CHAPTER NINETEEN
Thisbe passed the bottle of wine back to Shy and smiled languidly up at the stars.
“Your turn,” she said.
“For what, my star sign? I’m a Taurus.” Shy grinned and took a drink from the rapidly dwindling wine.
Thisbe laughed and grabbed the wine back.
“No! Although that is interesting, yes. Noted. I meant, your turn to spill it. I bared my frigging soul to you in the middle of the street outside of a nice restaurant. Your turn. Why do you distrust people so much?”
Shy grabbed the bottle back and bought time by drinking slowly. It was a fair question, but one she wasn’t sure she could answer without sounding like an absolute lunatic, or worse.
“It’s complicated,” she tried.
Thisbe pinned her with a look, which strangely filled Shy with delight. It was the look. The kind only intimate lovers gave each other when they knew the other was full of shit. Regardless of anything else, she could always look back on the night that this bewitching woman gave her a look that implied they were going to be together forever, no matter what came out of the other’s mouth.
“Alright, alright,” she passed the bottle back and held up her hands in surrender. “It is complicated, but I’ll try. For you, I’ll try.”
“That is all I ask,” Thisbe giggled magnanimously. They had remembered the wine bottle and resumed drinking after they had finished (for the time) with the mind-blowing sex, and had been drifting aimlessly from one subject to another like teenagers on a first date.
Shy puffed out her cheeks and tried to figure out how to phrase certain things without coming off as a whiny, self-absorbed madwoman.
“When I was a kid… my parents split up when I was a baby, and my mother never got over it. She went from one bad boyfriend to another. Had a few more kids with a couple of them. I had to sort of be the grown-up in the house, from the age of six.”
Thisbe breathed out a strong puff of air and shook her head but waited for Shy to keep talking.
“A lot of kids were probably in the same position as me. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, just meant I had to grow up probably a little faster than most. So, I would make lunches for my half-siblings, I’d clean the house, I had to learn how to handle calls from debt collectors or child protective services. Anything to protect Mom.”
Shy laughed bitterly, took a swig from the bottle, and continued.
“I thought… I don’t fucking know what I thought. I guess I figured it would even out in the end. If I could just be strong enough, good enough, save Mom enough times from her own stupid ass, maybe she’d notice all the times I had saved her. Maybe she’d… fuck.”
“What?”
“Maybe she’d love me, you know? It sounds so stupid to say it aloud.”
Shy was shaking, and she hated herself for it. Since when did she tremble at the thought of her piece of shit mother? Since when did she tell anyone about this? Since Thisbe, was when.
“It doesn’t sound stupid at all, honey,” Thisbe put a hand on her shoulder and looked up at her with those big, pale, gorgeous eyes of hers. “Sounds like your mother needed a good shaking.”
Shy laughed at that, then shrugged.
“Well, at any rate, I used the Internet to figure out how to raise myself, then I raised my half-siblings, and along the way kept our mom alive. When I was in high school, she started seeing this one guy… I mean he knew I was a lesbian, and he didn’t care. Maybe it turned him on even more, I don’t know.”
Shy felt her skin go cold, crawling with goosebumps at the memory, and she pushed past it. Thisbe, bless her, did not ask for further details. She just looked sadly up at Shy as she continued.
“Yeah so anyway, long story short, I survive all that just to find out that Mom had spent the college money I’d been saving up from after school jobs on bailing out her pervy boyfriend three times without telling me. I had these big dreams of being a veterinarian or something.” Shy laughed bitterly.
“After that I told her, don’t fucking ask me for another thing again. Just don’t. And you know, I thought I had escaped all her excuses, all her lies, all the ways she protected literally everyone but me. But in the end I’d just sort of internalized it all, you know? I moved in with the first girl I fucked and then woke up one day to an empty apartment and the realization that she’d robbed me of everything I was worth.
“I tried a few more times, dating and working, keeping my head down. Somehow, I always managed to pick the worst possible human to get in bed with. I jumped from one sack of misery to the next. And all the while, I kept playing the dutiful eldest daughter. I’d show up to Mom’s holiday parties and every time, I was put to work. I was never a guest, not like her other kids. It was always ‘Shiloh, can you bartend for the night?’ ‘Shiloh, can you be the designated driver?’ ‘Shiloh, can you go outside and talk to the cops? You’re so good with them.’
“I was so close—so close—to just walking off the first bridge I came across and ending my miserable existence. Then I saw this ad for Sirona. A free shuttle to another world and as much land as I could successfully manage on my own?” Shy shrugged. “Plants and animals had always been a comfort to me, back on Earth. I’d already been programmed since practically birth to take care of other things, but at least a cat or a cactus didn’t thank me by getting drunk and slapping the shit out of me in the middle of the night.”
Thisbe couldn’t help but wrap her arms tighter around Shy at that, as if trying to reach back in time and protect her from any pain. Shy smiled briefly and shook her head.
“My past is my past. I signed up for a ranch on Sirona and never looked back.”
“It’s not the past, though,” Thisbe argued. “The way you keep yourself from accepting love, accepting friendship—present company excluded, of course. You’re stuck in that past, haunted by those ghosts.”
Shy didn’t answer for a long time. She knew Thisbe was right, but at the same time, how could she explain it? How was it even possible to describe the sinking, cowardly, quavering feeling she got in her belly when confronted with anyone new? How could she begin to explain that to put any trust in another human being was as easy as closing her eyes and walking blithely off a mountain?
At the same time, she felt deeply ashamed that these things would be so difficult, when she knew they shouldn’t be. Everyone had friends. Everyone had loved ones. Everyone could let their guard down now and then, to some extent—except her.
Shy felt herself retreating inward. It would only be a matter of time before a woman like Thisbe grew tired of her cowardice. She would get bored, get disgusted. Maybe even now she was already regretting—
“Hey.” Thisbe’s strong yet gentle voice cut through Shy’s internal downward spiral. Shy blinked slowly and looked into Thisbe’s starlit eyes. “Where did you go just now?”
“Thisbe… I’m so messed up. Really.”
To her surprise, Thisbe laughed. Not maliciously, not tauntingly. If anything, she sounded relieved.
“You and me both, my love. Did you miss the part where my parents groomed me from birth to be their perfect, obedient little scion and then when I didn’t make babies fast enough they scheduled an incest baby for me?”
Shy winced and Thisbe’s eyes grew wide.
“Not that it’s a competition! Oh, geez. Listen, I didn’t—my point is that we come from fucked up families. So what? Lots of people do. You’ve got therapists on this moon, right?” When Shy nodded, Thisbe nodded back. “Alright, then. So we get whatever kind of help we need and we hold hands and we step into our own future. Together. Can you do that? Will you do that with me?”
And what else could Shy say to a question like that? What else could she do but give her heart entirely to this glorious angel, this completely unexpected woman? Shy nodded.
“Together,” she said. When her insides wouldn’t stop shaking, she added: “It won’t be easy for me. I know it’s not easy for you, too. And I don’t want you to think I’m a coward, I just…”
Shy didn’t quite know the words she was looking for, but it turned out it didn’t matter. Thisbe just smiled and took Shy’s face in her hands and kissed her deeply, until all thoughts of betrayal or bad families drifted off, as far away as Earth itself.
“We’ll figure it out,” Thisbe whispered.
For the first time in her life, Shy had faith that they would.