THE LOVERS

Thorns

Gabrielle Harbowy

 

Lin splayed her fingers across the abstract thorns of the blue-faded tattoo, breathing along with the rise and fall of Celia’s slumber. Sunlight shafted through the break in the curtains, illuminating the fine hairs on Celia’s arm and catching in the diamond in Lin’s ring, making it shine a spatter of bright spots across the headboard.

Lin let out a slow, careful sigh.

Another night was over.

Her slender fingers traced the pattern that spanned between Celia’s shoulder blades, as they did every morning. It was roughly a triangle, downward-pointing. Briars with wickedly sharp tips surrounded a stylized blocky stone castle that rose from the center of the thorns. Lin chased the thorns with a fingertip, following each curl, but left the castle untouched.

She remembered when the ink had been fresh and black; remembered the way Celia had squirmed and flinched under the needle, and the way she’d whimpered relief when Lin had applied lotion—dutifully, twice daily—to the healing skin.

It had been their one-year anniversary present to each other. They’d gotten inked together, though they hadn’t gone for anything as cloyingly sweet as identical designs. Body art had been a common interest and needles had been a common fear, so they’d faced both together.

The fortune teller in the cramped storefront at the corner of Main and Spring had been first; as if her single needle was somehow a warm-up for the hours in the tattooist’s chair...Or maybe it was that they had sought the safety of needles in greater duration to chase the finality of that other, more frightening single sting away. She’d been at her craft in the same little shop for over a hundred years, people said—one of the Transhuman Collective, who’d taken the age-halting treatments before the serum had proven to have unpredictable effects. Supposedly she could tell, from rubbing a drop of blood between her fingertips, how a person would die. Supposedly, she had never been wrong. Cryptic, perhaps, but never wrong. They walked away from her scarf-strewn parlor in silence.

They’d decided on their tattoos en route. Celia had gotten the briars, protecting Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Lin had gotten the rose buds, on delicate spiraling barbed vines that snaked and clung down each forearm to her wrists. Her thorns were more subtle, hidden by the half-bloomed promise of beauty and growth, but had been shaded in such a way that they seemed to dimple just slightly into her own skin.

Fortunes, tattoos, then drinks...Drinks at the bar around the corner from Celia’s apartment, floating on alcohol and endorphins and the temporary invulnerability of denial and of youth.

Fortunes, tattoos, drinks...And then home, where Celia had proposed.

“If you’ll have me,” Celia had said solemnly, resolutely looking into Lin’s eyes. “If you still want to sleep beside me, knowing that someday, some morning, I’m not going to wake.”

“I’ll savor every morning with you all the more for it,” Lin promised in return. Celia had responded with a watery smile, taking Lin’s hand and pressing it to her lips to hide their quiver, closing her eyes to deny the tears that threatened to spill.

They celebrated their engagement with the ink still fresh. The soft white sheets bore the ghostly outlines of tribal art ever after.

Lin traced the complex, thorny design. She remembered all of that with crystal clarity, but she couldn’t remember the point at which the years had faded the ink from black to almost-blue on Celia’s brown skin.

Lin still had those sheets. She kept them, folded reverently, at the back of the closet. A part of her, unspoken, knew that she would sleep on them to keep Celia’s memory near, once sleep had stolen her Beauty away.

Her fingers rose from the fading ink to sift through the thinning hair at Celia’s temple. A few threads of silver shot through the mighty natural red now, along with the vibrant sun-enhanced copper strands that Lin had always loved.

That night, unruly curls had snared her fingers, the copper locks tangled after their energetic passion.

“I’ll give you as many as I can,” Celia had promised.

“Mornings?” Lin asked archly, settling back against the pillows to savor the way her body was tingling and pounding in hidden, delightful places. “Or those?”

In the present, remembering, Lin leaned forward to kiss the center of Celia’s sun-warmed back. Her wife shifted in her sleep, making a tiny, contented noise. A few heartbeats later, the pattern of her breathing started to shift, too; quieting, drifting toward wakefulness. Over the years, Lin had come to know the cadence of Celia’s breathing very well.

At first, though, it had been hard to sleep beside her. After.

Lin would lie awake, as if only her vigilant watch kept Celia’s chest rising and falling; as if that promised end would come the moment she looked away or relaxed her guard. She would drift, only to dream that the soft exhalations beside her had ceased. In her dreams, she would awaken with her breasts pressed to a cold, lifeless back instead of Celia’s fiery heat. If the nightmares themselves didn’t wake her, Lin would snap awake with the sinking weight of liquid lead in her stomach every time Celia shifted or went too quiet, or her breath hitched a certain way.

Fighting off death forever hadn’t worked; now, even if the means could be known, the timing remained a mystery.

Dying in one’s sleep was an old person’s way out, a marker of a quiet life well lived. Therefore, Lin had reasoned that they had years of invulnerability left to them. Eventually, comforted that it was all unspeakably far off—and aided by a prescription for anxiety that she tried to keep hidden from Celia at first—Lin slept. It wasn’t going to happen for years.

But that had been years ago.

 

 

Not that Celia was sick now, of course, but the signs of age were starting. Had started, and Lin could only wonder how, like with the tattoo ink fading from fresh to blue, she had not noticed them; she could only wonder how long she had not been noticing them. They were reminders that age was creeping up on them; that even if it wasn’t now, it was soon, and soon would only creep closer and closer until it was now.

Celia shifted in her sleep, toes of each foot curling alternately against Lin’s calf like a cat kneading its contentment. Lin kissed the center of her back again, right on the lowest point of the briars, as if daring them to cut her lip. In many of her dreams, those thorns were slick with her blood. But not today.

In some of the incarnations of Sleeping Beauty’s story, all the false suitors were killed by the briars and only the prince who was destined for her could make it through; the thorns parted for him, opening a clear path. In other versions, the prince hacked and slashed and burned and bled, just like all his predecessors, before emerging victorious at the castle gates. She wouldn’t be able to save Celia from her final sleep, she knew, no matter how she hacked and clawed at it. She sometimes wondered if that meant she wasn’t really the one destined to be with Celia after all; if she were somehow inferior, unworthy. If Celia’s real prince, or soulmate, or whatever you wanted to call it, would come along with some cure, something...something that Lin herself lacked. Some token to prove that other suitor the rightful one. She knew it was silly, especially after all these years, and she never let herself dwell on it for long, but occasionally—like now, in the quiet moments between waking and rising—the concern dimpled into her just a little, pushing at her skin like the points of her inked thorns.

Celia stretched languorously, arm moving beneath her pillow. A muffled rattling shifted with her, and she rolled over onto her back with the small plastic bottle clutched lightly in her hand. Lin gently retrieved the pills, reaching across her waking beauty to place the bottle upright on the nightstand.

Celia’s life was to end in sleep, but Lin’s end was, even more cryptically, barbs. Perhaps she’d be the valiant prince to the end, and trying to break down the impossibly high thorny walls around Celia’s fate would be the death of her. Or perhaps, someday after Celia was gone, Lin would indeed weaken and take the pills she let her wife guard for her each night. Their fates were entwined—they had known that since the night of the fortune teller, the tattoos, and the promises—so each did what little she could to protect the other, in her own way. When the time came, it wouldn’t be enough. Neither would be able to rescue each other through the thorns. But it was a token, a ritual that gave them each peace through the semblance of control, or at least the semblance of acknowledgment of what was, someday, to come.

Celia’s eyelids twitched restlessly, her eyes moving beneath them, still focused on the fading threads of her dreams.

Lin leaned down to awaken her with a kiss.