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Fingertip imprints are all over the window, steam from the hot faucet water revealing them slowly. Her mom washes the dishes while she sits on the counter, half listening to Lexi, not any worse than any other time that she half listens to her. It’s even kind of better. Lexi wouldn’t know what to do with the full weight of attention crushing the tender shoots of her tentatively revealed fears and hopes right now.
Suze is more meticulous about the chore than you might assume, holding the dish this way and that under the lone sink light. It’s one of the few times her mom stills during the day, her thoughts clearing, the thin sliver of time after her first buzz wears off and before her evening one starts to kick in a reflection pond in her own mind she stands at everyday like clockwork.
She looks both life tired and tired tired when she’s like this. A sudden need to tell her mom she loves her wraps up and around her body like a crushing hug, the words hanging heavy off her lips, the corners of them little anchors sinking down with every passing beat she wants to and doesn’t, but every second that passes pulls her farther from just say it until the moment passes and it’s too late. It’s not an unfamiliar sensation, even if the disappointment in herself stings just as cold as it did the first time. And will the next time.
“One day, honey, you’ll meet someone, and you’ll start talking and then you’ll never stop talking.”
She can’t imagine that, and she doesn’t respond.
//
Lexi is used to talking to herself. Even when talking to people she’s talking to herself, transactional conversations at best. Lexi tells people what they want to hear, or what she thinks they want to hear. Or, in the case of Cassie, not what Cassie wants to hear but what she really thinks, and even then the words don’t come out right. Lexi finds herself saying things she doesn’t mean, or in a way that’s way too mean and she doesn’t recognize what she’s saying, little trainwrecks of words, crashed and blurred together, inflicting a wreckage Lexi can see in Cassie’s face after it’s too late to stop herself.
So she refrains when she can from talking, observing is fine, even when she wants to speak up. (The memory of her dad leaving the house with items stolen from them in the dead of night pops up like a shitty surprise. He stands at the bottom of their stairs sweaty and bruised and not her dad anymore and she doesn’t speak up and it’s fine fine fine.)
But she sits on a stranger’s couch in a goldenrod shirt minutes before midnight on New Years Eve and she’s spoken to by someone she kind of knows, and the words are like champagne, bubbling over and spilling from her lips for so long they trickle over into the New Year. And Fez hears her. And she might say stupid things, but his quirks and laughs and curious looks up and around her face and hands aren’t at her, they’re with her, and she’s see through for the first time not because she’s ignored, but because she’s seen through clear to the heart.
Lexi never needs to get high off anything other than the warmth she feels when he remembers what she says. Or references it.
She tries not to be bereft when the night ends, and refuses to cry when she gets into bed later, an uncertainty that she’ll ever get over herself and text him vibrating her bones, and an uncertainty in him that he’ll ever want to talk to her again embarrassingly hurtful. (She’s shocked at how easily she glazes over his fight with Nate, but she’s trying something new, and that includes following her heart and trusting herself a little more, and she just feels like–there’s more there than she knows. Fez was kind to her, soft and genuine and Nate–Nate couldn’t spell genuine if he tried.)
So she wakes up on the first day of the new year and feels new, and decides that this new Lexi does new things.
//
Days later, her newborn confidence is cracking like thin ice in the harsh lighting of Fez’s store, pinpricks racing up her spine, raising the fine hairs up like dominoes. She’s a baby deer, staring at a package of chips like she’ll be tested on it later. (She’d fail, she might be looking, but she’s really just breathing in and out, in and out, a mantra loud enough in her mind she’s worried the sound could spill from her ears into the open room.)
He can hear her then, too. The imprint of her body is all the communication he needs from her to know that this isn’t right, he already knew, but she’s on a razor's edge of I’m fine and help me and Fez is right there with her, his eyes giving a quick glance to hers, steady, even if tinged uncertain in the depths of all that blue, looking too much like trust me for a second real meeting, but Lexi does, too much, regardless, for a second real meeting.
Somewhere between Cal coming in and Fez watching him go from the driveway a thread must form between her and him–he’s different, and she’s different. Something about the sudden danger a resetting of a bone, and the worst of the initial awkwardness is over. He drops her off, windows down to let in the scent of fresh cut grass and tells her to text him later. She does one better and calls him with shaking hands but a steady voice when she thinks enough time has passed and asks if he got home safe.
//
Days and weeks and months pass with countless texts and minutes spent on the phone. She’s folding her laundry with airpods in, he’s putting groceries down on the counter on speakerphone. It’s mundane but thrilling and constant and he gets her when her moods shift into uncertainty and she listens when he talks to her about his mom, and what he wishes he knew about her. She’s not sure what she defined love as before this, but she thinks being understood is being loved. Or being heard. Maybe both.
What she does know is that one day they started talking.
Every word he says is a memory pressed into her mind like little love letters for her to open up later and reread until the creases wear out and the ink starts to smudge from her fingertips tracing the curve of each line.
She hopes they never stop.