they’re both too stubborn to ever admit it. But all the same, she hadn’t appreciated Kristin Marie’s remarkably low blow about Joseph.

Hell, she may have even said something herself had Melissa not gotten there first.

“About that…” She begins, biting her plump lower lip. It tastes like pineapple. She briefly prays—perhaps inappropriately—that the rum will give her liquid courage. 

Barbara is well-aware that they have an implicit but long-established rule not to bring their personal lives with them to conferences. Last year, for instance, they did an exceptionally fine job of not talking about the fact that the Howards had been in unhappy straits, their marriage strained by Gerald’s recent promotion. His long hours exacted a toll from them; his frequent out-of-town trips caused an abyss that neither of them knew how to functionally bridge.

They didn’t argue necessarily—they just constantly disagreed with each other in their normal tones of voice—but that was somehow the exact same thing and possibly even worse.

(Maybe they were too apathetic to even muster themselves to fight.)

They persevered and made it through that dark time, though.

(Mostly.)

They tentatively reconciled.

(They never directly spoke about the thousands of tensions between them, steamrolling over and through them instead, affecting a normality that neither of them looked like they could wholly feel.)

Of course they did. There was no other option. Divorce was synonymous with quitting, and quitting was in neither of their vocabularies. 

But things had been complicated there for a while.

Life had been.

And this time last year, Melissa didn’t have to ask if something was wrong. Attentive to every microgesture, she just capably knew and didn’t press Barbara about any of it. 

Just kept plying drinks into her open hand.

And Barbara Howard had loved her for that—for her discretion, for her clear sensitivity to the delicate situation, for all her innumerable and wordless acts of care—the drinks, her purposefully inane chatter, the way she would sometimes rub circles into the side of the kindergarten teacher’s wrist when they sat at the bar, and every tall man with a sad smile unfailingly reminded her of Gerald.

She’s too something or another—(Involved? Hypocritical? Christian?)—to ever extend her the same courtesy.

“Don’t,” Melissa warns, sucking on the straw of her drink rather petulantly. “I don’t wanna hear it. I ain’t makin’ up with her.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest that,” she replies patiently. (Well, she is. Eventually. If the two of them keep it up this weekend. Both for Melissa’s sake and her own. She’s not willing to play referee to the Schemmenti sisters’ knock-down-drag-out fights again. She’s been there, done that, and every attempt has unfailingly ended with her needing to imbibe copious amounts of wine for doing so.) “I was just going to ensure that you’re okay—see if you wanted to talk about it.”

It isn’t entirely lost on her that Melissa had said the exact same thing to her just two weeks ago when she’d nearly set the school on fire, distracted and undone by the stress of Gerald’s health scare. It isn’t beyond her grasp of irony that they’d concluded that same conversation on a laughing agreement that neither of them believe in the necessity of advertising their stressors.

But still.

It’s them, and they talk through these things when they’re ready or just on the verge of being so. It’s them, and they both implicitly know when the other needs a little push off the terrifying ledge. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be them if they didn’t—push each other and need to occasionally be pushed, that is—always challenging each other in their relationship in some way or another, more than willing to be what the other lacks. 

Melissa immediately averts her eyes, staring at the water mere feet away from them, how it rhythmically laps against the side of the pool, and Barbara stares at her, intransigent and yet so gentle, knowing it is a form of love to not let the moment go.

“What’s there to talk about?” She eventually shrugs. Her green cover-up slips at the gesture and the magenta strap of her swimsuit briefly becomes visible, her slightly freckled shoulder exposed.

Barbara blinks rapidly, forcing herself to concentrate, briefly unspooled by a sudden desire to kiss the creamy skin there, to sample the anatomy of her all the way down…

She coughs into her free hand, briefly choked.

Damn sinuses.

“Kristin Marie’s a little shit,” Melissa goes on, oblivious, still looking away, now idly swirling the colorful umbrella in her cocktail glass. “End of the story. Same old, same old.”

“A little shit who is also your sister,” Barbara parries back with a knowing smile as her friend just as deliberately scoffs, crossing her arms over her chest. “Which is what makes it so complicated, sweetheart—the people we love know how to wound us far more effectively than any knife.”

“Did ya get that off a Snapple lid, Barb?” Melissa retorts. Melissa jokes. Melissa capably deflects. Always, always, always. It’s one of her less aggressive defenses against unwanted vulnerability, the one she tends to wield most in conversations with Barbara. 

(With other people—outsiders—she’d just bark and perhaps even bite.)

But Barbara solemnly shakes her head, unwilling to let her get away with it, thinking of her best friend’s kindness in these last few weeks—how, ever since the fire, not a day has gone by that she hasn’t made sure that she’s okay. Gerald even told her the other night—as they laid in their sheets after yet another round of celebratory relief sex—that he was glad that she’d finally told Mel. 

Mel.

He called her that because he loves her too.

Not in the same way Barbara does, of course…

… whatever way that happens to be.

That’s too complicated for her to ever fully—or at least, audibly—define.

Messy even.

And she despises mess, especially within the immaculate temple of herself; she scrubs it clean at the altar every Sunday, asking God’s forgiveness for a sin that she can’t even name.

She thrilled at her husband bringing Melissa’s pervasive specter into their shared bed, relieved that she didn’t have to be the one to do so; and yet, her hand splayed against his bare chest, she could not bring herself to interrogate the root cause of her own pleasure.

“I was worried about you,” he went on gently, his warm knuckles skimming her forearm as he held her in the dark, “keeping it all on the inside.”

“It was the only thing I could do,” Barbara returned, perhaps a little too quickly, echoing the same sentiment that she had said to Melissa. She could only pray and not talk about it; she had desperately wanted to talk about it, had almost dared to—several times, in fact—as she and Melissa sat at the same table that she’d later burned, as was their habit, as was their decades long norm. But the words remained lacquered on her tongue; the weight of them rendered her incapable of speech; she was convinced that speaking her fears to Melissa would make them all real.

I’m afraid my husband is sick, she could not bring herself to say.

And if he is—if this is our lived reality—then I am devastated, Melissa.

I am so, so guilty.

Our marriage is not what it once was.

She loves Gerald Howard; she always will—he has been her best friend for thirty-seven beautiful years—but she secretly wonders if their renewed closeness in these last few weeks is just mutual and desperate apology, a last-ditch attempt to mend what has certainly been disrupted between them.

They’ve been distant from each other for a long time now.

And it hasn’t been anyone’s fault, really.

All their polite disagreements aside, Barbara is more than aware that Gerald’s promotion was not the fundamental breaking point in their marriage; it was just the easiest grievance to turn into an excuse, the tangible obstacle that they could both offload their hundreds of insecurities into without delving further into any single one of them. They could blame the promotion because it was there. It kept them from having to confront each other, which was far more complicated than having an impartial something to unite against. This lack of introspection allowed their middling reconciliation to be easier to swallow than it probably should have been, and yet, conversely, it made Gerald’s irregular prostate exam results all that much harder to bear three weeks ago. After the fact, they both became alive to the reality that their marriage has long been broken, and they’ve done everything since then to try and bandage the festering wounds.

The sex has been passionate.

Has been sensational even—(they’re both overachievers)—and yet, strangely controlled, as though both of them are seeking atonement from the other’s satisfaction. Barbara appreciates the intimacy; she deeply fears that it is compensating for something that they can never, ever get back. 

“You’re happier now that you’ve told her, though,” Gerald continued, and his voice was so kind as it wound its way down to her in the quietness of their room, and yet, she could distinguish that his eyes were shrewd… and perhaps even a little sad.

That had scared her a little.

And maybe a whole lot.

What was there to be shrewd (and perhaps a little sad) about when it came to her relationship with Melissa?

What did he know?

Was it something that she didn’t? Was it the unspoken thing that she could not force herself to articulate—the twinges in her gut that she sometimes experienced when she looked at Melissa, the recurring visions of the woman in her underwear, the thrill that she just experienced when he had only said her name? Was Melissa the unnamable sin that she kept committing—over and over again—without ever fully acknowledging that she was doing so?

“Gerald—” She started, the slightest plea in her voice. She curled her manicured fingers into the dividing line of his sternum and wished that he had said something that she could truthfully deny.

But he cut across her; he enveloped her hand with his own and lightly squeezed.

“—I like it when you’re happy, Barb.”

And somehow, in their nearly four decades long marriage, that was the cruelest thing he had ever said to her because of what it indirectly and yet so clearly implied.

She was not happy with him.

She found, even in the rawness and the immediacy of that moment, that she could not wipe her hands free of blood and cleanly refute this assertion either, and so, only one ruinous fact remained.

She and Gerald love each other deeply and so much.

They’re hurting each other all the same.

“Be serious, girlfriend,” she tells Melissa, frowning firmly, her mind full of her husband, her chest aching because of her best friend. “I’m not talking about Snapple lids and you know it. I’m talking about lived experience.”

I’m talking about your sister.

I’m talking about Gerald Howard.

I’m talking about us.

(She always is in some way or another.)

We both know what it’s like to be hurt by loved ones.

And equally, what it means to hurt them back.

Maybe she and Melissa—without ever really realizing it—hurt each other every blessed day, just by inhabiting the same spaces and fooling themselves into believing that they are careful about never crossing any of its dutifully articulated lines.

“And I don’t wanna be serious, Barb,” Melissa huffs, the playful smile slipping sideways from her mouth. “I want to drink my piña colada and inhale so much chlorinated water that I accidentally get high. Is that so much to ask for PECSA weekend?”

The answer, of course, is no—it’s not a demanding request at all, and if Barbara is any sort of friend, she’d drop the conversation right here and right now, and allow them to return to their various attempts at self-medication… but she can't entirely help herself, a little reckless under the influence, freer here in Allentown from the facade which circumscribes her in every other given context.

PECSA Barbara has a lot in common with Sea Barbara.

They’re both almost truthful.

“Perhaps not,” she admits grudgingly, watching as Melissa places her drink down on the table between them and starts to take her cover-up off, clearly about to make a run from her feelings by diving into the pool. This is yet another one of her friend’s go-to diversionary tactics, the one she commonly resorts to when joking about her pain doesn’t work.

(It never really works on Barbara.)

“But you miss her, Melissa, and she’s here,” she continues, now dry-mouthed and overwhelmed at the sight of the younger woman in just her bathing suit: the ample exposure of her cleavage, the powerful silhouette of her thighs, the thin pink fabric that stretches tightly over her belly. “Perhaps God is trying to tell you something.”

Her chest bruises even as she utters the words.

She probably shouldn’t be invoking God when she can’t keep her eyes off of Melissa Schemmenti’s ass.

“And maybe it’s just a coincidence,” her friend says bluntly, suddenly standing up and kicking her sandals off. One nearly flies into the water.

Barbara winces at the tone, knows that she provoked it and hates that she did—(why can’t she ever leave well enough alone?)—which Melissa immediately catches, her green eyes softening, her entire expression, a conciliatory smile rising to her lips. It’s as crooked as the necklace of saints nigh perpetually strung around her neck.

“But, uh, enough chit-chat,” she says, jerking her head towards the pool, her messy ponytail violently swinging from side-to-side. “You comin’, hon?”

Barbara quickly decides that she’s pushed her luck far enough in this conversation and nods emphatically, slowly tugging her own cover up above her head, revealing her sky blue bathing suit underneath. It doesn’t escape her notice that Melissa’s cheeks have slightly reddened at the sight, that her pupils have dilated, that she’s rubbing at the hollow of her throat with three fingers. Indeed, thoroughly aware of all these reactions, she swallows thickly, suddenly self-conscious. She makes a meal out of neatly folding the garment and placing it in her bag, giving both of them time to recompose themselves.

“After you,” she eventually says in a voice that’s not her own.

And so, when Melissa wades into the water, Barbara dutifully follows, drawn siren-like by the fiery undulations of the other’s hair. 

—

Barbara showers first, and Melissa follows. 

Afterwards, of course.

Separately.

That’s probably the one thing that they’ve never shared—well, besides a bed, but even that’s about to change in the course of a few hours.

The entire time that she’s getting dressed, blow-drying her hair, smartening up in a green dress and turquoise blazer, meticulously applying her mascara, she’s thinking about that damn bed. She can’t escape it no matter where she moves in the room. It’s too big. It invades the entire space and all her rational senses. Even as she was showering, rinsing off the sharp stench of the pool, she could not escape the inexorable pull it had on her, the sensual thoughts that it engendered…

Red hair on a pillow.

Lace bras that don’t do their one and only job.

Hands touching hands.

Verdant eyes peering out of the darkness, pulling her inwards into the jungle of the night, a beautiful kaleidoscope of revolving bodies… scarlet curls, plum-colored lips, thighs like creamy taffy, skin like smoky quartz.

She can’t remotely blame any of this on her sinuses, so she rationally concludes that she should stop drinking for the evening—

—a resolution she almost immediately gives up on when a bellhop knocks on the door and delivers the hotel’s apology champagne. 

She pours herself a glass in one of the red solo cups she and Melissa had brought with them for the trip and unslowly drinks it, sitting on the edge of the bed that she and Melissa will eventually share. Some paint-by-the-numbers procedural show is playing on the television. She stares at it without really comprehending it and idly wonders if Melissa is the big spoon or the little spoon.

But then that particular line of thought makes her remember that her best friend has a boyfriend, and her stomach unpleasantly lurches at the thought of Gary the Vending Machine putting his hairy arms around her waist, pulling her in to his chest, working his undeserving fingers beneath the elastic band of her undergarments…

She’s never entirely liked the man.

(Yes, she absolutely pushed Melissa to date him in the first place.)

He’s good, he’s fine, he’s perfectly okay—but those are the same sorts of adjectives that one might apply to a functional kitchen appliance, not a romantic partner. 

She takes another distracted swill of her drink and doesn’t clock the precise moment when Melissa apparently steps out of the en-suite bathroom in a white robe, her vivid hair wrapped in a towel. But when she looks over and apprehends this dizzying sight, Barbara can only stare.

“Forgot my bra in here,” she chuckles, which is precisely the worst thing she can possibly say because Barbara’s eyes immediately roam upwards to the v-shaped divot of the robe, where little is visible except for curving shadows, the tantalizing suggestion of something more. “Kinda need that.”

“Yes,” she hears herself agree in a pathetically small voice, squeezing her plastic cup as Melissa saunters past to her suitcase, which is resting on top of the armchair in the corner of the room. It’s all very hypnotic, the pendulum-like swing of her hips, the graceful coordination of all her white-clothed limbs.

Barbara wonders if this effect is intentional, if Melissa knows exactly what she’s doing to her.

But she doesn’t give the thought too much air lest she accidentally name the animal of an emotion prowling around her gut for what she thinks it might be.

(It’s certainly nothing her fellow brothers and sisters in Christ would sanction, that’s for sure.)

(Happiness, her own husband might call it in the dead of night, in the sanctum of their shared bed.)

Melissa bends down to rummage through her suitcase, which doesn’t help matters much either, and Barbara tugs at her layered necklace, thinks she may have clasped it on a little too tightly.

“Listen, Barb, I’ve been thinkin’ about what you said earlier,”' Melissa starts falteringly, clear reluctance in her low voice. “About Kristin Marie. Y’know, at the pool.”

After Melissa had so firmly put a stop to that conversation, Barbara hadn’t brought it up again, and within minutes, they had returned to their jovial selves again—or, perhaps more specifically, the selves who they were at PECSA—hedonists, only thinking about the next physical pleasure. They laughed. They played. They were both experts at compartmentalizing, well-versed in the art of drowning out the noise with a facsimile of a smile. They dried off, finished their piña coladas, and enthused about the party tonight like it was the only pressing matter in their two-person world.

“Oh, do allow me to apologize for that, Melissa,” she frowns deeply as the other teacher finally straightens up with something in her hands. “I know your sister is a sensitive subject for you, and I… I shouldn’t have brought her up… we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

But Melissa vehemently shakes her head, a few damp curls falling from her towel, and finally turns to face Barbara again, a sad smile crooked at the corner of her mouth, a silky black bra dangling from her fingertips.

One hand still gripping her solo cup, Barbara buries the fingers of the other into her right thigh.

“Good, yeah,” her friend laughs, though the gesture doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She shifts uncomfortably, rolling her weight from foot to foot. “That works for me… but, uh, I also just wanted to say thanks, Barb.”

Barbara can’t pry her gaze away from that damn brassiere; Melissa’s own is darting anywhere but her: the ceiling, the carpeted floor, the empty space just over her shoulder. What a pair the two of them make.

“For what?” She asks in a constricted voice, and the oddness of it must draw the other’s attention because suddenly, they're finally looking at each other in the face again. They’re staring, mutually constituting each other in the wordless interaction.

Seeing and being seen.

It is all that they have ever done.

It is all that they seem to want to do.

“For bein’ there for me,” comes an equally charged reply, freighted by that which neither of them can openly name. “I know you were just trying to help out, and I appreciate that.”

“Always,” Barbara breathes immediately, so glad that there is space between them—some six feet and something even more intangible than that. The elaborate ring on her fourth finger digs into her thigh too. “You’d do the same for me.”

A slight beat; she smiles so widely that it almost hurts.

“You have done the same for me,” she adds passionately. “I don’t know who or where or what I’d ever be without you, Melissa Schemmenti.”

But she does in fact know—maybe they both do. Maybe even her sweet husband does too. Maybe it's the most horribly kept secret in the whole wide world.

“God, you’re such a sap,” Melissa laughs because it's easier than actually engaging, and Barbara allows her the indiscretion this time, even joining along.

“Girl, you’re one to talk!”

“Hey!”

She is more than dimly aware that it’s probably better for them both if they continue to treat their relationship like it’s some huge joke.

Because isn't it, though?

They love each other, and they can never actually say it aloud.

Isn’t that the funniest punchline in God’s almighty world?

They love each other, and they can never act upon this reality in any meaningful way.

They live with this crucial fact every single day and spend so many of their waking hours dangerously straddling the borders that they've so carefully articulated to keep themselves apart.

But, of course, that's only when they're sober.

—

With each math-a-rita that they guzzle at PECSA-geddon, the more liberal with their affection that they get, all of their studious inhibitions subsumed beneath the ministrations of tequila. 

One drink in, they start with little gestures.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Innocuous even.

Forgivable.

Barbara places a guiding hand on the small of Melissa’s back as they weave their way through the throng of nicely dressed people, looking for a table with room enough for two. The younger woman is wearing a leopard-print dress.

And she never wears a dress.

And she thinks about this, much longer and more sinfully than she probably should.

Melissa curls her fingers into Barbara’s wrist when they realize that they’re sitting with the Dawn Nichols, whose school supplies are legendary amongst educators. The second grade teacher gives her a knowing look, the kind that clearly says, Holy shit, there’s an opportunity here. 

We can make something happen.

And Barbara shivers with quiet delight as their ankles accidentally glance beneath the table, as the expression in those green eyes does something to her, unloosing her at her tightly knotted core.

Two drinks into the night, they’ve run into Kristin Marie by this point, and Melissa’s entire body is wound so tightly that Barbara thinks that to touch her is to break her.

But she does it anyway—touches her, that is—a little reckless with her head buzzing so pleasantly, the sermonizing voice who often tells her no locked outside her personal church for the night. She interlinks their arms together as they revolve around the ballroom, and Melissa vents about her younger sister being a total puttana—whatever that means—and a shithead—which is perfectly comprehensible.

She gets a little tired of this after a couple of revelations, though, her feet aching in her heels, and she doubles back on her initial resolve to not interfere with the Schemmenti sisters, suggesting the impossible in the same breath—that they try to make up with each other. 

And she touches Melissa’s arm when she says as much.

She presses her thumb into the crook of her soft elbow.

And when they look at each other—really look at each other—less than two feet between them, an island unto themselves in the middle of this crowded room, Barbara somehow knows that they’re both thinking about their conversation in the hotel room earlier—about the fact that they’re always there for each other, and it's not just a trite thing that either of them have unthinkingly said.

It's the truth.

Trust me, Barbara tries to say with just her eyes. I’m here for you.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be there to catch you if you fall.

Fuck you, Melissa all but communicates with her own, though with the deep sigh that comes shortly afterward, she just as immediately intimates, Okay.

Yeah.

Sure.

I believe you.

Trust has been hard won between them in over twenty years of companionship.

(It is a part of the love that they can never fully say.)

Two plus one math-a-ritas in, they’re back at the round table with Dawn Nichols and Kristin Marie—the Schemmenti sisters have finally made up!—and they’re all tipsily laughing about a story that Melissa is telling. Something inappropriate, of course. Something crass. Something about a wild escapade that she’d had when she went to France with a few of her friends for her college graduation trip, where she somehow became very close friends with a young Parisian couple she met at a bar.

“So we go back to their place and I’m thinkin’ that we’re just gonna throw back some shitty European wine,” Melissa carries on, simply exuberant, her cheeks suffused with a rosy glow, “and the guy, God bless him, he was flippin’ hot, but he didn’t have a thought in his head.” 

“Just your type,” Kristin Marie snorts, but the quip doesn’t have any real bite to it anymore. She grins at her older sister lopsidedly, with a reluctant tenderness that makes the striking resemblance between them all the more apparent.

“Yeah,” Melissa acknowledges cheerfully, nodding once, and Barbara is just happy to see her friend so happy, even though she’s not exactly sure where this adventurous story is going. “So his girlfriend’s in the bathroom, and he starts jabberin’ away at me, askin’ if I wanted to take my jacket off." Her eyes twinkling with mischief, she affects a spectacularly bad French accent. “Do you need to use ze restroom? Would you like some… lotion, mon chéri?”

She switches back to her normal voice, snickering at herself.

“Only he didn’t say lotion, y'know."

Dawn Nichols and Kristin Marie must arrive at similar conclusions at the exact same time because the former claps an amused hand over her mouth, while the younger Schemmenti sibling goes, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

“What?” Barbara purses her lips, pouting a little, feeling left out, as she stares between the three women. She’d gotten sidetracked by the leg brushed up against hers beneath the table and perhaps lost the nuance in the conversation as her companions laugh raucously. “What am I missing?”

“It was lube,” Melissa proffers without the slightest modicum of reserve, shrugging her nearest shoulder. “They wanted to fuck me, Barb.”

Barbara can't recover her face fast enough; her mouth falls open where she sits, and she can only blush and suddenly be assaulted with a thousand new images pirouetting through her head—all of which have to do with Melissa and none of which are remotely acceptable to God.

“And did they?” Dawn asks in a hushed voice, her own features delicately feathered with pink, as she leans forward in anticipation of an answer.

“Oh, hell yeah,” her best friend smirks as Kristin Marie guffaws at Barbara, who is now currently choking on air.

Melissa, unshaken and unfazed, takes it in stride, though, rhythmically patting her on the back.

“Oh, shit, ya’ve broken a woman of God,” Kristin Marie snorts, wiping at her eyes.

“Nothing new,” Melissa says charmingly and she leans over to press a kiss against Barbara’s cheek as though to prove a point. 

Barbara cradles her burning face in her hands.

“Lord,” she exhales into her palms, fully incapable of looking at the woman next to her, “I don’t know why I’m even still friends with you.”

Melissa just laughs and laughs, and she continues to massage the spot between her shoulder blades, and she laughs.

Four drinks in, and they’re having a math-a-rita drinking contest with Derek, a bellhop whom they’ve become friendly with over the years. 

Well, Melissa has a drinking contest with him, while Barbara uses the barest sliver of common sense and sobriety that she has left to cajole Dawn Nichols into working with Abbott for at least a year.

“Thank you,” she enthuses, briefly squeezing the other woman’s arm where it rests on the table. “You don’t know how much this will mean for our students.”

“Of course,” Dawn says, warmly observing the drinking game happening a few feet away. Melissa has nearly polished off another glass to Derek’s growing chagrin and Kristin Marie’s violently loud delight. “It’s clear to me that you and your partner are excellent educators; I know you’ll put the resources to good use…”

In her unadulterated surprise at the word used to describe hers and Melissa’s relationship, she nearly forgets to be gracious.  

“Oh, we aren’t—“ She suddenly starts and then stops herself, reevaluating mid-sentence. 

Partner isn’t necessarily a romantic term. Partner simply implies companionship and association with another, inseparability and togetherness. And they have absolutely been those things.

Inseparable.

Together.

A united front.

Partners.

Yes, of course they are and have always been.

“I mean, thank you,” she amends herself politely. “Melissa is truly one of a kind.”

The second grade teacher’s ears must be burning because she apparently hears this and turns back to face them with a radiant smile on her lips, as red as the blush that enlivens her soft cheeks.

“Damn straight I am,” she jests, comfortably resting her chin on Barbara’s shoulder. “What are we talkin’ about again?”

Barbara naturally leans into the touch as Dawn briefly turns away, now engaged by Kristin Marie asking a question about supply packages.

“Oh, nothing, sweetheart,” she muses in a low voice, suddenly feeling herself pulled into the other’s mischief, even wanting to play along; she's simultaneously breathless, intoxicated, by her intimate proximity and the scent of her orange blossom perfume. “Just about how you and I are partners. It’s a rather lofty descriptor for the shenanigans we get up to, isn't it?”

“Yeah, it’d be far easier to just say gay.”

“Melissa Schemmenti!” She nearly chokes. 

Again.

“I kid, I kid! Jesus, Barb! Get a sip of water!”

But there’s not one ounce of water to be found on their table, and so Barbara has to compromise with another hearty swill of margarita.

Tragic.

But she'll cope.

An ungodly amount of alcohol later—(Barbara has lost track of how much either of them have consumed)—they finally stumble into their room around 2AM, supporting one another as best as they can with their altered equilibriums, giggly and utterly euphoric, triumphant in their respective conquests. 

Melissa has outdrunk Derek for the fifth year in a row, and Barbara has secured a contract with Dawn Nichols.

And they are both so drunk and so exhilarated and so unbelievably alive in the moment, that they don’t entirely know how to extricate themselves from each other in the come down from such an exquisite high; they fall into bed—that one, singular bed—in a tangle of loving limbs, still in their dresses, only just capable of kicking their shoes off into the semi-darkness of the room. They didn’t close the curtains all the way before they left for PECSA-geddon, so moonlight intrudes upon the moment, silver and stunningly bright, catching both of them in the simple act of being happy.

Frankly, though, at this current junction of time, as compromised as they are, it’s beyond either of them to fully care. 

“Shit, fuck,” Melissa laughs so hard that she shakes the mattress beneath them. “Your ring’s caught in my hair, Barb.”

“Oh, sorry, girlfriend,” Barbara apologizes and attempts to unravel her fingers from that mass of scarlet waves, but her ring is caught in the wilderness of it, snarled and apprehended. Somehow, in the incredible dysfunction of her mind, she thinks that raising herself above Melissa as she lies vulnerable on the mattress is the best way to set herself free, but all this does is give her a proper aerial view of her prone best friend.

All this does is nearly place her on top of her, their heaving chests inches apart, threatening to collide every so often by the force and desperation of their breathing. Barbara’s slender hands are splayed on either side of Melissa’s head. 

Her face.

She can see every pronounced lineament in the younger woman’s face. Its dramatic height and angular proportions. The complicated expression in her eyes: the profound tenderness of them and something else too. Hunger. Reverence. Melancholy. She can trace the crow’s feet that gather beneath them and at the very edges of them. The redness of her slightly parted lips and the parentheses which enclose them. The slope and the playful upturn of her sharp nose. 

She is beautiful, so unspeakably gorgeous.

Melissa Schemmenti.

Her very best friend.

Her partner.

Maybe even the love of her life, the opportunity who has always eluded her, the what if? just beyond her reach. But, at long last, there is no barrier between them, no insurmountable wall. There is only them and their bodies and the chemistry that electrifies them both whenever they so much as look each other. There is this feeling in her stomach that has been building all day, a tension that she cannot swallow, a queerness that she cannot properly digest. It erects itself in her like a monument, scaffolding its way up the column of her spine.

It will reach her tongue finally.

Those three glorious words.

Fuck me, Melissa. 

(Because I love you is something she still won't be able to say.)

(I love you would make all of this so very real.)

(And precisely none of it can be real; these are the fantasies; these are the fairy tales.)

(The delusions.)

“Ouch,” Melissa murmurs as her hair is pulled. 

By Barbara Howard’s diamond encrusted wedding ring.

It shines in the irradiated light of the moon, glinting harshly, in clear and damning reprimand, and Barbara flinches viscerally, as though stricken. The ring becomes a token again, symbolizing something else besides its own beauty.

Gerald is a good man.

She loves him so much.

She isn’t in love with him, though.

But even still, what gives her the right to ever hurt him?

She straightens up into the air so fast that her head spins, that her stomach lurches, that all the booze she has consumed in the past few hours nearly crests within her and outside of her. She frees her hand; she undoubtedly tugs some more of Melissa's hair. She almost reels backwards into the TV, unable to recapture her balance. She covers her mouth with the hand that always reminds her that she is a married woman, a taken one; the silver band firmly scolds her lips.

“Shit, Barb,” Melissa breathes, abruptly sitting up in the bed, concern in her eyes, such tender and evocative care. “You okay?”

She nods mutely, incapable of trusting herself to speak without expelling all of the accumulated pollution inside of her. Tears form in her eyes and leak over her lower lashes anyway. 

“No, you’re flippin’ not,” her friend readily supplies, standing up herself on rather wobbly feet, but she takes a step towards Barbara anyway, as though to bridge the gap between them, the untenable, omnipresent distance.

And Barbara equally takes a step back, her lower hip hitting the wardrobe that the TV sits upon. 

“Don’t,” she hisses painfully, finally uncovering her mouth.

“Why not?” Melissa challenges, at once defiant and wounded, her brow furrowed over her eyes. The recognition of this makes the kindergarten teacher want to scream. In not hurting Gerald, she’s surely plunging a knife into Melissa. She’s proving her own point from earlier.

Love is a weapon.

It maims and occasionally destroys.

“Because I would kiss you,” she admits, and it feels good to finally say it aloud, to give shape and dimension to these feelings that have seethed inside of her for so long, for so many of the years upon aching years that they've taught at Abbott Elementary side-by-side.

“… and that would make a monster out of me,” she quickly adds because this is also true, and it needs to be said aloud.  

It needs to injure, push away, and deter; she doesn't want to do it; necessity drives her on.

“Oh, yeah?” Comes a reply gentler than it has any right to be. Kind. It Is far less than what she deserves. “And what would that make me then, huh?”

One too.

Complicit. 

Just like me. 

She could say any of these three things but doesn’t; it was clearly a rhetorical question; she can see in Melissa’s darkly lashed eyes that she is willing to accept every wayward epithet if this is the price, if this is the blood sacrifice of their communion.

They can be monsters with each other; they can be so totally in love.

Barbara swallows; thoroughly inebriated though she is, she is not insensible to the magnitude of this offer, the knowledge that all she has to do is say the word and down they’ll descend into hell, hand in monstrous hand.

Alone.

Together.

“I can’t,” she rasps anyway. She swipes angrily at the tears still slipping down her face. She sniffs noisily and loathes herself for it.

“I know,” Melissa returns, her own eyes suddenly overbright. 

But then Barbara Howard leans down and almost does it anyway, gathering the silky hair at the back of Melissa’s neck in her fist, her knuckles softly scraping the skin there. And their noses brush. Their boozy breaths gather in hot pockets in the barest space between them. 

Their lips never touch, though.

Sacrilege remains uncommitted.

“You can’t,” Melissa echoes as a singular tear spirals from the corner of her eye and down the tall plane of her cheek. It collects calmly on the vertex of her chin and remains there.

Barbara brushes it away with her thumb before completely letting go.

“No,” she agrees hoarsely, stepping back for good, and there is a finality to the act that saves and devastates them both.

—

They take turns showering, rinsing the night off them, the copious amounts of booze. Melissa goes first this time, and Barbara follows. 

Afterwards, of course.

Separately.

And when Barbara eventually stumbles back into the bedroom, wearing pajamas that she’s pretty sure are inside out, she sees that Melissa is already in bed, covers pulled up to her face, clearly asleep, lightly snoring.

She’s erected a pillow wall between the two halves of the one bed. 

It’s a smart move.

And an incredibly isolating one.

But smart moves usually are.

Barbara accepts this for what it is and staggers to her side, slipping beneath the sheets as quietly as she can, briefly tossing and turning to get comfortable, which eventually means facing the two feet tall chastity belt, staring at it as her eyelids begin to droop.

Loving it.

Hating it.

Eternally grateful to it.

Disappointed at its necessity, disappointed with herself.

She is so weak in a thousand myriad ways; maybe that, too, is love…

… she doesn’t exactly know what compels her to in the end—(weakness, loneliness, monstrosity, love)—but before she entirely drifts away, she reaches underneath the pillows and is relieved to find a hand waiting for her there.

A concession.

A forgivable compromise.

And so, Barbara allows herself this one pittance too. She intertwines their fingers beneath this latest boundary that divides them, understanding that this—yes, this—is the sole degree of happiness that she can afford without too high of a moral cost.

She falls asleep haunted by the way that the striations of their fingers so perfectly align.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #THIS FLIPPING THING IS 8K WORDS #AND FOR WHAT REASON MAGGIE?! #HDIOHFIHI

[mimik-u]

Flower Child (Chapter 3)

Title: Texts

Summary:

Garnet, Pearl, Amethyst, Greg, Yellow, and Blue—they've all lost someone. Lovers and daughters and friends and family, and that's not a wound you easily come back from.

If at all.

But this isn't an 'if at all' kind of story.

It's a story about a sickly, little kid named Steven and his ever-growing surrogate family.

It's a story about the kind of boy who'd extend a flower and a smile to a sad stranger he meets at a cemetery. Human AU.

AO3 Link

Sunday, 9:43 PM

Pearl: You’re really going to let him go see the Diamonds?

Pearl: After all they’ve done?

Pearl: After all WE’VE done to stand against them?

Greg: Its what he wants Pearl. who are we to deny him that?

Pearl: He didn’t want her to know about his condition.

Greg: That was different!

Pearl: Sure, Greg.

The three dots of impending doom jumped onto her screen within an instant, but Pearl didn’t wait for what was surely another half-assed justification from a man who seemed to half-ass anything that could be half-assed. (Which was neither fair nor right, but God, she was livid.) She shut her phone down, placed it on the nightstand, and rolled back onto her pillow with an aggressive thump.

Which, of course, did nothing to alleviate the headache that had been beating against the back of her skull all day.

Rose… Rose wouldn’t have wanted this, would she?

Her son fraternizing with the enemy.

With Yellow Diamond.

Even the mere thought of the woman was enough to conjure a clear image of the imposing CEO in Pearl’s mind-eye. She had golden eyes and a hard heart, and her practices—from her exploitation of workers to the conditions of her factories—were far from ethical. She was a tyrant, a monster, a despot.

And Steven was set to enter her lair.

(An extravagant penthouse suite that had reportedly cost over 200 million dollars.)

Her little boy, swallowed up by the yellow beast.

Rose… Rose wouldn’t have permitted this…

… Right?

Right?

It was a single instant of hesitation, but it was enough, and her mistrust and anger and irritation at Yellow, at Greg, at the world, soon gave away to another emotion, one that had been swelling up in Pearl’s chest all day. She rolled over to her side and plucked her phone up once more, clearing Greg’s response away with a furious swipe so she could type in her password.

It was 7673.

It was Rose. 

She clicked the little photo icon and scrolled.

Scrolled past pictures of Steven as he slept during one of his dialysis treatments.

Past twenty Amethyst selfies that had been taken while Pearl wasn’t looking.

Past the family’s vacation to a cabin in the vast, snowy mountains.

And then she abruptly stopped, tapping once to expand the only image she wanted to see.

It was a picture of a picture, of a polaroid Garnet had taken approximately a year before Rose had met Greg, and everything had gone to—

Rose’s arm was wrapped around Pearl’s shoulders, and her pink lips were pressed against her cheek, and they were laughing.

Laughing!

And Pearl was in love.

Even in the blurry polaroid, she could see the faint blush that had traced itself across the bridge of her pointed nose like a messy pink scribble, could see the admiration that had made her eyes shine so bright once upon a time.

And she could feel the phantoms of warmth.

The warmth of Rose’s big, encompassing arms.

The warmth that had spread across Pearl’s entire body, that had electrified her veins.

A hot, itchy sensation climbed and climbed her throat until it welled up in her eyes. The phone went slack in her hand, tumbling to the bed.

Who was she kidding?

She didn’t know what Rose would have wanted.

After all, once upon a time, Pearl had thought that she wanted her.

She would have turned forty today had she not chosen… She bit her lip. She didn’t want to admit it, not even to herself.

It did not compute.

She would have turned forty, she tried again. The tears dripped down her beaky nose. And she would have been radiant.

Monday, 7:02 AM

Garnet: safe drive steven. <3

Steven: Thanks, boo. <3

Steven: And just so you know… I did think about what you told me last night.

Steven: And, like, I really thank you for being upfront with me about how you felt. Pearl just straight up told me that I shouldn’t go, and you took the time to tell me why I shouldn’t go, but this is just something I have to do Garnet.

Garnet: have to?

Steven: I guess I don’t have to, but I want to.

Steven: She’s really nice, and she’s really sad, and I want to be her friend.

Around her, the gym’s locker room was coming to life. Fellow trainers changing into exercise gear for appointments with clients. Early gym comers heading off to the showers for a rinse off. People talking and sipping coffee and slamming locker doors with aplomb. But Garnet was immobile on the bench, her entire world contained in the little screen sitting in the palm of her hand.

She was conflicted, and conflicted wasn’t exactly a feeling she experienced very often.

It was unpleasant to say the least.

Like a fist nurtured into her stomach over and over and over again.

On one hand—one of the fists churning her stomach in nauseating ways—the memories and the rage and the rage those memories roared into existence tore through her overwhelmed head like fire in a forest. She saw Rose Quartz standing on a box in front of the D.E. building, the force and passion in her words inspiring disgruntled workers to join her in protest. Saw her own hands wrapped around a sign that screamed for FAIR WAGES as her hoarse voice did the same. Garnet’s own mothers, Ruby and Sapphire, had worked in one of D.E.’s factories overseas before they’d come to America.

They were the reasons she had taken up Rose’s banner in the first place.

Ruby’s calloused hands testified to cruel work—the kind of stuff that may have broken a lesser person—and Sapphire’s strained silence about those years spoke volumes where she could not.

Whenever they saw Yellow Diamond on TV, they would immediately blanch and grasp hands, as though they were afraid that she would reach through the screen and wrench them apart.

On the other hand—Garnet gritted her teeth to make this concession—Yellow Diamond was her demon. Hers and her parents’ and Rose’s and Amethyst’s and Pearl’s.

Not Steven’s.

She wanted him to inherit so many things from her—some wondrous and some wise.

Love and light and patience and perseverance.

But not hate.

Never hate.

Garnet threw her towel around her neck and stood up with a sigh that reached into her bones and shook them for good measure.

Garnet: okay… i love you steven. <3

Steven: I love you too Garnet. <3

Monday, 9:12 AM

Amethyst: 

Pearl: You’re not driving, correct?! If so, please put your phone down immediately! 

Pearl: If not, very cute.

Amethyst: chillllllllax P

Amethyst: ste-man is getting a snack from the gas station. we’re about an hr out from empire city

Garnet: :)

Pearl: Excellent timing, Amethyst!

Pearl: Remember, his appointment starts at 12, so that should give you plenty enough time to check into the hotel and get situated there.

Pearl: I’ve put the reservations under your name.

Pearl: You have the debit card, right?

Pearl: Oh, goodness. I think I forgot to pack M.C. Bear Bear.

Garnet: i handled it.

Amethyst: haha - nice save G

Garnet: B)

Garnet: i’m psychic

One of the double doors leading out from the gas station was pushed open with a lethargic kind of energy, and Amethyst, who had been leaning against the hood of her car, looked up from her phone to see that the wimpy gesture belonged to none other than her little buddy, her Steven. He closed the door carefully with his weak hand, nurturing a bag of Chaps in the other, and then, without so much as glancing her way, trudged right past her to the passenger side of the car, pulled the door open, and barreled in.

The door didn’t slam to a close so much as it did feebly stutter to one.

Well, that was a huge yikes.

Not waiting to give him time to stew in his feelings, Amethyst pocketed her phone and proceeded to the driver’s side, pulling her seatbelt across her chest and cranking the ignition to her little Honda Civic in one, fluid motion. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Steven was looking at the bag of chips clenched in his hand, but there was something in his expression—something unfocused, something glazed—that told her that he wasn’t quite seeing what he was seeing.

She pulled out of the parking lot and tried to keep her voice as casual as possible. “You okay, little dude?”

He wasn’t. Obviously. But it didn’t hurt to ask.

She knew Steven well enough to know that he’d rather drown in the ocean ten times over rather than share his feelings.

But she also knew that once he started talking through them, like the ocean, they’d flow.

“Yeah… just got a little dizzy when I was standing in line for the register.” He laughed humorlessly, the bag in his hand crinkling in a way that told her that he’d squeezed it tightly. “But I guess that’s just a occupational hazard of this whole dying business.”

They were on the highway now, Jersey speeding past them in a blur of green and gray and black. Amethyst’s fingers choked the wheel.

“You’re not dying, Steven,” she gritted out, trying to see straight. The edges of her vision bursted with red, and all she wanted to do was pull over and slam the kid into a freaking hug. “Get that outta your head.”

“I know, I know.” He rested his elbow on the door’s control panel and leaned his head against the window. She couldn’t see his eyes, but their reflections were dark with trees. Perhaps they were just dark all over. “Just joking.”

Amethyst took one hand off the wheel and squeezed his free one. His skin was clammy and cold to touch.

“You’re not, but that was a good try, Ste-man.”

“What can I say?” He laughed again, and at least this one had a little more body to it. “I’m a virtuoso at using dark humor to cope with my crippling depression.”

And he meant it to be funny.

Meant it to be ironic.

But she wasn’t having it.

“You don’t have to be, though,” she told him, as serious as she could be. “Not with me anyway”

And he turned to look at her, his dark eyes widening in something that may have have just been awe.

She blushed furiously but blustered on anyway because dammit, this kid needed this talk, like, yesterday.

“I mean, I know you front with everyone else, but, like, you don’t have to do that when you’re around me, okay?” Amethyst’s grip tightened on his hand. “I get not wanting to talk about it. I get desperately needing to talk about it. I get you, Steven.”

Because they were alike, him and her.

They had issues, and they tried not to think about those issues and only ended up thinking about them all the more.

It was a cycle she knew well.

She wished Steven didn’t have to.

He didn’t answer immediately. Amethyst withdrew her hand and replaced it on the wheel, driving in silence for as long as the silence stretched thin between them.

She felt his gaze upon her.

Felt the intensity of it, the sadness.

“I just… I just feel so bad, Amethyst,” he whispered. “All the time.”

Amethyst wanted to melt into her seat. A lump rose to her throat.

“I know, buddy.”

“I’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel good.” His voice was fragile—not in the way glass was fragile, but in the way a dandelion was. One puff, and then it was gone.

“I know.”

She heard a sniffing sound.

A surreptitious swipe of the nose.

Amethyst knew better than to look his way.

Monday, 11:31 AM

Amethyst: heyyyy greg. steven and i made it to e city. bout to drive to the hospital.

Greg: Thanks for the update!

Amethyst: yah. np.

Greg: uh, what does that mean ??

Amethyst: no problem

Greg: i didn’t thank you for anything?? ?

Monday, 4:38 PM

Amethyst: sorry for not answering ur calls. just got back to the hotel. steven’s asleep. gonna have to text.

Greg: He’s asleep? already?

Pearl: What did Dr. Maheswaran say?

Amethyst: yeah poor kid’s worn out

Amethyst: she’s not happy w/ his blood count. she says his hemoglobin is low. if it doesn’t get better by the end of the week she might do a blood transfusion

Amethyst: 4 days of dialysis this week instead of 3

Amethyst: steven’s not happy :/

Pearl: That’s it. We’re coming up there immediately.

Amethyst: no!

Amethyst: i mean, not that i don’t want you guys to be here, but u guys can’t afford to take any more time off work

Amethyst: and we’ve got bills ’n stuff to pay

Amethyst: not 2 mention the new iron pill dr. m prescribed

Amethyst: like - i’ve got this

Pearl: Garnet? Greg? What do you think?

Garnet: amethyst is right.

Greg: i mean yeah… I’m not happy about it, but she’s got a point.

Pearl: Okay… but if things get worse, we’re coming up there. Alright?

Amethyst: k

She’d drawn the curtains to make it darker in the room, but even still, a crack of blue light slipped in through the gap, illuminating Steven’s sleeping form. He was curled up under the blankets, which obscured most of his face.

His little button nose poked out.

His closed eyes fluttered restlessly.

Amethyst wondered if he was dreaming.

And if he was, she hoped that it was a good one.

Because frankly, reality sucked.

While Steven had been changing from the hospital gown to his regular clothes, Dr. Maheswaran had pulled her aside and given her a haughty once over that let Amethyst know at once that the doctor wished she were Pearl, who, out of Steven’s four parental figures had the best grasp of all the medical jargon.

“He’s needs a new kidney, and he needs it soon,” Dr. Maheswaran said. No sugarcoating. No bull. She didn’t have the best bedside manners per say, but the nephrologist would tell it to you straight, and that was what mattered most to Amethyst.

“Then find him one, Doc.”

“I’m trying,” she frowned, and the lines under her brown eyes became all the more pronounced. “But kidneys are a tall, damn order.”

Monday, 4:48 PM:

Greg: love ya champ

Greg: i’m so proud of you

Monday, 5:01 PM:

Pearl: Call me when you get up! Love you, Steven. <3

Monday, 5:09 PM:

Garnet: <3

Tuesday, 10:32 AM:

Amethyst: picked up steven’s prescription

Amethyst: we’re @ breakfast

Pearl: How much was the copay?

Amethyst: only like $10

Pearl: :) I’ll add that to my ledger.

Amethyst: neeeeeeerdddd alert

Pearl: This ‘nerd’ does your taxes for you every year.

Amethyst: and i appreciate tht but that doesn’t make u any less of a nerd

“Gosh, I was hungry,” Steven said around a mouthful of waffles. He already had his next bite queued up on his fork, and a trace of syrup dripped down the corner of his mouth.

Amethyst was hella relieved to see that his appetite had returned; last night, he’d stayed passed out until 3AM, and when he woke up, she could only get him to nibble on a couple of crackers. 

“Bet,” she replied, chomping down hard on a piece of syrup covered bacon, savoring more than just its taste. The sweetness was good, but seeing Steven in a good mood made it even sweeter.

“Who were ya texting?”

“Pearl. She was being lame and trying to talk to me about math.”

Steven chuckled. “You should try being homeschooled by her.”

He squared his blocky shoulders and clasped his hands behind his back, two actions which resulted in an uncanny physical impression of their dear Pearl.

“Now Steven,” he mimicked in a high, lofty voice, “you can’t just move the x around like that. There’s a certain finesse to it. A technique. Here, let me do it.” He lowered his voice back to its normal pitch. “And then she starts talking about how my mom was great at solving division problems or something like that.”

Amethyst’s eyes were streaming. She banged her fists on the table, drawing a nasty look from a passing waitress.

“You’re a riot, Steven.”

“Thank ya!” He grinned.

When their meal came to a close—and it only did after they’d each slammed a couple of more waffles—Steven swirled the quarter of orange juice he had left in his glass, and Amethyst pulled out his ever-expanding pillbox from her bag.

Red pills.

Blue pills.

Iron pills.

Diuretics.

And by God, they were all big enough to be choking hazards.

“Ugh, Steven,” she muttered, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “I dunno how you do this everyday.”

“Oh, that’s an easy one,” he replied cheerfully, accepting her offering of his Tuesday pills. “I totally dissociate.”

“Solid, dude.”

Steven downed the pills one by one, chasing them with vigorous swills of juice.

“Tell me about it,” he gasped when he was done, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

They had another hour or so to kill before Steven had to return to the hospital for his treatment, so they took to walking down one of Empire City’s lesser known shopping districts. From time to time, they’d rest on a bench until Steven could catch his shortened breath.

It was during one of these breaks when the little bugger finally breached the topic of conversation she’d been crossing her fingers to avoid.

“If I don’t end up having to get a transfusion,” he began thoughtfully, head angled backwards so he could stare up at all the high rises poking into the sky, “I think I wanna text Blue Diamond soon. Visit her while I’m here, maybe.”

“Maybe…” She hesitated, and Steven was quick to snap up on it.

“Amethyst, I love you, but if you give me the same, old spiel on why I shouldn’t visit Blue, I’m gonna walk away.” She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. His voice was playful, but his eyes were grim, and his mouth was pressed into a thin, determined line.

“You’re sure bent on doing this, huh?”

“Very bent,” he agreed succinctly, nodding with dramatic precision before adding, “Super bent.”

Because there was obviously a discernible difference between super bent and very bent.

Amethyst scratched her neck and sighed.

“If the doc gives you the go ahead, then text her,” she told him grudgingly. “I wasn’t a part of the team when all the big protests against Yellow D were going on, so I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t go.”

Pearl and Garnet seemed to have plenty of reasons, though.

“Thanks, Amethyst!”

“No big deal, dude.”

Their little bench was an island in the stream—solitary, stable, even with so many people flooding around it. Amethyst did as Steven was doing and tilted her head back to drink in the panorama from above, appreciative of the cool breeze that slid across her face and stirred her long hair. Her eyes closed against the bright, golden sun.

“I was doing some research,” Steven said, and he was very quiet. Melancholy.

Amethyst opened one eye to look at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. His hands were clasped neatly on his lap, his solemn gaze still offered to the heavens.

“A couple of years back, there was an awful murder that took place outside of a bar somewhere in this city.” He paused. “The details were too… gruesome, I guess, for the article to talk about. She was only twenty-one.”

She raised a questioning eyebrow at him. “Dark stuff you’re reading there, kid.”

His shoulder rose and fell in a half-shrug.

“It was a dark thing that happened.”

Tuesday, 4:29 PM

Steven: Hey guys! Just got out of treatment.

Greg: how was it kiddo?

Steven: Better than yesterday. We’re heading to the hotel.

Pearl: I’m so glad, Steven!

Garnet: !!!

Steven: Thanks! Love you all.

Amethyst read the texts in the group chat while Steven was hung over the toilet, puking his little guts out.

Insistent that Amethyst stay out of the bathroom until he was done.

She rapped on the door anyway, unsure if he heard her over the sound of his own violent retching.

Dialysis naturally had the effect of making him nauseous, but nausea was also a side effect of the new iron pills he was taking, so really, the odds were just not in Steven’s favor today.

“You okay in there?”

“I feel like the answer to that question”—he paused to gag—“is very obvious.”

Asshole, she thought fondly and barged into the bathroom. Kid needed a Sprite, a cold rag to the forehead, and a nice, little trip to bed.

“Amethyst—“ He whined, lifting his head feebly from the commode. The traces of throw up were edged along the corner of his mouth.

“Shut up, Steven, and let me love you.”

She grabbed a washcloth from the counter and turned on the faucet, the loud hissing noise just not loud enough to mask what was surely another round of vomit.

Wednesday, 3:22 PM

Amethyst: STEEEEVEEENNNN’S GOT A GIRLFRIEND

Pearl: What?!?!

Garnet: nice.

Greg: way 2 go champ!

Amethyst: asgdshafl 

Amethyst: so dr. m’s daughter came in today to read to patients and like she and steven rlly hit it off

Amethyst: her name is Connie

Amethyst: and i’m calling it now. their ship name is stevonnie

Pearl: I think I’m experiencing premature empty nest syndrome. 

Amethyst: ya’ve got the nose for it

Pearl: Rude.

Amethyst: but anyway his treatment’s almost done and dr. m says his blood count’s looking better

Amethyst: no transfusion!

Pearl: Thank goodness. 

Greg: ugh I agree

Garnet: Woo.

Amethyst: and he’s happy today

Amethyst glanced up from her phone to confirm what she was telling the others.

“Buuuuuuut Connnnnnnie, you can’t just leave it on a cliffhanger!” Steven was pleading, fingers mussed through his dark, curly hair in exasperation. “Like, Lisa is literally hanging from a cliff. I need to know what happens!”

“Okay, okay!” The dark-skinned girl pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “One more paragraph… Mom’s about to unhook you from the machine, though.”

Dr. Maheswaran waved her off with a dismissive flick of the hand. “One more paragraph would be fine.”

“Yes ma’am!” She re-buried her nose into the thick book. “Lisa’s hand was slick with sweat as Archimedes…”

Steven leaned forward expectantly, hand tucked under his chin, M.C. Bear Bear clutched tightly to his chest right next to his dialysis catheter and all of the tubing involved.

And he was smiling like a fool.

Like a kid.

Amethyst: he’s rlly happy

Wednesday, 7:41 PM

Steven: Hi Blue… this is Steven.

Steven: That cute kid from the cemetery. :)

Blue: Hello, Steven. It’s so very nice to hear from you. How are you?

Steven: Could be better. Could be worse. You?

Blue: Ah, likewise.

Steven: I was texting to say that I’ll be in Empire City for the better part of the week, and I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of coming to visit, maybe?

Blue: Of course—I would love that.

Blue: When would be the best day for you?

Steven: Friday would be great if that’s ok with you. 

Blue: Friday would be perfect. 1:00? We could do tea and cakes.

Steven: Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Blue: Friday it is then. I can’t wait to see you again, Steven.

Steven: I can’t wait to see you too.

Blue set her phone down on the bathroom counter, and twenty sleeping pills slipped between her tall fingers and back into the bottle.

It’d been a bad day.

She wouldn’t have done it…

She hadn’t been going to…

She had just been thinking.

It had been a bad day, and then Steven had texted.

“Well, I’m home for the night.” Startled, Blue looked up in the mirror to see her wife leaning in the doorframe—arms crossed, a permanent frown carved into her striking face. “Stocks are down, and my investors are running for the hills. It’s a hellhole. I’m in literal hell.”

Yellow detached herself from the door and drew closer. The tips of their fingers brushed ever so slightly, ever so softly.

And that was about as physically affectionate as they got nowadays.

“How was your day?” Her voice sharpened at the end. “I see you’re still in your nightgown.”

“It was fine, Yellow.” It absolutely was not.

Blue gripped the edge of the sink to keep her hands from shaking, determined not to glance at the pill bottle she’d been holding just moments before.

“Are you sure? I could call the doctor right now. Check the dosage on your antidepressant, perhaps?”

“Oh, yes,” she muttered venomously, more to herself than Yellow, but she supposed she didn’t care enough if Yellow heard it, too, “because that’s exactly what I need. An upped dosage.”

That seemed to be Yellow’s only reliable solution when it came to fixing her.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Blue bit out. “Nothing at all.”

And she pushed off from the sink, impelled by dull anger, her shoulder roughly knocking against Yellow’s as she went.

Her hand slammed against the light switch before she exited the doorway, and it did her a great deal of good to submerge Yellow Diamond into total darkness.

#steven universe #blue diamond #pearl #amethyst #garnet #yellow diamond #a little bit of #bellow diamond #flower child #s: steven universe #mimik-u #reginianwrites

[cdyssey]

Friend

Summary: After Melissa breaks up with Gary, Barbara insists on staying the night with her. [Post-3.01]

CW: Alcohol; Emotional Infidelity

AO3 Link

—

Barbara is vaguely aware that she should probably let Melissa set the tone.

An obliging friend would anyway.

A supportive one.

If Melissa wants to haul ass in her Honda Civic and drive away without saying nary a word, then fine, reasonable, absolutely and resoundingly valid—that’s how she’s chosen to cope. An obliging friend would make sure that she has her keys. Tell her that she loves her. Open the double doors for her on the way out.

I’ll check on you tomorrow, girlfriend.

Drive safe and call me if you need me.

Conversely, if the younger woman wants to yell and scream—kick a desk over and then kick it again, punch the nearest brick wall, issue a string of vicious Italian curses between her teeth—then that would be perfectly intelligible, too. A more than reasonable reaction to the nonsense that her paramour just pulled, embarrassing her like that in front of God and Jalen Hurts! (Mmph! The audacity of him! The absolute nerve! Barbara had told him—at least twice that she recalls—that it was a bad idea to propose. She hadn’t even been intending to help him. She had just wanted to minimize the startling possibility that Melissa could be hurt.)

A supportive friend would dutifully be there in the ugly aftermath, double and triple-checking that the second grade teacher didn’t accidentally break a toe, wrapping her bloodied knuckles in gauze.

Let it all out, she’d maybe say.

I’m here for you.

Now, in theory and moderate practice, it’s all well and good for people to be obliging and supportive. They’re admirable traits that Barbara would advocate in any Christian worth their paid tithes. But the crucial problem—(well, the one that she’s willing to admit to anyway)—is that Barbara Howard, for all of her upstanding moral fiber, has never once been the obliging type, having learned unshakeable grit long ago in the Sisyphean grind of the Philadelphia public school system.

And moreover, even though she would be the first to proclaim her undying loyalty, that’s far from synonymous with her support. The kindergarten teacher would crawl over hot coals to be there for Melissa Schemmenti. 

That’s loyalty. 

The primal abnegation—the inherent masochism—of love. 

But to helplessly watch her best friend punish herself over yet another undeserving man has never been her inclination nor her particular strong suit.

So, if the two choices are to let Melissa run away or further hurt herself, to be obliging or to be supportive —(and these have always been the two choices when Melissa has been in pain)—then Barbara chooses neither, which is to say as soon as the bell rings and all of her students have been ushered to the gym, she chooses to stride over to the classroom across the way and plant herself firmly in the door, folding her arms over her chest.

“I’m driving you home this evening,” she declares and is glad to find that her voice is gentle. (She had been afraid all afternoon that the consolation would come out a little wrong.)

(That she would slip up and sound relieved.)

(And she is that—assuredly.)

(She’s so relieved that Gary the Vending Machine Guy didn’t get to make such a half-assed proposal and get away with it. Perhaps a little inappropriately, she thanks God for his divine mercy in ensuring that the karmic struggle bent towards justice.)

(But she also knows that she has no right to advertise this sensation—this incredible, gut-wrenching relief—somewhere that her friend might see it. She may not be supportive—(hell, she might not even entirely be kind ) —but she isn’t callous. She isn’t cruel.)

Melissa is at her desk, half-slumped in her perpetually creaking seat, staring at nothing at particular. The wall. A faded poster of the solar system. Dust notes suspended in the sunlight trickling in through the blinds. There are sweeping shadows beneath her eyes where her mascara has been running. A telltale redness around the nose. 

“Barb,” she starts tiredly, only barely glancing her way, “you don’t hafta—“

But Barbara intercepts her protestations neatly.

“—I want to,” she insists, intending to step forward and just as suddenly reluctant to even try, discerning something horrible in the other woman’s eyes that terrifies her. 

Something unnervingly still.

Something broken.

She distinctly remembers that the last time Melissa’s eyes had looked like that, she’d been staring down the barrel of an acrimonious divorce. She didn’t smile for an entire year. She just pretended to when she thought that people were rightfully concerned.

“We could… have a girl’s night, perhaps,” she presses on, perhaps a little hesitant at first, sensing that she’s sidling up to an invisible wall. “Yes, a true lady’s evening! Drink a lot of wine. Watch Jeopardy! Order takeout from that—mmm, oh what’s it called?—that… that interesting pizzeria on the corner. The one next to the Shell Station that was robbed last year.”

“It’s Rizzo’s, and you hate that crap,” Melissa snorts humorlessly, never once missing a beat, an expert at finding meaning in her ellipsis. “Said it gave ya indigestion.”

“But you love it,” Barbara returns emphatically, lips kneading into a fond smile. It’s a sorry excuse for a restaurant in her opinion, the pizza greasy, the garlic bread overseasoned. and to add insult to improperly cooked injury, the owners are tremendously rude, always complaining when shedares to complain about the lacking quality of their products. But that’s not the point. The point is: “I’ll guzzle some Pepto. And if it comes down to it, indulge in a Tums.”

I’d do anything to make you happy.

Her smile widens and she dares to hope for something of a crooked grin in return, but Melissa doesn’t seem to find this playful gesture of self-sacrifice nearly half as amusing—nor even endearing for that matter—finally meeting her in the eye, a certain hardness in her tall face, a steeliness that is willing to cut.

“I don’t want your pity,” she mutters, quiet defiance in every syllable, audible defeat in the strained silence that follows.

Barbara knows that her friend has to say some version of this line. She has to make it perfectly clear that she thinks she’s hard to love, and then, for some godforsaken reason, she feels compelled to go as far as proving it, street fighting with just her teeth.

“And you’re not getting it either,” she says firmly, shaking her head. 

“I’d be a blessed fool to ever pity you, Melissa Schemmenti.”

More silence weaves its way into the gap, as thick and as complicated as a rope between them. The younger woman scrutinizes her closely, trying to locate the mockery that she seems to perpetually assume is there, while Barbara stares just as intensely back, refusing to let her arrive at such a profoundly incorrect conclusion in the first place.

“And you couldn’t possibly be that, could ya, Barb?” The second grade teacher eventually sighs, a wane smile bobbing to her dark lips. “Anybody’s fool?”

“Exactly,” she agrees with a certain smugness, rightfully intuiting that she’s won. “And you're nobody’s pity project either. Now grab your purse, sweetheart. As the kids would say, we’re blowing the lid off of this popsicle stand."

But for all this—their familiar back-and-forth, the other woman's stunning pain, their mutual agreement that Barbara isn't a fool when it comes to all matters Melissa—Melissa remains unmoving, though clearly not untouched. She blinks once, and Barbara sees that her pale eyes are overbright, everything about her so tender and visibly scraped raw.

“You serious about this?” She rasps, achingly vulnerable, almost child-like as she sits with her hands loosely templed on top of her desk. “You don’t… gotta babysit me, y’know. I’m gonna be just fine.”

“I know that,” Barbara exhales softly, and more than that, fundamentally believes it. She believes with every atom in her that her best friend is going to get through this latest tribulation with all her pieces intact, that she’s Melissa Schemmenti, for goodness sake, and she’s never known a challenge that she couldn’t capably meet.

“But let me take care of you tonight anyway,” she finishes, all kindness and ferocious warmth for the woman six feet across from her in this cold and empty room.

Her colleague of some twenty-odd years.

Her sister.

Her partner—as loaded as that word is, as Barbara often pretends for it not to be.

“God, you’re such a gagootz,” comes an affectionate reply, and then a hitch of a laugh of a poorly concealed sob.

“Only for you,” she teases right back and shifts slightly on the balls of her feet, suddenly discomfited by the idea that she could actually possibly mean it. 

She swallows lightly and shoves the traitorous thought into one of the innumerable drawers of her mind. Locks it. Rebelliously holds on to the key.

—

Barbara is more than aware that she probably shouldn’t prod the freshly exposed wound. An obliging friend wouldn’t anyway—a supportive one. 

But in their particular friendship, where the only barrier between them sometimes is the fabric that separates their brushing skin, pushing a little harder than they should is an implicit given for them, if only because they know the other is so prone to pulling away.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Barbara asks on the drive away from her own house, where she picked up an overnight bag: some clothes, her toiletries, a bottle of unopened wine, her CPAP machine. She feels guilty for abruptly canceling on Gerald. She’d made plans with him and just as immediately bailed when there were suddenly more important things. 

When there was Melissa.

To his lasting credit, he immediately understood.

Her wonderful husband always understands when it comes to Melissa, something complicated in his eyes and maddeningly patient in his weathered smile whenever they talk about her. Barbara doesn’t know what to make of these microgestures, nor does she try to decode them into an alphabet that makes sense when they’re both currently content to let their arcane meanings go unworded. 

Instead, she grips the sun-baked leather of her steering wheel all the tighter, and asks Melissa if she wants to talk about her pain, perhaps solely for the reason that she won’t have to spend any unnecessary time interrogating her own.

“Nope,” Melissa grunts unhelpfully, eyes eclipsed behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses. “Nothing to talk about. I had a boyfriend. He wanted somethin’ more than that, and I, uh, couldn’t… I could never give that… I mean—and now I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. Simple as that.”

But Barbara hears the clumsy slippage of words, the implicit pain there, the story her best friend is choosing to tell herself, the solely placed blame.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” she murmurs, easing to a stop light that’s just turned red. She takes the lull for the opportunity that it is, reaching over without looking, placing a hand on Melissa’s wrist where it lays across the console. Squeezing once.

Gently—always gently.

Not letting go, even though she absolutely should.

“You told that man. You told him and you told him, and you explicitly told him. It’s hardly on you if he was too obtuse to ever get it.”

“He’s not obtuse,” Melissa snaps, suddenly pulling her hand back into her lap. The violence of it shocks them both, the silence taut, frayed and fraying. Somewhere in the unbearable static, the light turns green without either of them ever being really aware. 

The rusty sedan behind them honks at Barbara to go.

She presses the pedal with a little more force than is required.

“Sorry,” the second grade teacher mutters, flushing a little, tugging at her seatbelt strap. “It’s just… if he’s obtuse, then what am I, y’know? We both thought we were on the same page, and here it turns out I can’t open any book without makin’ spaghetti of the words.”

“Melissa,” she exhales softly. She doesn’t know what to say to such a revealing proclamation, where to even begin, how to unpick a skein of self-loathing that’s as convoluted as that, the threads unwilling to be anything else but a tangled ball.

“Which is why I don’t wanna talk about it yet,” the younger teacher shrugs, harshly swiping at the skin beneath her eyes, angling her body away. “I gotta figure out how to explain it all to myself first.”

“And would it be too much to ask for you to be kind to yourself in that process?” Barbara can’t help but ask, forcing herself to keep her eyes on the road, fingers tightly locked around the wheel. “To afford yourself the same grace that you so generously bestow to others?”

To Gary the Vending Machine Guy.

To Joseph.

You always take up for fools who don’t deserve it, she bitterly thinks and half-despises herself for it. Melissa can’t help who she loves, anymore than Barbara can’t help but drop everything to be there for Melissa, which is probably the same thing as saying that Barbara can’t help who she loves either.

It's a terrifying thought, one that the kindergarten teacher can't exactly afford to entertain when there's a diamond studded ring on her fourth finger that Gerald took out a loan for when they were just twenty-five. He was besotted with her, and she liked him so very much, and she thought that the safe boundaries of marriage would teach her how to love a man like a good woman of God.

Melissa only offers another listless shrug, staring out of the window as the city passes them by. 

A blur of color and light. 

Streaks of meaningless sound.

—

They fall into a familiar routine, the same metronomic cadence that they know by heart after nearly three decades of jokingly calling each other home. They eat. They drink. (Barbara swills copious amounts of Pepto to deal with that disgusting pizza.) They curl up on Melissa’s plastic-covered couch beneath the knit blanket that her nonna made and watch Jeopardy!, shouting out the answers at nearly the exact same time. When the show is over, they drink even more, quickly draining Barbara’s cheap bottle of Merlot to the lees. Melissa moves on to some old beer she had in her outside fridge, refusing to touch her good stuff—the vintage wines, the nice beers, her impressive collection of bourbons—for the occasion.

Barbara decides to sober up in case Melissa needs her, exchanging her delicate wine glass for a plastic Hooters cup filled with water.

The younger woman’s face gets steadily rosier the more she indulges, petals blooming across her cheek, a pleasant ruddiness shading the tip of her nose. She laughs a little too hard at the harmless sitcom that they’re not even really watching. She tucks her feet beneath Barbara’s thigh on the couch to warm them, causing the kindergarten teacher to inexplicably shiver. Around ten, she drunkenly muses about the astonishing merits of her own breasts.

“Gary called ‘em the best honkers he’s ever seen,” she says suddenly, two-thirds into her second Miller Lite, staring down at her cleavage with a frown that makes her plump lower lip poke out.

Barbara nearly chokes on her water, spilling a little on her blouse, her own gaze unwittingly magnetized to the objects in question—specifically, the way the divot of them is just barely visible at the low neck of her shirt. Cream-colored things, smooth and deliciously warmed in the golden glow of the lamp, delicately freckled with sun-spots from so many youthful days spent out in the sun.

“Used t’think that’s the best compliment a guy’s ever given me,” the younger woman half-smiles, “‘cuz my only point of reference was Joe sayin’ I should get a touch up on my boob job.”

The explicit reference to Melissa’s ex-husband snaps Barbara out of her reverie, a cold splash of water over the heat that had been incrementally rising in her face by degrees.

“Joseph was a manchild and a heathen,” she sniffs primly, finally feeling comfortable enough with the details of Melissa’s divorce to confidently say so. Of course, six years ago, she also thought as much and occasionally said it, too, but that only ended with her and Melissa bitterly arguing over what sort of treatment that the second-grade teacher seemed to think she deserved.

Time must really heal all wounds, though, because now, Melissa only limply chuckles between drags of stale beer.

“And if the only compliment that men can ever muster about you concerns the state of your bosom—impressive though it certainly may be—then they don’t deserve the opportunity to compliment you at all,” she finishes pointedly, tapping her long nails against the side of her water. (By goodness, and dear almighty God, she’s trying to let it escape her notice that the Hooters logo is an incredibly apt brand for the conversation they’re currently having, but it's a damn uphill climb when the whole cup is nearly the same shade of Melissa's hair.)

The younger teacher must sense that they've arrived at dangerous grounds, though, skating around the very perimeter of a conversation that she’s so clearly unwilling to entertain, because she polishes the last of her beer off in one gulp and adeptly changes the subject.

“So you think my rack is impressive, huh?” She suddenly smirks, eyes twinkling in the dim light.

“Girlfriend!” Barbara immediately groans, shutting her eyes as something lurches within her at the insinuation. A twinge at the seething core of her. A not particularly unpleasant warmth coiling upwards from the pit of her stomach, coloring her insides the most intoxicating shades of red: scarlet, crimson, candied apple, vermilion.

The exact shade of Melissa Schemmenti’s vivid lips.

“I-I didn’t mean it like that!”

She suddenly feels the pressing need to go to church, but since that’s not currently an option, maybe a cold shower and an unspecified prayer for forgiveness will have to do.

Melissa only laughs at her, long and almost offensively hard, clutching her soft belly. 

“Ha!” She wheezes. “I’m not sure there are other ways t’mean it, Barb.”

—

A little after midnight, Barbara finally settles into the guest bedroom that she knows used to be where Joseph slept in the bitter months leading up to the divorce. It’s small but cozy, containing everything she needs to get through the night—a good mattress, a nightstand, an outlet to plug in her phone and sleep apnea machine—and yet, the kindergarten teacher finds herself in a hopeless war in the pursuit of stillness. She tries to read a few pages from the Danielle Steel book that she picked up from the library, but all the words just seem to fall off the page. She scrolls through her phone for a bit—checking emails, liking Facebook memes, adding to the grocery list in her notes—and just as abruptly stops when she sees that she missed a goodnight text from Gerald a few hours ago.

Night, hon. Sweet dreams. Give Melissa my love.

It’s entirely kind—(Gerald is and always will be)—and it excavates her on the spot for some obscure reason that she is unwilling to try and name. She slams her phone down like it’s the fabled Book of Judgment, flicks off the lamp, and attempts to finally go to sleep, but the smothering dark just becomes a convenient cover for her less palatable thoughts, ones explicitly having to do with the woman in the master bedroom next door.

Did she make it into the shower alright?

Take her medicines, shimmy into some pajamas?

(What sort of pajamas does her best friend wear when she's at home and no one is looking anyway? Surely, not a full set—such as the kind that Barbara prefers. Old t-shirts? A nightgown? Perhaps simply her undergarments.)

(Maybe even nothing at all.) (Barbara shivers in the darkness and idly wonders if the same reason that she cringes when Gerald is kind to her is because she spends her nighttime hours wondering what Melissa does or doesn't sleep in. She sternly dismisses the thought. Calls it absurd. Absolutely needs it to be. Cathedrals of bare flesh erect themselves in her mind anyway: a temple of a body, suffused in a divine and feminine glow.)

Is Melissa finally asleep, the copious amounts of booze that she drank blissfully washing her away into the gentle sea of the night?

Or, is she lying alone in bed, staring listlessly at the ceiling too?

Thinking about Gary.

Heartbroken over the loss of a man who could have treated her far better than he did.

It shouldn’t really concern her, and yet it does. Absolutely. Every unanswered question jabs at her as she lies in the bed that Melissa’s ex-husband used to sleep in, hopelessly trying to get comfortable under such inherently distressing conditions. She squirms, writhes, tosses and inevitably turns. 

She just as suddenly stills at the plaintive knock on her bedroom door.

“Barb?” The familiar voice leans tiredly against the wood. “You still up?”

“Yes,” she just barely breathes, slowly gathering herself into an upright position. Then louder, sounding much more like herself: “Mhm. Come on in.”

The invitation is heeded, the door swinging open to reveal Melissa in the silvery pool of the hallway’s night light, hair still damp from the shower, wearing nothing but an old Eagles shirt that just barely covers the tops of her thighs. 

Barbara swallows thickly, a kaleidoscope of sensations whirling through her stomach: so many colors, indecorous thoughts, and sickly desires.

Needs.

The very center of her tightens, shifts uneasily in response to this unprecedented sight that she'd just been vaguely dreaming of. She doesn’t remember the last time she saw something that she could so easily name as beautiful.

“Couldn’t sleep?” She croaks, loathing how affected her voice sounds, every syllable touched. It’s just her best friend after all, half-naked in the dripping light, looking strangely small in the tall frame of the door.

Nothing worth getting her panties in a twist about.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Melissa confirms, pulling a hand through her hair. “... I’d forgot how much I hate bein’ alone.”

It’s the type of vulnerable confession that the second-grade teacher would never, ever admit in the cold light of day, but here, in the complicated darkness, all of her inhibitions loosened by booze, Barbara can see that the younger woman thinks it might be permissible to finally be truthful.

Maybe, by the morning time, she’ll even forget that she ever was. 

“I’m here,” Barbara murmurs, suddenly aware of the painful emptiness of the space next to her, like it’s a hole in her side, an untenable absence, needing attention. How pathetic of her. 

How lonely.

(She has an incredible, caring husband.)

(Why in God’s blessed name is she lonely even still?)

“You always are,” Melissa agrees, apparently hearing the doubled-speak, too, and with that, there’s nothing else for her to do except crawl into bed next to Barbara, the mattress shuddering with her added weight.

And then there they are, two women lying in the same bed, side-by-faithful-side.

Shoulders just touching.

Hips.

Thighs.

The delicate bones of their ankles.

Melissa’s hair tickles Barbara’s neck.

Barbara's heart revolts in its ivory cage.

“I keep thinkin’,” the second-grade teacher eventually starts, slowly spooning the awful words into the bigness and the blackness of it all, “what if Gary was it? What if that cavolo was the best I’m gonna get at sixty-years old, and I just let him slip away ‘cause I don’t ever wanna see a big, shiny rock on my finger again? He was good to me. He cared. He could do his own laundry, and he always let me have the last beer. Shouldn’t that have been enough, Barb? Would it have killed me to give it a go?”

Barbara more than understands that these musings are not exactly for her—spoken to her, yes, but that’s not the same as directed at her, requiring her opinion, her precise judgments, her thoughts, her thoughts, her spinning, desperate thoughts. The younger woman is just venting, exhaling the noxious fumes before they can build up in her nervous system and explode.

Perhaps a good friend—an obliging one, a supportive one—would just let her do it. Get it all out there, and let her eventually fall asleep to sound of absolute silence. There’s no harm to be done in that, no stain on her immaculate soul if she does nothing that will make her feel like she needs to atone the next morning.

But, of course, maybe the crucial problem isn’t that Barbara Howard isn’t obliging and supportive.

Maybe the essential crux, the truth that she has tried desperately hard to alienate and annihilate and so cleverly elide, is that it has been a long, long time since friend has been a sufficient enough epithet for the intimacy that exists between herself and the woman scarcely inches away in the dark of this room. 

Maybe friend is just the necessary lie that the kindergarten teacher tells herself to make it through the day.

Something easily digestible, a poison that she doesn’t have to think too hard about to continually swallow.

But this particular epiphany, as revelatory as it is, as equally disruptive, is quickly cut off at its knees, oxygen deprived, neatly culled in the well-pruned garden of Barbara’s mind. She cannot think these things. 

They’re dirty, simply blasphemous. 

And yet, she can’t just let Melissa go unanswered either; she can’t let her go around thinking that she’s too damaged to fully love.

“But shouldn’t the precise inverse be true as well, Melissa?” She asks, perhaps a little fiercer in the darkness, and yet, every bit as exacting as she would be in the light. “That if he had loved you enough, he would have listened and met you where you were at? What is a marriage but a signed paper between two people? If he loved you enough, why on God’s green and almighty Earth did he require a government stamp as certified proof?”

Her chest heaves with the weight of this line of questioning; she feels strangely proud of this outburst and simultaneously sick that she does, the bitter extremes chasing each other in whorls in the pit of her gut, totally irreconcilable, both awful and glorious.

There’s no catharsis for the longest time either, the silence gnawing upon them both with razor-sharp teeth, puncturing their already tender skin.

“Melissa,” she bites her lip, fearing she’s finally gone too far, said too much, revealed something about herself that she can't possibly take back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—"

But the second-grade teacher cuts across her. 

“It wasn’t a dick move for him to propose.” And Barbara can hear it in the shattered facets of her voice, how hard she’s trying not to cry—not even here in the darkness where no one except the good Lord can ever really see. “It wasn’t his fault I’m effed in the head.”

“You are not —” She starts vehemently.

“I am.”

“You didn’t settle, Melissa Schemmenti,” she insists, reaching over into the barest gap between them and decisively grabbing the younger woman’s hand, templing it with her own, their ten fingers interlinking beneath the coolness of the sheets. “You loved him and yourself enough to let him go. That isn’t self-destruction, sweetheart, and never could be. You saved yourself. There are plenty of people in this world who wish they had an inch of your bravery to do the same.”

Someone in this very room even.

A pious would-be-sinner in Melissa's ex-husband's bed.

“But maybe I was wrong, Barb. Maybe it wouldn’t have cost me anything t'get married.”

“No,” Barbara says sharply, but then, feeling Melissa’s hand tense in her own, just as immediately softens, brushing her thumb along the sharp spines of the other woman's knuckles.

“No,” she repeats herself, with a renewed gentleness that almost overwhelms her, with all the collected tenderness in her bones. “You already knew that it would cost you everything.”

Melissa sits with this thought for a longer while still, perhaps arranging her counterargument into an fusillade of harsh words that Barbara probably even deserves at this point, but in the end, all that comes out is a low, defeated chuckle.

A squeeze of the hand.

“Jesus, if I only loved myself about half as much as you loved me,” she starts, but Barbara interrupts her again, keen to get the last word in, to have the golden opportunity to define the exact depths of her love.

“—then you’d be the most self-assured woman in the world,” she finishes softly, squeezing Melissa’s hand right back.

“Gagootz,” Melissa accuses her again with a fond sigh, and she shifts in the bed a little—and then a whole lot—until she’s leaning against Barbara’s shoulder, and all of her senses are filled with an excess of her: the slight dampness of her hair, the delicate swell of her strawberry shampoo, skin-touching-skin-touching-smooth-and-warm-skin.

“Forever and ever, amen,” Barbara murmurs, finally daring to press her cheek against the crown of Melissa’s dark head.

She asks for nothing more and daily gets by with so much less, so this is the closest thing to paradise if such a thing exists on this mortal earth. 

In the permissive darkness, she breathes it all in.

#work wives #reginianwrites #s: Abbott Elementary #It is so good to be back

[cdyssey]

Human

Summary: A quiet moment between Barbara and Janine after they return to the school from their shopping trip. [2.21 Spoilers]

CW: Allusions to Parental Neglect

AO3 Link

—

When Barbara neatly slots into her favorite parking space—right next to Melissa’s sleek, black Civic—she smiles a little at the gentle scolding that she’s probably going to receive from her friend. Something to the effect of, What the hell, Barb? Where’d you fly off to? And then, when she explains, and recognition lights upon the forest of Melissa’s eyes like sunshine, she might even get something of a warm belly laugh and a familiar crooked smile that makes her heart beat faster than it probably should.

Nosy and interfering, she’ll maybe say, shaking her fiery head, elbowing Barbara’s arm. But I can’t say that I blame ya.

There are things in this life worth crossing boundaries for.

People even.

Sitting in her passenger seat, staring thoughtfully out of the window, there is Janine.

With a flick of her wrist, Barbara puts her sedan into park, but she doesn’t turn off the ignition quite yet. A quick glance at her watch lets her know that they still have some time before lunch is over. 

Ten minutes.

Sure, she just spent the last half-hour combing the aisles at Ross’s with the second grade teacher—showing her how to find the best bargains and helping her choose a cover-up that doesn’t seem like three clashing patterns have gotten sick on it—but Barbara has more in her left to give to the young woman who has looked like a kicked puppy all day long.

She gets it now, having finally met Vanetta Teagues.

That’s Janine’s mom.

“Sweetheart?” She prods gently, leaning back in her seat to better look at her coworker, who doesn’t initially stir at the pet name, carved from stone where she sits. Her chin is propped in one hand; the other is knuckled tightly around the handle of her shopping bag. Sunlight dusts her unmoving curls in gold. 

“Janine?” Barbara tries a little more loudly and succeeds this time, unfortunately startling her. She nearly jumps, restrained only by the seatbelt strapped across her, breathing heavily.

“Oh, sorry, Barbara!” She apologizes vehemently and rather unnecessarily. It seems to be a reflexive habit of hers to assume that she’s the one at fault. Barbara, having only spent five minutes alone with Vanetta, already has a distinct visual map of every time that she must have told her two daughters that they were the problem and the burden, perpetually the ones to blame. “I was just, um… lost in thought.”

“It happens to the best of us,” she shrugs warmly, “especially after a long day. The good Lord knows that I can be two crayons shy of a box from time to time.”

Barbara pauses, mulling over what she just said. It’s actually an uncommon admission for her—not being perfect, having off days, maybe even more often than she cares to admit—but she supposes that it’s something that Janine probably needs to hear. After all, it's what she would have liked to hear when she was a young woman of color, growing up and knowing, far better than most, that the eyes of the world were trained on her, waiting to see if her careful balancing act would ever collapse.

She had to be excellent, and so she was.

There was no room for error; every minor flaw was admissible to the merciless jury of mankind, who ultimately had the power and the audacity alike to pronounce her doomed.

Even though she's now decades removed from being considered young, Barbara still hasn’t quite forgotten those ingrained fears of her adolescence. Maybe she even inadvertently passed a few of them to her own daughters when she was raising them. But inwardly, privately, so secretly that she's likely disguised the selfless intention from even herself, she’s hoped for better lives for them, a world where they could be freer than she ever was—freer to make mistakes, freer to try new things, freer to have big and messy feelings that they don't have to neatly package in the well-ordered systems of their minds. 

Maybe she should tell them that one day and make the hard part explicit, but she has a sneaking suspicion that both of her wonderful girls have already figured that vital truth out for themselves.

Janine, though, she might need a little extra help to see the bigger picture.

That’s clear enough for Barbara to both discern and capably respond to.

She’s never been able to say no to a child in need.

“What, no?! You?” Janine laughs incredulously, picking up on the rarity of the circumstance almost immediately. “You’re Barbara Howard. Your crayon box is always full, and, like, super clean and shiny. It makes all the rest of us kinda jealous."

She smiles sadly at this; it's a familiar refrain—this adoration that she's striven most of her professional career to deserve and the entirety of her personal life to wholly live up to. (Even to this day, she's not sure she's ever completely reached the mark.)

“It’s touching that you think so highly of me, Janine,” she says, lightly shaking her head, “but I have my moments too. Perhaps far fewer than I used to, sure—experience has seasoned me, and it absolutely will you too someday—but still, even at sixty-six years old, I’ve been known to accidentally set tables on fire during my time.”

“Oh, God,” the younger teacher snorts inelegantly, covering her mouth. “I forgot about that.”

“Well, I certainly haven’t,” Barbara says it teasingly, like it’s a part of the joke, their quipping game, but she knows that it very well isn't. Every time she so much as walks in to the teacher lounge these days and sees the pot of sunflowers on hers and Melissa’s table, she understands that it’s covering up her own scorch marks.

Her momentary lapse.

Her nearly costly mistake.

That one bad day.

She’s somewhat made her peace with that, partially because she doesn’t have the energy to make a new martyrdom out of a mole hill, and partially because Melissa once delicately fingered the stems of that ersatz arrangement and noted that there were two.

Just for them.

Only for them.

“Point is, Janine,” she continues softly, “no need to apologize for simply being. I’ve been down that road far too many times before.” (A perpetual hypocrite, maybe she still is.) “So take this as wisdom from an old timer who cares. It’s perfectly okay to be human.”

Janine immediately glances away at the profound weight of these words, visibly overwhelmed and unprepared to be so. She tucks one of her dark curls behind her ear; her shoulders shiver against an unseen cold.

Barbara bites her lower lip and wonders if she’s overstepped yet another line; she seems to be doing that a lot with this particular young woman today, profusely and perhaps even recklessly blurring the margins between colleague and friend, mentee and work daughter.

But her fears seem to be unfounded because she does in fact get a response.

Eventually.

(Harrowingly.)

“Is it okay to still be sad about my mom, even though you just did a really nice thing for me?” Janine asks in a small voice that cleaves the kindergarten teacher’s beating heart in two.

This poor child.

This twenty-six year old woman, who pays rent, drives a car, and is a good teacher to all her children.

But even still.

“Yes, baby girl,” she murmurs, reaching over and curling her fingers around Janine’s wrist. 

It’s a simple gesture, a precious one. 

“That’s part of being human too.”

Janine nods and sniffs once, but she doesn’t say anything.

She doesn't exactly need to.

#barbara howard #janine teagues #Abbott Elementary spoilers #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #a quick piece while I'm in my feels auhdiohfi

[cdyssey]

This is @straperine’s fault. I have an essay due tonight, but noooooooo, they were like Barb/Gerald/Melissa hours.

CW: Sex Mention/Alcohol Mention

—

After Melissa divorces Joseph, it’s not a suggestion—not even close.

It’s a fact.

“You’re coming to stay with us for a while,” Barbara says one night when they’re all having dinner together, and Melissa’s hands are shaking so badly that she can barely chop the vegetables for their stir fry. The kindergarten teacher secures the knife and hands it to her husband, who lightly touches Melissa’s arm before capably taking over.

“Nuh-uh, nope,” Melissa vigorously shakes her head as Barbara refills her wine. “I’m not imposing on you two.”

“You’re not imposing,” Barbara insists emphatically, with all the righteous indignation of a tent-revival preacher.

“Not at all,” Gerald agrees, his voice soft, barely audible over the rhythmic percussions of the knife. “We love you, Mel.”

The Howards have talked about this—night after night after long and charged night. Neither of them want Melissa, their closest friend in the entire world, to be alone in the wake of a tumultuous divorce, and yet, they refuse to even so much as broach the topic of what it means that they both jumped at Barbara’s suggestion that they invite the younger woman to share their home with them, nor do they discuss how the effect that it produced upon them was instantaneous.

(Of one mind and of one accord, they’d had the best damn sex that they’d had in a long time.)

“I love youse guys too,” Melissa shrugs helplessly between swills of Merlot, “but I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m—”

But whatever protestation that she’d been going to make is immediately undercut and undone by the fact that fresh tears are forming in her eyes, and oh, God, she hates that. She hates crying in front of others, hates appearing weak, but it just hit her that she’s going to be alone in her big, empty house again tonight, and she keeps having nightmares, and Joe—

Fuck that bastard.

That utter stronzo.

She still miss him all the same.

“You’re not fine,” Barbara finishes for her, gently encircling her hand around Melissa’s slender wrist. Her chest thrums at the touch, all of her nerves electric, but she holds on. She doesn’t ever know how to let her best friend go. “And that’s perfectly okay, sweetheart.”

“Let us take care of you, Mel,” Gerald adds without looking up. “You’d do the same for us...”

Melissa looks between the couple, tender and so speechless, her heart an obstruction in her throat.

But eventually, she nods once to show that she’s understood.

She’s absolutely not fine.

She needs them.

(And they want her—they really do!—and she pathologically needs to feel wanted. It is the only way she ever feels secure.)

“Shit, last time I was in a threesome, I didn’t feel nearly as warm and gooey on the inside,” she tries to joke as she leans into Barbara, as she finds herself soothed by Gerald humming to the Sam Cooke song warbling upwards from the record player.

“Melissa!” Barbara cries, torn between amusement and alarm. 

Gerald chuckles, and it’s a rich, crooked sound that settles pleasantly upon them all.

“You’ve been in all the wrong threesomes then,” he smirks, winking at both of the ladies. 

And Melissa laughs so hard that she feels as though she’s going to bust her damn remaining kidney, and Barbara desperately tries and gloriously fails not to crack a smile.

They have a lovely rest of the night, eating dinner and drinking wine, talking about everything and nothing.

They make plans to go over to Melissa’s house later and grab her clothes.

They’re doing this.

#maggie blogs #s: abbott elementary #MICHAEL #feel free to continue and i'll add more later <3 #once i finish talking about death and dying in the middle ages #reginianwrites

[cdyssey]

Heavenly Moments

Summary: Unable to sleep at the Franklin Institute, Barbara searches for Melissa. [2.22 Spoilers]

CW: Emotional Infidelity; Alcohol Mention

AO3 Link

—

Barbara startles awake around two that morning, having nightmared about candy colored galaxies and the aliens who populate them. Nasty, little green creatures chased her around the moon at some point, jabbering away in some unknown tongue.

Children were screaming.

Ava was trying to get phone reception in the vacuum of space, apparently hellbent on calling an Uber.

(“Nuh-uh, I ain’t gonna get Tusken Raided by those green dudes. Not today!”)

And Melissa was also there, as sturdy as ever, wielding her pink-tipped baseball bat like a pro, and reassuring her, in that warm, husky voice that Barbara knew and loved so well, “Don’t worry, hon. Me and Edith Houghton have got ya.”

And in the blurry edges of that dream, in the fantasy and the strangeness and the utter unreality of it all, her very best friend in the entire world grabbed her hand, their ten fingers interlinking, and it was somehow the scariest moment of them all.

It was the only one that felt plausible.

That touch.

Her hand.

Their mutual and perfect accord.

Barbara knobs her C-PAP machine off rather violently and just as forcefully hoists the restrictive mask over her head, breathing hard as she reorients herself.

In and out. 

She’s at the Franklin Institute for the overnight field trip.

It was just a bad dream—no doubt engendered and provoked by Ava’s crackpot conspiracies that she’s been forced to listen to all evening.

Inhale. 

Exhale. 

She is safe.

She is married.

(These variables have always been one and the same to her.)

In and out, inhale, exhale.

The air is mercifully cold—she’s right beneath a vent—and yet, her insides continue to seethe so hotly. Her stomach. Her cheeks. Her tightened chest. She unconsciously twists the elegant band on her fourth finger and decides that what she really needs to do is go splash her face with some cold water. 

That’ll make her feel better.

(She clenches and unclenches her hand once, a vain attempt at exorcising its unsummoned ghost.)

Quiet and careful, every movement nothing less than deliberate, the kindergarten teacher apprehends her phone from where it had been nestled beneath her pillow, slips from under her blankets, and straightens up into the coolly lit room, using the conveniently placed trunk next to her for support. Her bones ache. Sleeping on the floor is going to probably end up being murder on her back, but standing at least helps. Moving around is even better.

And so she tiptoes through the neon twilight—through the electric blues and the pulsing purples—and between the curled up forms of her precious children, glancing at their faces to ensure that they’re actually sleeping, sometimes bending down to adjust their blankets. When she’s satisfied that her students are alright—notifying a night security guard to keep an eye on them while she’s away—she finally passes into the big room where the other classes have bunkered down for the night. 

It’s darker in here and certainly much louder, humming with snores and heavy breathing, all of it a vibrating symphony that echoes off the tall ceiling. Barbara smiles fondly as she picks out familiar faces in the crowd, even as she’s eager to light upon just one in particular. But in the meantime, there’s Ava in a glittering sleep mask, her mouth wrenched open mid-snore; Jacob with one bony leg out of the covers; sweet Janine folded in on herself like a child; and Gregory with his hands beneath his head, long elbows extended.

But scan the place though she does, combing it over intently, there’s no telltale mass of auburn hair.

There is no Melissa Schemmenti.

In fact, there’s a gaping absence where she absolutely should be. 

Barbara stops short, her breath hitching.

Last she had seen, the second grade teacher had been in the middle of all her students, homely in an Eagles hoodie, striking even without her bold mascara, but her sleeping bag is empty now. And yet, Edith Houghton is still there, a watchful guard dog at the head of the younger woman's pillow. 

That fact alone vaguely alarms her. She knows just from years and years of having been Melissa’s stalwart companion that she doesn’t go anywhere without her baseball bat at night anymore—paranoid of possible intruders, hypervigilant even when it is more than permissible to be vulnerable.

She once admitted to Barbara at a PECSA conference—maybe four, nearly five years ago now—that it was a habit that had only started in earnest after Joseph had left. They were in their shared hotel room, winding down for the evening, tequila-tipsy and loose-lipped, exchanging secrets like they were pieces of candy.

Wonderful to chew upon.

“I guess I felt safe when he had his arms around me,” she had shrugged, not quite looking at Barbara as she squirmed a little beneath her sheets. Edith Houghton was the woman of a baseball bat who divided them, propped against the nightstand between their beds, and Barbara had felt her presence keenly. 

So she had asked about her—it—and the ensuing answer landed in her stomach like a blow.

It devastated her, simply ruined her, to know that her closest friend was so lonely and scared at night.

“Havin’ someone there… even if it was just that old bastard—that made a difference to me, y’know?”

“I know,” she croaked softly and suddenly yearned to not be where she was at—merely seven feet and some change away from Melissa Schemmenti, so alone in her own queen-sized bed. She wanted to wrap herself around her friend’s curving form. She wanted to provide that essential kindness for her, wanted to make her feel safe.

It was almost a maternal impulse, and yet, it really wasn’t.

(That was the lie she told to rationalize herself, to justify her keenest and innermost desires.)

“It’s dumb, isn’t it?” Melissa laughed hoarsely, the sound throttled.

So broken.

“Not at all,” Barbara had returned—perhaps a little more fiercely than the moment required. “You want to be protected, sweetheart. That’s only the most natural feeling in the world.”

And so, she stares at the abandoned baseball bat uncomfortably, knowing what it means, well-aware of the totemic abstraction it has become.

It’s insurance for a woman who doesn’t feel like she has any at all.

“Barbara.” 

She looks up hastily at the sound of her whispered name, proffered across the rustling dark. Gregory is sitting up in his sleeping bag, and there’s a tension in his wiry frame that lets her know that he hasn’t been asleep this entire time.

“She went that way,” he says, pointing in the direction of an archway that leads to the institute’s space exhibit. 

Barbara supposes she should be concerned that the young man immediately intuited what—or rather whom—she is after... in fact, she should probably be terrified that her dearest secret has possibly been sussed out—her irrational heart understood—but in the midst of such a long night, all of her bones so desperate and weary, she can only find it in herself to be grateful. 

Besides, if there's anyone at Abbott Elementary who gets wanting someone they probably shouldn't, it has to be Mr. Eddie.

She nods once and smiles at him sadly.

“Thank you,” she mouths silently, and he gives her a thumbs up before resuming his former position, statue still. 

As she heels across the room, skirting around the mass of sleeping bodies, she wonders if he has a lot on his mind too. Maybe she’ll ask him tomorrow. Meddle a little. Intervene. It’s how that she shows that she cares.

She proceeds through the arch and down a narrow corridor, only marginally aware that she shouldn’t be wandering through a museum at night, grown adult that she is, though frankly a little too absorbed by her mission to properly care. A younger, more sanctimonious version of her would have cared, of course—the her that she was before she had known Melissa to be exact.

She had been a more righteous woman then—absolutely, beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt—but she had also been a profoundly sadder one too.

The hall eventually opens up into a stunning spectacle, one that Barbara had eagerly taken her children through just hours earlier. The space exhibit has well-earned its name, a cavernous room with hundred thousands of stars projected all over its concave walls. These artificial lights twinkle and slowly swan through a sea of black, cycling in an endless rotation. A spray of asteroids occasionally spirals in the digital aether. Neon lights suspended on iron rigs above bathe the entire chamber in alternating blues, purples, and magentas, everything lush with magical color.

Strewn throughout the room are nine gigantic models of the eight main planets in the solar system, as well as one of the sun, each encircled by steel railing, each carefully revolving on its mechanical axis. She hadn’t attempted to explain the effects of gravitational pull to her five-year olds, knowing it was far from the time; it was more than enough to watch their round faces light up as they grappled with the fact—possibly for the first time in their entire lives—that the universe is so much bigger than their home and school.

It is infinite.

And therefore extraordinary.

In the midst of all this beauty, this vast wonder and this precise, scientific joy, Barbara finally spots what she had been looking for—that telltale spray of red hair—in the very center of the room, illuminated, quite fittingly, by the sun. Melissa is leaning against the railing surrounding that colossal star, her ankles crossed, one hand rubbing the skin just above her right hip.

“Couldn’t sleep?” She rumbles somewhat loudly in a vain attempt to not startle her.

But Melissa still jumps anyway, swearing violently.

“Jesus, Barb,” she shakes her head as she turns around. “How d’you manage to always sneak up on me like that?”

“I’m just stealthy, I suppose,” she teases, closing the untenable gap between them, sidling up to the other teacher's side, where she should be, where she utterly belongs. “A veritable ninja as my children would claim.”

“Hardy har, asshole,” Melissa rolls her eyes, visibly fond. 

And they both laugh then like the little girls that they most certainly aren’t. It’s delicious and lovely and just a little bit illicit, as though time has opened up and made an impossible pocket of childlike tenderness for just the two of them.

Barbara revels in the moment. 

She dares to brush her shoulder against Melissa’s and imagine that it’s home.

“Nah,” her friend eventually circles back to answering her original question. She’s stopped laughing—they both have—but the crow’s feet edging Melissa’s eyes still pitter-patter in playful motion. “My hip couldn’t take much more of that floor, so I flirted with a security guard. Asked if she’d turn on this display for me for a little while.”

“Girlfriend!” Barbara lightly smacks Melissa’s arm in faux-offense. Or what she tells herself is just faux-offense anyway, firmly ignoring the fact that something in her sulks at the idea of Melissa ever flirting with a woman who isn’t herself. “Aren’t you still seeing Gary?”

This makes her frown too—this self-inflicted reminder of her friend’s total unavailability.

And besides, it’s Gary, and he’s nice enough, certainly, but in her humble and completely unbiased opinion, he doesn’t inspire much confidence as a potential life partner for Melissa.

Nice enough is fine for a little while, a good palate cleanser after a bad meal, but it’s not any foundation to build a stable future upon.

“What?” Melissa snorts, entirely unbothered, tossing a hand through her vivid hair. “No harm, no foul, as long as I’m not crossin’ any lines I can’t come back from, right? And besides, can you deny me this view?”

She gestures happily to the nearby model of sun, golden and spectacular, spinning so perfectly on its motorized stand, but Barbara never takes her eyes away from Melissa: her shimmering hair, her light-flecked eyes, the delicate shaping of all her curves.

A view indeed.

“No, I suppose I can’t,” she murmurs, and she can hear it in her own voice—how reverent that she sounds without ever meaning to. She coughs into her hand and briefly looks away, feeling the same heat in her gut that she did upon waking up and trying to untangle herself from the phantom of Melissa’s hand.

Of course that gesture had been plausible.

Somehow, in real life, they’re always maneuvering themselves into moments where they’re just mere inches and moral compromises away.

“You couldn’t sleep either, huh?” Melissa asks sympathetically, nudging her arm, bringing her back. She peers upwards at Barbara through long, dark lashes. “Back troubles?”

“That,” she acknowledges with a grim smile, “and nightmares about aliens pursuing me all about the moon—likely inspired by our principal’s cockamamie shenanigans, I'm sure."

They both chuckle at this, exasperated and simultaneously fond. Barbara’s beating heart violently surfaces to her throat when Melissa unexpectedly places a hand on her lower back and begins kneading slow circles into it.

She’s apparently an expert at this.

She dips her knuckles hard in to the sensitive tissue, and the ensuing ache is absolutely glorious. 

Oh, Almighty God in Heaven, it feels so good.

“You were there,” she chokes out in a constricted voice, biting her lower lip in a desperate attempt not to make some kind of noise that could be construed as inappropriate. “You had your baseball bat.”

“Was I goin’ all Rambo on those little suckers?” Comes a facetious reply that doesn’t exactly match the serious expression on the younger teacher's face, nor the way that her tongue gently flirts across the pink line of her closed lips.

Barbara swallows thickly.

“No, but you were absolutely, positively threatening to,” she responds before finally forcing herself to shrug Melissa’s intimate touch away, smiling painfully, ignoring the injury that briefly flashes in the other’s eyes.

“Sorry, sweetheart, that hurts a little too much.”

Yes, that has always been true between them.

And it's had nothing to do with a damn massage.

“No need to apologize,” Melissa returns, already recovered, or at the very least, doing a wonderful job of pretending to be so anyway, a grin languishing at the corner of her mouth. “I’m not in the business of giving you hell.”

And this has also been historically true.

Even in her dreams, Melissa has never sought to hurt her.

“Hey!” She interjects with sudden eagerness, and this is penitence, maybe. Atonement. It usually tends to be with her. “What do you say you and I go raid the vending machine in the atrium? I’ll split a Kit-Kat with you.”

“At”—Melissa squints at her Apple Watch rather skeptically—“2:30 in the morning?”

“Why not?” Barbara challenges, feeling a little reckless at the younger woman’s visible resistance. It’s a role reversal between them. Usually, it's Barbara pulling them away from hot pretzel stands and cinnamon roll displays. “It’s not like you and I will be sleeping much anyway.”

“Ha,” the second grade teacher snickers, scratching the skin below her ear. “I guess that’s true.”

“Come on then, silly,” Barbara cajoles, lightly bumping her hip against Melissa’s. “A little nighttime adventure for Mrs. Howard and Ms. Schemmenti. It’ll be fun.”

She smiles innocently, with childlike glee, and she somehow knows, from the momentous way that Melissa exhales, that she’s hooked, magnetized, caught, and completely undone. Fie the planets and all their collective moons. Whatever celestial pull exists between them is far more potent, all of their atoms longing for each other, impatient to so totally collide.

“Oh, what the hell?” She finally huffs, grinning, radiant in the starlight. “Let’s flippin’ go, Barb.”

And she fulfills the prophecy then.

That ridiculous nightmare.

Her most tantalizing dream.

Melissa grabs Barbara’s hand, their ten fingers interlinking, and drags her forward through the solar system, past Mercury and Venus, Earth and rusty Mars.

And Barbara, suspended in this heavenly moment as she is, laughing, floating above it all, frankly doesn’t remember it's her matrimonial duty to let this happiness go.

#work wives #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #I've missed writing :')

[cdyssey]

Zipper

Summary: Frankly, Barbara Howard has never had so much trouble with a damn zipper before.

A/N: Hi, @athenaseden! I'm so glad that you were one of my giftees for @abbottgiftexchange! Thank you so much for being such a positive light in the fandom with your great edits, your kindness, and your passion for anything and everything Work Wives! Hope you enjoy!

AO3 Link

—

“Hey, Barb,” Melissa’s voice floats outwards from the en-suite bathroom in their shared hotel room. “Can ya help a gal out a little here?”

“Anything for you, sweetheart,” she idly responds, not really paying much attention. She’s been stretched out on her bed, ankles primly crossed, for sometime now, just watching the Food Network, passively admiring the way that Alex Guarneschelli moves through a gleaming kitchen.

(Mm! That woman sure knows how to work a whisk.)

Melissa, meanwhile, has been in the bathroom for the past half-hour or so, getting ready to go down to the hotel bar and catch a televised poker championship with a couple of teachers they had met at the conference earlier today.

“Fun dudes, but probably not. Nah,” Melissa had said of them, shrugging in an almost casual manner when Barbara had carefully asked if she planned to stay out for the night. They had been in the hotel elevator together, ascending to the correct floor, their shoulders just barely brushing, the delicate skin of their forearms, and the question had electrified the thinnest space between them.

She had shuddered inadvertently and dubiously blamed the cold.

Barbara always discusses sex in euphemisms, treats it like it’s something too dirty to ever articulate with her mother tongue, but Melissa, perpetually a good sport, easily plays along.

Often teasing Barbara.

Sometimes even openly mocking her.

But, for all of her snarky witticisms, she indulges her nonetheless. They speak about sex in the same way mischievous kids come up with creative alternatives for swear words to use when they’re around their parents.

(In their heart of hearts, they both know what they’re poorly disguising anyway.)

 “Eh, they’re a little too goody two shoes for my tastes if y’know what I mean,” she had continued, chuckling. “I like my men the same way that I like my beer.”

“And how is that?” Barbara had only smiled, all balanced again, anchored and blissfully  moored, relaxing at the implicit confirmation that Melissa would return to her well before midnight, that there would be no tomfoolery behind closed doors, and that there would be Melissa, not even five feet apart from her in another bed, stretched on her side, the thin blanket outlining the hourglass silhouette of her body.

Barbara had liked that incredible sight when she had woken up this morning.

Very much.

(Perhaps entirely too much.)

(She had stared, in reverent awe, far longer than propriety would allow, until Melissa stirred herself and finally turned to face her, the crow’s feet just edging her eyes crinkled in a laughing hello. )

“Tall, robust, and just a little bit dirty,” Melissa smirked coyly, waggling an expertly arched brow.

And Barbara had immediately elbowed her in faux-outrage because that was just what she always did whenever Melissa made a vaguely crass joke. 

“Girlfriend!”

And Melissa had pouted in faux-indignation because that was just how she always responded when Barbara was faux-offended.

“What? I’m just tellin’ it like it is.

And all was right with Barbara Howard’s world so long as this careful pattern that she and her partner have threaded together for over twenty-something years was so perfectly maintained. She leaned into her friend then and laughed freely.

She was comfortable again.

She was secure.

It’s been a lovely trip all around—the both of them have gotten tons of good tips about integrating tech into the classroom—and, well, it’s been nice for a slew of other reasons too, most of them having to do with Barbara’s semi-recent divorce and what shortly followed afterwards: Melissa insisting that they do fun things together over the summer break.

And she was a uniquely stubborn woman, the second grade teacher.

She wouldn’t take no for an answer.

And so, in the last month alone, they’ve gone to the movies and shopped ‘til they’ve dropped and taken art classes at the local civic center. They’ve visited museums and thrift stores and cozy cafés that no one else but them and Philly’s hipster population seem to know about. On one particularly memorable occasion, they picnicked in Fairmount Park, spreading their blanket near a bed of honeyed daffodils, and Barbara read aloud from a collection of John Donne poems as Melissa spread jam on their sandwiches.

The kindergarten teacher is well-aware that most, if not all, of this has been for her benefit—that by fun, her red-haired companion is openly caring for her, making sure that she gets out of her achingly empty house, redeeming her from the prison of all her thousands of collected hurts.

Thirty-seven years had been a long time to be married, especially when the last five of them had consisted of both herself and Gerald politely ignoring the fact that they had run out of things to talk about anymore besides the basics: they loved God, they loved their girls, and they were mutually obsessed with their respective jobs. 

They both thought that the other worked too much.

And in the end, they had argued about that fact all the time, even though it was not the crux of the problem but rather just another side-effect of it—the excuse they could readily latch onto when facing the truth was unbearable.

Gerald was always so gentle after a fight, though, apologizing profusely for all the things he did and didn’t do. And Barbara was wracked with Christian guilt, that mighty scourge, wondering many questions, though two most of all.

Where had it all gone wrong between them?

And why was the place she felt most at home in a school, in a certain classroom, at a special round table that was reserved for only two?

Before she could satisfy either query, though, she and Gerald had amicably divorced nearly a year ago to the day, and she had set all forms of introspection about herself and her failed marriage and her home away from home in the teacher's lounge aside, incapable of performing such tender examinations on still open wounds.

Her ex-husband still calls her sometimes, and they talk enthusiastically about the girls, what Taylor is up to at her job, how they think that Gina’s girlfriend might finally propose to her this year. And occasionally, when nostalgia or wine hits them just right, they reminisce about the thousands of good times they assuredly had too, even though neither of them have any inclination to return to the start.

Barbara loves him even still. He will always be family to her. He blessed her with their two beautiful daughters. They were wonderful partners for nearly four decades.

She is not in love with him anymore, though, and that is the crucial—sometimes still sad—difference.

Melissa has understood this involved dichotomy, far better than most, and she has offered her shoulder to lean on every time Barbara has nearly asked. She doesn’t ever request Melissa’s help herself, of course, her pride always balking at the terrifying idea of being so vulnerable before another, but her friend has always known when she has needed it.

When she has wanted it.

Ached for it even.

Yearned.

And so, here they are in a shared hotel room at a pedagogical conference in Manhattan that neither of them had really been able to afford to attend, but Melissa had known a guy who knows a guy who got them discounted passes. The younger woman had told her that this was just another fun thing too, a chance to discover some new ideas to bring to their classrooms… but Barbara knows—and is deeply appreciative of the fact—that this is yet another way that she is being so powerfully loved by Melissa Schemmenti.

“Okay, coming out,” she calls from the bathroom. “Don’t laugh, okay?”

“Never,” Barbara hums, finally turning away from the TV.

She assumes that she’s just helping with a necklace or taking the rollers out of her friend’s hair, nothing about their previous exchange exactly preparing her for the moment when the barely cracked bathroom door slowly opens, and there—in the triangle of light fanning across the carpet, stumbling a little, one of her black stilettos catching on her other ankle—is Melissa in a sophisticated cocktail dress, black and silky, the neckline plunging in low places.

Her vivid hair spirals over her bare shoulders in soft, elegant curls, and the reflective fabric of the dress rides over the outline of her curving hips with care, precision, and an unmistakable stroke of sensuality.

Barbara Howard, her mouth fallen open in a perfect, comedic o, is utterly speechless.

Incoherent and overwhelmed at the sight of her.

She barely remembers her own name, much less how to capably speak. 

“Well?” Melissa asks, at once impatient and self-conscious, her cheeks rather rosy with blush. She shifts her weight from heel to heel. “You gonna sit like a log, or are you gonna come zip me up?”

“Zip… you… up?” She echoes dumbly, every syllable punctuated by a rather unnecessary pause. There is something caught in the pillar of her throat—perhaps dust, perhaps her beating heart—constricting her ability to breathe.

“Yeah.” Melissa suddenly turns, revealing a long vee of creamy skin trailing down the length of her back, a hint of her black bra visible, a clasp that just seems to be barely hanging on. The vertex of this sliver, of this little slice of Heaven, ends just above Melissa’s lower back.

Barbara swallows indelicately, unable to pry her eyes away from this remarkably inappropriate place.

“Can’t reach back there,” the other teacher goes on, seemingly oblivious to the chemical reaction denaturing Barbara’s insides, “and the zipper hole’s too small for that wire hanger trick.”

“Oh,” she can only force herself to say. “I see.”

And so, with mechanical movements, all of her limbs alien to her and awkward in proportion to her body, she peels herself off of her hotel bed and shuffles across the soft carpet like a sailor drawn by siren song across the distance of that wine dark sea. 

Temptation is assuredly Melissa. 

Salvation quite possibly too. 

If utter consumption follows, then at least Barbara will die in glorious rapture.

She has never seen someone so beautiful, and it is only as she finally reaches the other woman, less than three feet away from her and then mere inches, that the strangeness of the situation suddenly dawns on her.

Melissa doesn’t wear elegant dresses and Old Hollywood ringlets to bars. She wears leather jackets and black jeans and lovingly scuffed boots. She throws her hair back in loose ponytails. She buys her favorite jewel-toned v-necks in bulk from Target.

The effect is charming in a rugged kind of way.

“All of this,” she croaks, her shivering fingers now poised above that zipper, beneath which the outline of a lace elastic band is just visible, “for a drink with a couple of men from Vermont?”

She doesn’t know why she says men like that, as though she has already judged them and found them wanting.

As though precisely none of them are deserving of the sight of Melissa Schemmenti dressed for the nines.

She supposes that they're all perfectly nice—good teachers, passionate about what they do.

That still doesn’t grant them access to the Holy of Holies.

“Connecticut,” Melissa corrects, with some amusement. “And no, this isn’t for them. It’s… uh, well, you know Alice? That teacher who did a really good speech on music therapy? She’s also gonna be down there. We might grab dinner later.”

Alice Liang.

Yes, Barbara certainly remembers her—a stunningly put together woman in an excellent turquoise pantsuit, who had carefully and exhaustively delineated the importance of preserving music classes in schools. In the corner of her notes—(in the big, even letters she knows makes it easier for Melissa to quickly decipher)—Barbara had scratched out that she looked a little like Michelle Pfeiffer, tilting her notebook so that her companion could see.

Yeoh, Melissa had scrawled back, silently snorting.

But yeah, she had added. She’s hot.

Barbara hadn't gone as far as saying that—(even if she did unaccountably think it)—and it immediately threw her off that Melissa did.

And then, on top of that, Melissa went up to Alice after the presentation was over, and Barbara had watched from afar as the two women talked, both animatedly gesturing with their hands, sometimes laughing at something the other had said. Around ten minutes of this, with Barbara growing antsy enough to consider going over there herself—(To interrupt? To satisfy her ungodly curiosity? To drag her friend away? She didn’t know)—they pulled out their phones and seemingly exchanged numbers before Alice turned away to talk to other attendees.

And Melissa had returned to her, looking quite pleased with herself.

“Another prospective admirer of Melissa Schemmenti?” Barbara had asked in a tone that she hoped to God sounded light. The twinkle in her friend’s eyes discomfited her for no good reason. It inexplicably annoyed her that she hadn’t been the one to tease this lovely softness out of her.

And that it’d been a virtual stranger.

A breathtaking woman at that.

“Oh, shut up,” Melissa had only laughed, ribbing her with her elbow. “I just wanted t’see if she’d send me some more of her research later. I’d love to make silly song time better for my kids.”

“Suuure,” she’d drawled, unconvinced, attempting to remain playful.

“I’m bein’ serious, Barb!” Melissa poked out her lower lip, indignant. It was less ferocious than it was adorable. “It was just shop talk.”

“Don't get your panties in a twist—I believe you!” She had laughed, she had placated, she had soothed—(both herself and the other woman)—patting her friend on the arm like she would one of her kindergarteners, convincing herself that perhaps the conversation had been purely platonic. (Perhaps she had simply imagined the moment when Alice’s hand had lingered on Melissa’s back as they parted.)

And yet, despite everything, despite all that each woman had done to deny significance of that exchange, here Melissa is now—in an unspeakably striking number—for one Ms. Alice Liang.

“I thought she was not, in fact, another member of the Melissa Schemmenti Fan Club,” Barbara teasingly accuses, even as her stomach clenches, even as something unpleasant settles at the hollow of her throat. She pinches the zipper between her long fingers and begins to pull it upwards with slow deliberation, watching, mesmerized, as the teeth close over that smooth and beautiful skin. 

She could be quicker about this whole ordeal, a little voice inside of her quietly suggests.

She shushes it.

She gently tugs.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to stay out tonight,” she adds, dragging out every syllable on her tongue. She appreciates the fact that even though every other part of her body is conspiring together to shut down, her voice is somehow unshaken—low and deceptively smooth.

“Well, I lied, okay,” comes a huffed, embarrassed reply. “I won't object if a pretty woman in a blazer asks if we can go get cosmos. Sue me.”

A slight pause then as she tilts her head to look at Barbara, her chin resting on her slightly freckled shoulder. And though the swoop of her auburn hair eclipses part of her profile, Barbara can still see the crooked curve of her mouth.

That red and radiant smile.

And she briefly stops her very inefficient zippering—nearly three quarters of the way done—frozen, her knuckles resting just above Melissa’s bra line.

“I supposes that makes sense,” she rasps in a thoughtful tone, as though they are simply talking about the incidentals of the weather.

They are absolutely not.

They are openly talking about the way Melissa is very much attracted to and attractive for other women.

Of course, even though the two of them never talk about sex outright, Melissa has never shied away from being candid about her sexuality with Barbara. Indeed, when Gina had come out to her and Gerald a few years ago, it’d been Aunt Mel who had apparently been a silent confidant for her daughter even long before that, telling her of own experiences, assuring her that her parents would love her no matter what.

In that moment, Barbara had deeply appreciated the confidence that Melissa had placed in her.

And ever since then, she has occasionally wondered about that exquisite—(and somewhat conceptually remote to her)—promise of being loved no matter what.

No restrictions.

No insurmountable barriers, no carefully articulated boundaries in-between.

Love that is not circumscribed by the comfortable mantle and the heavy burden of tradition.

Love that is fully liberated.

Love that is unconditional.

“You... said of men that you prefer them like you like your beer. Would I be too”—she searches for the right word in the vast dryness of her own mouth— ”forward in understanding that you have a different palate for women…?”

“You’d understand right,” Melissa says carefully, her voice suddenly solemn and hoarse, sieved of its teasing and its mirth.

Barbara still hasn’t zipped her dress.

Frankly, she doubts she ever will.

“I like my women like I enjoy my wine.”

“And how is that?” Barbara asks the same question all over again, but she is not smiling this time. Not even close. And she is not comfortable, thoroughly unrelaxed, far from at ease with herself and the unspoken tension that vacuums up the air between them. She is teetering on a precipice—toes curled over the unguarded edge—and looking down at the seething sea, calculating her chances for survival if she unreservedly jumps. She is touching Melissa Schemmenti’s exposed skin, and she is incapable of coming up with a rational reason for why she should stop doing so.

She's always had a rational reason before.

A marriage to a good man.

A diamond encrusted cuff on her fourth finger as the material proof of this fact.

But now it's in her jewelry box of a reliquary, consigned to the past, ancient history.

And now she is unbalanced without its restrictive safety.

Horribly insecure.

Unmoored.

Knees bent in preparation for the dive all the same, a prayer of faith lacquering the tip of her tongue...

“Good,” Melissa replies huskily. “Vintage. Full-bodied, like it’s tasted its fill of the world before I've even touched it. Elegant and always there when I need it. Swirling with all sorts of complex notes, the symphony rollin’ across my teeth."

“That’s… quite a lot to ask of one woman,” Barbara tries for a joke that falls flat as soon as Melissa finally sweeps her hair back behind her ear, revealing the profound darkness of her eyes, how they are speckled with so many glittering stars.

“Oh, I think I know of someone who can cope...”

Barbara Howard doesn't need any more prompting than that—she leans forward and and captures the taste of Melissa’s lips against her own, sipping slowly and savoring, relishing, discovering, her fingertips still touching the other’s arching spine. Melissa is a practiced sommelier, and she is ever so gentle with Barbara as she expertly explores what happens when the two of them brush tongues. It is a patient and glorious sensation, a sweet buzz that lingers and radiates outwards through Barbara’s entire body.

Every atom in her shudders with holy, intoxicating delight.

She has leapt and not fallen.

She is flying.

She is kissing Melissa Schemmenti; she is being kissed; and though she has been kissed so many times in her sixty-six years of life, she has never been kissed like this before—as though she knows how to innately return the favor forward.

They eventually have to catch their breaths, even though they're loathe to break apart, all of their limbs now tangled and intertwined, Barbara's hands on Melissa's hips, Melissa's fingers curled into the collar of her shirt. She presses her head against the younger woman's own, inhaling the aroma of her, the vanilla and the honey and the smokiness of her wild perfume.

“Shit,” Melissa breathes, her cheeks flushed. “I got all dressed for nothing.”

“I can possibly help with that,” Barbara only replies, finally reaching upwards to grab a hold of that damn zipper, and at long last, undoing what she had so imperfectly done.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #abbott elementary #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #this was so much fun to write!!

[cdyssey]

Trust Me, Pt. 2/2

Summary: Melissa had to put someone down as her emergency contact.

A/N: Part two, @straperine​, my friend!!! 8K+ words of the most unhinged angst imaginable, but then I wrote a little fluff—as a treat. 

CW: Car Accidents, Medical Procedures, Hospitalization, Alcohol

Part 1 | AO3 Link

In the hospital waiting room, Barbara paces the harshly-lit tiles back-and forth and then back again, likely driving the other two bleary-eyed occupants of the space insane. 

She is beyond caring about other people at this point, though, as selfish as it is, as uncharitable, and as unkind.

Melissa Ann Schemmenti might as well be the only person left in the world.

The wonderful surgeon, a maternal woman who insisted upon being called Njoki instead of Dr. Anyango, had already come out around an hour ago, sat next to Barbara in one of those dreadful hard-backed chairs, and explained it all very carefully to her. When the truck had hit Melissa’s comparatively tiny Civic, her seatbelt had thankfully done its duty and kept her in its seat when she careened into a shallow ditch… however, the external pressure exerted by the safeguard alone probably would have been enough to bruise a kidney. It was not an uncommon injury in a car wreck—a trade off even for not flying through the windshield. But then, on top of that, Melissa’s airbag didn’t deploy, and it appeared that she slammed forward into her steering wheel, which did quick work of lacerating what had likely already been a tender kidney.

Her only remaining one.

This was news to Barbara, who had assumed that she knew most everything there was to know about Melissa: her favorite color (lime green), the names of her fists (John and McClane), the significance behind the saints nigh perpetually suspended around her neck (a gift from her late nana, divine and holy protection). She even knew things that her friend hadn’t explicitly told her, such as the fact that she always had to face the door, hypervigilant against potential threats.

But she hadn’t known this.

“What do you mean she only has one kidney?” She had all but yelped, gathering the collar of her shirt in her clenched fist, rumpling it even further than it had been already. She’d barely given a thought to what clothes she had thrown on, half-pulling on garments at random. She wasn’t wearing a blessed stitch of makeup.

Njoki seemed surprised at Barbara’s surprise, raising a grayed brow, but she didn’t remark upon it.

“Her other kidney must have been surgically removed because there’s some old scar tissue there,” she said in a didactic voice, not dissimilar to the one that Barbara used when she was introducing shapes to her five-year olds for the first time. “But I didn’t see the operation on her medical records, so it may have been done a long time ago.”

Barbara hadn’t known what to do with this overwhelming information except to be distantly hurt that she had never been told about it. Granted, she supposed that there weren’t too many occasions when Melissa could have brought up the detail that she was missing a kidney in casual conversation… but just maybe, it could have been folded into the same discussion that they should have had about her apparently being Melissa’s emergency contact.

Because that was news to her too.

Not as surprising, she grudgingly reasoned.

Melissa probably had to put someone down after the divorce, and she didn’t trust any of her family as far as she could throw them.

But still.

Barbara would have liked to have known.

She would have liked to cherish the knowledge that Melissa trusted her so deeply… even though the very fact that it had remained a secret almost ran counterintuitive to that epiphany. 

Melissa had spent the entirety of their friendship taking care of her in so many ways, from making her feel at home in Philly at the very start to doing her damnedest to ensure that her house didn’t become an empty haunt in all the lonely months after the divorce.

But, in twenty-something years, she rarely—if ever—let Barbara extend those same sorts of extraordinary measures to her.

Not even when she had been married to Joseph, who was an overgrown manchild at best and a drunk buffoon at worst.

Not even when she had finally divorced his stupid ass and seemingly forgotten how to smile for years upon aching years, the gesture never entirely reaching her dark eyes. 

Not even when her nana passed away a few years after that, and she’d ended up falling out with her younger sister because of it too.

So much pain, year-in and year-out, and Barbara had tried to be present for her—bringing casseroles over to her house, embracing her in the teacher’s lounge, taking her out for lunches, telling corny jokes that never exactly succeeded in making her laugh, threading their hands together in unnoticed places, sometimes taking far too long to let go—but it never felt like enough. These gestures were all nice and good, and Melissa was audibly appreciative of each and every one of them, but Barbara, ever a model Christian, wanted to thoroughly save her friend.

Melissa once said she’d kill for Barbara—Barbara was family—but the inverse was precisely true for her.

She’d do anything to drag her friend back from the consumptive darkness, even if it killed her.

“I’m sorry… this is just a lot to process,” she had admitted to Njoki, by then delicately massaging her pounding temples with her fingertips. “Melissa can be”—(so damn stubborn, headstrong, prideful, cagey, self-deprecating, and maybe even self-loathing, quite possibly unconvinced that she deserves to be loved)—“protective about the particulars of her life sometimes.”

“Understandable,” Njoki smiled graciously and let the sticky moment pass.

“But her other kidney...” The only one she had. God, it sickened Barbara. How could she not have known? “Were you able to fix it?”

She dreaded the answer, already fearing the worst outcome, unable to prevent herself from catastrophizing when every nerve in her body was alive with adrenaline and panic and hurt.

She would be brave enough for Melissa not to look away from it—the answer, the future, whatever else this hellish event had in store.

She owed Melissa her bravery at the very least.

“Mhm… I was able to fix it with an emergency partial nephrectomy,” Njoki returned patiently, “which simply means that I removed the damaged tissue from the kidney and did other repairs to successfully restore it to full functionality…”

The surgeon bit her dark lower lip then, hesitating slightly for the first time since the conversation had begun, and the gesture wasn’t lost on Barbara.

“There’s a but in there, though,” she intuited, her mouth abominably dry. She stared at palms, which were slightly red from the way she had been worrying them together for three hours.

Because Melissa had been in surgery for that long of a time—if not longer given the fact that an hour had passed since the accident and when Dr. McGill actually called.

Three godforsaken hours.

And Barbara had endured every second like her own personal hell. They drove through her hands—those seconds, those minutes, those hours upon unfathomable hours. They wounded her tender skin—scourged it even—but she could not stop herself from participating in her own bitter annihilation. 

She could not stop herself from fearing a world where Melissa Schemmenti could suddenly stop existing.

“Yes,” Njoki agreed softly, lightly curling her hand around Barbara’s wrist. Her fingers were cool, and that felt good to her feverish skin, soothing even. “She only has one kidney, so recovery is going to be on the longer side. We’re giving her a hemofiltration treatment while she’s in the ICU to ease the stress on the organ as it starts to heal. But I’m also not necessarily happy with her oxygen output yet, so I’m going to wait to take her off the ventilator for another couple of hours until she’s stabilized.”

“She’s on a vent?” Barbara had inhaled sharply, incapable from keeping the terror and unholy fear from climbing up the rungs of her throat. What she knew of medical terminology wasn’t much. What she knew of ventilators was absolutely terrifying. “She can’t breathe on her own?”

Njoki’s grip on her wrist tightened.

Reassuring but firm.

And kind.

So kind.

“It’s less that she can’t, Mrs. Howard, and more that the ventilator is giving her some help at the moment, so her body doesn’t have to work so hard to do so for her,” she clarified. “We’ll have her off of it in no time—don’t you worry, hon.”

Barbara winced at the use of her surname—the very one she had consciously decided not to change—still attached to the history behind it, wanting to continue to share a name with her daughters, and not wanting to endure the legal hassle of reverting to her maiden name besides… but, at the same time, Howard was inherently a reminder of Gerald. And there was something about the invocation of her ex-husband when she was in the waiting room of a hospital nearly about to lose her mind over her dearest not-just-friend that knifed her between the ribs. 

They’d been divorced for nearly an entire year, and she still felt the need to apologize to him.

For what exactly?

She could not say—in the very same way that she’d been unable to tell him the real reason why she couldn’t leave Philadelphia.

There had only been one reason, really.

One name.

One inexcusable sin.

“I’m going to allow her another hour to rest,” Njoki continued, giving her one last squeeze before finally standing up from the rickety chair, “and then I’ll send someone to come and get you. Does that sound alright?”

“Yes, of course,” she had replied somewhat untruthfully. Every atom in her itched to be wherever Melissa was now, to lay eyes on her for herself, to embrace her, to empirically confirm that she was still breathing, but she forced the facade of Barbara Howard to arise and perform her due diligence.

She smiled at the doctor with all her pearly white teeth.

But when she was finally gone, when it was simply Barbara and the two faceless individuals in the waiting room who were studiously looking away—rightfully lost in their own torments and fears—the kindergarten teacher bowed her head and cried.

She cried because she had apparently almost lost Melissa Schemmenti, and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing she could have done about it. And she cried precisely because she didn’t lose her best friend. She was still on this Earth—alive, tangible so miraculously here—and the guttural relief cascaded through her broken body like a deluge, like a Biblical, almighty flood. She cried because she was so utterly exhausted. She had spent the last three hours in a state of hypervigilance, every microscopic detail that she perceived razor sharp and stinging in the clarity of trauma. She cried because everything hurt—it all did—down to the way that when she glanced at her phone—and it was Melissa’s twinkling eyes that greeted her!—she had to hold back a sob.

She cried because had this been the end—had Melissa gone and left her, had she died—then there would have forever remained an unspoken thing, a wordless specter that perpetually haunted the few inches that unfailingly remained between them.

In Melissa’s music-filled kitchen when they accidentally brushed hips, standing side-by-side in front of the stove.

On Barbara’s soft couch when their shoulders just touched as they coincidentally laughed at all the same parts of a stupid movie.

In the teacher’s lounge at the round table that they both loved, their ankles occasionally glancing beneath their chairs.

Barbara cried about all of these things, having never verbally articulated the importance of even just one of them, a hand carefully splayed over her mouth to keep the carnage from coming out.

It was a quiet affair, of course, because she was conscious of the others—(she was always conscious of the others and their perpetual surveillance)—but the tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and down the weathered planes of her face anyway, collecting calmly on the vertex of her chin.

She allowed herself those five minutes of nearly unadulterated grief.

She indulged the child inside of her who had no recourse except to fall apart, who could only physically manifest these big emotions in the total reckoning of her own body.

And then, just as quickly, with expert precision, she capably mothered herself.

She wiped her streaming eyes on the sleeve of her soft shirt, the mask settling back into its proper place again, and she became Barbara Howard once more, unable to sit with herself and all of her unwanted baggage for very long.

Quite literally.

Which is why she’s been pacing for almost the entire hour, only taking a few sitting breaks before inevitably getting up again, continuing to pace, and impatiently waiting for the moment when the double doors open and someone tells her that she can see Melissa.

When that finally happens—sometime around three—when a nurse appears in front of her and tells her that her wife is starting to wake up, she never fully registers that there is something inherently wrong with such a sentence in the first place.

She just nods—speechless, so grateful—and follows eagerly, every step forward illuminated by the harsh fluorescence above.

—

The ICU is a terrifying place, dimly lit, shadowy, claustrophobic, and frankly alive with ghastly noise. Curtained beds line each side of the unit like stalls from which the intense whirring of machines rises upwards into the air and crashes indelicately upon her ears, but even that electric undercurrent isn’t enough to disguise the moans that frequently surface through the hum like a keen sort of lowing. 

Her stomach clenches, the column of her throat, as she catches a glimpse of a patient on a ventilator—not Melissa, thank God—but she knows that her friend must look similar, spidered with so many crawling appendages.

The nurse, a young lady named Cecily, silently gestures for Barbara to follow her down the corridor of beds on the right.

Before they reach the very last unit there, which is also initially eclipsed by a floor length curtain, Cecily gently whispers prepare yourself as though this is something achievable when one’s best friend—(and partner, confidant, companion, family, sole reason for staying in Philadelphia, guilty pleasure, greatest what if)—is behind that curtain, vulnerable and so broken, picked over and picked apart. But she only nods, distantly aware that it’s just something that the nurse has to say to be polite.

And so, Barbara Howard takes a deep breath and rounds the corner.

And she nearly falls to pieces where she stands.

Because there is Melissa Ann Schemmenti—a woman who always insists on looking so damn alive —thoroughly diminished in a hospital bed, washed out in a paisley-studded hospital gown. She is crisscrossed and scissored and swallowed up by so many colorful wires and tubes. Lines ribbon her arms, snaking around them and plunging inwards, connected to at least four different IVs that are swinging gallows-like from a singular pole. A row of stitches, neatly taped, rakes her colorless cheek, and the bottom of an empty catheter bag just pokes out beneath the blankets on the left hand side of the bed.

All of this Barbara Howard might have been able to live with, rationalize, and capably endure as part of the minutiae of what it means to be in an intensive care unit, were it not for the big and ugly tube erupting from the side of Melissa’s mouth, leading to a dreadfully bulky machine.

The ventilator.

Every rise and fall of the second-grade teacher’s chest is too perfect, too controlled, too precise.

Mechanical.

“Melissa.” Her name, the lilting three syllables of it, comes out shattered on her tongue. Barbara is desperate, unhinged at all of her carefully articulated seams. She’s scrambling to her side, unkeeled, unraveled, and so utterly unmoored. “Oh, sweetheart."

She stops just short of reaching out and touching her, though, suddenly afraid to do so—unable to stomach the thought of hurting her even one iota more—but then Njoki, who has just arrived, moves to the opposite side of the bed and gently shakes her head, her hands primly tucked into the pockets of her lab coat.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Howard,” she says. (It takes everything in her not to visibly recoil at the innocuous usage of her full name again.) “You can go ahead. See? She’s looking at you…”

And so she is.

Melissa’s olive eyes are half-lidded with exhaustion and likely a slew of painkillers too, purple half-moons edging them like elongated shadows, but even still, she’s clearly staring at Barbara, something of distress in those dark depths, something of unmistakable fear.

The younger teacher has always hated doctors—distrusts them, suspects that some (if not most) of them are quacks, won’t even go to her yearly check-ups unless Barbara nags at her to do so. Remembering all of this with a pang, she reaches out and runs her fingers through the familiar mane of red hair splayed all around Melissa's face in dull and lifeless tangles, tucking a stray strand behind her ear... behind the ventilation tubing...

“I’m here, sweetheart,” she murmurs as a single tear lances down the side of her face, falling somewhere onto the whiteness of Melissa’s sheets. With her free hand, she grabs the other woman’s closest hand—so careful not to disturb the IV port—and squeezes lightly.

“I’m here. I’m here.”

Melissa, with what little strength she seems to possess, squeezes back. There is dried blood still crusted around her painted nails, and the sight disturbs Barbara. They’d gone to get mani-pedis together just last week, and Barbara had never laughed as hard as she did when the technician had scrubbed Melissa’s feet with a pumice stone, and she’d erupted into unreserved giggles, surprisingly ticklish.

Endearingly so.

“Ms. Schemmenti and I—” Njoki starts, but Barbara quickly interrupts.

“—Melissa,” she says gently, glancing back at her friend, who hasn’t pried her glazed eyes away from her yet. “She prefers to be called Melissa… and it’s perfectly fine if you call me Barbara...”

Mrs. Howard—though she has long served Barbara well—does not have a place in this hospital, not here, not in this fragile moment, not by Melissa Schemmenti's sickbed.

Njoki nods once, her eyes warm and commiserating.

“Melissa and I, then, have come up with a system for communication while she’s still intubated,” the doctor continues with a slight smile. “I don’t want her moving her head too much, so we’ll go by blinks in response to questions until we can get her off the vent. One blink for yes and two blinks for no—right, Melissa?"

For the first time, Melissa’s gaze darts over to Njoki, and she blinks once and rather slowly to indicate that she’s understood.

Easy enough. 

Maybe, when all of this is behind them, years and years and innumerable years down the road, they will both be able to laugh about how this is the least Melissa has ever talked in all her sixty-years.

(Maybe, though, that wound will always be too tender to ever jokingly prod, and Barbara will treat any reminder of it like a cardinal offense. This is the day, the hour, the night, when she almost lost her. That will never not hollow her out to her bones.)

“Are you hurting, sweetheart?” Barbara asks, slowly lowering herself into the chair next to Melissa’s bed. It’s as uncomfortable as the ones in the waiting room, so she leans forward a little and presses her elbows into the mattress of the hospital bed for support, still holding on to her friend’s hand, though, refusing to let go.

Not now.

Never again.

Melissa blinks once and then twice, but the agonized way that her brow is furrowed over her eyes easily tips Barbara off to an alternative and very distinct possibility.

“Are you lying to me, Melissa Ann Schemmenti?” She asks in her most serious teacher voice, the one she only uses when she catches her kindergarteners trying to stay awake during naptime. And when she receives a thorough eye roll and then an accompanying blink in response, she can’t help but hoarsely chuckle in such a way that it's clear that she’s rather close to crying.

“As inappropriate as ever, I see.”

Another blink, and the corner of Melissa's bloodless mouth nearly twitches, but there is a tube in the way.

There is a ventilator.

The smile slips away from Barbara’s own lips at the unpleasant reminder, and before she can stop it, another tear falls from her eye. She hastily swipes at it—doesn’t think it’s her right to be so damn emotional when she’s not the one lying in the hospital bed with one barely working kidney and a machine dispassionately breathing for her.

“I apologize,” she says thickly, and she leans down to impulsively press a kiss against the other woman’s bruised knuckles. “Silly me. I shouldn’t be so upset in front of you…”

Melissa blinks once.

And then twice.

And then three times, staring at her expectantly, but Barbara glances up at Njoki instead, her dark brow pinching somewhere in the middle.

“Three blinks?” She muses aloud. “What would that be…?”

Njoki seems confused herself, pulling a hand through her long braids as she thinks on it.

“Mmmm, could be analogous for maybe?” The surgeon suggests, at which point Melissa squeezes her hand again, this time a little more insistently than before.

Barbara looks back down again to see that she’s blinking thrice once more, the expression in her eyes impatient, frustrated at not being understood. She frowns sympathetically; it has to be an utterly alienating experience to be entombed in one's own body.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she murmurs, now rubbing soothing circles into the other woman’s clammy hand with her thumb. “I’m not sure what you mean. You’ll have to tell me later...”

She receives a look that quite plainly says, What aren’t you getting?  

But nonetheless, slumping her shoulders resignedly, Melissa blinks once anyway, which she assumes is most closely translatable to an affectionate, Fine, dummy.

“So how long will she have to be on the vent again?” Barbara asks, now addressing the question to Njoki, who is adjusting a dial on the main IV pump. Whatever she does seems to produce an immediate and tangible effect on Melissa because she moans with audible relief.

“Just increased the dosage of morphine you’re receiving,” the doctor explains, briefly placing her hand on Melissa’s other arm. “Should help with any pain you’re feeling, hon… as for the ventilator”—she looks at Barbara again—“the team who does early morning rounds can reassess in a few hours while I’m in another surgery. If they’re satisfied that her vitals are stable, I’ll give them the go ahead to extubate her.”

Melissa tightly closes her bruised eyes at this, her nails suddenly digging into Barbara’s palm, sharp and terrified.

“I know,” Barbara interprets readily. “You don’t like that answer…”

It scares you to be so thoroughly dependent upon another.

Upon an unthinking, brutalist machine.

You’ve never known of a fight that you cannot handle with nothing but your own two fists.

You always think you have to survive the worst alone, Melissa.

Why is that?

Who taught you such a terrible way of existing in this world?

Barbara knows that even if Melissa wasn’t on a ventilator, she wouldn’t have been able to answer either of these questions aloud. They’re far too vulnerable, demanding the second grade teacher’s total honesty, and Barbara knows that it would be hypocritical to ask that of her when she can’t even fully offer it herself.

“But I’m not leaving you, you hear?” She goes on, her voice suddenly constricted, a hundred emotions thick. “I promise.”

Even though the effort looks a little painful, Melissa opens her eyes again to deliver one blink.

Two.

And then three… that same elusive response, and Barbara frowns, feeling guilty and lost. She knows Melissa so intimately, and yet, whatever she is attempting to convey with these microgestures is as baffling to her as some arcane language.

“Mhm,” she placates lamely. “Yes, of course. I see...”

But she still doesn’t get it, and Melissa isn’t stupid. 

She blinks twice in blatant admonition, and Barbara can almost hear what she would have said.

No, goddammit, she would have laughed. You definitely don't.

—

The critical care team extubates Melissa around six that morning after a weaning test is successful; her oxygen saturation has risen, and she’s been heavily struggling against the vent for a while, trying to breathe on her own. Barbara holds her hand through the entire process, whispering soothing words into her ear as she tries not to cry at the sight of Melissa coughing and coughing, her throat inflamed from the intrusive tubing. The resident in charge immediately replaces the life support apparatus with an oxygenated mask, and it’s a sign of the younger woman’s utter exhaustion that she doesn’t buck against yet another restrictive measure.

She just stares at Barbara from the depths of glassy eyes for what feels like an eternity before finally closing them, less falling asleep than succumbing to it. The kindergarten teacher kisses the side of her hand again and continues to temple it with her own, rocking back-and-forth in her deeply uncomfortable chair. She prays to God for at least another half-hour after that, asking Him for His mercy and His healing, for His continued hand of protection on Melissa; she pleads and pleads and so desperately pleads, hoping that the voice in her head scrapes against the infinite (and sometimes depressingly remote) heavens. 

When she has done all the prostrating herself before her Lord that her overtaxed mind can handle, she simply sits still and vainly fights against the fatigue that is threatening to overwhelm her own body, focusing on the rhythmic beeping of the intravenous fusion pump that is decorated with a nauseating number of IV bags—all playing a part to sustain her best friend’s life.

Beep.

Surely it’ll be okay if she closes her eyes for just a minute… she won’t fall asleep… she just needs a moment to collect herself, to recenter her shaken core…

Beep.

Nothing bad will happen if she allows herself a brief respite; thinking otherwise is just a byproduct of the remaining adrenaline that is slowly working its way out of her system.

Melissa is stable.

Melissa is (likely) going to make a full recovery.

Melissa is the strongest person she knows.

Beep.

Despite her best efforts, though, Barbara feels herself starting to drift off, and she is unable to drag herself back from the depths, her consciousness floating out to that vast and welcoming sea of darkness. The last productive thought she feels her brain entertaining has to do with her friend’s three blinks, which no one had been able to satisfactorily decipher. She doesn’t think it’s Morse code or some other professional equivalent, nor does she think it’s maybe like Njoki had suggested. Melissa has always hated the tepidness of that word, preferring a straightforward yes or no…

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

I and love and you.

The epiphany—agonizingly simple though it is—suddenly breaks over Barbara's head like a cresting wave, nearly pulling her back to the waking world with a fierce and overwhelming  joy. She smiles in her twilight state, eyes still closed…  

“I love you too,” she murmurs sleepily, only dimly aware that Melissa can’t currently hear her.

Perhaps they’re constantly saying those three words to each other, her and Melissa...

... just always doing it when the other isn’t able to fully understand.

—

She wakes up to the sensation of someone gently pulling a thumb across her jaw—over and over again, tracing the outline of that sharp bone with a practiced touch. The action disorients her—reminds her so powerfully of her late mother who had once soothed her when she was sick in the exact same way, but then the clinical smell of the hospital hits her: sharp, astringent, acidic.

And it all comes rushing back to her in jagged fragments.

Oh, God.

Melissa.

The wreck.

Those untenable hours in the waiting room.

The ICU.

She bolts upright, limbs half-flailing, and is suddenly confronted with a sight that reconfigures her insides: Melissa, looking like death warmed over, but even still and all the same, smiling that damned crooked smile—the one that Barbara loves so well. While she was sleeping, they apparently replaced the oxygenated mask with cannulas that have been threaded into her nostrils and around her ears. But she’s still covered with as many lines and tubes as ever, and the presence of them unnerves her.

Barbara blinks a couple of times as her eyes adjust to the dim lighting.

“Melissa,” she simply says, relishing every phoneme of that holy name.

She’s so powerfully relieved that she will have every opportunity to continue saying it.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” the younger woman rasps, her voice hoarse from the ventilator, barely audible, but it’s still the sweetest sound Barbara has ever heard. She will never forget the sight of her on that machine for as long as she lives; it will stain her vision like an anemic afterimage every time she so much as closes her eyes at night; she will nightmare the staccato beats of Melissa’s heart being measured out by a rhythmic monitor. 

And she will thank God every day that He spared her.

That He let her have this one good thing.

This miracle.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa.

“Hello yourself,” Barbara chokes out, sudden emotion throttling the stem of her throat. “You gave me quite a scare there, you know.”

“Gotta liven things up a little every now and then,” Melissa tries to chuckle—as is one of her favorite defenses against any sort of uncomfortable sentiment—but the familiar gesture immediately costs her. She begins to cough, her pale face suddenly splotched with small patches of red, and the beeping on the heart monitor starts to pick up. Barbara, her own heart plummeting into her stomach, reacts swiftly, splaying a sturdy hand on the younger woman’s chest.

“Breathe,” she instructs in an almost calm voice, but the word breaks at the end, her facade slipping, her poise. She cannot stomach seeing Melissa Schemmenti so helpless; it is an untenable contradiction, an oxymoron that she cannot capably resolve. “Mhm… that’s it, sweetheart. Inhale. Exhale. In and out.”

And beneath the weight of her palm, she feels Melissa’s breathing begin to slowly even out, the rise and fall of her chest regulating itself again. Relief cascades through her, comorbid though it is with the heartache, and the interplay of these two polarized emotions settles inside her like a stomachache. When the beeping on the cardiac monitor finally returns to normal, she briefly dips her head against the railing on Melissa’s bed, grounding herself against its coolness and steadiness, closing her eyes against the rising nausea.

“Sorry,” Melissa apologizes, her voice indistinct. The exertion of the coughing spell has thoroughly depleted her; there is nothing left of rosiness in her cheeks; gone is that inappropriate twinkle in her eyes.

All that is left is apology and pain.

Barbara doesn’t know why the younger woman has always felt the need to apologize for something she didn’t do. She can conjecture, of course—can guess that it’s a side-effect of having been told that it was her fault all of her life. Joseph was especially bad in this regard, foisting the most egregious of his indiscretions onto his ex-wife’s overburdened shoulders.  

He has supposedly matured since then—has assumed total responsibility for what he so recklessly broke in the first place—and Melissa, being a good Christian, has generously forgiven him. She even calls him just to chat from time to time...

But Barbara hasn’t.

Forgiven Joseph, that is.

God forgive her for it.

“Nothing to apologize about,” she forces herself to lift her head from the railing and smile a wane smile; it feels stiff on her lips, tense and unnatural; it stretches her mask of a face into a new and unsustainable configuration. “You’ve had a long night.”

“So have you,” comes an immediate rebuttal, so tender and concerned. Indeed, the intensity of the other’s penetrating gaze makes Barbara suddenly realizes that her hand is still on Melissa’s chest, and blushing slightly, she withdraws it—idly smoothing her blankets instead.

Of course, the second-grade teacher quickly follows this charged moment with yet another quip: “You look like shit, Barb.”

“Me?” She snorts incredulously despite herself, despite knowing what Melissa is trying to do. “You’re the one who’s lying in a hospital bed looking like, like...“ But she stops short, faltering, stumbling on her next words.

The expression she had nearly been about to use was like you’re knocking on death’s door, but she finds, at the threshold of this teasing irreverence, she cannot follow through. She cannot be like Melissa and turn the severity of what happened tonight into just another throwaway joke.

“Like what?” Melissa prods quietly, sensitive to the change in the conversation.

Or, maybe more accurately still, sensitive to any changes in Barbara herself.

“Like… you nearly died,” she shudders, her voice folding in on itself, seismically collapsing. And there are unbidden tears in her eyes yet again.

There is the raw and visceral grief of having almost lost Melissa Schemmenti.

She withdraws both of her hands, using one to grip the fabric next to her stomach, using the other to swipe her forearm across her eyes, as though that will help, as though that will do anything but prolong the inevitable.

Which, granted, might be what the both of them do all of the time in their separate and intertwined personal lives.

Prolong the inevitable.

Familial heartbreaks.

Broken marriages.

This unspoken thing between them.

“You nearly died, Melissa,” she goes on, still shielding her leaking eyes away from the other woman, “and I don’t know what I would have done in light of that fact.”

The proclamation lands heavily in front of them both.

It is an ugly, pitiful thing.

And it whimpers.

It wails.

“It… would have been... hard,” Melissa swallows, her voice uncertain, as though she's just now realizing how close she had been to the end herself. Between being on the operating table, waking up on a ventilator, and trying to recover from the ordeal of both of these traumas, there probably hasn't been space enough for her to fully process the night's events—excluding the times she’s been consciously trying to repress them all with a laugh, of course. In the back of her mind, Barbara wonders if there’s some implicit faux pas she’s making by discussing the hypothetical of Melissa's death even when she's right in front of her, clearly and miraculously and so thankfully alive.

“Yes,” she replies anyway because they’ve gone all of their damn lives without ever once saying exactly what they mean.

And she can’t take it anymore—Melissa almost died and all of her nerves are so brutally exposed.

Melissa almost died, and things still haven't changed between them; there is still something dividing them, unbearable inches.

“But y’would have gone on, Barb," she valiantly replies. "Life would have gone on, even if—“

“No,” Barbara cuts across her ferociously, finally lowering her arm to see that Melissa is staring at her from wide and watery eyes too, her face still leached of all its exquisite color. She looks less like a person than she does a corpse, less like a corpse than she does a ghost: insubstantial and wispy, one exorcism away from total dissolution. “Don’t even suggest that, Melissa. I would have never been able to move on from you. I would have been so... so lost.”

And there would have been no coming back from that.

She knows herself entirely too well.

She would have wasted away in the absence of Melissa Schemmenti. She would have let it all, the sixty-seven years that she has spent meticulously constructing the mythology of Barbara Howard—mother, wife, woman of God, devoted teacher—crumble to dust and ashes, returned to mire and clay.

“And what does that matter, huh?” Melissa croaks, and the stubborn woman tries to prop herself up on her arm, but she’s stopped short by all the wires and tubes, and perhaps (hopefully), the withering glare that Barbara levels at her. “I’m still here, aren’t I? And according to the doc, I'm not leavin' anytime soon. You don’t have to imagine a world where I’m not in it.”

The other teacher attempts a smile that almost instantly falls flat on her chapped lips, but she extends her nearest hand all the same, palm facing upwards—an open invitation of platonic communion, yet another reification of their well-established status quo of just being friends—but Barbara wants more than that.

She wants more than the stolen glances and the almost touches and the secret words that languish on the tips of their guarded tongues.

She's nearly seventy-years old and she has only recently wondered what it means to be selfish in a glorious, unabashed, and unrepentant kind of way; she wants a whole  lifetime.

Barbara slowly stands up then, ignoring the dull ache in her arthritic knees, and simply stares at Melissa, the light wash from a nearby machine staining her face a sad and desolate blue—the same color as a mottled bruise.

"Barb, what are you—" Green eyes widen, the pupils in them entirely blown.

And as the tears that have been threatening to obscure her vision finally spill over her long and dark lashes, she leans down, with exquisite tenderness, and kisses Melissa Schemmenti's forehead. Eternity stretches between them, infinity wrapped in the moment that her lips meet the other's feverish skin, and she is the sole witness to the exact moment when Melissa's eyes glaze over too.

"I don't want to imagine a home without you in it anymore," Barbara whispers, drawing back. "I realized as much tonight."

Perhaps even well before she received that damned call.

Perhaps sometime or another over these last twenty-something years.

She just could not say the words aloud; they were impossible to think, much less articulate.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry"—and she bows her head, ashamed, verklempt, overwhelmed, and undone—"for having not said it sooner..."

She's been a coward, hiding behind the veneer of her wedding ring up until very recently, ultimately hurting herself and Gerald both.

(She's been a good, Christian woman.)

Melissa reaches upwards then, disturbing the nest of varicolored wires that spiral around her milk-white arm, and palms Barbara's cheek, her thumb gingerly resting against the side of her jaw.

"Always slow on the uptake," she chuckles as tears trickle down her scraped and battered face like a soft, April rain. Barbara tries to wipe some of them away, but they continue to fall anyway, as though the spillage is endless, a long drought finally ended.

Rejuvenation can only follow.

Spring.

"Forgive me, sweetheart," Barbara implores again, sniffing noisily, as Melissa lightly cradles her face.

"You keep acting like that's something only you've gotta apologize for."

"Isn't it?" She doesn't dare to be hopeful—doesn't dare to believe that Melissa feels the precise same way that she does about all of the missed opportunities and untaken roads and lost years—but even still, the relief prematurely leaks into her voice anyway.

"Nah," Melissa grins, the crooked gesture somehow both beautiful and tortured all at once, "we're both complicit here."

"Oh."

And then, whether Melissa is drawing her downwards, or Barbara is taking initiative and leaning in, regardless, they're suddenly brushing lips like everything about this moment is fragile and delicate, like the time they have been afforded is precious, like they are making up for all the times they have never kissed before, like they plan on kissing every day from now on—as long as they both shall live. It is slow and lovely, pained and more than a little sad; they're both hyperaware of Melissa's current physical limitations, careful not to exceed them. The rhythmic whirring of machinery, the hiss of the oxygen filtering into Melissa's nose, the lines that entangle their hands like so many dozens of snares, serve as perpetual reminders of where they are, and what it almost cost them to arrive to this bliss in the first place.

Barbara tastes the salt of their intermingled tears and suddenly dreams about how one day, when the younger woman has sufficiently recovered, she would like to take Melissa with her to the sea, where they can wade into the warm waters, chest deep beneath the moon, and bask in its silvery glow. She will drag her fingers through that damp, red hair and tell her that she is so lovely.

She is beloved.

But at least for now, they're confined to this oppressive hospital and to the fact that Melissa could have very well died last night; indeed, the weight of that particular knowledge presses upon them both like a shared and bloodied wound.

Oh, how they anoint each other's lips with their own, though, in jubilant defiance of this unspeakable grief, and in doing so, begin to heal.

—

Later that same day, when Njoki and the rest of Melissa’s care team are satisfied that she’s fairly stable and that her kidney function has mostly returned to normal, they move her from the ICU into a regular room on the second floor, where she'll stay for a couple of days for close monitoring. And upon Barbara’s polite, if a little embarrassed, request, kind orderlies obligingly shove two hospital beds together with the rail lowered between them.

And for the first time in both of their lives, Barbara and Melissa lie together in the same (kinda-sorta) bed.

But it will not be the last time—they're both damn sure of that.

And once Melissa is finally out of the hospital, the next time will be under far better circumstances.

For naturally, Barbara Howard plans on taking her home.

Until that eagerly anticipated moment, though, she just holds her, laying an arm across that soft, warm belly, careful not to disturb any of the many lines that are still attached to her companion, conscientious of every wire and every trickling tube.

And for her part, Melissa is astonishingly good at finally letting herself be held, perhaps too tired to fight the sensation, or perhaps realizing that it isn’t such a bad thing after all to be cared for so intimately by another. At one point, when Barbara is idly skimming her fingernails up and down the length of her arm, Melissa even admits that this is nice.

And so it is.

And so it shall always be.

The setting sun leans against the square window with a relieved sigh, amber and honeyed gold.

They talk a little about everything and nothing as they patiently wait for seven o’clock when they can finally watch Jeopardy! together on the boxy TV mounted in the corner of the room. Melissa recounts what she remembers of the accident; she’d thankfully reacted quickly enough to avoid swerving into a tree, but the alternative had been careening into the ditch—that was when she’d slammed into the steering wheel as the car violently tilted downwards.

“Damn piece of shit,” she pouts mutinously. “I outta sue Honda’s ass for that airbag not deploying.”

“Amen,” Barbara vehemently agrees, her chin nestled against the younger woman’s shoulder. “They owe you big time."

When Barbara tentatively asks how she’d lost her first kidney—(after spending at least ten minutes ranting and raving about having never been told that crucial fact in the first place)—Melissa only chuckles, which makes Barbara immediately suspect that this is yet another thoroughly traumatic event in Melissa Schemmenti’s sordid life that is about to be tragically underplayed.

Much to her chagrin, she is absolutely correct.

“Lost it in a game of cards.”

“A game of what?!” Barbara nearly cries, briefly forgetting the intimate geometry of their bodies.

“Dammit, Barb. My eardrum!”

“Sorry"—she lowers her voice—"but, girlfriend, what?"

“Listen,” Melissa shrugs casually as Barbara massages the skin beneath the other's ear in silent apology, “it was no big deal. Needed some money to pay off some student loans, and I was, uh, young and dumb, and that was a very high paying game. Fuckin’ Tony Artino, though, a stronzo if I've ever seen one, cheated when he was dealin’ the cards.

If Barbara could do so without disturbing the other woman, she'd be emphatically shaking her head in disapproval right about now.

Mm.

“Every time I hear a new detail of your younger years, I’m very much alarmed,” she says, thinking about how this is somehow even worse than the story of a twelve-year old Melissa having had to take all five of her younger siblings out to the woods one night because her paranoid father had thought the mob had come to call.

It had not, in fact, been the mob.

It turned out to be a very lost pizza delivery guy.

“Yeah, well, that’s why I don’t say most of this stuff aloud,” Melissa teases, glancing over her gowned shoulder at Barbara. “Don’t wanna upset your delicate constitution, hon.”

“Well, quit that,” Barbara immediately retorts, as studiously solemn as Melissa is facetious. “I don’t want to find out any more dark secrets from some doctor in a waiting room at three in the blessed morning, Melissa. I want to just know your truths—all of them.”

“Even the ones that involve me gettin’ into illicit organ gambling poker games?” Melissa arches a not entirely serious brow, though her tone has slightly shifted, raising itself into the form of an implicit, tentative question.

Do you really want all of me?

Even the ugly parts?

Even the parts that most people run away from?

And Barbara’s definite, resounding answer is,“Yes, even those. I want you in your entirety, Melissa Schemmenti.”

Ugly parts and all—anything and everything that makes you human.

That makes you my Melissa.

My lovely Mel.

"That makes you a masochist, I think," comes yet another quick witticism—(she should really start calling them Schemmenti-isms at this point)—but she can tell that Melissa is genuinely moved by the sentiment, the strange gravity in her voice betraying her, the tightness with which she squeezes Barbara's hand.

"No," Barbara murmurs, so softly, against the shell of Melissa's delicately formed ear. "I think that just means I plan on taking my role as your emergency contact very seriously. You've made it my business—nay!—my moral duty to worry about you... to care for you with everything in me, Melissa. Let me do that then. I want to do that."

She gently cards her fingers through that rich and vibrant hair as Melissa seems to formulate her response to this against the background noise of the steadily beeping heart monitor and the pneumatic hissing of the oxygen that is still being supplied to her. Barbara is supremely comfortable with the silence—quite patient with it now that she figures that she and Melissa have all the time in the world to finally get things right.

"Trust doesn't come easily to me," she finally says, and there's a hint of warning in her voice, as though she's alerting Barbara to this long-ingrained trait of hers for the first time, as though nearly three decades of friendships hasn't made her well-aware of the fact that the younger woman approaches the world like everyone she meets is doing a good job of hiding their knives.

Barbara gets it.

Sometimes, she absolutely feels the same.

"Me neither," she admits quietly, still playing with Melissa's hair, now twining a curl around one of her fingers, now just as idly letting it go. "I've always been terrified that my honesty to others would be used against me... or else, my candor would eventually backfire in some other karmic hand of fate."

"Yeah." It's just a monosyllabic reply, but even still, Barbara hears the weight of it.

Melissa knows precisely what she's talking about.

The lived experience of being vulnerable before another and agonizingly paying for it.

"But we'll just have to learn how to fully trust each other together," she insists, trying on the role of the idealist for once. She wonders after all these years of resisting the  very idea, if Janine hasn't been rubbing off on her anyway. "We already have an excellent foundation already; now we're just building up the walls, brick-by-carefully-placed-brick."

"Hah. You always know how to make it sound so damn achievable," Melissa chuckles tiredly, even as she leans further into Barbara's embrace, apparently growing comfortable within it.

Secure.

"Perhaps it is this time," she smiles softly against the crown of that scarlet head. "When the two of us put our mind to something, there is little that can be done to stop us, you know."

"Oh, I know," Melissa only says—still skeptical, perhaps—but nonetheless gentle and entirely fond. 

Jeopardy! comes and Jeopardy! goes, and between them joking about how Ken Jennings reminds them a little of Jacob and competing over who gets the most correct answers, Barbara has probably never had so much fun in a hospital in her life. Melissa wins—just barely—but that’s because Barbara is rubbish at anything to do with pop culture categories.

(Who in God's almighty name is Christine Baranski, for instance, and what exactly does she have to do with ABBA?)

When the show is over, though, both of them start to feel the weight of their exhaustions dragging at their aching bones—Melissa especially. After the night nurse comes in to administer some more pain medicine to her, she settles in Barbara’s arms, her breathing becoming heavier, her eyes starting to droop to a close despite her best efforts to stay up and also watch Wheel. When a long time passes without the younger woman saying something, Barbara assumes that she's asleep and decides to settle down herself, flicking the TV off, and tracing vague patterns into the back of Melissa's thin gown.

Even though she won't want to, she'll likely go home for a little while tomorrow... shower... make a soup for herself and Melissa... pack a proper night bag... and then come back to stay again. She'll also need to spend at least a few hours on the phone to placate each of her daughters, as well as so many other people besides. When she'd called Taylor earlier to tell her about why she had to cancel dinner plans, her eldest had immediately freaked out over the prospect of her Aunt Mel being hurt. And then Taylor had told Gina, and Gina had told her grandmother on her father's side, and Gerald's mother Hannah—Barbara's kind but notoriously interfering former mother-in-law—had seen fit to put it in on Facebook that Melissa needed prayers, tagging Barbara in the post, and now everyone at Abbott knows that Melissa is down and out for the count too. Janine has texted her at least five times that she's seen since she last picked up her phone.

So, yes, she'll have a busy day tomorrow trying to make sure no one barges in on an unsuspecting Melissa.

Or, well, the both of them together.

They'll tell their friends and family in their own time assuredly.

Soon even.

But she has a strong feeling that both of them would like to remain in their infinitesimal pocket of forever—just the two of them—for a little while longer.

It's nice here—safe.

Melissa has always felt like home.

As she turns these plans over in her tired mind, s he's incredibly surprised when not even ten minutes later, Melissa unexpectedly breaks the silence again.

“Barb?” She asks, her voice comically thick with drowsiness.

“Yes, honey?”

“Did ya ever flippin' figure out what three blinks meant?”

Barbara can't help but laugh, pleasantly caught off guard by the question; she had passively wondered if Mel had been too zoned out and drugged up to remember those failed exchanges in the ICU but apparently not.

“It took me awhile," she confesses.

Hours. 

Months. 

Years upon lonely years. 

Decades even. 

Almost all the time that the two women have known each other and pretended that friendship was the only mutual language that they spoke. 

“But I made it there in the end,” she finishes, pressing a light kiss against the side of the other woman’s head.

Three blinks.

Three words.

"I love you," she utters it so easily, like she's been saying it for quite sometime now.

I love you and I love you and I love you.

Maybe, if she's lucky, she'll echo this refrain throughout eternity.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #abbott elementary #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #it took me so long to edit this section #because i genuinely kept ADDING to it #but then i just realized i finally had to let it go sdhfiohoi

[cdyssey]

Facetious

Summary: After the end of yet another long work day, Melissa comes to collect Barbara. [Post-1.01]

CW: Emotional Infidelity

AO3 Link

—

At precisely five past three, there are two blunt knocks on her halfway open door. Barbara doesn’t even have to look up from the reading diagnostic that she’s skimming to know that it’s Melissa dropping in to either say goodbye or to forcibly collect her at the end of yet another long day. She glances up anyway, her golden-rimmed glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, and smiles softly.

For this is habit between them, long-established and well-loved tradition—as baked into their daily routines as their shared communions at their favorite round table in the teacher’s lounge or their little rendezvouses at the copier, where they trade new bits of gossip with their elbows pressed on top of the machine. 

Melissa comes to look for her at the end of every day—of course she does.

And Barbara’s enduring role is to simply let herself be found.

“The ops are upstairs with Jacob,” the younger teacher says, leaning against the door like it’s both habit and home. Her vivid hair is haloed by the ring of Barbara’s sunflower wreath, and the effect is lovely—all that scarlet, crowned in pops of autumnal gold. 

“Quick. You ‘n me can make a break for it if we hustle.”

“Girlfriend,” Barbara can’t help but chuckle, “you’re fooling yourself if you think I ever belong in the same sentence as the word hustle. I don’t hustle, I—“

“—sedately shuffle from place to place?” Melissa grins, waggling a mischievous brow.

“—gracefully swan from one destination to another,” she finishes with a mock sniff, unable to be especially affronted when Melissa laughs like she does, so loudly, with the entirety of her belly. “Don’t tease! You’re not making it anywhere quick either on that hip of yours."

They both have a bad something or another. Melissa’s bad hip and Barbara’s bad knee. They're mutually bad backs. They complain about these grievances to each other often, especially now that it’s fall and the cold is starting to seep into their bones.

“Sheesh, don’t remind me,” her friend half-smiles. “Almost threw it out again luggin’ that new rug to my room.” 

But then she half-grimaces too, lightly rubbing the affected area with three fingers, and Barbara frowns just as immediately, pushing her playfulness to the side along with her class’s reading report.

"You should really go see a specialist about that, you know.” 

“And let some rich quack put me on a bunch’a painkillers? Hell to the no,” Melissa scoffs easily. She has distrusted doctors for as long as Barbara has known her, thinks they’re all two-bit charlatans and overhyped clowns. The only person she ever goes to see is her second cousin, Frankie, a general practitioner whose practice is adjoined to a pizza joint that may or may not also be a money laundering front.

Barbara doesn’t like to think about that fact very often.

“Well, at least come here and get yourself an Advil for the road,” she exhales, making the more expedient decision not to press the point. They’ll have that row another day, and it’ll likely be spectacular—as their rare arguments usually are—but that’s future Barbara’s cross to painfully bear. “You know I hate it when you’re hurting.”

“I hate it when I’m hurting too,” Melissa quips, always a snarker, even in the pits, but all the same, she obediently peels herself off of the door and limps on over, one plod of her clunky boots at a time. Barbara’s heart inexplicably plummets into her gut when the second grade teacher decides, apropos of absolutely nothing, to partially lower herself on the edge of her desk, rattling her pencil cup with her added weight.

Her sheer and overwhelming presence. 

Her leopard-spotted blouse and those tight black pants. The way the leather rasps when her thighs brush together as she incrementally shifts and makes herself comfortable—cozy even—on Barbara Howard’s extraordinarily immaculate desk. The endless cascade of her fiery red hair and the saints that are perpetually worshiping at the altar of her marble bosom. The slight citrus smell of her favorite perfume.

“What?” Melissa chuckles, apparently seeing something complicated in Barbara’s expression, something that Barbara would probably shy away from in the uncomplicated honesty of a mirror. Sudden heat crests within her. It becomes a knot in the column of her throat, becomes a ticking time bomb, a violent pleasure, a pleasant wound. “You prefer I keep my ass off your stuff?”

She has less than three seconds to decide which is worse—having Melissa Schemmenti on her desk or not having her there. Neither of these options frankly brings her closer to God.

“You’re being absolutely facetious,” she finally mutters, not looking the second grade teacher in the eye as she dives down to retrieve her purse. She makes quite a meal out of rifling through it for a bottle that she handily keeps in a side-pocket.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Your question was hardly appropriate enough to warrant a response.”

“So I’m being naughty, huh?” Melissa guffaws. Melissa jokes. From Barbara’s limited perspective, it’s all a joke to Melissa: her innuendoes and habitual crassness, the intimate geography of their bodies in relation to each other. 

Their closeness in general.

In so many more ways than one.

She’s always like to flirt with Barbara, no matter their respective marital statuses.

Nothing ever truly inappropriate, of course, calling her hot mama here or lightly ribbing her about them being work wives there. And that was all fine and good until one day, after many, many years of them being the very best of friends, Barbara suddenly collected the punchline like a baseball bat to her gut.

Until one day, every touch and casual glance, every hon and other pet name lightly thrown her way, actually did something to her.

Set her eternal soul on fire for one thing.

Condemned her.

(Saved her.)

Condemned her.

“That word has an entirely different connotation, and you know it.”

“I mean, depends on how you’re using the word.”

“Melissa!” She groans, flushing, feeling nauseous, vaguely suspecting that she’s flirting back.

“Okay, fine, fine. I’ll stop being a cagacazzo—“ Melissa chortles obliviously and goes to get up, but before Barbara can capably stop herself, before morality can catch up to the rest of her usually well-ordered senses, she impulsively places her free hand on her best friend’s knee. 

They both shiver violently upon first contact, stunned silent, both incredulous that she actually dared. 

Melissa’s cheeks blanch and then just as immediately color, all the mirth draining from her face and becoming… well… Barbara doesn’t know.

(Barbara doesn’t want to admit the mirrored emotion—even to herself.)

(Especially to herself.)

“You don’t have to get up,” she croaks, withdrawing her hand as though burned, cupping the pill bottle she finally retrieved like it’s the only thing keeping her from kissing her colleague. Surely, there are other barriers, though.

Surely, there is her wonderful husband.

Surely, there is God.

“I was just… joking.”

“Me too,” Melissa says quickly, eyes averted. “I was just joking too.”

And they both laugh then because they’re both joking—obviously—a little too loudly to ever sound entirely sincere. Still, they grant each other the kindness of overlooking this inconvenient truth. Still, they laugh and unpleasantly laugh.

(That’s how this—whatever this is that exists between them—keeps going after all: this almost tango, this halfway song-and-unending-dance. This terrible thing. This beautiful thing. This unfathomable sin. This simultaneous grace.)

(They’re a chemical collision that keeps never, ever happening, and there’s primal relief in the fact. There’s unspeakable sadness too.)

“Here,” she says, untwisting the cap of her bottle and finally shaking an Advil into the palm of her hand. Extends it. An offering. A perfect opportunity to move on from the stickiness of the moment. 

Melissa takes it. Her fingers scrape Barbara’s lifelines.

“Take a swig of my coffee,” she continues weakly, all her atoms thrilling at even that barest touch. “I don’t mind.”

“Thanks,” Melissa grunts, popping the pill into her mouth and hastily lifting the aforementioned drink to her lips. Her nose promptly screws up in disgust.

“Blegh. Too flippin’ sweet.” 

An unsurprising criticism coming from this particular woman. Melissa usually takes hers black.

“It’s just French Vanilla creamer.”

“It’s a milkshake in a mug is what it is,” she shakes her head fondly. “Don’t how you flippin’ stand it, Barb.”

“Oh, well, believe it or not, I have my sundry vices too,” Barbara chuckles lightly. They both do. And it’s far more genuine this time, perhaps simply because it’s the kind of banter they’re more accustomed to. It's familiar territory, safe and solid ground. They won’t get themselves in trouble joking about their coffee preferences, and Barbara almost convinces that she doesn’t regret their capacity for discretion, their exercise of extraordinary and remarkably Christian restraint.

“You? Vices?” Melissa arches an amused brow. “Get outta here, Mrs. Barbara Howard, perfect woman of God.”

Barbara opens her mouth and then abruptly closes it, immediately wants to refute the point, needs for Melissa to know that faith and perfection aren’t necessarily intertwined, that she is as flawed as any other human on this God-blesséd earth. 

But she stops herself; she disciplines her wayward tongue.

She’s spent decades upon unceasing decades constructing the meticulous reputation that her friend is proposing that she has achieved. And that gratifies her, of course—sure, yes, absolutely. Her lifelong project of embodying excellence beyond excellence has clearly been a quantifiable success.

But still, there is something in her that instinctively balks at Melissa elevating her to a lofty pedestal. She wants the whole world to believe that she is perfect but needs just one person—this person—to understand that it’s all just a well-executed and beautifully performed facade

She’s saved from trying to resolve this frankly unresolvable contradiction, though, by Melissa suddenly wincing again, her hand going to her hip as she shifts a little on the desk, and Barbara latches on to this microgesture and readymade excuse gladly. She leans forward, shoving her own thousands of invisible hurts away.

“You should have told me that your hip was bothering you, sweetheart,” she murmurs seriously, still flexing her fingers around the Advil bottle, resisting the urge to reach out and help her friend, to work her fingertips into the sore tissue there… discovering the plump softness… the forbidden fruit… of her rosy skin…

She briefly turns away, coughing into her own shoulder.

Ridiculous impulse.

Absurd.

“We could have gotten one of the Three Musketeers to shoulder an additional load.”

“Pssh,” Melissa rolls her eyes, “I don’t think Jacob could lift a log if the log was a two-by-four with the word log written on top of it.”

“Foul!"

“But I’m right,” the younger teacher grins.

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” she agrees as Melissa laughs again, all mischief, so playful and unapologetically loud. Barbara swats at her arm, always pretending to be the sanctimonious one between them. 

A smile smuggles itself at the corner of her lips anyway.

“‘Sides,” Melissa eventually shrugs, “it was worth it to see the pipsqueak all happy.”

“Mm,” Barbara shakes her head fondly. “That Janine.”

She’s certainly a handful, that’s for sure—overeager and overzealous, clearly overcompensating for something that’s likely above Barbara’s thoroughly abysmal pay grade to ever fix. But even still, the young lady has a kind heart and an admirable passion for what she does. She’s good with her kids and tries hard to be better for them every day. 

Those traits alone aren’t sure signs and predictors that she’s going to survive this Sisyphean hell of a public school system, of course, but they’re certainly not going to hurt her chances either.

After a year of having known her, Barbara likes her—not that she'll ever admit as much to her, though.

“A flippin’ mess.”

“Oh, beyond a shadow of an entire doubt.”

“Think she’ll last?” Melissa asks, which is a pretty remarkable question in and of itself. No new teacher has stayed long enough recently for either of them to bother caring. Their investment is hard won, fought for, far from easily earned.

They’ve both been endlessly burned in the past, or rather, more accurately still, they’ve mutually spent their lifetimes burning themselves trying to care for other people.

“If life has taught us one thing,” she starts thoughtfully, “it’s that good things rarely do…”

Before she can continue, though, Melissa cuts her off with a short laugh like a bark.

“Ha!” Her verdant eyes twinkle. “What about us old bats then?”

“Exceptions to the rule clearly.”

“Clearly,” the younger teacher mocks. 

“Girlfriend!” She chides, laughing. “Let me finish.”

“Okay, okay, go on telling me about how shit the world is.”

“Vulgar,” Barbara shakes her head in a long-suffering manner, “and not where I was going with that sentence anyway. Good things rarely last, yes, but who but the good Lord ever truly knows? Perhaps Janine will surprise us in the end. Maybe Mr. Hill too.”

“Oh, look who’s bein’ all facetious now,” Melissa grins as she finally sidles off the desk, straightening up on the tiled floor with a thud and a slightly pained grunt. She towers over Barbara now, who’s still in her rolling chair. The skin of her leopard-print shirt stretches across all her delicious curves. 

“At least it’s not the same thing as being naughty,” she mutters, glancing away as her friend seizes with laughter.

“Semantics, schemantics, Barb. We both sound like total lesbos sometimes, y’know.”

Barbara can't help herself—she splutters incoherently, accidentally dropping the Advil bottle she’s been fiddling with for the last five minutes. It rattles and comedically rolls somewhere far beneath her desk.

“W-what?!” She eventually gets out, now gripping the arms of her chair. “We don’t? I could never. Melissa! You and I—“

“God,” Melissa goes on, all her features alive with raucous delight, positively shit-eating. She taps her chin with one finger.  “Come t’think of it. I’d make one hell of a good lesbian if I didn’t also like dudes—“

“Melissa! Be serious!”

“I am serious,” the second grade teacher laughs, not sounding particularly serious at all. “About who I am anyway. Don’t worry, hon. I know you play for a different team.”

But that last sentence, even if it’s a part of the joke—of this game of fluster-Barbara-Howard-senselessly that Melissa is expertly playing—suddenly veers into an earnest sadness that Barbara can’t quite unhear and her friend can’t just as quickly disguise.

“Shame,” Barbara mumbles without really intending to, but the word slips from her mouth before she can catch it and scold it for being reckless anyway.

“Shame,” Melissa agrees and tries another smile. It's an exhausted, little thing; it slumps like a body in the darks of her eyes.

“You would'a made a great one too.”

#barbara howard #melissa schemmenti #work wives #s: abbott elementary #abbottrw #reginianwrites #I am back on writing two old ladies pining for each other bullshit again <3

[cdyssey]

Different World

Prompt: i re-read your gardening fic recently where mel's staring at barb and is heart-eyes at her and it's just. so nice. so anything along those lines, would be lovely.

A/N: 

Happy belated birthday, Scottie (@gatalentan)!!

I can't believe you have me over here writing fluff, smh.

But on a sincere note, I'm extremely glad that I've gotten to know you over the last few months. You are so kind, so talented, so funny, and so wonderful, and I'm incredibly lucky that I get to be a witness to all your brilliance firsthand. 

Thank you for all that you do for the Abbott fandom, and thank you for just being a lovely person all around. I'm honored to be someone that you call friend.

CW: Alcohol Mention, Discussions of Coming Out, Suggestiveness

AO3 Link

—

That night, as Barbara ices her coconut cake with passive aggressive gusto, Melissa wraps her arms around her partner’s curving waist in apology, nestling her chin against her shoulder. She has to prop herself up on her tiptoes to do so, which is one of the occupational hazards of being naturally short and loving someone whose favorite kind of shoe is a sensible heel. 

She likes that, though.

Their height difference.

She’s spent all these years looking up to Barbara Howard in so many more ways than one.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry before you talk to me again?” She pouts, poking her lower lip out a little. Barbara pauses her emotionally charged cake decorating to audibly sigh, the gesture filtering thinly through her nostrils.

“I’m talking to you right now, Melissa,” she says in a measured voice, her Sister-Howard-who-goes-to-church-three-times-a-week tone. It’s guarded and three octaves too formal, somewhat sanctimonious even. “And I assure you—I’m not mad either. It isn’t exactly your fault that you’re irresistible.”

Yep, there it is.

Both the problem and the succinct answer to what has gotten under the older woman’s skin.

Melissa works hard to suppress a smile.

They’d only recently come back from dinner at Ricci’s, where the waitress had spent the entire meal alternating between blushing and stammering every time that Melissa had so much as looked her way. She had found it vaguely amusing, such puppy dog love from a clumsy kitten, chuckling when she opened the tab and saw that the young thing had shakily scrawled her number in pink pen on the receipt. It reminded her of her long past youth, when she’d often found herself wondering if her ma’s cousin with suspiciously cropped hair, or her eleventh grade English teacher who carefully referred to her significant other as her partner, or her favorite foul-mouthed nun at St. Bartholomew’s were like her. 

Did they like women too?

It was harder to talk about back then, of course, and so she didn’t. She kissed girls beneath bleachers and in shadowy, secluded corners all around Philly. She’d been terrified to tell Joe that she swung both ways, afraid that he’d leave her, unaccustomed to people in her life ever staying—but to his enduring credit, that was one of the few things that the old gabbadost never gave her shit about.

It’s a different world nowadays, though, and she loves that for the generations below her. She loves that a squirrelly, little waitress can feel comfortable enough to write down her number and hope for a call that’ll unfortunately never come.

Barbara, on the other hand, had decidedly not been so endeared by the discovery, nearly silent the entire drive back to her house, almost immediately drowning out their ability to talk by turning the volume up on her spectacularly horrible Pandora playlist.

(It's just seventy percent Otis Redding and thirty percent instrumental jazz that isn’t sound mixed properly.)

“Sure feels like you’re something at me,” Melissa shrugs. “Mad, disappointed…”

She trails off, a slow and easy grin lifting one side of her mouth.

“Jealous,” she whispers against the column of Barbara’s exposed neck, pleased when she feels the other woman shiver beneath her.

That will never get old. 

They’ve only been officially dating for a little less than half-a-year now, sure, but every time that Melissa is reminded anew that Barbara is forever hers to cherish, to worship, to love, and reverently respect, she gets chills running laps down her spine all over again.

She’d never thought that she would get to be with her best friend without at least one of them—or, hell, sometimes even both of them—having a foot out the door.

“What? I’m not… jealous,” Barbara huffs, resuming her pastry ministrations again, attacking the cake like it's personally offended her. “You’re being facetious—distracting me while I’m trying to ice this cake. I'm making this for you, you know!"

“Touching, but the cake can wait,” she says firmly, reaching over to pluck the spatula out of Barbara’s hand. 

“Hey!” She protests, but Melissa pays her no mind.

“I wanna know what’s up your craw,” she continues, undeterred, and takes a step back, brandishing the spatula like a wand. She’s tempted to lick the vanilla icing off of it, but she’s well-aware that she’d get an ass chewing faster than she could say Dave-n-Busters if she did.

Barbara finally pivots around herself, arms crossed over her chest, a gesture that Melissa recognizes to be protective. And yet, she equally knows that getting the other woman to admit to feeling caged is half of the battle. Even that’s an admission of vulnerability too far for her sometimes.

“I’m not jealous,” she repeats herself, looking somewhere about an inch to the left of Melissa’s face. “I’m not.”

Melissa instantly softens, noting the consternation in Barbara’s dark eyes, how the emotion swells in them like a bruise. 

“Okay,” she says gently, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “You’re not. I believe you.”

And she does.

That’s the mutual kindness that they’ve extended to each other after all these years of having known and loved each other so intimately: as colleagues, as friends, as lovers. 

Honesty.

It’s a truth made even more striking by the fact that neither of them are particularly honest people, lying to other people and themselves all the time as their most reliable defense mechanisms.

With each other, though, they’ve never held anything back, except maybe for the crucial fact that they loved each other.

But even that had to eventually be named, confessed, and appropriately acted upon—wordlessly communicated by way of mouth and tongue.

“So spill,” she goes on, with all the fondness and exquisite tenderness in the world. “I’ve got time."

Indeed, she has nowhere else to be except for present with Barbara in this delicately fraught moment. She looks at her, this goddess in the flesh, elegant in a silky blue blouse and her shining pearls, and feels a rush of holy adoration.

“Melissa…” The kindergarten teacher starts and then just as abruptly stops, briefly worrying her plum-colored lips together, looking uncomfortable. “I know I said otherwise, I know I said that I wasn’t quite ready for us to be… transparent with the world just yet, but I was—Lord, this sounds so silly saying it out loud—"

She visibly winces and Melissa takes pity on her.

"It's not silly at all," she says quickly. "I'm listenin'."

Barbara smiles gratefully at this intrusion, taking a deep, steadying breath to clearly orient herself.

"... I was, well, annoyed that the waitress didn’t realize that we were together.”

Melissa isn't exactly sure what she was expecting to hear, but it certainly wasn't that. She knows that she doesn’t discipline her expression well-enough either, painfully aware that her visceral reaction is the one that Barbara receives; her entire face stretches in utter and cartoonish shock.

“You’re mine,” Barbara says hurriedly, taking advantage of her rare speechlessness, “but that poor waitress didn’t know, and she flirted with you, and I realized how foolish it was—entirely ridiculous even!—to have at least six articulated boundaries preventing me from reaching out and grabbing your hand.”

And to Melissa’s increasing wonder, astonishment, and unadulterated surprise, Barbara reaches out then and does it—she grabs her free hand, lacing their fingers together and squeezing.

“What are you sayin', Barb?” She asks, not daring to hope, hoping anyway. She hasn’t begrudged the older woman for insisting that they wait at all, knowing that she’s just wanted to approach the situation delicately with her girls and to spare Gerald's feelings for just a little while longer following their divorce a little over a year ago now. And even though they’ve never quite talked about it, she has a sneaking suspicion that fear is a powerful inhibitory element too. 

It always is.

It’s terrifying to be in the closet, to not know what's waiting on the other side.

Melissa has been out of it for a pretty long damn time now, but she had no trouble sliding back in just to patiently hold Barbara’s hand.

“I’m saying that we’re absolutely not taking separate cars to school anymore,” comes an astoundingly decisive answer as Barbara rolls her thumb across the side of Melissa's own. “And when you stay over, I want you to bring more than a night’s worth of clothes and a toothbrush. I’ll even make you a drawer.”

“Just a drawer?” Melissa laughs, but there are tears standing in her eyes, and she’s smiling so damn hard that it almost hurts. Barbara takes the opportunity to steal the spatula back, prying it from her fist and tossing it on the kitchen counter behind her. 

“Two,” she amends teasingly, her own eyes over bright, briefly swinging their hands in the gap between them. “And maybe some space in your closet for your frankly ludicrous collection of leather jackets.”

“Hey! I’ve only got seven.”

“That’s at least five too many.”

“Screw your calculus,” Melissa snorts, and now it’s her turn in the tango of their affection to make a bold move. She leverages their clasped hands to reel Barbara in, pulling their bodies close, aligning their chests, their tummies, their warm thighs.

“Vulgar,” Barbara smiles down at her, anchoring her fingers on her hips.

“Feisty,” Melissa corrects before gathering the collar of her partner’s blouse in her fingertips. It’s a wordless request that she should lean forward; they have plenty of things to say to each other without ever needing to speak. 

Their lips meet at a crooked angle, soft and luscious, a little bitter from the champagne that Melissa had at dinner and simultaneously sweet from Barbara’s honeyed wine. And Melissa’s toes splay on the cold tiles, fireworks bursting in the column of her throat as she reaches up to gingerly cradles the nape of Barbara’s neck. And Barbara is so gentle, so kind, and yet characteristically exact as she spreads her kisses from Melissa’s mouth to her jaw to her neck to the slightly freckled skin just above her collarbone—a practiced connoisseur by now in knowing all the little places that make her sing.

She thinks that if they could ever just get these damn clothes off, she’d reciprocate the favor, starting with the space between her lovely breasts and loving her all the way down.

“Would you hold it against me if I confess to having been the tiniest bit jealous?” Barbara finally admits when Melissa’s lips ghost the side of her head. The overhead lighting rings her hair in a golden halo.

Melissa laughs loudly—enchanted, so perfectly in love.

“I think I’d hold it against you if you weren’t,” she clucks, gratified when she feels Barbara hitch against her. The kindergarten teacher begins to work her fingers beneath the edge of Melissa’s shirt, rolling it upwards, baring her skin.

“You’re so unserious, girlfriend.”

“Tell me that again after we’re done,” she smirks before doing her part and helping out.

When all is said and done, there’s a pile of clothes on the kitchen floor, a half-iced coconut cake on the marbled counter, and two women who can’t quite take their hands off each other, stumbling and dancing all the way down the dimly-lit hall.

#work wives #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #writing this made me soooo tender #love you scottie!!

[cdyssey]

Texts

CW: Innuendo/Suggestive Language; Alcohol

A/N: The way that not one of my damn micro-prompts have ended up being actually micro. @dkc2017​

AO3 Link [The AO3 version is a little diff. from this one! I added some more to end!!]

—

It’s become somewhat of a Sunday tradition with them—Ava and Melissa skipping church to watch football together. They’re both sure that the good Lord will forgive them. Ecclesiastes does say that there’s a time and season for everything after all…

(“Damn straight that football season counts,” Ava had justified with a positively mischievous smirk.)

(“Hell yeah,” Melissa had agreed, her own resounding laugh clearly up to no good.)

It all started after they had unsuccessfully tried to foil Mr. J’s fantasy football team and realized that they stood a better chance of beating his ass if they teamed up and worked on their spreadsheets during game days. Sitting side-by-side on Melissa’s plastic-wrapped couch, they’re currently watching the Dolphins because Melissa has Tua Tagovailoa as her team’s quarterback, while Ava has Jaylen Waddle as one of her wide receivers.

“Ugh,” Ava groans as Waddle misses what should have been a fairly easy catch, slipping on the sleet-slicked turf. “We ain’t ever gonna whoop him if our boys keep playin’ like this.”

“You’re preachin’ to the choir,” Melissa snorts, and just as she reaches forward to grab her beer from the coffee table, her phone—which had been snugly nestled between her thighs—suddenly chimes once and then twice.

Two texts.

She leans back again and scoops it up—squinting at oversized font—and sees that they’re both from Barbara, asking if she wants to go on a double date with her and Gerald to see the new Avatar movie later this evening…

You and I can even share a popcorn this time, she tempts with the second text. We’ll add all the blessed butter that we want to.

Even as she’s digesting these tantalizing words, three dots bounce on her screen for only a few seconds before another white speech bubble appears with an elegant swoop.

Please?

Melissa frowns slightly at the implicit desperation, doesn’t know what to make of it, scared to read too much into it, even more afraid to ignore it if this is all she ever gets.

With Barbara.

Her best friend.

Scraps and dregs on the margins of her happy, heterosexual marriage. She’s learned to be resigned—if not content—to the crucial fact, a lifelong expert in the intertwined practices of abnegation and self-sacrifice. The eldest of six children in a Catholic household, the third parent in the room in so many ways, nothing has ever wholly belonged to her that she didn’t have to eventually share.

Clothes.

Toys.

Food.

Their parents’ six ways unevenly divided love.

All of it has prepared her for what her life has come to now, subsisting on stolen moments with Barbara Howard as though scavenging is a meaningful way to exist.

Hence, another double date.

Her, Barbara, Gerald, and Gary.

The two men get along well when they all go out, continually joshing about the cars they want to own some day... while she and Barbara are usually off in their own little world, carving out a sanctified space for themselves wherever they’re at, be it a restaurant, a movie theater, or a football game.

As always.

As is their norm.

Even though Barbara will hold her husband’s hand, and Melissa will dispassionately fuck Gary later, maybe in the forgiving darkness of the movie theater, the two women will accidentally brush shoulders.

On paper, it seems like a good enough way to spend her night.

In reality—

“Girl, don’t tell me you’re still seein’ that crusty ass vending machine guy,” Ava says, having apparently been peeking over her shoulder for the last few seconds. Melissa, caught off guard by the unexpected intrusion into her personal space, startles violently, accidentally elbowing Ava in the side.

“Damn!” She hisses in pain, pouting, poking her lower lip out, dramatically rubbing the afflicted area. “Cool it, Rambo. I was just teasin’…” 

“Not funny,” Melissa grunts unapologetically, crossing her arms over her chest. She suddenly feels exposed, out in the open, laid bare, like her texts with Barbara are as intimate as a diary and Ava is rifling through the pages. “And his name is Gary.”

“He looks like a Gary.”

“That sounds like an insult.” Melissa glares at her suspiciously. She supposes she should probably refute the idea of him being crusty ass, but an immediate defense eludes her.

Gary.

He’s a sweet guy, a good man…

… but he ain’t exactly gonna win awards for bein’ Romeo.

There are vibrators more romantic than him.

And far less crude.

“That’s ‘cuz it is,” Ava chuckles, clearly finding all of this amusing, but there’s something in the twinkling depths of her eyes that disconcerts the second-grade teacher—something keen and entirely knowing. She shifts uncomfortably where she sits, making the plastic beneath her squeak.

“Speaking of Barb…” The principal begins, tilting her head towards the still-lit up phone in Melissa’s hand.

She hastily clicks it off, even though she knows the gesture is futile.

The other woman has already seen.

“It sure is somethin’ that she can’t go out with her hubby unless you’re taggin’ along,” she muses shrewdly as color painfully floods Melissa’s cheeks.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” she huffs, stubbornly returning her gaze to the TV. A stupid commercial for Valentine’s Day jewelry is playing.

Every kiss begins with Kay.

“She’s beggin’ you,” Ava goes on, undeterred, so stubborn when she digs in, when she cares. It would be endearing if it wasn’t so presently annoying. “And you know, our Mrs. Barbara Howard, proud, married woman of God, never begs.”

“She’s just lonely,” Melissa says automatically, and she could slap herself.

She flinches.

That’s precisely the part that she’s not supposed to fucking say out loud, and Ava jumps on the mistake readily, not missing a beat.

“She’s got a whole goddamn husband,” she shakes her head, and the thoughtfulness in the younger woman’s voice takes Melissa by surprise. She glances over and is horrified to see that her expression is a strange mixture of pity and understanding.

Ava gets it.

Melissa clenches the darkened phone in her hand and her heavy, aching teeth, successfully suffocating the next words on her tongue.

Even still.

Barbara is lonely.

She’s got a whole goddamn husband.

Even still.

#work wives #barbara howard #melissa schemmenti #ava coleman #reginianwrites #s: abbott elementary #i'll edit and post on ao3 later!! #but i loved playing with this one #it's been fun working with ava's voice more

[cdyssey]

Trust Me, Pt. 1/2

Summary: Melissa had to put someone down as her emergency contact.

CW: Car Accident; Medical Procedures; Hospitalization

A/N: Pt. 1 of my gift for @straperine​ for the Secret Santa exchange! Michael, ily!! I wrote more in the AO3 A/N, but the gist is that I adore you, and I’m so glad that we’re friends!

AO3 Link | Part Two

“Last time I trusted someone else to shuffle, I lost a kidney.” - Melissa Schemmenti

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

Standing barefoot in her kitchen, listening to an old Sam Cooke vinyl on her grandmother’s still-functioning record player, Barbara hums to herself as she cards her fingers through her recipe box, looking for her poppyseed chicken recipe. Taylor is coming over for dinner tomorrow evening with her new boyfriend—a young gentleman named Marcus, who apparently works on Wall Street.

Barbara hates that.

Just a little.

Thinks she knows the type from the books she’s read and the movies she’s seen. 

Tie-wearing, cocaine-snorting, fast-talking hooligans.  

Mm. 

When she told Gerald of her suspicions during one of their occasional calls a week or so ago, he only laughed and said that she should give the boul a chance. Her ex-husband had caught a glimpse of him once on a FaceTime chat with Taylor and said that he seemed nice enough. A little bit of an egghead, maybe, but that’s only to be expected from a broker. When she told Melissa the exact same thing in the teacher’s lounge the next day—(dissatisfied with that perfectly reasonable answer)—to her chagrin, her best friend only doubled over in laughter too, briefly holding on to her shoulder for support. 

“God, Barb,” she shook her head, her green eyes twinkling with amusement, “I do love the way you see the world, hon.”

So, with these humbling reactions in mind, she grudgingly supposes she’s going to give Mr. Marcus Wall Street a singular shot. 

He had better not waste it either.

She eventually finds the recipe, props it up against a half-empty bottle of Merlot, and starts rooting around her kitchen to ensure that she has everything. She’ll need to go to the store and grab the chicken, definitely… a box of Ritz Crackers for the crust too… and maybe a few other necessities besides. 

More TV dinners to neatly stack in her freezer. (It’s hard to cook for precisely one person.) Another half-pint of milk. (That she won’t be able to drink by herself anyway.) A fresh bottle of wine that she will slowly and methodically desiccate to its dregs throughout two weeks, allowing herself a singular half-glass when the home she has lived in for twenty-one years feels like a total stranger. 

(So quiet. It used to never be quiet in the Howard residence. Once filled with the pealing laughter of her two beautiful girls. Once filled with the ambient noise of Gerald flicking on the TV after a long day at work. Once filled with their shared laughter as they gossiped together about some neighbor or another. But this had been well before the disagreements had begun. They never had fights, her and Gerald. Just polite disagreements in slightly raised voices. And she’d go to school the next day, attempting to plaster on a beatific smile that would crumble as soon as Melissa saw her, clocking her on the spot, seeing her. Oh, how naked she was beneath that verdant gaze, so exposed, like the carefully layered outfits that she meticulously put together disguised absolutely nothing. And the younger teacher would rush to her in an instant, dropping everything, and in the embrace of her friend’s arms, Barbara would finally let the mask drop too—if only for a few seconds, a minute at most, her face buried against the crook of that warm neck like it was her own personal Bible.)

As Sam Cooke’s soulful voice continues to warble through her empty kitchen, she harmonizes with him as she makes her grocery list.

And idly pours herself a half-glass of Merlot.

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

After she heats up a bowl of leftover tomato soup for herself, she settles in her favorite recliner in the living room and prepares to watch Jeopardy!, which’ll be on in about ten minutes.

She tries to call Melissa twice to see if she wants to get on the phone and watch it together—as they sometimes do these days—but to no avail. She gets hit by Melissa’s vaguely threatening voicemail twice.

“Melissa.” A slight pause, wary, like her dear friend thinks that even giving her first name might backfire on her. “Schemmenti. If ya need me, you know where to find me. If you’re tryin’ to sell me somethin’, don’t.”

She leaves a message on the second call, just a general no worries if you’re busy.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

And so, Barbara eats dinner in silence too, occasionally calling out the answers to clues. Hamlet. The Grand Canyon. Ghosts. Jennifer Coolidge, though the correct answer is actually Jennifer Hudson, which seems incorrect to Barbara but alright. 

She gets tired of doing that by Double Jeopardy, though, and sits the rest of the program in silence, idly stirring the dregs of her soup. The grandfather clock in the corner slowly drags her into seven, the toll echoing solemnly through the darkened room.

Melissa never calls her back.

And it’s fine, of course.

She’s well-aware her friend has a life of her own… but Barbara admittedly likes it—much more than she rationally should—when the two of them share their evenings together, even when it’s just over the phone.

Melissa’s been her saving grace in all of these endless months since the divorce, coming over on so many weekends—and now that school’s out for the summer, much more often than that. They’ve chatted and cut-up and talked about new art projects they want to try with their kids in the fall, shoulders lightly brushing, their curving hips, their thighs. Melissa has unfailingly cooked for her, always lamenting the deplorable state of Barbara’s fridge or else complaining about her depleted spice cabinet. 

Perpetually making sure that she has enough to eat.

She made the tomato soup that Barbara is currently picking at, having popped over for dinner just two nights ago with a foot-long baguette, a bunch of vegetables, and assorted spices that she dragged from her own kitchen.

“You gotta know I love you, hon,” Melissa had huffed as she dropped her haul onto the pristine island in Barbara’s kitchen. “I haven’t cooked for someone this much since Joe.”

At first, Barbara had easily smiled at the fact that she was loved by Melissa, warmth radiating through her chest and all the way down to her perfectly manicured fingertips, but then, she had been less pleased by the casual comparison to Melissa’s idiotic ex-husband, blinking in a manner that she hoped wasn’t too revealing.

“Joseph was hardly as good-looking as I am, though, right?” She had asked, trying to play it all off as a joke.

Of course it was a joke to her.

This jealousy that she was pretending to affect.

Melissa only chuckled, though, and lightly swatted her on the ass with a dish towel, which did something unpleasantly delightful to her insides too.

“Damn straight,” she winked, and Barbara hasn’t been able to let go of the moment since. She rubs the emptiness on her ring finger almost subconsciously, as though she can still feel where it had cuffed her.

(The inlaid diamonds had almost been as heavy as her guilt.)

She gets Final Jeopardy right.

Derrida.

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

After taking her makeup off, showering, and slipping into her favorite silky pajama set, she finally crawls into the king-sized bed that she had once shared with Gerald and tries to settle her mind by reading. She and the ladies at her Bible Club have been making their way through a pretty hefty devotional lately—(in-between a little light gossiping about Brother Carlton Sanders’ possible mistress, of course)—and Barbara tries to stay on top of the weekly readings as much as she can with her busy schedule.

But tonight, the words of God are falling on glassy eyes. She can only get through a few pages before she’s distracted, disconcerted, discontent—staring at the empty space next to her, gently biting her tongue between her teeth.

It’s been eleven months since she and Gerald divorced, their thirty-seven year marriage ending as it had so beautifully begun—with a moment of quiet intimacy. They laced their hands together in their attorney’s office and both quietly shed tears at what they were about to do.

She almost changed her mind then, right as her shaking pen was poised above the dotted line with her name neatly printed beneath it.

Almost conceded to everything that would be required of her to not let him go.

Almost gave that crucial piece of herself away.

Here, take it—I can’t do this.

I don’t know how to be alone.

I don’t know how to be without you.

But Gerald, still holding her other hand, squeezed it and silently reminded her it was okay.

They had done everything right in a desperate attempt to preserve their marriage.

They had talked to their dear pastor first, Brother Hank, who told them that God knew the plans He had for them, plans for them to prosper and not be harmed, plans for them to have hope and a future.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your future is together,” he had added kindly, peering between both of them with keen eyes. He had known them for well over twenty years now and had been their friend through most of them.

It was time, he implicitly said without ever saying the words, but neither Barbara nor Gerald had been ready to hear it then, both stubborn to the last.

They had gone to at least five months worth of couple’s counseling after that, Gerald an unstoppable force and Barbara an immovable object on the subject of her husband’s possible transfer. He was an excellent welder, and his company wanted to send him down to New Orleans to work on the cruise ships that docked and departed from the Big Easy. The pay was handsome—far more money than Barbara had ever seen in her entirety of a career as an public school educator—but the emotional toil was steep. 

Gerald wanted to move back to Louisiana—where she’d been raised and where they had initially met when he temporarily located there for a job. It clearly made more sense than him traveling back-and-forth between contracts, but Barbara had been adamant about staying in Philadelphia. She was too old to start anew at a different elementary school in a now foreign place. And she didn’t want to leave Abbott, having invested nearly half of her life there, with so much more left to give yet. 

Ava surely needed her. Though the once thoroughly incompetent principal had grown leaps and bounds over the past few years of her tenure, she still relied upon Barbara for some help with the budget and other administrative duties.

Her young mentees too—Janine, Jacob, and Gregory—all coming into their own as fine, young teachers, of course… but still, whenever they encountered some hard problem or another, they unfailingly continued to consult Barbara. They called her their work mom and she fondly (if a little exasperatedly) claimed them as her own.

And then there was the problem, the possibility, and the exquisite pain of surely losing Melissa Schemmenti.

Melissa—her dear, sweet Mel—independent and self-sufficient, bold and thoroughly capable and so full of life… probably didn’t need her.

But Barbara did.

Barbara needed her best friend.

She would never admit it aloud—not even to herself, much less to Gerald—but even the mere thought of parting with Melissa fueled an almost ungodly amount of her hesitation. She had been inseparable from the younger woman for nearly as long as she had been teaching at Abbott, then new to Philadelphia, lacking a community and a context beyond her nuclear family and the Baptist church they went to every Sunday.

But then there had been Melissa, whom she had instantly clicked with despite the thousands of differences between them: their ages, their upbringings, their overall demeanors and almost every last habit in-between. But before three months had passed since Mel had become a teacher at the school, the two of them had already claimed the round table closest to the fridge in the teacher’s lounge as their own.

A South Philly native, born and raised, Melissa took her under her wing and made her feel at ease in the city, something that even her husband hadn’t been able to accomplish. She would never forget this initial kindness, even though she has long since striven to repay it. 

She would always remember that Melissa had been the first person who made her feel at home.  

But there was something about this particular truth that felt like it was unsavory—a confession of sin weighing upon her otherwise stainless soul. 

So they argued about thousands of different things.

But never once about Melissa.

She wouldn’t dare probe that tender wound for Gerald to see, somehow finding it much more tenable to let it fester beneath her carefully buttoned shirt and become an abscess, a maw, dark and desolate, devouring her from the inside out.

It gnawed on her that her husband of three decades had to beg her to leave, but she innately knew that her friend of nearly the same amount of time didn’t have to so much as lift a finger to convince her to stay.

What was wrong with her?

How had her kind and loving marriage arrived at this terminal end?

(And what, pray tell, had her relationship with Melissa become in all the intervening years?)

(Friend was starting to feel insufficient, lacking the gravitas to encapsulate the fact that the two women had spent nearly thirty years together, teaching side-by-side in the unchanging hallways of Abbott Elementary. Partner felt closer—maybe comfortable even—but partner was dangerous too, laden with some of the same connotations that encircled the diamond encrusted band on her fourth finger.)

(So friend would have to fit. She would make it fit, damn it. She was Barbara Howard, by God, and if anyone could maneuver a square through a circular hole, it was surely her.)

“You could retire.” If Gerald had brought this suggestion up once, he had done it a hundred times. “My salary would finally be more than enough to support us, Barb, and you wouldn’t have to work anymore! You could finally have time for all the hobbies you’ve wanted to do!”

Barbara had intimately known that he was just trying to be considerate when he made remarks such as these, but it had simply devastated her, with each occasion, to know that he had thoroughly misunderstood her life’s project. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life pursuing hobbies; she wanted to be in Classroom 1A, teaching the next generation how to read.

Their marital counselor, a kindly lady named Mrs. Russell, emphasized honest communication, encouraging them to voice their wants, needs, and fears to each other—something which they increasingly found they could only do with her in the room, and even then, in front of the counselor and God Himself, Barbara could not be completely vulnerable.

“We’ve raised our daughters here,” she once said, deflecting.

“And our daughters are grown now,” Gerald replied gently—always gentle, her Ger. She loved that about him. Sitting across from him in a hard-backed chair, she had never hated that trait of his more, how it cast the weakness of her protestations in clear and ungainly light.

“But what about your family?” She grasped at straws. “Your stepfather?”

“My brother can finally step up to the plate to help with him, and we can always come back to visit.”

“Taylor’s only an hour or so away from us now.”

“Taylor can fly out to see us anytime she wants to.”

“Gerald,” she had only pleaded at the end, during the last fifteen minutes of their final appointment with the marriage counselor. Their careful budgeting wouldn’t allow them another, not if they wanted to make next month’s mortgage payment on time. “I’m not finished yet.”

Finished.

Barbara Howard used all her words very carefully, and this particular verb was no different. On her desperate tongue, it implied an end, a conclusion, a vital depletion.

She’d be passively destroyed, hollowed out, chipped away piece-by-sordid-piece, weathered with the patina of time until nothing was left but the ruins of herself still standing miraculously tall. She’d be the pillar of salt, perpetually looking back at the homeland she had made for herself as she slowly eroded to the grains.

I’m not finished yet.  

And I’d be finished if I went to New Orleans.

If I retired in a city I was unfamiliar with.

A ghost well before my time.

She begged him with her eyes, with the tears that were traitorously starting to leak from them, to read between the lines, to understand the magnitude of what she was still incapable of fully saying.

Gerald digested it quietly, agony straining every weathered line in his face. He stared at the ground and sat like a man carved from stone for what felt like minutes, hours, days—forever in a microscopic moment.

“Me neither, Barb,” he eventually croaked, finally looking up at her, with desolation in the darks of his eyes, and she knew at once that he wasn’t talking about leaving Philadelphia.

His own ghosthood was staying in it.

“I’m not finished either.”

Together, they had arrived at an untenable conclusion.

The only one that remained.

It was time.

They had been married for thirty-seven years, in love for perhaps forty.

Even still.

It was over. 

Finished.

It was an amicable split, a no-fault divorce, and the two of them have done everything in their power to remain on good terms with each other since then—not just for their girls’ sakes, but very much for their own. Their one irreconcilable difference has done nothing to change the fact that they still care for each other deeply, that they will always have thirty-seven wonderful years between them, that they will always be family. They chat on the phone at least once a month and send texts even more often than that. She forwards him mail all the way in Louisiana. He sends her pictures of weird birds he sees when he’s out on a job. She usually smiles and responds, LOL.  

Barbara most definitely isn’t in love with him anymore—the entire year they had spent fighting and ten months of separation besides has firmly put the nail in that coffin—but admittedly, she does miss him from time-to-time all the same. 

The companionship he offered. 

The safety.

The peace.

She places her devotional on top of her blanket-covered lap and stares off into the middle distance for what feels like an hour, though when she checks her phone, it’s only been three minutes. Her lockscreen is a selfie of her and Melissa from when they had gone on a road trip together this past spring.

It’d been the younger woman’s unsubtle way of saying, Hon, I’m dragging your mopey ass outta the house if it kills me.

Melissa’s chin is nestled against Barbara’s shoulder in the unsteadily taken picture, the sun glinting off the scarlet vividness of her hair, and Barbara herself is smiling down at her friend, visible affection in her eyes.

Love.

She is smiling even now, at this very minute, always heartened by the reminder that she exists at the same time as Melissa Schemmenti.

Oh, how she adores this woman.

It vaguely bothers her, though, that Melissa hasn’t returned her call or even sent a text to show that she's received it. It’s a bit unusual for her; she’s always been fairly quick about replying to Barbara…

She supposes that she’s just being a little clingy, though. 

Mel had mentioned something about going out this weekend after all. She likes to frequent bars occasionally and shoot pool with strangers.

Sometimes, she even takes them home.

Barbara crinkles her nose at the thought, distantly irritated by the image of Melissa swapping spit with some man who always ends up resembling Joseph in her head or trading lipstick with some woman who is devastatingly beautiful.

The women Melissa dates are always devastatingly beautiful.

That crucial fact always makes Barbara feel some type of way. She can deal with the Joseph substitutes—the slobs, the drunkards, the sleazes. After all, using Joseph as the paradigm and the example, she knows they’ll never last.

She cannot say the same of her own gender.

Indeed, she cannot say anything at all about the way that she has to repress an inexplicable urge to compete with Melissa’s inamoratas for her attention.

Even though she knows she maybe shouldn’t, Barbara wings one last text her friend’s way.

Girlfriend, call me back in the morning!

Let’s grab brunch.

Perhaps they can go to Over Easy—that breakfast café up the road from Melissa’s house—and inappropriately sip mimosas at eleven in the morning and share a stack of waffles as they talk about their week. And perhaps, like the last time they did as much, Barbara will have the opportunity to reach over and thumb away the little bit of whipped cream that somehow gets on Melissa’s cherry-red nose…

It'd been so lovely, sharing that domestic intimacy with her.

It doesn't strike her as odd at all that she wants to do it all over again.

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

And then, Barbara’s phone rings precisely six minutes after midnight, startling her upright in that big, empty bed. 

Groaning, moaning, fumbling a little in the coagulated darkness, she flicks the latch on her bedside lamp and snatches her phone up from where it had been laying facedown on her devotional.

Her first thought, seeing the unregistered number, is that it’s just another one of those damn robocalls, interrupting what had been a very good sleep, but the area code seems to suggest that it’s local.

She tentatively decides to answer—perhaps solely to chew the midnight caller out—pulling the phone up to her ear.

“Hello?” She asks crossly. 

“Hello, yes,” comes a tired voice—gruff but not necessarily unkind. Clinical, practiced even. This person is a professional. “Is this… Barbara Howard?”

He says her name like he’s reading it from a document, and sudden terror carves through her like a knife. 

“Yes, this is she,” Barbara grips her phone so tightly that her arthritic wrist starts to ache. “May I ask whom I’m speaking to?”

All of the sleepiness has been sieved from her in an instant, shed like a decaying skin. She palms her stomach, suddenly and completely nauseous. 

“My name is Dr. Alex McGill, and I’m in charge of the emergency room at St. Vincent’s tonight,” the voice identifies itself, nearly doing her in right then and there. St. Vincent’s. The hospital about twenty minutes away. She’d given birth to Gina there, and the association immediately makes her think of her girls, even though one is certainly in New York and the other is all the way in California. But then she comes to her senses—remembers that it’s highly likely that she’s still listed on Gerald's medical forms—and that terrifies her just as powerfully. “I’m calling to inform you about—”

“Who is it?” She interrupts sharply, incapable of enduring polite decorum, not now, not when every muscle in her body is clenched with unbearable anxiety. 

There is only one type of phone call that this can possibly be.

A short pause.

And in that infinitesimal moment, that tenth of a second before the entirety of her world is irrevocably shaken at its foundation, Barbara suddenly realizes the awful answer before Dr. Alex McGill ever articulates it.

“I’m calling because you’re listed as Melissa Schemmenti’s emergency contact,” he says, so gently, but even still, Barbara lets out a strangled cry that she barely registers as coming from herself. “A driver in a truck rear ended her around eleven this evening and caused her to skid off the road.”

The proclamation is simply ruinous.

And its hypotheticals violently assault her, seizing across her mind’s eye in a whirl of vicious colors.

Melissa in a pool of crimson blood.

Melissa slumped over against the wheel, turning blue.

Melissa, cold, laid out beneath a white sheet.

They force Barbara Howard on her knees, these horrible visions, these phantasmagorias; she feels the cold metal of their possibility against her goosebump knotted skin. She waits for the inevitable pull of the trigger.

Melissa! She wants to yell. She wants to scream. She wants to shake the world with her primal grief and tear it all asunder until someone, anyone, feels an ounce of the horror that is currently rearranging her central nervous system.

Melissa.

Please, God. Not now, not yet—not ever. 

“Is she—“ She can’t quite get out, choked and choking.

“She’s still alive,” Dr. McGill quickly assures her, his voice steady where hers is not. “She’s in surgery now with one of St. Vincent’s finest.”

And Barbara, holding the phone against her ear like it’s a lifeline, begins to weep with visceral relief.

She’s alive.

The doctor tries to console her further, she thinks—perhaps even giving her specifics—but she barely registers that he's speaking; her head only has room enough for one recurring refrain.

She's alive.

She's alive.

She's alive.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #abbott elementary #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #straperine

[cdyssey]

Valentine’s Day

Summary: On Valentine's Day, Barbara and Melissa have their worst fight yet. [Pre-2.14 Fic]

CW: Sex Mentions, Adultery Mentions, Emotional Infidelity

AO3 Link

—

The last time that they had fought so viciously, Barbara had openly called Joseph a manchild to Melissa’s face.

He had cheated on Melissa, had lain with another woman in their own damn bed.

He was more than a manchild.

He was an utterly selfish pig.

But Melissa hadn’t been ready to hear it yet, still in love with him, even though he had hurt her and hurt her and hurt her so many thousands of times over, like their marriage was a cartoon and his inability to be an adult was a recurring joke.

(The unfailing punchline was Melissa’s dutiful and obsequious forgiveness.)

She didn’t talk to Barbara for an entire week after that, ignoring all of her calls, brushing past her in the hallway like she was nothing, until Barbara found her one day in the supply closet on the second floor, sitting on top of an overturned mop bucket, gripping the phone in her hands like it was a loaded gun.

“I’m divorcin’ him,” she had spat, directing the words to the scuffed and stained floor. Her body was visibly trembling, everything that was usually solid and sturdy about her simply undone. “Kickin’ his sorry ass to the curb, so he can go fuck whoever the hell he wants to. Let the next woman deal with his beer breath and his goddamn scratchy beard. I’m so sick and tired of never bein’ enough for him. Blow job after blow job, and he still—“

But the second grade teacher had abruptly stopped herself, perhaps remembering that there was another person in the room, pressing her whitened knuckles against her red mouth as she looked up at Barbara, who could only stare at the wounded creature on the floor with horror and pity.

She could not get the disgusting image that those last words had conjured out of her head—Melissa on her knees in front of Joseph Lombardo.

Like a sinner touching the hem of Christ’s robes.

“You were right,” the younger woman said, and her voice was more than terrifying.

It was broken.

“I... didn’t want to be,” Barbara rasped, vehemently shaking her head, lowering herself to the ground as fluidly as her arthritic knee would allow. She anchored herself by palming Melissa’s upper thigh, only realizing a second too late that the touch was far more intimate than should ever pass between two friends, even very close ones.

She blushed profusely but didn’t withdraw her hand, thought it would be too awkward since she had already extended the gesture.

It didn’t escape her notice that she was the one of her knees now, a holy suppliant.

(She was incapable of envisioning herself in anything but the role of a worshipper.)

“I wanted you to be happy, Melissa,” she continued, unsure whether she was hurt that the other teacher’s gaze was averted or thoroughly relieved. “I wanted you two to make it…”

Well, at least part of that had been true. 

She would pray for God to forgive her for the lie later.

Whether Melissa actually believed her—(unlikely)—or didn’t have the energy to argue—(more likely)—she didn’t challenge her on it either way, dropping her face into her hands as her shoulders began to silently heave, all of her limbs wrought in unspeakable agony. Barbara didn’t hesitate. She encircled her friend with her arms and held her in the dark of that tiny room for a long time, resting her chin against the crown of that vivid head, whispering soothing words into the negligible space between them. You’ll be okay, sweetheart. I’m here for you. We’ll get you through this—I swear on my life, Melissa Ann Schemmenti.

And that was the end of the worst fight they had ever had.

This fight, though, the one that they’re currently having about Gary the Vending Machine Guy, is somehow far more ruinous.

Barbara, arms defensively folded across her chest, grips the skin of her forearms with her nails as though trying to physically hold herself together.

At the end of this conversation, this confrontation, this reckoning—Melissa might never speak to her again.

“You knew,” she snarls furiously, pausing her incessant pacing long enough to jab an accusing finger in Barbara’s direction. They’re in Barbara’s classroom, the door completely closed. The room is still papered with pink and red hearts that her children had cut out with safety scissors. She made them all sugar cookies for the holiday. They colored pictures of Cupid at recess today because it was still too cold for them to play outside. “You told him to set up the ring in the vending machine. You kept me outta the teacher’s lounge all day. You listened to me blather on and on about how I was afraid he was cheatin’ on me, but you knew he was doing something far flipping worse!”

Barbara can’t refute any of this. 

It is absolutely true that Gary had informed her that he was planning to propose. It’d been just last month, in fact, on a double date that she and Gerald had gone on with Melissa and her boyfriend. They’d all adventured out to dinner and a car show, and when Melissa and Gerald had walked over to ogle at some old Chevy or another, Gary had told her his intentions. He was gonna pop the question sometime that Sunday, maybe spring for a nice dinner at Applebee’s and ask her when the Eagles game was at halftime.

What d’ya think?

Barbara had been visibly, entirely, and perhaps even offensively mortified, had told him absolutely not, sir—here was how he was going to do it instead. He was going to cover the teacher’s lounge in rose petals on Valentine’s Day. He was going to buy her a bottle of Prosecco. Not the cheap kind from a bodega but a moderately priced vintage from that fancy wine cellar with the French name downtown. He was going to put on something nice—no bowling shirts, no cargo pants, and definitely no gaudy chains. He was going to be cutesy and strategically place his ring in the vending machine, attaching it to her favorite candy bar.

Snickers. 

She loves Snickers.

Come hell or high water, Gary the Vending Machine Guy was going to show Melissa Schemmenti that she was loved.

(Did it ever occur to Barbara when she was meticulously planning all of this—staying on top of Gary for an entire month, ensuring he was following her plans to the last detail, overseeing him like an overzealous hawk—that she was being a hypocrite by propping up this man’s unquestionable mediocrity? Saving him from it even? Joseph had been so careless about these sorts of occasions too, always forgetting his and Melissa’s anniversary, thinking that a gift card to his favorite restaurant was ever an appropriate gift on her birthdays. )

(It did, in fact, occur to Barbara.)

(She often thought about it.)

(Obsessed over it even.)

(This lone question has tormented her for weeks upon weeks now, kept her up at night, made her sick with guilt—but what, pray tell, was the alternative that she could have lived with? Discouraging him and risk Melissa ever finding out? Enduring yet another circular fight about how she’s too judgmental, and she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, and she should butt out of it because Melissa is a grown ass woman who she can make decisions for herself?)

(Has she not known from the very start—deep down inside the anguished well of her soul—that as nice as Gary is, as well-meaning, he's a far from a capable partner for Melissa? That he's but a type and marginally improved shadow of Joseph? That he is a man who is comfortable with settling, never once trying something new? Yes and yes and undoubtedly yes, but Barbara can’t confront any of these questions without asking a tougher one of herself. Why does she care so much?)

(There is but one answer to this particular inquiry that would destroy her where she stands, that would render her incapable of looking at herself in the mirror the next day—and all the days after that. There is an unspoken truth residing in the lily-white paradise of her moral worldview, where everything is neatly partitioned into a knowledge of what is good and what is evil, except for in the ungodly amalgamation of that one damn tree.)

(She loves her.)

(It’s as simple and as complex and as utterly horrible and as exquisitely beautiful as that.) 

(Barbara loves Melissa in a rapturous kind of way, has long elevated her to the Holy of Holies in her reverent and besotted mind. She loves her like a condemned sinner. Guilt defiles the temple of her chest every time she so much as catches a whiff of the other woman’s floral perfume. She loves her in the same way that she had loved Vivian—that girl from church camp all those many decades ago—when she was just fourteen, and their hands had accidentally brushed when they sat on the same log as the whole choir of God-fearing kids sang “Amazing Grace” around a roaring fire. They gingerly kissed behind their cabin one star-strewn night and never spoke to each other again.)

(She loves Melissa in a way that she has never quite loved her own husband. Gerald is kind and good, and he is good to her. Hell, even good for her. So steady and so gentle, the sturdy warmth she has curled up to in their shared bed for over three decades now. And she has loved that—has undoubtedly loved him—but their kisses have historically done nothing for her. She can only have sex with him when she’s a little tipsy. She desperately hides that from him, though, stuffs that dirty secret beneath her beatific smile like it's an empty bottle of Merlot hastily shoved under a bed; it isn’t fair to him that she can never get aroused. She convinces herself that no one has libido after menopause. She conveniently ignores the fact that she never had any long before that physiological change. The weight of her elaborate wedding band constricts her fourth finger like a cuff.)

(She sometimes feels that she should hate Melissa for making her feel any and all of these strange and estranging things, but she never does. She just loves her, even though it feels so wrong, except for those choice times when they’re alone in the same room together, side-by-side, taking up mutual intimate space, and Barbara has every reason to suspect that Melissa loves her right back.)

(So, yes, she planned Melissa’s proposal; she engineered the everloving and God almighty mess out of it.)

(Melissa seems happy enough with Gary.)

(She has made it her punishment and life’s mission to swallow that.)

Barbara blinks rapidly at the other’s vitriol, feels her own pride rise and rush to her defense.

“It’s worse that he proposed to you?” She cries incredulously, taking a step forward as Melissa takes a defensive step back, her leather-clad leg accidentally knocking one of the children’s tables. She winces and swears angrily under her breath, some Italian word that Barbara is sure God doesn’t like the meaning of. “You’ve been dating him for over a year now, Melissa. I just thought—“

But Melissa cuts across her violently.

“You didn’t think, Barb,” she laughs bitterly, crossing her arms over her chest, a gesture that nearly always means that she’s starting to shut down. “You hoped.”

“Excuse me?” Barbara’s heart feels liable to explode inside of her chest, throwing itself against the wall of her sternum like a wild animal. 

Feral

Unhinged.

Inconsolable.

“I said that you hoped,” the younger woman repeats herself, and the sound is somewhat quieter—if still wounded. Less of a gaping cut that a pulsing, chronic bruise, and somehow even more painful because of that. “You hoped that if I got shackled to Gary, I’d be all happy ‘n whole again. You hoped that maybe a shiny new ring would fix everything about me that my last marriage broke, and you wouldn’t have to—we would never need to—we could just keep pretendin’ that—“

But Melissa can’t seem to wrap her blunt tongue around the words in the same way that there is one tree that Barbara cannot eat from, let alone touch. She can only admire from afar and wonder to herself if its fruit would fit perfectly in the palm of her hand.

“Why—in God’s beloved and Almighty name—did you say yes to him then?” Barbara asks, her voice utterly alien to her, cold and so detached from the chemical reactions currently disrupting and denaturing her entire body. Her stomach churns. Her throat aches. Every nerve in her body is alive to the fact that there is now a new ring wrapped around Melissa Schemmenti’s fourth finger.

Because that is the crucial fact—the younger teacher said yes to the proposal.

Just minutes ago.

And she had smilingly accepted all the sweet congratulations from their colleagues that she received, and she had plopped a big kiss on Gary's laughing mouth—(making Barbara immediately want to wretch)—before dragging Barbara back here—("Just need Barb to help me take a good picture of it! Gotta rub it in my dumb cousin's face!)—so they could row about it.

About the fact that she said yes. 

Melissa dramatically falters, looking as though she’s been shot.

She glances down at the ring, as though she's expecting a bullet hole.

“What would we have done if I hadn’t, Barb?” She finally chokes out, rubbing the silvery band. “Kissed? Fucked? Lived happily ever after?”

It’s Barbara’s turn to be stricken now, to feel as though the mere six feet between them has suddenly become six-thousand, and the space between them is an abyssal depth—impossible to cross, let alone capably survive—but because she's Barbara Howard, because she is entirely used to adjusting her mask in the face of intolerable crisis, she gathers herself and all of her practiced composure together one more time, a hand resting just above her nauseous abdomen.

“I don’t know why you’re insisting on making yourself unhappy,” she hisses and almost finds it unbearable to look her best friend in the eye, hot tears threatening to form in her own. “It makes me sick to watch.”

But Melissa is apparently waiting for this particular response—locked, loaded, and brutally prepared.

“If we’re playin’ by those rules, hon, then you make me sick all the damn time.”

The effect of those words is immediate, visceral, and raw. Barbara feels as though the floor has been knocked out from under her, as though she is falling, falling, falling through that endless abyss. 

“Don’t say that, Melissa,” she utters, and she’s horrified that the words stumble out as a plea. “Never say that to me again.”

Melissa must hear it in her voice—her desperation, her denial, the presentation of her most deeply espoused fears—because apology briefly flashes in the darks of her eyes. She reaches up and scrubs her weary face with her hand, the one with that stupid, awful ring on it.

Barbara even helped the man pick it out.

Melissa likes simple jewelry.

Nothing intricate.

Something practical and sturdy—exactly like her.

“Goddamn, Barb,” she mutters, the curse muffled when she drags her palm over her mouth. “I’m engaged.”

It was already true—it’s been true the entire time that they’ve been having this accursed conversation—but hearing it aloud is too much on top of everything else. Her own hand splayed at the hollow of her throat, Barbara bows her head and fails to repress a sob.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #i should promise to write you guys fluff soon #this one was so painful for no reason

[cdyssey]

Lies

Summary: When Barbara has a flat tire at her church, Melissa goes to help her. Of course she does. (Post-2x13).

CW: Religious Guilt, Alcohol, Emotional Infidelity/Infidelity

AO3 Link

—

Gerald Howard is the one who calls her.

It’s unscheduled, for sure, but not entirely unexpected.

He’s out-of-town on a work trip, and as such, he only calls Melissa when he’s gone, away, out-of-pocket, and unavailable.

When he has a slight variation of the same, old favor to ask of her. 

Take care of her for me, will you?

(Like she doesn’t already do so anyway.)

“‘Sup, Ger?” Melissa says around the toothpick clenched between her teeth, propping her phone against her ear with her shoulder. She’s just polished off the rest of her leftover steak from the other night, and now she’s in the process of making herself an excessivelyboozy bushwacker with every intention of getting buzzed.

Between the demands of the fundraiser and everyone and their cousins either fighting or eye-fucking, it’s been a long damn week at Abbott Elementary.

Melissa had mostly stayed out of it, except to help two grown men arbitrate custody rights over a cat and give Janine a little unsolicited dating advice that may have accidentally just boiled down to women are hot… but still, all of the collected tension gradually sucked the air from the hallways and kept her on edge—that fine line between general wariness and hypervigilance that she tends to straddle on a daily basis.

So Mama undoubtedly needs a drink… or two… to help ease her into the weekend. She’d been planning on stripping down to her undergarments and curling up in her bed to watch basketball, sipping on her bushwacker through a bright green bendy straw…

When Gerald calls, though—sometime a little after six—she gets a gut feeling that these best laid plans might just have to wait until later.

“Nothing much, Mel,” he returns, and she can hear the tired smile in his voice, his gentle fondness for her, his familiar care. “Still in Jersey for a couple of days. This job’s taking a little longer than expected…” 

Gerald’s a welder and he sometimes gets sent out-of-state for the odd contract or two. Decent money. Effed up hours. It’s been happening with more and more frequency lately too, driving his wife nearly up the wall and through it. 

“He’s never home anymore,” she’d only recently complained. They’d been sitting on the sagging couch in the break room together, waiting for the morning news to come on. No one else had arrived yet, and so their shoulders just touched, the soft lines of their thighs.

Side-by-side. 

Parallel to each other.

Always.

And Barbara had idly played with her ornate wedding ring, twisting and twisting it around the base of her finger, while Melissa had simply watched, mesmerized by the way that the diamonds glittered in the harsh light.

“And even when he is home… even when we’re in the same room—" She had gone on before abruptly stopping, biting her plump lower lip, visibly conscious that she was about to reveal too much.

Even to Melissa. 

Perhaps especially to her.

For all that the two of them shared between and with one another, somewhere along the way of their nearly thirty year friendship, they had articulated an implicit rule to never quite discuss the intimacies of their love lives anymore. 

That particular conversation nearly always devolved into one of their rare and exceedingly bitter fights.

(You don’t know him like I do, they’ve both said to each other before.)

(Why do you care so much?)

“Mm,” Barbara had only murmured, shaking her perfectly coiffed head, “forgive me, Melissa—you shouldn’t have to be subjected to my marital woes before the bell has even rung…”

In that moment, as Barbara expertly smoothed her troubled brow over with a sad and beatific smile, Melissa hadn’t dared transgressed their personal golden rule of noninterference. Letting the other wallow, no matter how much it hurt to watch them suffer. Moreover, she knew from experience that there was nothing to say to that anyway—nothing, at least, that the older woman was ready to actually hear.

But in the absence of words—in the mutual understanding that they were not allowed to confront each other directly in that way—she reached over and laced Barbara’s slender fingers with her own, creating yet another contact point between them.

Shoulders.

Thighs.

Hands.

Barbara had permitted the intimate touch; she even closed her darkly framed eyes and leaned into it.

It was an innocuous indulgence that both of them could live with come the next morning.

“Oh, yeah, Jersey,” Melissa replies neutrally, finally taking the toothpick out of her mouth and lightly tossing it into the nearby trash can. “Barb said somethin’ about that.”

Granted, she can’t help but get one jab in, perhaps as recompense for all the times that she’s had to listen to Barbara endlessly complain about the circular problem, day-in and day-out: “She swears y’spend more time in a hotel than at home these days.”

She has no particular remorse for saying so; she knows this isn't exactly news to him.

“Occupational hazard,” Gerald mumbles sheepishly, his only reasonable defense, his go-to excuse, that same somethingshe’s pretty sure that both Howards tell themselves at night, incapable of admitting to anything else.

“I know,” Melissa frowns sympathetically because even still, despite her frustrations, she gets it.

She really does.

It took her and Joe years upon miserable years to ever 'fess up to the truth of what time had done to them and their once loving marriage—and even then, they could only do it when the barrel of their loaded histories were pressed against each other’s already bleeding skin. 

In the end, she couldn’t stand for him to even touch her.

They fought so much—every day and all the goddamn time. If it wasn’t about their abysmal finances, then it was about his booze problem, the way he drowned a particularly bad fire in whiskey. And if it was supposedly about his jealousy that men and women alike looked at her whenever they went out, then it was really about sexand their increasing lack of it thereof.

In the end, too selfish to ever go long without a good fuck, he cheated on her with Nina Santa Cruz, one of their mutual friends.

And that was that.

The trigger was pulled; there was nothing left to do except bury their vows in a shared grave and call it a goddamn waste.

They had loved each other.

Really.

But that’d been a long time ago, and they had been different people then.

(They had just been kids.)

“But, uh, listen… that’s kinda what I’m calling about anyway,” Gerald continues, his tone now hesitant, appropriately chastised. “Just got off the phone with Barbara and she said that she has a flat tire at our church. Bible Club tonight, y’know… I called my brother, but he won’t be able to help her out for another hour or so. Do you mind swinging by there and taking a look?”

She doesn’t even hesitate. 

“’Course,” she nods vigorously—only dimly aware that Gerald can’t see her—already moving, already raring to go. Barbara is in trouble. Barbara needs her. She unceremoniously shoves her blender glass with the unfinished bushwacker in the fridge, throws on a leather jacket and scarf, and unhooks her keys from their place on the wall. In the mad whirl and cacophonous rush, she almost misses his next response.

“Thank God—I knew you’d say yes,” he sighs in audible relief. “It’s funny. Barb seemed kind of reluctant to call you...”

“Huh?” The question comes out a little more forcefully than she had intended. Hurt even. (Melissa hates to admit it—how easily hurt that she gets.) She’s at the door that leads from her kitchen to the garage, her fingers tensed around the brass handle as she digests those thoroughly unexpected words. “What d’you mean by that?”

Gerald must hear the defensiveness in her tone because he scrambles to come up with a placating answer. 

“Oh, well, you know our Barb,” he chuckles nervously, and her stomach strangely twists at the choice phrasing. Not his Barb. Theirs. As though they have an equal claim to knowing her intimately: her husband and her... best friend. “So prideful… and she told me that you were busy doing something with Gary tonight.”

The strange assertion stops her short.

Not only is it explicitly untrue—(she hasn’t been out with Gary the Vending Machine Guy in ages)—but Barbara specifically knows that it’s untrue. In fact, just before they’d walked to their cars this afternoon, Melissa had told her what her plans were for the evening.

Nothing and jack squat.

Wanna come over for dinner?

It’d both been her way of making sure that Barbara wasn’t alone in her achingly empty house for yet another night while Gerald was gone… and also a subtle opportunity for her to check in with her after everything that had gone down with the fundraiser and Ava. Melissa has had a long week just being at the margins of everything, but Barbara, in the center of it and the thick, has had a hard one. 

There’s a crucial difference in the fact, but there has been precious little time for her to pull Barbara off to the side and ask her how she really feels about any of it. 

She got a sense, from how Ava and Barbara had been laughing together in the gym earlier today at the assembly, that they had at least patched things up; however, Melissa won’t be completely satisfied until she hears it from her friend’s mouth that she’s okay.

Barbara had politely refused her offer, had told her that she was going to Bible Club, but that she'd see her on Monday, girlfriend. And nothing had seemed amiss except for a vague tiredness in her eyes and perhaps a certain tightness in her lipstick coated smile that could have been just a trick of the light.

Clearly, though, something is up.

“Seriously, Mel, if you’re busy, don’t worry about it,” Gerald adds as she mulls this over in complicated silence. “Samuel will be able to get to her once he gets off of work, and there are probably still folks at the church who can keep her company…” 

“No,” Melissa says hastily, realizing that he’s trying to give her a generous out. “I’ve got it. Gary, uh, went home early.”

She’s not entirely sure why she’s playing into Barbara’s inexplicable lie—perhaps to spare her best friend the ignominy of being caught, perhaps because she wants to be the sole one to discover the truth, perhaps because she’s starting to get an inkling that whatever is going on is bigger than she’d originally assumed, and only she seems to realize this.

To recognize the warning signs.

Gerald is… well... absent.

“Oh, good,” comes a grateful reply, a thoroughly oblivious one. “Thank you again, Melissa. What would we ever do without you?”

“Excellent question,” she laughs heavily, shrugging a hand across the back of her neck.

The gesture does not warm her eyes.

— 

Some twenty-five minutes later, when Melissa pulls into the driveway of the Baptist church that’s a little less than ten miles away from Barbara’s house, she’s greeted with an utterly strange and estranging sight: a nearly empty parking lot, a vast and unlit building, and a dark silhouette sitting on the stone steps leading up to the white double doors—simply shivering in a long, silvery coat with a fur collar…

As she eases into the empty spot to the right of the familiar black sedan that’s parked directly in front of the stairs, her headlights rove over and mercilessly illuminate that tall and lonely figure.

Barbara Howard, ashen with the cold, squints and visors her eyes against the twin beams, her mouth rounded in a perfect ‘o’ of surprise.

She’s caught.

Apprehended.

And, just by the looks of her, clearly undone.

Melissa barely remembers to brake her car and turn the ignition off before she’s stumbling out of her door and into the biting air. Out of the corner of her eye, she can already tell that Barbara’s front right tire is indeed flat, but she’ll worry about that later. Knows how to put a spare on with her eyes closed.

There are bigger problems to deal with, far worse demons to bravely confront.

“What the hell are you doin’ out here, Barb?” She calls out, her voice nearly swept away by the wind. Folding her arms over her chest, she marches forward and forward still until she’s at the foot of the weathered staircase, and Barbara’s wide-eyed gaze is consuming her. Her painted lips are chapped, her cheeks noticeably hollow, and unmistakable tear tracks have vertically frozen on the sharply hewn planes of her face. “You’re freezin’ your ass off.” 

“Language, Melissa,” Barbara scolds reflexively, though the sound is vacant, lacking any real conviction. “We’re near the house of the Lord…” 

“Sorry.” She resists the urge to roll her eyes at the familiar sanctimony, recognizing that now is hardly the time. “You’re freezin’ your tush off. Is that better?” 

But she doesn’t receive a response, Barbara now determinedly looking somewhere over Melissa’s shoulder, plainly trying not to cry, so loathe to be vulnerable in front of anyone, eternally convinced that no one wants her emotional honesty, that they’ve come to expect the performance and the impeccable mask. 

Melissa gets it.

She really does.

Nine times out of ten, she feels the exact same way.

“Okay, okay, no more wisecrackin’ out of me,” she says, her voice softening, and she takes the last couple of steps between herself and Barbara at a jog. When she’s even with the other woman, she lowers herself down gently until they’re sitting as they always do—as they have historically done—brushing limbs. Shoulders. Hips. Thighs. It doesn’t escape Melissa’s notice that Barbara’s forgotten her gloves again, and her fingers are trembling where they're clasped in a neat temple next to her stomach.

Without hesitating, she peels off her own green scarf and methodically winds it around Barbara’s chilled hands like she’s bandaging a critical wound.

“So level with me here,” she goes on as she finishes the job, loosely tucking the ends away. Barbara only stares down at her now swaddled appendages, her eyes glazed over, her posture as unimpeachable as ever, shoulders squared, spine ramrod straight, like a perfect, porcelain doll. “You’re sitting outside in the cold in front of a completely dark church even though it’s barely seven o’clock. And your tire’s flat, but ya lie to your husband about why you don’t want me to come ‘n bail you out.” 

Barbara inhales sharply at this last part—at being called out for her fib—snapping out of her reverie as though stricken.

“Melissa, I—” She rasps, audibly horrified.

“—I’m not mad,” Melissa adds quickly, curling her hand around the other woman’s slender wrist and squeezing. It’s true enough. Any anger that she might have felt quickly dissipated upon seeing the kindergarten teacher on the steps, so sad and tired. Irrefutably broken. She’s never had it in her to kick a helpless creature when it’s down. “I just wanna understand. This isn’t like you…”

In the ensuing silence that follows this choice assertion, long and painfully loaded, the harsh wind eddies around them both. Melissa instinctively wants to encircle Barbara with her arms and shield her from it.

But she takes one look at her face, at the divot in her black brow, at the ruins of her ancient eyes just beneath, and immediately understands that the kindergarten teacher is barely feeling the cold right now, that whatever is hurting her springs from some deep well within her soul, spewing forth like a polluted spillage, gurgling and gushing.

Simply oozing.

An infection has settled, and it has made Barbara Howard absolutely sick. 

“Isn’t it, though?” Comes a quiet reply, faint and almost indistinguishable, but wrought with unmistakable bitterness. “I am all hypocrisy, Melissa… I’ve tried so hard to be good, to follow all of God’s carefully articulated edicts, and still fall short of His glory…”

“Is this about Ava?” Melissa guesses—perhaps a little too hastily. Even though she hasn’t heard all the details yet, she’s at least understood that Barbara’s fight with the principal had been about Ava playing dirty with the fundraiser and the older woman not liking it. “If it is, I’ll talk to her.”

And say what—she doesn’t exactly know. 

She doesn’t particularly see anything wrong with what Ava did in the first place. 

Hell, in her shoes, she would have done the same herself.

She has done the same herself. What Ava calls her  charisma, the Schemmentis just know as basic survivalism—whatever it takes to be the last shmuck standing.

But she’s desperate to solve the problem, to propose a solution that will make the woman next her stop looking so haunted. Barbara shakes her head, though, with more vehemence than she’s displayed through the entire conversation.

“No,” she says firmly, cutting her dark eyes at Melissa. “This isn’t about Ava… she… she actually made a lot of sense this week, perhaps being the first person to ever directly tell me that many of my moral boundaries come from a position of privilege—the luxury of never having had to learn better.”

It’s a charged sentence, one that the second-grade teacher doesn’t have to dwell on very long for it to click. Barbara Howard is undoubtedly a sheltered woman in many respects, having never needed one goddamn reason to play in the mud as she had once so indelicately put it, cutting Melissa to the quick. She’d been discounted by so many people in her life that it’d almost become background noise—the way that every Tom, Dick, and Harry had no trouble in presuming the worst of her. But never in a million years had she ever thought the same sort of dismissive rhetoric would ever come from Barbara, her closest friend in the entire world.

Barbara, who had always believed in her.

Barbara, who thought her capable.

Resourceful.

She supposes, though, the other teacher must have limited her definition of Melissa's resourcefulness to just having a guy who knows a guy, willfully ignoring that her affinities for scraping by and twisting arms and shaking people down are crucial extensions of this trait. Indeed, being resourceful to her just means doing whatever it takes to endure a life where she learned quickly enough that just about everyone has it in them to hold a knife.

Melissa is silent at this revelation—awed that Ava of all people had been the one to tease it out of Barbara and maybe even a little jealous that she hadn’t been able to do so herself.

That she hadn’t been the one to make her friend fully understand that there is no such thing as clear-cut morals in a world of monsters and men, especially not when the two are often one and the same.

“This is about me,” Barbara continues of her own accord, her voice breaking on that last syllable, that simple and so heavily freighted word. “And the fact that even though I am well aware of my own follies, of the sins that stain my immortal soul, I… cannot bring myself to fully repent, to refute Ava’s philosophies, to emphasize the straight and narrow way to my students…”

She pauses, glancing at Melissa through long lashes, tears shining in her eyes. 

“To regret shaking down Sister Delisha Sloss for you, Melissa," she breathes, her voice low and constricted. “I was so happy to do that—if it allowed me to make things right with you, if it granted me your precious forgiveness—that it was easy to justify everything I had thought wrong about it in the first place…”

So they’re both thinking of that day, huh?

Of one of the most horrible fights that they have ever had.

Barbara doesn’t regret her apology, she’s saying.

It was sin, but even still—

She did it for Melissa—she cares for her that much—and the confirmation of this settles in her belly with a warmth and a gratitude that she would have never thought possible.

“Barb,” she intones gently, still gripping the other’s wrist, “there’s nothin’ to regret about any of that. Being good and being right sometimes aren’t the same thing in this world. Life's too complicated for that. Humans are, and God’s gotta understand that.”

He’s God, not some fundamentalist Christian.

Surely, He’s made it so that the fate of one’s soul isn’t determined by how well one mindlessly and dispassionately follows a set of written rules.

Surely, that is not all that worship boils down to in the end.

“I think you’re right,” Barbara readily replies, sniffing as surreptitiously as possible. “I think you and Ava both are for that matter—”

“—words I never thought I’d hear ya say for 500, Alex,” Melissa can’t resist the quip and receives a baleful glare in return.

Okay, she deserves that one.

“—but understanding that for myself? Internalizing such a crucial message? That’s even trickier when I’m surrounded by people who don’t get it either,” she finishes with an exhausted sigh, glancing over her shoulder at the church, magnificent and imposing even in the concentrated gloom of this starless night. Melissa follows her gaze to see that she’s specifically staring at the double doors, upon which a neon pink flyer has been taped to one of them.

She can’t make out the wording from this distance, but she doesn’t have to—Barbara explains in a horrifyingly numb voice.

“I’m being iced out,” she says, her eyes flat. “Bible Club was apparently canceled this evening, and the first I heard of it was when I pulled up and saw that notice on the door. I should have received a call, or even just a text from a fellow sister in Christ, but why would I?”

She laughs bitterly, and the unpleasant sound aches Melissa’s sternum—the clarity in it, the conviction.

“When Sister Sloss—yes, her"—she nods vigorously at whatever disgusted expression must be manifesting on Melissa's face—"saw us at the mall the other day, she designated me as not church-like, so naturally, the whole Bible Club—ha! perhaps even the entire congregation!—probably believes so as well now, and I’m being righteously punished for it, judged and clearly found wanting…"

Barbara smiles coldly, the gesture settling like iron on her lips.

"Perhaps the good Lord is in on the joke too if my flat tire is any indication of the karma that I’ve earned."

Melissa just stares at her, blinking.

“So wait—you mean t’tell me that the woman who’s been stealin’ from your church has the gall to call you not church-like?” She huffs indignantly, her breath forming a visible cloud in front of her face. (Goddamn, it’s freezing.) “And you believe her?!”

“Yes,” Barbara laughs again, this time sounding genuinely amused at Melissa’s outrage, this time almost sounding like herself again, and somehow, at the same time, still sounding so broken. (Maybe, though, this is just how the older woman always sounds, and she's just taken all the correct precautions to masterfully hide it.) “Utterly ridiculous, I know.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and I thought I had some image issues,” she shakes her head, unable to see the humor in Barbara Howard loathing herself as much as she clearly does. There is nothing funny about that, nothing acceptable, nothing even remotely light. “But you, hon, you take the cake, icing and all.”

She says this last part very gently, though, well-aware that Barbara’s conception of herself is a delicate subject, and indeed, even at this slight comment, the mirth quickly drains from the other’s eyes, leaving nothing behind but the unwanted dregs—that same sense of loss that she’d perceived in them earlier when she had first pulled up. 

Barbara is as unbalanced as she has ever seen her, standing on a tightrope high above a dark, seething sea. Melissa wants nothing more than to grab her hand and lead her back to solid ground, wants to tell her that she can rest now.

It's over.

There’s no more need to so capably perform.

She's going to fall and break her neck; she's going to plummet, headfirst, into that violent and pitiless sea.

“Yes,” the older woman returns quietly, her shoulders sagging, even if just a little. “I’m starting to recognize that too…”

And a tear finally slips from the corner of one of her eyes, slinking down the crevasse of her angular cheek, collecting calmly, like a crystallized memento, on the vertex of her chin.

But Melissa, without so much as blinking, reaches over and gently thumbs it away, cupping the line of her beautiful jaw. She knows she should let go—painfully cognizant that this moment does not require such prolonged intimacy—but she doesn’t. She just holds Barbara’s face in the palm of her hand, in the gentle caress of her shivering fingertips.

“I’m sorry that I lied to Gerald,” Barbara croaks, leaning in to the touch, more tears starting to visibly well, falling in earnest now. “I didn’t want you to see me like this, the mess that I am.”

“Shh,” Melissa consoles her, continually swiping at her face. “I know. I know.”

“I don’t deserve you, Melissa Schemmenti.

“Don’t say that,” she protests fiercely, meaning it with everything in her, with every atom, every indivisible cell. “Love isn’t flippin’ conditional, Barbara.”

Goddamn, who taught you that?

How did you ever come to think such a horrible thing?

“You… love me?” Barbara asks, her voice almost aching with childlike wonder, and the simple question and the older woman’s rapt, awed expression nearly knocks the air from her lungs, and on the steps of this Baptist church, she’s suddenly staring at her best friend’s lips, which are only inches away from her own—the plum color of them, the beauty—and seriously thinking about committing sacrilege.

“Yeah, ‘course,” she breathes, her fingers still gracefully arched against that cool, smooth skin. “To know ya is to love you, Barbara Howard, all of you—even your messiness."

She loves every part of her. 

Oh, God, how she does.

And she has tried so hard to ignore this crucial fact for years and years now—deeply aware that Barbara is a somewhat happily married woman—but knowing and feeling are two entirely separate entities, and they war with each other daily, unfailingly drawing blood when they clash.

Barbara visibly swallows at this, the peristaltic motion pronounced in the pillar of her throat, and Melissa’s heart throbs against the wall of her chest, damn near close to leaping out of her ribcage and killing her.

(Maybe even liberating her at the exact same time.)

Without being fully aware of what she’s doing, or perhaps being entirely aware, perhaps losing all the inhibitions that have kept her in line, Melissa leans forward, still holding the other woman's face—

—and Barbara, as though magnetized, eyes wide open with melancholy and longing and horror and holy delight, does so too—

—but as their foreheads just touch, the tips of their noses brushing, their hot breaths flooding over each other's skin, they both recoil backwards, like two binary stars who have remembered that their lot in life is to eternally orbit each other.

Spiraling around the same center of gravity for time immemorial but never, ever colliding.

Barbara pulls away violently, gasping for air, unloosing the scarf around her hands so she can massage her convulsing neck. She coughs and coughs—her chest heaving—and she coughs. 

And Melissa, suddenly feeling sick at what she’d nearly made Barbara do, can only pinch the bridge of her nose against the nausea surging through her.

They’re literally on the steps of a temple, and they almost just desecrated it together.

They almost just kissed.

“Fuck,” she spits out, even though she's not supposed to be cursing because something holy happens here. Something decent. But she forgets herself. She'd almost just done a far worse thing. “Sorry, Barb, I—“

“No, no,” Barbara interrupts her, her voice impossibly hoarse. “I just… accidentally slipped, that’s all.”

She had done no such thing.

This is the crucial lie that they will both tell themselves, though, the story they will desperately cling to so as to keep everything the same between them come Monday morning. 

They are just friends.

Barbara slipped.

Melissa loves her but not like that.

“Oh,” she happily plays along, relief flooding through her entire nervous system at this exceptionally good pretense, this readymade out. “You’re always such a klutz.”

She most certainly is not, but this is the role that Barbara will gracefully inhabit to make this charade work for the both of them.

“Guilty as charged,” she laughs, and Melissa does too, the sounds horrible and strained and just a little hysterical—and maybe a whole lot—as they mingle in the darkness of the night, the unrelenting coldness.

“C’mon, let’s get your flat changed before both of us freeze t'death,” she suggests, standing up somewhat laboriously, nearly toppling over, her joints all sore and stiff. She catches herself on the nearest railing. “I’ll follow ya home and make sure the spare doesn’t pop or anything.”

Melissa damn well knows that she should extend a hand and offer to help Barbara up too, but she thinks that could be dangerous.

What if Barbara accidentally slips again? 

So she faces forward, towards their cars, and starts legging her way back to them. Always prepared for emergencies such as these, she’s got a jack in her car and a heavy duty flashlight. It won’t take her long to put the donut tire on at all…

“I’m so sorry, Melissa,” she only just hears the spoken words, whispered as they are to her retreating back, snatched up as they almost are by the brutal, unforgiving wind. “I love you too.”

Melissa pauses on the bottommost step, the heels of her boots teetering on the precipice and the vertiginous edge.

She knows if she looks behind her now, it will all be over. She will not freeze. She will not turn to stone. She will run to Barbara Howard, that married, married woman and tenderly cup the nape of her neck. She will kiss her senseless, spread her lips like they are divine, and she will enjoy every last second of their mutually entangled sin… she’s never exactly had a problem with being a cheat…

… but then, Melissa—just as Barbara must do every single day—suddenly hears Gerald Howard’s soft voice in her ears.

Take care of her for me, will you?

Our Barb.

What would we do without you?

And the horror of those words—the weight of that carefully placed trust—simply guts her. She unwittingly touches her stomach and half-expects for it to be covered in matted blood.

“Huh?” Her voice sounds like a nasty echo of itself. “What was that? I didn’t hear ya.”

(But she did, and despite what both of them would like to believe, there's no rewinding the tape, no unringing the bell, no resetting the sands in the hourglass, no taking back the words they have said and the things they have almost done and the secret something that exists between them, taking up space every time that they sit next to each other in the same damn room. They love each other; the fact is irrefutable. They love each other; they're running away from the fact even now, as though the freshly dug dirt won't be visible in the clear light of day.)

“Nothing,” comes an equally harried reply. “I just said that I’m right behind you…”

Sure, yes.

That’s exactly what Barbara must have said.

Melissa lets out a breath that she didn't realize she had been holding and takes that final step. The soles of her boots harshly scuff the dark pavement, the sound intolerable to her ears.

Life goes on anyway.

#work wives #barbara howard #melissa schemmenti #gerald howard #s: abbott elementary #abbott elementary #reginianwrites #oh i fit so much angst into this bad boy #IF YOU SAW THE ITALICS WERE BRIEFLY FUCKED UP AUHGHSHE #GDI #I FIXED THEM

[cdyssey]

Advocate

Prompt (@kalikoke​):

CW: Alcohol Mentions

AO3 Link

As they’re walking out to their cars, Barbara insists on going out to dinner that night to celebrate the reigning Read-a-Thon champ.

Her treat.

“Oh, so you’re takin’ me out on a date, huh?” Melissa grins widely, full of piss-and-vinegar. She loves to flirt with Barbara Howard—married woman, woman of God—thinks it’s fun to see her nearly bend over backwards trying not to accidentally flirt back. Meanwhile, the second-grade teacher has long made her peace with the fact that after nearly thirty years of friendship, the two of them talk like old lesbians who probably own a cat named Fred Astaire.

It’s just one of the occupational hazards of being work wives.

Somewhere along the way, they started to sound like actual wives too.

She likes that.

A lot.

Much more than she reasonably should.

They stop in front of Barbara’s car, a gray sedan that is meticulously washed every weekend. The windshield is completely white with recent sleet, and both of their breaths gather in pockets next to their faces.

“As a matter of fact,” Barbara only harrumphs, at once pompous and playful, a teasing glint in her eyes, “I am. Wear something befitting your winner status.”

“I got a new thong from Victoria's Secret the other day?” She immediately suggests, arching a positively lecherous brow. “Red. Matches my hair ‘n everything.”

Melissa tells herself that it doesn’t mean anything to her when Barbara visibly swallows at these words, when her dark pupils dilate, when the heavy binder in her arms abruptly slips from her grasp and onto her knee, causing her to cluck at Melissa like a mother hen.

“Lord Almighty! Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” The other woman moans, rubbing her leg as Melissa bends down to retrieve the binder, snickering silently.

“Yeah, and everyone else too,” she replies in her most suggestive voice.

“Melissa!”

But the second-grade teacher just laughs and laughs—and she carefully ignores the way Barbara’s cheeks have flushed—and she laughs.

This is all she ever feels comfortable asking for, these infinitesimal moments with Barbara Howard, snatched from the relentless march of time. She cups the nanoseconds in her palms just to hold them, if even for a little bit—which is precisely how long that a moment lasts anyway.

There and then gone, lived and then a fragmentary relic of the past with all the rest.

But, Jesus, how they kiss her fingertips so gently—these moments, these relics, these precious nanoseconds—dusting them, like falling snow.

—

A few hours later, they’re sitting across from each other at a booth in Mamma Mia’s, a relatively new and upscale pizzeria that used to be a laundromat a couple of years ago until the feds finally figured out it was another front for the Philly Mob. (None of Melissa’s idiot cousins were involved this time, thank God. Even they weren’t stupid enough to launder money in a goddamn laundromat.)

All of the washers and dryers and probable bloodstains were removed a few years back, and a yuppie couple has since gutted the rather sizable space, remodeled it, and turned it into the talk of the town. Barbara, completely unaware of its history, has been begging to try it out for lunch sometime. 

She’s heard that their salads are excellent.

And Melissa, entirely aware of its history, has always entertained the proposition with a secretive chuckle at the thought of her very proper friend unwittingly stepping foot into a building where at least two men have definitely died.

Yeah, sure, Barb. Let’s go.

Which is how they end up here for dinner, blissfully sipping on their Merlots as they wait for their waitress to come back and take their order. Melissa is indeed wearing something befitting her victory over Janine—a short, green dress with sleeves that billows out around her wrists—but she thinks Barbara has her beat, so elegant in a teal blouse and black vest. Her fitted slacks—also black—accentuate the shapely curves of her hips.

Melissa appreciates the way her friend looks.

(Again, much more than she decently should.)

“You know,” Barbara begins without looking up. She’s been busy scanning the menu for the past few minutes, her readers delicately perched on the bridge of her nose. Melissa’s own menu is still on the table, unfolded and untouched. “I didn’t get to have one blessed slice of pizza today. My kindergarteners were simply voracious.”

“Mine too,” Melissa chortles, recalling how she’d had to tell at least five kids not to chew so fast. They were gonna get indigestion! “And I gave my leftovers to little Benji.”

Sweet kid, Benji Andrews—the youngest in a family of seven.

There sometimes isn’t enough food to go around at his place, so she and Barbara—(who’d had Benji in her class two years ago, and they'd both had several of Benji's siblings)—worked out an agreement with the lunch ladies to make sure that he gets sent home with extra meals a few times a week. 

“Ah, that’s my Melissa,” Barbara murmurs fondly, her gaze flicking upwards from the glossy foldout.

“Yeah, well, you would have done the same, ya schmaltzy gagootz,” she readily deflects—never one to accept unadulterated praise without a fight—but even still, she can’t help but smile at the quiet intimacy of being called Barbara's own.

Damn her and God bless her, she always knows how to tease the softness right out of Melissa.

“Oh!” The older teacher suddenly gasps, glasses slipping a little down her nose. “Shame on me—I almost forgot. Melissa, would you like me to call out some menu items for you? There’s a spinach-ricotta calzone that might have your name on it.”

And Barbara glances at her perfectly unopened menu then, apology flashing in her eyes, but Melissa only shakes her head. She’d taken one look at the front of the pamphlet, seen its kookily stylized typeface, and quickly placed it down before any of the letters started doin’ any funny business.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says firmly. “I looked at their menu online before we got here, and I'm fine if you just wanna share a pizza."

“Are you sure?” Barbara frets, conscientious about her reading struggles—always—from the very moment she found out about them some two decades ago when she was the first person to ever realize that Melissa only rarely peruses menus at restaurants.

And that’s only if the font is just right or if there are helpful pictures or if there’s not too damn much happening on the page at one time.

Before the Internet really took off, and Melissa didn’t have a reliable way of checking a menu before she went to a restaurant she was unfamiliar with, she’d just ask the waiter for the specials and choose one that sounded the most appetizing to her—far too humiliated to spend the necessary time trying to decipher a block of text that almost looked comprehensible to her. She didn’t have the luxury to chisel the individual words out, unit by unit, as she did at home with her books. The someone sitting across from her was unfailingly impatient. Her siblings. Some of her antsier friends. Her own ma. 

Joe.

He got so freaking annoyed when she took forever to order, even though he knew she had a hard time with menus.

He just swore up and down that she needed better glasses.

But Barbara, from the very moment she found out, approached the matter far differently than her ex-husband, which is to say with the same determination and kindness that governs most of her actions. She suggested that she could read some parts of the menu aloud for Melissa—so as to provide her with options—and for years upon years, she’s done so every time they’ve tried a new restaurant together.

Melissa hated that at first.

Hated that her weakness had been seen and so thoroughly identified by another.

Hated that someone would ever have the guts to call her out on it.

Hated that all of her dozens of coping techniques were stunningly powerless against a goddamn laminated piece of paper.

Hated that it was so obvious if anyone cared to notice.

Which the kindergarten teacher absolutely did.

But then again, Barbara notices a lot of things about Melissa, even the all-too-vulnerable details that she refuses to articulate aloud.

She notices baseball bats firmly taped under desks and irrational fears having to do with ever facing away from a door. She notices new scrapes on her knuckles from bar fights and dark shadows turning circles beneath her eyes after restless nights. She notices when Melissa is having trouble with dinner menus and eighty-paged curriculum updates and legalese from divorce papers that get served to her two days before her fifty-fifth birthday.

And yes, she once hated all of that—Barbara's keen eyes and Barbara's annoying inability not to intervene.

Barbara's hero complex.

And Barbara's pity.

Melissa hated the pity most of all.

But time and trust and her repeated exposure to her friend's particular way of being in the world have ultimately softened her initial understanding of this point, have made her come to terms with the fact that Barbara Howard doesn’t exactly pity her when she reads menus aloud to her, when she sends her emails in big, uncrowded fonts, when she helps her mark up stupid administrative packets with their stupid, tiny text.

She accommodates her.

And this is to say that she loves her.

“I’m positive,” she nods vigorously, well-aware that it takes a lot of verbal and physical gesturing for her friend to ever drop something. She doesn't necessarily want to talk about her insecurities right now—has had to think about them a lot these past few days with Maya, dredging up so many memories—but she damn well won't be responsible for Barbara feeling bad about herself because of them too. “I’m covered tonight.”

As to be expected, though, Barbara, still holding on to her guilt with a frown, sighs deeply.

“You shouldn’t have to be, though,” she insists, vaguely waving her menu around. “It’s absolutely absurd that no one considers how hellacious this font can be on the eyes.”

“Hah!” Melissa snorts, propping her chin up on her fist. “I know you’re angry when you start pullin’ polysyllabic words outta your ass.”

“I’m not angry,” Barbara sniffs (clearly angry). “I’m just disappointed in the lack of accessibility.”

“You should write an op-ed for the Times.”

“Melissa,” she pouts, now finally placing the menu down, crossing her arms over her chest, “I’m being utterly serious.”

And Melissa readily softens, knows that every word is true. Barbara cares so much about making sure that the world is a just place—for her students, for her family, for Melissa herself.

There’s a wheelchair accessible ramp at Willard R. Abbott Elementary School not because some egghead at City Hall gave a rat’s ass.

But because Barbara Howard is a goddamn amazing teacher who fought for it.

There's a reason why she's the best of them all.

“Yeah, I know,” she smiles sadly, impulsively reaching over and offering her upturned palm, an olive branch. But she waits, with remarkable patience, for the inevitable moment when Barbara unbends her arms and takes it, interlinking their fingers together over the checkered tablecloth. She squeezes once and desperately wishes that they could stay like this forever, suspended in time, connected by touch, but the elegant ring on Barbara’s fourth finger shimmers in the light from the tabletop candle.

And so she lets go in the end.

She always does.

(Relics and nanoseconds.)

“I gotta say, I'm... disappointed too,” she goes on with a heavy sigh, pulling her now free hand through her hair. “Had a talk with one of my kiddos today whose parents won’t let her get tested for dyslexia."

“Oh, Melissa,” Barbara murmurs, understanding dawning in her eyes, gentle and profound care. Her best friend knows the very specific way that this situation hits close to home.

It’d been a matter of time for Melissa’s ma. 

Or, well, for the lack of it more accurately.

She had five children all under the age of ten to take care of, and she didn’t have the energy to wonder why her eldest daughter sucked at reading beyond thinking that she just wasn’t trying hard enough. 

How hard, after all, could it be to read Dr. Seuss?

“I taught her one of my tricks—y’know, highlighting the first parts of words,” she adds quickly, as though to blow past the sentimentality of everything, of it all, “but it made me sad for my kid t’think that she doesn’t have an advocate…”

Maya's parents had been afraid—afraid for their child to get a label, afraid for her to be different, afraid for her to be perceived as less than.

She'd kinda wanted to key their car after that disastrous conference, but she also gets it—she really fucking does.

“She has you,” Barbara immediately says, adamant, adoring and so perfectly convinced. “You were her advocate today. You were there for that baby girl in a way that she will never forget.”

Melissa blinks rapidly, unable to stop a lump from rising to her throat as she suddenly recalls Mrs. Myrick, the teacher who had given her that book about a sad child who was also different all those many years ago. 

She’d sat with Melissa in the hallway and taught her how to steady a highlighter against a page without messing things up.

But even if you do mess up, Melissa, the teacher had murmured, brushing a stray curl behind the then six-year old’s ear, that’s perfectly okay too.

You’re enough, Melissa, she finished, soft and so kind. You're always enough.

“I’m so proud of you,” Barbara intones in the exact same cadence some fifty-odd years later, eyes gleaming in the dim lighting of the restaurant, radiant with quiet affection.

Melissa falteringly opens her mouth to say something then, to tell Barbara thank you.

For reading menus aloud to me.

For making sure the school has a wheelchair ramp.

For not pitying me.

For loving me.

For always being in my corner.

For never once betting against me.

Other people have me?

Well, I have you.

You’re my advocate.

And I love you.

But their waitress comes up to them then, a slight, young thing who might be Kit or Kat according to the slightly distorted name tag pinned on her chest, and she’s asking if they know what they’d like to eat. So she closes her mouth again, the words dying away on her tongue.

“A pizza then?” Barbara asks, a smile rising to her plump lips. “To celebrate the fact that you’ve taken the prize home once again, Ms. Schemmenti?”

“Oh, hon,” she smirks, easily shifting back into utter asshole mode. “How can you say that when I haven’t even introduced you to my folks yet?”

“Girlfriend!” Comes another scandalized groan, Barbara pinching the bridge of her nose. “Now is not the time!”

And Melissa laughs with all her belly as Barbara hastily explains to the waitress that they're not dating, they're just very good friends—(which somehow sounds even gayer)—and Melissa is merely being facetious. And she doesn't do anything to refute her, just savors the moment, reveling in the blush that has delicately darkened the skin around Barbara's nose.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #abbott elementary #abbott elementary spoilers #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #LISTEN #OKAY #I KNOW I HAVE TO FINISH MY SECRET SANTAS #BUT THIS EPISODE MADE ME CRY

[cdyssey]

Wreck

Summary: When Melissa's nana dies, Barbara is there for her.

CW: Death Discussion; Heavy Grief

AO3 Link

Melissa smooths her to-do list across her kitchen island with trembling fingers. Having been folded and unfolded several times over, marked upon profusely, tossed into her purse, crammed into her back pocket, unceremoniously stuffed into her bra at least twice, and probably stained with some cheap Chardonnay that her kid cousin picked up from Dollar General, the tear-out from a yellow legal pad has certainly seen better days.

But, hey, that’s nothin’ special.

She guesses she looks like a shit piece of paper too, all crinkled and creased, smudged and barely fit for perusal anymore.

Someone load her ass in a garbage truck and cart her off to the dump because she’s a wreck: fucked up, overwhelmed, annihilated, undone.

She doesn’t even feel like a human anymore.

Her nana died just around two days ago now, passing from the world about as peacefully as one could dare to imagine for a woman who’d been sick for the last ten months of her life. It was quiet in the end, as simple and as easy as falling asleep after a long, hard day. And the doctor-on-call promised that the sedative he was giving her would ensure that it was painless, which was a relief perhaps only because everything else leading up to that day had been so goddamn painful: the sickness, the waiting, the wrenching, bone-heavy grief.

(It was entirely possible to grieve someone who was still alive—to look at their utterly wasted body and understand that what was left was just a tangible echo, a breathing ghost.)

Melissa held her bony hand during that last hour and told her that it was okay to go—she’d be fine—and it was the first and only lie she’d ever told that saint of a woman in the entirety of her life.

She didn’t exactly ask forgiveness for doing so either.

She thought that if God knew anything about mercy, He’d understand and grant her this one sin: comforting that comfortless woman.

Nana had been ready to go, of course—sure, yeah, absolutely—she had known that it was her time for far longer than any of her headstrong relatives had been willing to admit. But she was so scared too: scared of leaving all her loved ones without their resilient matriarch, scared of their eventual (and perhaps inevitable) in-fighting, scared of a fractious future that she wouldn’t be around to mend with a homemade ziti dish and warm, jam-filled pie. She made Melissa promise—over and over again, ad infinitum—that she’d keep the Schemmenti clan together long after she was gone.

“Family’s all that we’ve got, Melly,” she once said. In the same way that Joe was the only person to call her Lissa, Nana was the only one to ever know her as Melly. It was a bit childish, maybe, but Melissa didn't mind. She always felt like she was twelve again when she was in her grandmother's presence: gap-toothed, impertinent, a hellion in patched overalls. “You gotta swear to me, on your Papa’s grave, that you’ll always remember that—no matter how balorde some of your aunts and uncles can be.”

“Nana!”She’d belly laughed at the time, bracing her hands on the edge of Nana’s steel-basin sink. They’d been in the kitchen together, as they so often were, peeling russet potatoes for her famous gnocchi recipe. This was at the very beginning of those long ten months when they both thought she just was just having bad arthritis flare-ups, perhaps. Her doctor was supposed to call sometime in the next few days with the results from her most recent labs...

“Those are your kids. You can’t just call ‘em stupid.”

(Even if it was expressly true.)

“Yeah, I can! I pushed them outta me, every one of ‘em eight or nine pounds a pop! Apple doesn’t fall far from the bush is what I say!”

It was the kind of statement that only her grandmother could pull off, something that made her want to snort and cry at the exact same time. She was outrageously funny, that stout, little woman, but she never seemed to think much of herself, especially when it came to education. She had to drop out of high school to work and help her parents raise their endless passel of kids, and then, before she knew it, she was poppin’ out little redheaded Sicilian Catholics of her own—Melissa’s own ma included.

Nana was so proud of her for making it through college and becoming a teacher, telling her as much every opportunity that she got, and constantly bragging about her accomplishments to her canasta group. She’d known how hard it was for Melissa at times.

Reading had always been a little challenging for her.

Taking exams could be a goddamn nightmare.

“Would you quit flippin’ saying that?” Melissa had rebutted, both exasperated and fond all at once, attempting to discipline her smirk into a reproving frown. “You’re not dumb either, Nana. Alright? Capito?"

She was the smartest person Melissa knew, high school diploma or not, for education was far from the same as intelligence in her book. There were plenty of eggheads out there with degrees coming out of their asses who didn't know how to haggle for the best cuts of beef or stay clear of certain Philly streets at night or change a flat with a crying kid on one hip and three more bouncin' around in the car. Before she had ever decided to become an elementary school teacher, those sorts of things were her only measures of how clever a person really was, and her grandmother had been the golden standard of them all—competent in a world that could be so arbitrary, needlessly complicated, and cruel.

At this, her sweet nana suddenly smiled, her dark eyes warmed by the golden light leaning in from the window above the sink. It was a sad smile and a profound one—the kind that little, old ladies always gave in the movies before they up and died, kickstarting the next act. It was accompanied by a slow shake of the head. She had her green rollers in; they shivered in time with the movement.

“Good God, I love you, Melissa,” she had murmured softly, each syllable laden with a certain gravity, as though she already suspected something about her health that Melissa didn’t, as though she had an inkling of what awaited her in the coming days, weeks, and months upon godawful, medicine and machine-filled months. Maybe Melissa should have known then herself—by that rare usage of her Christian name, by the way her stubborn-as-hell grandmother didn’t argue back—that something was horribly wrong.

But she hadn't.

Just ten months and some spare change ago, it was impossible for her to fathom a world where her nana wasn't in it.

She just accepted that love, basked in it, took it for granted even, and now, a little less than a year later, as she pores over a checklist of all the shit she’s gotta do to bury that precious lady—(so much, too flipping much)—she racks her exhausted brain and wonders if she’d said it back that time.

I love you too, Nana. 

Of course, she’s said it about a gazillion times since then. Never left a conversation with the woman without doing so in case it was their last. But all the times she didn’t reciprocate those three words and every other missed or botched opportunity besides tangibly aches her chest, pounds upon it, like fists against an awful drum. Missed calls. Canceled lunch dates. Squandered chances to ask her about her storied life. The endless thank you she didn’t give that woman for practically raising her.

It’s irrational, of course, so goddamn stupid; she loved that woman endlessly and proved it in a thousand different ways.

But even still, what she wouldn’t give for one last tomorrow with her to tell her again and again.

Unbidden, unwanted, totally out-of-line and out-of-the-blue, tears threaten to spill over Melissa’s lashes and onto that yellow paper that’s already been to hell and back. She furiously swipes them away with the heel of her hand, doesn’t have the time to cry.

She’s still gotta call the Social Security Office and get Nana’s checks to stop comin’ through the mail. And after that, she has to take Joe’s suit to the dry cleaner ‘cuz her useless lump of a husband keeps forgetting. And when she gets back home—at who knows what time because she’s really gotta stop at the store and grab a few necessities—she desperately needs to go through Nana’s files again to see if she’s got that damn burial policy in there somewhere. Otherwise, they’re gonna have to pay for the service and the cremation out of pocket, even if she knows a guy who knows a guy who knows the funeral director, who can only get them an okay deal, which is fine.

It'll help, or at the very least, it won't hurt, but the crux of the sordid matter—the bottom line at the end of the shitty day—is that dying is so freakin' expensive.

“Fuck,” she groans, sliding her hand down until she’s palming her mouth. “Shit.”

No one ever talks about how the aftermath of death is just one cold bureaucracy after another: files, papers, tasks, and duties.

It’s unbearable.

Melissa alone has to bear it.

Her ma’s gone. Her remaining aunts and uncles are fragile. Her cousins aren’t any good with this kind of organizational crap. Her own goddamn sister’s been AWOL ever since the diagnosis, and the rest of her younger siblings haven’t done jack squat either.

It’s up to Melissa.

It always is.

That doesn't change just because someone she loved died.

The responsibilities simply take up the same air as the grief.

Just as she’s about to get started, though, reaching for her phone to start looking up numbers, her one saving grace walks in through the arched entranceway of the kitchen. Elegant as ever in a floral print blouse and black slacks, a plastic bag hanging off one arm, her comically huge purse on the other, is none other than—

“Barb,” she croaks, overwhelmed and overcome, weak-kneed with a relief that she just as immediately tries to hide. Vulnerability utterly terrifies her; it is one of the few house guests that she doesn’t know how to capably entertain.

“You don’t… y’know, you don’t have to come every day.”

But her best friend unfailingly has, bringing over various dishes and groceries, helping Melissa keep track of all the shit she needs to do, and oftentimes, just sitting next to her on her plastic-covered couch and holding her hand, palm-to-palm, their ten fingers intertwined. If Melissa has known any modicum of peace in this hellish last week, it’s only because Barbara Howard has deigned to carve out some for her, offering it to her like an alm. 

God bless her—she even showed up before her nana passed away, when family and friends were just congregating in Melissa’s house, filtering in and out of the guest bedroom where Nana’s hospital bed was to say their goodbyes. And when death finally lifted Nana away—arriving as gently as a mother carrying her child to bed—Barbara’s warm arms were the first around Melissa, holding her so tightly, her lone defenses against collapsing into a million goddamn pieces on the floor.

Barbara would never let that happen, though.

She had her.

She would cradle all her shrapnel; she would salvage her from abyssal ruins.

“And you,sweetheart, know better than to think that’ll stop me,” Barbara laughs kindly, setting her purse and plastic bag on the kitchen island. There’s a twinkle in her dark eyes, a lovely playfulness curving her plum-colored lips. “I do as I please.”

“Stubborn fool,” Melissa chuckles hoarsely, a sudden thickness in the column of her throat. She’s always on the verge of crying over nothing nowadays: spilled wine on the counter, a sad headline on the news, smelling something in the kitchen that reminds her of her grandmother, being joked with, having companionship, being loved.

She knows that she’s been caught, too, by the way her friend gingerly skims her fingertips against her forearm.

It’s the lightest touch imaginable.

It nearly shatters her where she stands.

“Yes,” Barbara hums in gentle agreement, “that’s why we get along like two peas in an unshelled pod.”

“Hah,” she tries to smile. Her entire mouth feels like concrete. “Some pod.”

“Extraordinary peas, though, if I do say so myself,” the older woman declares with an air of finality as she starts to busy herself, pulling out a white takeout container and some utensils from the plastic bag. Even before she sees the familiar logo of a happy chef wedged in-between some blocky lettering, Melissa knows the rich, homely smell of fried chicken.

And not just any fried chicken, but—

“Danny's Wok?” Her eyebrows lift at least three inches from their exhausted lids. “Jesus, Barb, that’s all the way across town. You didn’t have to—“

But Barbara cuts her off with a raised hand, a familiar teacher pose. “But I wanted to and so I did. Now park your fine derrière on a stool and tell me what you would like to drink, girlfriend.”

“I’ve got things to do,” she protests weakly, gesturing at the to-do list still laying pathetically on the counter. She doesn't know why she's being so obstinate. Maybe it's just instinct; her immediate reaction to people offering help has always been a deep, gut-felt shame: shame that she can't do something by herself; shame that she's so weak, and someone else is stronger; shame that she isn't enough. (One of her deepest fears is that she's never been enough) Or maybe it's because she just doesn't want to think about the way that Barbara saying she had a nice ass made the contents of her stomach do a loop de loop.

“I can eat later.”

It’s not a sentence she’s said very often in her lifetime, and Barbara peers at her skeptically, damn well knowing this.

“But when’s the last time you did have a bite, Melissa? You look pale.”

“I had a piece of toast this morning,” she grunts uncomfortably, more than aware that it’s not sufficient by either of their standards. That was hours ago. According to the digital clock on her oven, it’s nearly five o’clock now.

But all truth being told, she hasn’t been particularly hungry in a while, not since the hospice worker sat her down a few days before Nana died and said that it’d be soon.Food has lost a lot of its flavor. Nausea is constantly doing laps around her digestive tract. She doesn’t know how to care about eating when this grief is taking up so much real estate in her body and never paying any of the rent.

“Hardly enough,” Barbara scolds predictably, first pushing the styrofoam tray in her direction, now shuffling towards the stainless steel fridge, no nonsense and all productivity. It's how she shows her love. “You need to put something substantial in your stomach, sweetheart. You'll be of no use to your list if you keel over on top of it."

“Okay, Ma,” she huffs, but it doesn’t have any real bite to it because she obediently unlatches the box anyway. She knows that Barbara is right, as she usually—(sometimes annoyingly)—is. 

“Ma is correct,” the older woman hums, undeterred. “Someone needs to be responsible for you.”

It's hard not to feel chastised by such a statement, as though she's being patronized—a little kid in her own damn home; she attempts a weak smile anyway. It wobbles like a tricycle across the chapped line of her mouth.

“‘Cause I’m doing a shit job at it, yeah?”

Of course she is; she's a disaster with good hair.

“Absolutely not,” comes an exceedingly gentle reply, thrown over the other teacher's shoulder, landing as gently as a kiss. “It’s just that you seem to think it’s your God-given duty to be responsible for everyone else in this world except for yourself. Let me—no, wait, I insist upon—doing the same for you, Melissa."

A new lump surfaces to Melissa’s throat as she digests this unadulterated tenderness; it’s unfamiliar to her, even after so many years of receiving it from the angelic woman standing in her kitchen. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She holds it in her like a rain cloud, just waiting for it to pour.

“It’s scary that you have my number like this,” she finally says, and it’s the type of thing that she’s not supposed to mention aloud—she knows. She’s well aware. She’s spent an entire lifetime avoiding emotional honesty like it’s a summons for jury duty. But sometimes—if only sometimes, and usually only when a hell of a lot of booze is involved—she and Barbara can transcend their mutual understanding to never talk about the way they secretly look at each other when they think no one is watching and arrive at the undoctored truth of their shared experiences.

They know each other.

They love each other.

Far more intimately than should be allowed.

Barbara freezes where she stands, shoulders squared, hand gripping one of the fridge handles; she doesn’t turn around, possibly can't.

“Well... that’s what friends are for,” she returns in a stilted voice, picking her way around each individual phoneme like it's a landmine. It’s a warning tone even, begging Melissa not to press, and so Melissa doesn’t, swallowing painfully—just as submissive as a dog and far more devoted.

The sticky moment passes—it always does. Barbara retrieves a half-empty jug of sweet tea from the fridge, and Melissa slowly legs herself onto a stool next to the island. Her feet ache—her head, her chest, her entire goddamn body—but when Barbara joins her a few moments later, having poured them glasses of tea and grabbed napkins and condiments, both of them proceed as though nothing happened at all. Melissa picks at the chicken in an exercise of politeness, tearing off a little piece here or there and trying to chew it in slow, methodical bites.

It tastes like burnt rubber.

She attempts to wash it down with her drink, but the sickly sweetness of the tea just as quickly nauseates her.

Barbara can’t keep up the ruse of not paying attention to this sad ritual for very long.

“I can make you soup,” she offers pleadingly, already halfway off her own stool. "Potato? Broccoli-and-cheese? Vegetable?" Melissa places a hand on her leg to force her to sit down again.

“Nah, you’ve done enough,” she says firmly. “I... just don’t have it in me right now, Barb.”

And without flinching or glancing away, though every nerve in her body itches to bundle her present fragility away from view, she allows the other woman to search her face and confirm this unsavory truth. She bares every line and gaunt shadow; they surely adorn the curvature of her face like bruises.

“You can only do what you can do,” the older woman replies reluctantly, as though it’s the thing she knows she’s supposedto say and not necessarily what she actually believes. Melissa almost smiles at that assessment, smug in her assurance that it's the correct one. Barbara’s never been exceptionally good at hiding her feelings. People think that she is. Hell, even Barbara herself thinks she has others fooled.

But Melissa can see right through her, all those hundreds of things that she doesn’t say, that she entraps behind those tightly pursed lips for fear of being construed as ungodly. She thumbs through the Book of Barbara almost daily—with all the reverence that such a project deserves—and her diligence has rewarded her with all the beautiful fine print.

“Advice you gotta listen to yourself, hon,” she muses fondly, patting Barbara’s leg again before finally withdrawing her hand. “You’ve gone above and beyond for me these past few days. It’s not your fault I’ve got a sick stomach right now.”

“I know,” she admits in that same grudging tone, “but still, I’d do anything to make things better for you, Melissa, to relieve the burden on your shoulders even the tiniest bit.”

She gestures emphatically at the to-do list between them with one of her manicured friends.

“It’s far from fair that you’re in charge of all this when I know for a fact that you have other family members who are perfectly capable of helping to lighten the load. For instance”—she picks the paper up, scanning it briefly—”Joseph’s dry-cleaning! Why in God’s precious name isn’t your husband doing his own dry-cleaning?”

“He’s busy,” Melissa says in a clipped voice, less offended that Barbara is criticizing her husband than she is annoyed that her friend arrived at the same question that she did so easily. “At work. Fightin’ fires.”

Spending his paychecks on booze and scratchers and God only knows what else. Sometimes, he comes home smelling like strange perfume.

The kindergarten teacher emphatically shakes her head. “That doesn’t abscond him of his duty of being a responsible adult in a time of crisis.”

“Yeah, well—” She starts to defend him and then just as abruptly stops, suddenly cornered and violently choked.

Melissa doesn’t know what to fucking say to that, if there's anything to be said at all. If she argues, she’d just be lying to herself, to Barbara, and to almighty God—an unholy trinity of delusion and willing deceit. There’s just no excusing the inexcusable, no dressing it up in rouge and calling it pretty.

She’s alone.

Oh, God—her nana died and left her.

She's got a husband and he sleeps in the same bed as her, but somehow and nevertheless, she’s all alone.

Her eyes begin to water, her breathing quickly turning shallow, as everything inside of her falls apart and implodes.

Barbara quickly places the list down again and exchanges it for a tissue that she plucks from a nearby box, reaching up to wipe the tears away. Her cool palm skims the side of Melissa’s feverish face, and the contact is so tender that it’s almost too painful to bear. Melissa reaches up and curls her fingers around her friend’s wrist like it’s a lifeline, unable to form any words, her throat throttled with vile, her stomach sick with it. And the tears continue to well, no matter how many Barbara capably catches.

She heaves out one ugly sob and then another, covering her mouth with her free hand as though that would help with the inconvenience and the noise.

(She's spent most of her adulthood trying not to be inconvenient to make up for all her loudness and her noise.)

“Oh, Melissa—” Barbara exhales, her own dark eyes filling. She continues to stroke the side of her face, holding her cheek, cradling it, cradling her. “Oh, baby—it’s okay that you’re hurting. It’s okay to feel this pain.”

“I-it’s freakin’ not, though,” she moans, the sound muffled behind her hand, the unspeakable anguish leaking through anyway. Her nails curl into her lower lip. “I… I gotta keep it together, Barb! I can’t just—Jesus—I can’t just fall apart. I don’t, I can’t, fuck, I can’t—”

She can’t breathe. Surely, there’s a vice in her chest, squeezing her ribcage into mere molecules and skeletal dust. Surely, her lungs have burst, her veins, her bleeding heart, one massive supernova of flesh and gory tissue, and this moment's all she’s got left. Minutes. Seconds. Nanoseconds. She’s going to die right here and right now, while Nana is unburied, and her to-do list is still unfinished, and—

“You can, Melissa Schemmenti,” comes an authoritative voice from above, shaking but somehow utterly unshaken, ringing like a decree from the Lord God on High. And then Barbara’s warm arms are around her, filling the encroaching darkness with all the flowers on her shirt: sunflowers, poppies, lillies, and roses. Petals everywhere. A garden of beauty and impossible delight. “You cando this because I’m here, and I’m not going to let you go under. You hear me, sweetheart? That’s my promise to you, my solemn, unbreakable oath.”

It’s the loveliest combination of words Melissa has probably ever been told in her life; she cries all the harder, weeping her horror, half-vomiting it. Her mouth tastes like tea and salt.

“Breathe,”Barbara instructs her, pressing a gentle kiss against the crown of her head. One of her hands finds its way to the hollow of Melissa’s constricted throat; she splays her fingers against it, palm resting on her chest where the divot of her shirt exposes some of her skin. “You have to breathe, Melissa.”

But it's hard.

It's so fucking hard.

Every hitched breath still becomes a sob, and every sob reverberates through her beaten body like a shock wave. But Barbara is patient where she isn't, a sturdy monolith when all of her vertices have become undone. She begins to rub slow, methodical circles into Melissa's sternum, perhaps modeling a rhythm that she can pattern her breathing against. As the seconds limp past, every bit as injured as she is, she learns to inhale on one revolution and exhale on another, doing this until her heart rate begins to slow again, until the tightness in her chest recedes long enough for her to rationally confirm that she’s not, in fact, dying. 

She's living.

(And after someone dies, that's one of the bravest damn things that anyone can ever do.)

Even after her pulse somewhat returns to normal, she and Barbara remain tangled together for what feels like hours, even though it’s surely only a handful of minutes.

Melissa finally lowers her hand from her mouth and twists it somewhere in the paradise of Barbara’s blouse.

Barbara kisses her head again, a little lower this time, near the peak of her red hairline.

Neither of them makes any move to extricate themselves from each other. Melissa doesn’t have the strength, every ligament in her body wrung with incalculable exhaustion. (She’s not exactly sure what Barbara’s excuse is. As secure as she is in her companion's embrace, she currently can't bring herself to care.)

“... I shouldn’t be this weak,” she eventually rasps, and it’s a confession. She’s glad she can’t see her priest’s scandalized face. “I had plenty of time to prepare for this. I’ve known forever she was gonna go.”

“As though that means a hill of beans when you loved her so much,” Barbara murmurs, now running slender fingers through her hair, the motion soothing and rhythmic, reminding Melissa of all the times that Nana had done the same when she was a small child. She briefly closes her eyes, simultaneously endeared by the memories and made sick by them. “You can’t prepare your way through grief. Believe me, girl—I’ve been there, tried that, and it went about as well as can be expected, which is to say not even remotely well at all.”

Melissa chuckles at the convoluted explanation; they both do; they laugh so hard that it almost sounds like they’re crying. She finally pulls back, wanting to look her friend in the eye, but Barbara still grips her by the arms, refusing to let her go.

And they simply drink each other in, mesmerized, tears standing in their eyes, an interwoven statue unto their own: locked limbs, glassy eyes, and a hushed silence that descends upon them like snow.

Maybe they would have stayed like that forever had one of their phones not chimed: her own, laying face-up on the counter. She sees that it's a reminder letting her know that she can take another Prozac in an hour if she needs one. If Barbara sees it—(and with the angle of the phone being the way that it is, she absolutely does)—she's kind; she doesn't say anything; there isn't really anything that needs to be said.

“Shit." She tries to wipe her face on the sleeve of her shirt. It's not a successful endeavor. “I’m a wreck.”

“Maybe so," Barbara agrees, grabbing more tissues for them both. She mops Melissa's face up before delicately attending to her own. "But you won't be forever, you know. it's a transition, not a permanent way of being."

"Doesn't feel that way," she hears herself grouse. It's petulant, a little childish even in her low voice, but it's what she feels; it's her personal nightmare of a lived-in reality.

"I know." The older woman reaches up to thumb away a new tear that has formed at the corner of Melissa's left eye. "But grief rarely ever does."

It's not an especially comforting thought, but Barbara clearly knows her well enough to understand that comforting isn't exactly what she needs right now.

She needs the truth, however ugly it happens to be, however unkind, and the ugly truth is that grief is far from fucking pretty too; it is certainly not kind.

"I love you, Melissa Schemmenti," Barbara adds quietly—in the same hushed cadence that all of their unutterable truths seem to be encased in.

It's dirty, this confession, this boundless and eternal love.

It can't ever be spoken in a normal way and tone.

"You know that, don't you?"

The pad of her thumb is still pressed against Melissa's skin, and there is such little space between them, mere inches and other inconsequential measurements besides; temptation has never been a shorter bridge to indecorously cross and just as deliciously burn. This isn't simply a tender moment between bosom friends, she innately knows, and yet, by the virtue of who they are and their relationships with other people, it can't be anything more than that either, she implicitly understands. She's married. Barbara's married. God is watching. Society is judging. Neither of them will make a move that that they can't just as quickly take back.

"I love ya too, Barb," she replies anyway, leaning very slightly into the intimate touch, as though she could pretend for a moment that they don't have to play that awful game.

Just this one evening.

Just this singular time.

They inevitably will, of course—no doubt about that.

One of them will certainly pull away, and the other will instinctively follow, and together, they will tango themselves out of this senseless mess that they have made; they will offer each other plausible deniability as their highest and most sacred form of love. But for now and until that unwelcome moment, in this fractional sliver of a shared existence and eternity, Melissa dares to rest her tired cheek against Barbara's hand as though she's allowed, and Barbara doesn't flinch like she's been burned.

Silently, they construct a mutual fantasy where they can hold each other without hurting.

Or maybe more accurately still, where they can hurt together and not have been each other's sole and ruinous cause.

"Don't ever leave me," Melissa demands a little unfairly.

It's an unkeepable stipulation.

People leave all the time—by necessity, by choice, by coffin, or in Nana's case, urn.

But nonetheless and all the same—

"Wouldn't dream of it," Barbara promises softly, and Melissa chooses to believe her.

#work wives #reginianwrites #I wrote this for myself because it's been a long damn week #and I'm so sorry for your loss if it ends up being for you too #s: abbott elementary