Luna shows her the flat on a day when a southerly is booming across the city, the sky so bright it’s nearly white overhead while the thin sun does not a thing to warm it. The air is so frigid it feels like it might snap as they step forwards into it, but Alicia always feels a little like that with Luna; as though the atmosphere is brittle, electric-veined.
She’s led down a dark hall and into a kitchen with a rattling wood-framed window. It’s potentially colder in here than it is outside, and the area where a dining table would sit on the other side of the kitchen bench is home to two mismatched chairs and an upturned fruit crate with a pineapple stencilled onto it.
Luna said before that her rent is very low, considering that this is an inner city flat, but Alicia can see why. The place is a shithole to the nth degree. Alicia tilts her head and wonders whether she can convince Luna to move in with her, and then gives it up before she can really start.
“What do you think?” Luna asks, spreading her arms to include the entirety of the room in her statement. She nearly touches the wall on both sides of her. Her eyes are the same colour as the sliver of sky visible out the window behind her, her hair a shade more brilliant. It’s a little unfortunate that her eyebrows are the same colour too, like two fuzzy cerulean caterpillars have crawled onto her face.
“You’re beautiful,” Alicia tells her, and earns a laugh so bright she can’t help but join in.
The two of them are nothing alike, this darling, dazzling girl and Alicia. It’s like a lion trying to date a butterfly, Alicia remembers a mutual friend whispering, conspiratorial, into her ear in a Newtown coffee shop. Back then, she’d smiled careful and close-mouthed, and thought, maybe. Now she wonders whether it even matters.
“That’s not what I meant,” Luna says, head tilted and her eyes alight.
“I know,” Alicia replies, and grins with her teeth showing.
She fell in love with Luna pretty early, she thinks. Sometime between their first coffee date on the waterfront, Luna laughing like wind chimes against a breathless backdrop of refracted sun and tourists peering into the sea water, and the first time Luna called her sweetheart with that particular tone she uses.
It’s not something she thinks about, much. It takes over in the quiet moments, when they’re together in bed like bookends or sharing the grotty couch in the flat on a peaceful morning with Alicia’s toes tucked under Luna’s thigh. When they’re apart, sometimes, because Alicia can’t start thinking about Luna without getting lost.
So, actually, she thinks about it a lot.
There’s such finality in the word ‘love’. A single syllable that you can’t take back without something breaking—and maybe that’s words in general, the finality matched with the brevity. The idea that matches with the sound. She’s scared of the concept, of a feeling that should outlive even the faintest echoes of the spoken word.
Love in permanence frightens her. Also, she doesn’t know if Luna loves her back.
Alicia has become spoiled by something approaching adulthood—post-university and police college, she turns on the heater whenever she likes, and eats things other than mince or occasionally chicken thighs, and has an apartment on The Terrace where the windows don’t let in draughts.
Luna, who is doing some complicated postgraduate degree in maths, doesn’t have those luxuries, and doesn’t like Alicia paying for things. That’s fine, except that Alicia despises being cold.
“Your feet are freezing,” the pillow mutters to her at one in the morning. She has been asleep, went to bed before Luna because of some assignment due at midnight. At some point Luna has crept in beside her and Alicia has attached herself like a limpet, cold toes and all, utterly undisturbed by the rising and falling of her chest-pillow until it began to speak.
“You’re going to die of scurvy,” Alicia replies thickly. There’s no connection except for bad life choices. Alicia’s is that they’re sleeping here and not in her apartment, where it’s not sub-zero in the bedroom.
“I’m going to die of frostbite,” Luna corrects. She sounds affectionate, pressing a kiss to Alicia’s forehead. “Go back to sleep.”
Luna won’t actually die of scurvy, because Alicia fills her fridge with jewel-bright out-of-season vegetables on the pretext that she’s here eating them. Alicia falls back asleep smiling about that.
It’s not all pretty, though, and not all peace.
Luna gives the impression that she’s just pink-cheeked smiles, wispy and whimsical, but when she fights she turns tooth-and-claw on Alicia with her words. It stings like wounds from something sharp that shouldn’t be, paper cuts beading red in all of Alicia’s tender spots. Some of those places aren’t even mapped until Luna seeks them and stabs her there, there, there.
Alicia’s from a soft-spoken family, and followed that tradition from the moment she said anything more than broken sounds, so it’s alien to her at first. She’s also born of a farmer’s wife and a Scottish-stubborn father, so she and Luna are the same brand of intractable.
“It’s like listening to my parents fight,” one of Luna’s flatmates confides in Alicia in the kitchen one morning, mournful.
“God, I hope not,” Alicia replies, full of vague horror. She and Luna argued about preserving endangered species last night. At this point, Alicia could happily walk out of this place and not come back for days.
“No, I just mean—the two of you seem so stable, yeah?”
How the rookie cop and the maths major with blue hair can seem an archetype of stability, Alicia doesn’t know. Perhaps when you’re a twenty-year-old uni student, your judgement gets skewed. She hums absently, breathing in bergamot steam from her mug in front of the window. There’s a stunning view of six square metres of cracked concrete out there.
“I would want you to get custody in the divorce, that’s all I’m saying,” the flatmate continues peaceably. She’s wearing a Hurricanes jersey and harem pants. What the hell does she know?
Alicia is an attractive woman, which means that she knows all about the predictability of people. Men hollering out their car windows at her? Predictable. People underestimating her, blonde and slight and pretty? Predictable. People calling her beautiful, calling her princess, calling her bitch? Predictable.
She would dearly like to live in a world that doesn’t conform to the rules she was taught the second she hit puberty. She would also like to live in a world that doesn’t continually disappoint her in the process of proving her right, but because she knows that will never happen, she’s made a career of it instead.
Being a cop has its perks. Alicia, despite what almost everyone has ever said to her after looking at her, is good at it. She’s good with people, calm in a crisis, and never hesitates to do the shit work that comes with the job. Better yet, she likes it.
But it has its downsides, too.
Her nightshift finishes at 7a.m., and by the time she gets to Luna’s the winter sun is creeping up over the hills to the east. Luna only has afternoon classes on Thursdays so she’s still fast asleep in bed when Alicia lets herself into her room and shucks her clothes like she can’t bear to have them on her skin anymore.
Luna stirs when Alicia presses into the sleep-warm safety of her body, making a soft sound. She lets Alicia bury her face in her neck, cradling her nape with a clumsy hand, just holding her there out of pure welcome. She’s not awake enough to comfort intentionally, but the unintentional version works just as well.
“Good morning,” Luna mutters after a few minutes, the words sliding into one. G’morning. She’s stroking Alicia’s hair, absent. “Okay?”
Alicia’s silence speaks for her. She has bad shifts, sometimes. They aren’t usually like this.
It’s the ones involving girls that get to her.
“Okay,” Luna says, and then, “Oh, sweetheart.”
Alicia breathes through it, because she doesn’t like the alternative. People are predictable, and so, in a way, is she. They don’t stop. Neither will she.
Luna doesn’t, either. For someone so inherently insubstantial in appearance, she bears up beautifully under Alicia’s weight. She’s stronger than she looks, easy with the concept of pain in other people without swallowing it herself.
Alicia, who has never been able to stop feeling all the time with her heart of glass, is a little bit envious.
One day when Luna is at a lecture, Alicia lets herself into the flat with a bucket full of glow-in-the-dark paints. She perches a stepladder on top of the pineapple crate—ignoring the critical voice in the back of her head that sounds like her father, scolding—and paints her best approximation of the night sky across the ceiling of Luna’s bedroom.
It turns out better than she expects it to. When she switches the lights out that night, Luna gasps over the spangles and pinpricks of faux-light in eerie greens and blues and purples. The wonder in her tone makes Alicia’s throat squeeze tight.
“You should move in here,” Luna says a little while later, the two of them entangled and bare to one another.
Alicia opens her mouth to say but your flat is a rathole, or I can’t remember the names of the people you live with so I call them Boy Flatmate and Girl Flatmate, or wouldn’t it be better for you to move in with me instead? Instead of any of those perfectly reasonable responses, what comes out is, “Are you sure?”
She swears there’s a tremble of uncertainty in her tone, just barely audible. She strangles it.
“Why would I ask if I wasn’t sure?” Luna teases gently, pulling her fingers through Alicia’s hair. “It’ll be fun. You practically live here anyway.”
As nice as Alicia’s apartment is, she hasn’t spent more than a couple of nights a week there in—she isn’t sure how long. “As long as you let me pay part of the rent.”
“Don’t overthink it, Alicia,” Luna says. She’s still teasing. She says Alicia’s name broken all the way down, Ah-lee-cee-ah, rather than the more compact Ah-leesh-ah that Alicia is used to. There’s something lovely in that extra syllable.
Alicia isn’t often criticised for overthinking: recklessness is her chief failing, according to most people. But in this case her brain is repeating words like permanence and love, phrases like I don’t know how you feel and I’m afraid to assume and more afraid to ask. She’s not a big talker. Luna, clever with words as she is with numbers, is better at it than her. Alicia wonders sometimes whether Luna can just read things like Braille from her body, torn between horror at the idea and God I hope so.
“Okay. Yes,” Alicia’s mouth says, and she feels in that moment as though everything in her reach might crumble to ashes.
She moves in. She brings her heater with her.
She holds Luna so, so close at night, unable to shake the fear that she might slip through her fingers. She holds the steady beat of her heart and her slow breathing in the cups of her hands until they overflow. She says goodbye with touches so soft that Luna doesn’t even stir.
I can’t let you go, she thinks, with a kind of desperation she feels in her bones, corpse-bared.
I can’t let you go.
At some point, Luna notices that fragility too. It’s Alicia’s fault, drawing back in an attempt to protect her graceless heart and going so far that Luna feels like they can’t reach each other. It’s not true—Alicia is right here, gasping her last and wishing it didn’t hurt so bad, waiting for Luna to push in the knife—but she’s a better actor than anyone would give her credit for.
If she’d considered it before, Alicia would have imagined that Luna would retreat if ever forced into this situation. Instead, she stays close like that alone can pull Alicia back from the brink. It’s in her voice when she says Alicia’s name—Ah-lee-cee-ah—and her firm and steady hands, the breathlessness she drags out of Alicia with her body and the quietude of them together, in tandem, side-by-side in the bathroom mirror.
She’s doing precisely that while Alicia muddles her way through plastering up cracks in the bathroom wall, sitting with her back against the bathtub and a textbook in her lap. The full moon trickles silver down her throat, still as a statue and insubstantial as a faerie.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” she asks, words dropping like stone into the silence between Alicia’s muttered curse words.
“I don’t know,” Alicia replies after a long moment, her hands still moving. She really should have told Boy Flatmate to do this job. “What’s in it for me?”
Luna doesn’t look up, instead chewing on her pen for a few moments before scrawling something into the margin. “My eternal gratitude? My first edition of Alice in Wonderland? Really great sex?”
“I have all that already.” For now, anyway.
Luna empties out a sigh, laced with something that might be the cousin of impatience. Then she puts her book aside and stands. “Come with me.”
She leads Alicia down the hall to the old-fashioned sash window at the end, pushing it upwards. The flat crawls awkwardly up three levels to fit in with the slant of the hillside, with the kitchen and living room on the bottom floor, a bedroom and the bathroom in the middle, and two more bedrooms on the top. Climbing out the window puts them on the flat roof of the kitchen, Alicia inching her weight over it while Luna walks like gravity or an inconvenient weak spot wouldn’t dare ruin her moment.
She sits, patting the dew-damp patch beside her. When she looks up at Alicia to check her progress, there’s an entire universe inside the sheen in her eyes, so Alicia does as wordlessly commanded and entirely ignores her restless heart.
“Lie back,” Luna says, flopping over. It’s bitter cold with the sky clear, but the light pollution cuts their view down substantially. After a moment Luna hums and continues, “This seemed more impressive in the planning stage.”
“Most things do, with you,” Alicia teases gently. She reaches over and takes Luna’s hand, looks at the moon and counts the stars bright enough to shine through to them.
“Tell me,” Luna says, eventually, little more than a whisper. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Alicia sighs and doesn’t look away from the sky. Even with a solid structure at her back she feels a little like she’s falling. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Of course not,” Luna replies. “Why, did I mislead you by asking?”
Alicia has to laugh at that, a soft sound that breaks, shatters. She doesn’t have the courage—isn’t sure she ever has—and in this moment their delicate balance is skewed towards solstice. Whether the power is in her favour or Luna’s is a mystery still.
Equinox, eclipse, collision. Things like the earth, so vast that to the eye they could be flat if you didn’t know better. Alicia should know better than to compare the simplicity and insignificance of her life to the stars themselves, but looking up she knows which can move her the most.
Luna’s fingers tighten around hers, like she’s holding Alicia down.
“That question?” she says quietly. “The one you’re afraid to ask me? The answer is yes.”
Alicia holds back, searching for gravity. The gratitude that rolls over her is overwhelming, gathering thick on the back of her tongue. “Just like that?” Her voice comes out incredibly, achingly frail, and for a moment she wishes that the roof or the ground or the sky would swallow her after all.
Luna sighs. “Just because you’re emotionally useless doesn’t mean I’m going to let it rub off on me.”
The laugh that bubbles up in Alicia’s throat emerges more like a squawk. It’s embarrassing, but the release of pressure is a blinding relief. “Wow, thank you.”
Luna rolls over, pressing them half together. Grit drops out of her hair into Alicia’s face, making her blink. She’s warm, a solid weight, and her smile gleams soft in the dark under the double glint of her eyes. Even ghostly in greyscale, there’s no impermanence in her. Alicia has known it, but now she feels it down to her bones.
“Hey,” Luna says, like a request for attention, like a welcome home. “You’re welcome.”