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It’s important to remember that Joan never thinks any of it is going to end well.
She’s not an idiot.
Bob’s another young, scruffy boy with that kind of insolent swagger that she knows is going to work out for him, writing songs that are so beautiful she wants to cry. He’s cocky, and insensitive, and pulls her in like a magnet. And sue her, okay? She likes singing with him. He’s not all good, but the good parts are plenty to outweigh the bad. At least for a little while.
Sylvie’s too good for him, and Joan knows this as well as she knows that Sylvie’s going to stick right by his side. She understands this because she understands what it is to love Bob, and she understands what it means to want to help someone, and she understands how it is a complicated thing, loving someone while the rest of the world is falling in love with them too. Sylvie is, in addition to being Bob’s girlfriend, smart and funny and organized, and Joan half-wonders what Sylvie could do for herself if she weren’t keeping Bob from floating away, like a kid at the beach with a kite.
Sylvie doesn’t like the arrangement. Joan knows this.
Joan knows that she should probably refuse.
But Bob comes to her, clean and cologne-d, sings into her microphone that way that sends electricity all the way down her spine, and he says we talked, me and Sylvie. She doesn’t mind.
Joan’s pretty sure Sylvie does mind.
But people do difficult things for the people they love. Joan knows this too.
So none of it is romantic and none of it is going to work out. But Joan’s lonely. And Bob doesn’t treat her like anyone else does. She likes waking up more when he’s next to her, and she doesn’t need all that much, really.
She’s supposed to be strong, and above the mess of it anyway.
So she says yes, and Bob kisses her, hands at her waist in the way she likes best, and it feels so good that she forgets, for a little while, how bad the ending might turn out.
--
Joan sees Sylvie for the first time in a photo on the wall of the apartment Sylvie shares with Bob.
Bob sees her looking, and flips the photo over.
Joan doesn’t ask.
The world almost ended last night, and this morning is all the more precious for its existence. Coffee has never tasted so good, Bob’s song is steady under her feet, and Joan feels oddly giddy. She is glad to be alive, glad to be here. Bob’s originals are better than the songs from his first record, good enough that her skin prickles at every new line he sings, and there are worse ways she can think to spend a morning, leaning over his shoulder, learning his melodies.
Later that morning he presses her back against the mattress, and she tangles her hands in his hair. A feeling like happiness thrums through her body. She wants more of this.
--
He visits her in Monterey, in her big beautiful house that might be haunted. She’s never told anyone this, because then she’d have to explain her ghosts, the weight on her shoulders, but Bob makes the ghosts a little quieter. One morning she wakes up to him singing, trailing a finger down her spine, and she thinks is this love? To wake up to someone else, to want them closer, to be kissed as you awaken like a flower in bloom?
--
Joan sees Sylvie for real, in the flesh and blood and bone, onstage in Newport.
Sylvie’s in the audience, face drawn, and it’s the pinch in her features, the closed-off set of her shoulders that draws Joan’s eye.
Everyone else across the field is smiling, or at least peaceful, lost in thought and the roll of the music, but Sylvie looks afraid. The fear thickens when Bob steps onstage, peaks when Joan sings into the microphone with him. Singing with Bob is starting to feel like home, or a sort of home, gold-tinted with enough room for both of them. Joan’s never had a real desire to be part of an onstage pair, to be forced to play off someone else and hand over half of this only way she’s ever really felt calm.
But Bob is different.
She likes the way their voices sound together, the way it feels to dip and turn around someone else, how slack can be given and taken and pulled again.
It’s safer, somehow, even with less control.
They’re careful in public, cordial and professional and friendly, but sometimes after they sing together he’ll dip her into a kiss offstage, around the back where no one can see. None of it’s romance, but some of it might be starting to feel too good. Joan is reminded of this, the precarity, how passion and stability do not equal one another, when she sees Sylvie. Sylvie’s face, before she learns Sylvie’s name.
Oh, she thinks to herself, watching the way Sylvie’s eyes track between Bob and herself, the tightening when Joan leans in, when Bob returns the favor. That must be her.
It's easier to pretend no one’s getting hurt when Joan doesn’t have a face to attach to the girl she’s pretty sure Bob has. She wants to be cutthroat, and sing these songs she loves with this man she keeps telling herself not to trust. But now the other girl has a face. And she loves Bob. And suddenly Joan isn’t so sure that this little arrangement really is keeping everyone’s feelings from getting hurt.
--
“You need to talk to her,” Joan forces herself to say, offstage when Bob’s looking at her instead of the crowd.
Bob sighs, boyish in his indecision. “I know.”
“Tell me how it goes?” she asks, hesitant, afraid this shows too many of her cards. “I don’t-“ I don’t want to lose you, but she can’t say that.
He nods, and she is hit with a flash of affection, how he makes up for all the ways he is frustrating with all the ways he is kind. “Me too.”
He kisses her then, and she kisses back. He leaves to find the girl from the crowd, and Joan tries to remind herself that she has her own two legs, how she can stand on those legs just fine.
--
Joan walks through all the rooms in her house that evening, singing to the ghosts. She tries one of Bob’s songs, a hymn from growing up, and The Wizard of Oz, come out, come out, wherever you are. The young lady is still falling from the star, and Bob is home with his girlfriend, and Joan is not lonely. She has herself, which is all she’s ever needed.
--
“She doesn’t mind,” Bob says the next time they play together, breath hot against her ear.
Joan tries to hold very still. She tries not to melt against him.
He holds her guitar out, uncharacteristically careful. “I missed you.”
Joan wants all of this to work out. She doesn’t want to step on a landmine, and she wants to believe that maybe she can have both of these things, the music and the warmth, together through the secure weight of her instrument in her hand. “Okay.” She nods. “If she says it’s okay, I’m okay with this.”
--
Sylvie doesn’t come to every show, but when she does, Joan finds her in the audience within seconds. Always near the back, always one face among many, always melancholy and resigned. Sometimes, during the saddest songs, Joan will pretend she’s singing right to Sylvie. I understand this pain, she wants to say, I feel it too.
--
One night in New York, Bob calls her. Come over, murmurs his voice on the phone, and Joan’s body burns. She remembers to ask, isn’t Sylvie home?
Yeah, Bob replies, we’ll all have some fun.
--
Joan goes, wrapped in her long coat against the cold, skirt brushing against her knees as she walks up the stairs from the subway to Bob and Sylvie’s front door. Bob meets her, smiling, hair tousled and shoulders relaxed. She hasn’t seen him look like this in a while, playful and present. Sylvie’s on the couch, tense but trying not to be. Joan sees this, and sees the effort, and feels something of the same fight in her own body. Sylvie’s shirt looks soft, the neckline a delicate scoop under her throat.
“So,” Joan pauses. “How does this work?” The walls are covered in the minutia of Bob and Sylvie’s life, memories woven into the ways they wake up together, talk over breakfast, kiss before leaving for the day. She focuses on a photo of their hands intertwined, walking down the street. She wants desperately to be cool girl and worldly singer but here she is, in the apartment Sylvie decorated, not sure what to do next.
Bob looks over to Sylvie, who uncrosses her legs, takes a breath, nods. He leans over and kisses her. It’s familiar, comfortable in the way her fingers curl against the back of his neck.
Then he walks over to Joan, and puts his hands around her waist. He grins, just for her. “Like this.”
Joan can feel Sylvie’s gaze, the wide brightness of her eyes. Bob kisses Joan, long, deep, then pulls her over to the couch. Sylvie’s waiting. Bob slides one hand up Sylvie’s thigh, keeps the other at Joan’s hip, and when Joan looks up she’s met with Sylvie’s gaze, questioning. The question is something between are we really doing this and are you sure and then Bob urges them both forwards, ever so slightly.
Sylvie darts forward, kisses Joan square on the mouth with determination, and it all goes from there.
After, Joan thinks about Sylvie’s laugh, bell-like when Bob runs a hand up her side, and Bob’s mouth, tasting Sylvie on his tongue. She accepts the offer when it is next extended, and the next, and the next.
--
Sylvie comes to a few more concerts, and somewhere in the spring, as the year stretches into summer and everything turns pink, she starts to smile more often. Joan can find her more easily now, the contours of her face shaded with meanings beyond discomfort. She sings the happier songs in Sylvie’s direction now, and sometimes Sylvie almost smiles, like the music doesn’t hurt as much these days.
--
June brings warm pavement, the beginnings of the festival route, and a more distracted Bob, half the time looking up into the ether, lost in what he’s waiting for next. Joan comes back from two weeks in Georgia lonely and missing his warmth.
She’s met with a voicemail from him, call me, I miss you, and when she dials back, legs crossed on the edge of her bed, suitcase not yet unpacked, a coughing fit greets her on the other end.
“Sylvie?” It’s not Bob, there’s none of his whine or rasp, just the throaty sound of someone struggling to breathe.
“Oh,” Sylvie’s voice cracks and whispers off, “I thought this might be Bobby. He’s supposed to call.”
“Are you okay?” Joan feels her own chest constricting at Sylvie’s labored breaths, “you sound really sick.”
Sylvie coughs again, groans, clears her throat. “It’s just a cold. Bobby’s away. Last minute. Albert put him on a plane. He’ll be back in a few days.”
--
An hour later Joan knocks on Bob and Sylvie’s apartment door, waits, knocks again, waits, knocks again, and keeps it up until it creaks open, limp and listing Sylvie leaning against the wall on the other side.
“Joan,” she sighs, closes her eyes, “I’m okay. You didn’t need to come.”
Joan nudges the door open with her foot, and cranes her neck to see inside. It’s dark, and stale. Joan’s been inside this apartment when it’s messy, cans and paper and ideas all over the floor, when it’s full of food, when it’s tight and clean and open.
Sylvie and Bob are many things, but none of those things are boring, and none of them are stale. Joan, for a reason she doesn’t quite understand, doesn’t want to walk away. And she could! She absolutely could. She could turn around, spend the night with her guitar, find a bar, read a book, unpack, do anything else than convince this woman who is not exactly her friend to take some cold medicine.
Sylvie shivers, and her face creases with misery. “You don’t owe me this.”
Joan doesn’t know exactly how to say maybe not, but we’ve seen each other naked, I’ve kissed the man you live with after you and tasted you in his mouth, you clap now, for me, and doesn’t all of that add up? Doesn’t it mean something? “Sylvie. Let me in.”
Sylvie pauses, then presses her forehead against the wall. “I warned you.”
Joan places a hand on her shoulder, and squeezes, gently. Sylvie’s sticky and sickly hot. “Consider me warned. Now go get in bed.”
--
Joan spends the next four days watching bad TV with Sylvie, making soup and tea and dosing out cold medicine into a shot glass.
She does three loads of laundry, runs Sylvie a bath and helps her into it, and prompts twice-daily vaporub applications.
Sylvie coughs and sneezes, and after the first day seems to give up on any sort of pretending to be put together.
Joan’s never seen Sylvie like this, so uninhibited, so caught up in the throws of illness that she can’t keep up the wall she usually erects when Joan walks in the room. She doesn’t know exactly how it makes her feel. They’ve never spent this much time together, one on one, even if Sylvie spends most of it sleeping, nose running and cheeks pinkly feverish. It’s not as unpleasant as it could be. It’s not as unpleasant as caring for an unwilling patient should be.
Joan watches a lot of soap operas, curled up on the couch while Sylvie tosses and turns, and reads four books. She hasn’t taken care of someone like this in a long time, and it surprises her how it spins the turning of the world, the way time slows and stretches as Sylvie’s fever breaks, or when Sylvie tilts her head against Joan’s knee while Joan brushes out her illness-tangled hair.
On the third day, as evening tips into night and cool air begins to waft in from the open windows, Sylvie turns to Joan and asks, voice still mostly gone and eyes red, “Sing to me?”
And of course, Joan does.
She pulls Bob’s backup guitar off the wall, his first, oldest one, what he was holding when they met, and turns it over in her hands. She starts with a lullaby, one of the first songs she ever learned, then moves to Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Unconsciously, the first few bars of Blowin’ In the Wind run through her fingers, but she pulls back. Her singing Bob’s songs are a sore spot, she’s not oblivious to this.
Sylvie’s eyes flicker open. “You can play something he wrote. I don’t mind.”
“It’s okay if you do.” Joan plucks a series of soft notes.
“No,” Sylvie shakes her head, “I really don’t mind anymore. Those songs sound good when you sing them.”
Too sick to lie, so she means it. Joan isn’t sure what to make of that. She plays The Girl from North Country, then one of her own, then a hymn from being young and bored in the pews, and Sylvie relaxes. Joan watches, muscle by muscle, tension released and something softer taking over Sylvie’s sleeping form, like a small infusion of happiness.
--
Bob gets back two days later. Sylvie, nearly returned to her normal self, hesitates, bites her lip, reaches out and catches Joan’s arm just before she leaves for her own home in the wake of Sylvie’s recovery. “Are you trying to get points with Bobby? Is that why you helped me?”
Joan frowns, surprised. “No. It seemed like you needed help. It wasn’t about him at all.”
Sylvie’s lips lift into a new kind of smile. “It’s nice to be your friend, Joan.”
Oh. Joan’s stomach warms. “It’s nice to be your friend too.”
--
“And she’s saying we need more, more than marriage and kids and making dinner at six o’clock every night.” Sylvie falls back on the couch, face flushed.
Joan laughs from her perch at the counter. “You needed a book to tell you that?”
“Of course not,” Sylvie pulls herself up, rolling her eyes at Joan’s teasing, “but isn’t it nice to hear someone else say it? To confirm we deserve more? To publish it? Come on,” she folds her arms, playfully commanding, “you like this just as much as I do. Admit it.”
Joan lifts her hands in mock surrender. “You’re right.”
“No,” Sylvie stands up, crosses to the counter, “for real. It’s not bad to go after the things you want.”
“I know that,” Joan’s voice sounds smaller all of a sudden to her own ears, shy at Sylvie’s closeness. “My whole life is about wanting more than marriage and kids. Betty got it from me.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie sighs, takes another step closer, and somehow she’s standing between Joan’s legs, hips pressed to the countertop Joan’s sitting on. Joan wants to tell Sylvie she’s sorry for teasing, that she read The Feminine Mystique and loved it too, felt less guilty, all of a sudden, for wanting a life different from her mother’s. Sylvie is so close that Joan can smell her soap, and the perfume on her neck. “But I think you feel bad about wanting what you want. Singing your songs. Like you feel like you’re supposed to be doing something else.”
Joan blinks. She wants to lie, or say something sweetly flippant to toss away the attention, something that works on boys who try to catch a piece of her. Somehow, she knows that none of those tricks will work on Sylvie. “Most people like when I’m a little sad.”
Sylvie’s eyes flicker up, meet Joan’s, and their faces are close, inches apart, nothing but air between their mouths. Sylvie swallows. Joan refuses to move a muscle. Sylvie steps away, back from the counter, and Joan shivers in her wake. “Those people like the idea of Joan Baez, all beautiful and aloof and mysterious.”
Joan presses her palm against the counter. “And you?”
Sylvie grins. “I think being friends with the actual you is more fun.”
--
The first kiss, sans Bob, happens when Bob comes home late.
He’s in the shower, water running to wash off the grime of the day, and Joan’s running her hands over his guitar, plucking a soft pattern from one of his newest songs. Sylvie walks over from the stove, where the remnants of dinner are cooling, and when Joan lifts her head from the instrument, Sylvie’s right there. Her face is lit up, teasing, buoyant, as she presses a soft kiss to Joan’s mouth.
Joan’s hand lifts to Sylvie’s neck without her really meaning to, fingers gentle in her hair. In the bathroom, the water turns off.
Sylvie pulls back, grinning.
“What was that for?”
Sylvie smirks. “He’s late. We should be allowed to start without him.” Her face sobers, “That was okay, right?”
“Yeah,” Joan swallows, and tries to not sound like her stomach is full of butterflies. “Of course.”
A drawer opens in the other room, then slides shut. Sylvie drops down on the couch next to Joan, and conspiratorially bumps their shoulders together. “He’ll be here in a second. Not so long to wait now.”
--
During all of this, Bob is changing. Joan watches it, sees Pete watch it, sees everyone with their eyes on the prize, urging Bob a different way. She’s not sure what Sylvie would advise. He’s always been hungry and a little brash, but she liked those things, or at least was drawn to them, and it felt so good to have a partner in the music. Maybe it felt too good, she thinks now, maybe she got safe and sloppy, and forgot the way the world really works. Bob treats her differently now and she doesn’t want it to be because he can’t get anything from her anymore. I’m still here, she wants to say, you can still have me! But folk, and people singing to other people, and all the things Joan knows she is don’t seem to be enough anymore.
It strikes her that Sylvie might understand this feeling. But she and Sylvie don’t talk about Bob, even in this tentative peace they’ve managed to find, and Joan thinks saying any of this might sound too much like I know I was always his second choice, he’s tired of me now, and you win. She doesn’t mind the idea of Sylvie winning the way she used to. But she doesn’t want to be alone again.
--
“Do you hate me?” Joan is lying on her stomach, picnic blanket between her stomach and the grass. Her calves are warm from the sun and she points her toes, then flexes them. She asks the question with a turned head, looking at the way Sylvie’s eyes are closed against the brightness of the sky.
Sylvie flips onto her side, brow furrowed. “What?”
“Do you hate me,” Joan repeats, unsure if this is going to ruin the intended laziness of their afternoon.
Sylvie turns onto her back, and sighs. “No. I don’t.”
The glare of the day starts to hurt.
“You don’t sound incredibly convinced.” Joan tries to say this lightly, like it doesn’t sting. “It’s okay if you are.”
“No,” Sylvie says again, “I’m sorry. I was thinking. I used to be upset. In the beginning. But I haven’t been in a while.”
“Not even when we sing together?” Joan winces, but she has to know.
Sylvie laughs, soft and thoughtful, at Joan’s concern. “The music is good. It’s always been good. That helps. I can appreciate how good it is now.”
--
“You’re lonely,” Sylvie observes one evening, Bob in the other room getting his things. He and Joan are playing across town in an hour, and she’s half-thinking of the setlist. Bob’s never distracted when they sing together, even if he kisses the side of her mouth afterwards like an afterthought. Joan jumps at the sound of Sylvie’s voice. It’s been quiet for the last half hour, save for Bob’s grumbling and the rush of cars on the street.
Except that while Joan’s been worrying, Sylvie’s been studying. Maybe Sylvie’s been studying for a long time.
Joan looks right back at Sylvie, and tries to make it sound like she’s not lying. “No I’m not.”
“Yes,” Sylvie dips her chin forwards, eyes soft, “You are.”
Joan looks down at the familiar shape of her feet.
Sylvie places a gentle hand on Joan’s arm, and lifts her gaze back up. “You don’t need to be. You aren’t alone.”
--
Two weeks later, waiting at a crosswalk, Sylvie offers unprompted: “I spent a lot of time in school alone. Being lonely. When Bobby left for shows, I used to feel crushed by it. I knew that I shouldn’t. But I was still so scared of having no one.” She pauses and squeezes Joan’s hand. “I haven’t felt lonely like that in a while.”
--
The earth shifts, or the air sharpens, and Joan knows her way of being with Bob is over the way she knows she has two hands and was born to sing. It hurts, a throb deep in her chest and stomach and throat, and singing burns a way it never has before. She feels half used, half betrayed, wholly idiotic for ever even beginning to believe this could be good, for forgetting all the ways she needs to be smart and think ahead and not get caught up in something as predictable as trust. Bob looks at her, then looks away. Joan tries to not think of all the ways he’s held her, all the ways she wanted to stay.
A week later she remembers the music was yours before it was his. You can still do this. The singing burns a little less after that. She has survived worse than Bob Dylan, and she will again, and this will not break her or burn her or change her. She is Joan Baez and she can hold herself up, the music back in her body like all is well.
--
Joan hears a few months later through the grapevine that Sylvie left Bob.
She can’t quite imagine it.
She knows, better than most people, the little ways Bob and Sylvie cut at each other, the opposite directions their hearts pulled in, but she’d seen the love too, tasted it and felt the commitment, all the little ways their lives had blended together. Joan’s known a lot of people who stayed together even if the pain overwhelmed the love.
She wasn’t really expecting the two of them to be any different – happier without her, easier without her, and if she’s really being honest with herself, maybe she left so Sylvie could finally have Bob all to herself. Maybe she took herself away so Bob could find Sylvie again, and love her the way she deserved, and stop the terrible pulling away he’d been lost in. Clearly, it hadn’t worked like that.
Somewhere in the past, Joan would have wanted to win Bob away from Sylvie, but instead she feels a strange sense of mourning, for Sylvie, and Bob, and the way the sun streaked through their apartment windows, cozy and warm even in the wind and rain.
So that’s the end of it, then.
Joan doesn’t get Bob, and Sylvie doesn’t either, Bob is off to live his life however he insists on living it, breaking Pete’s heart and Joan’s faith and Sylvie’s steadfastness along the way.
Joan hates him a little for this, and knows she’ll forgive him all at the same time. Joan knew it wouldn’t end in forever happiness, and wishes that meant she could forget any kind of sadness, but instead she carries it with her, packs the wistfulness up for tour, misses the warmth of Bob and Sylvie all across the country, and gets over it the way she always knew she would, in bits and pieces, returning to herself like a traveler from a foreign land.
--
The music has her, and holds her, and swings her to sleep. Joan sings, and plays, and feels better, and remembers she is still herself, and the crowds still come, and she sings, and sings, and sings.
--
A year later, Joan’s crossing the street when Sylvie appears, ghost and girl all in one, smiling. She’s at the corner, and when she spots Joan, which she does at almost the same time Joan sees her, she breaks into a run.
Sylvie’s arms wrap around Joan’s body, warm and familiar, and Joan breathes in the smell of her shampoo and perfume, unchanged. “It’s nice to see you,” she confesses, face muffled in Sylvie’s shoulder, and Sylvie pulls back, eyes soft.
“Are you busy tonight?”
--
Sylvie’s new apartment is full of lamps, and half-read books, and Joan fights the urge to sob when she sees it. Sylvie places a hand on her arm, concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Joan waves it away, “I just-.” She takes in the bread on the counter and clothes drying in the bathroom. “I missed this. I’ve been on the road for a while.”
Sylvie hums, “You and Bob underestimate the power of settling down. Or at least finding a place to land.”
Joan winces. “Is that what happened?”
“With me and him?” Sylvie raises an eyebrow. “He wanted bigger things and didn’t care to keep me a part of them.”
Joan laughs, unexpectedly, surprised at Sylvie’s wry matter-of-factness, then covers her mouth with her hand.
But Sylvie giggles too. “It’s okay. You can laugh. I’m not upset the way I was. And you get it more than anyone else. But,” she turns to Joan, “what happened to us?”
Joan’s stomach jolts at the iron in Sylvie’s eyes. “I declared defeat?”
“Joan,” Sylvie rolls her eyes, “we’re so past that.”
Joan shifts against the couch. “I left.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie looks up, sadness pooling in her face, “you left and you didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I thought you’d like me gone. Wasn’t it easier? Just the two of you?”
Sylvie rolls her eyes again, and Joan wonders how this happened, how Sylvie became the emotional truth teller out of the two of them, and she turned into the avoidant one. “You’re the best singer I’ve ever kissed.”
Joan scoffs. “Bob’s selling better than me right now.”
Sylvie snorts, and pulls her legs up onto the couch. “As a singer? He doesn’t hold a candle to you. Never did.” Her gaze drops. “You’re magic. I wanted to hate you, the first time I saw the two of you together. But I couldn’t. You were too good.”
Joan blushes. “Sylvie-“
But Sylvie barrels forward. “And I thought you looked so scared. Secretly scared, in a way no one else could see. You’re like,” Sylvie pauses to search for the words, “you’re perfect.” Joan opens her mouth to disagree, but Sylvie looks, terrifyingly, like she means it. “And everyone looks at you like they’re hungry. Like they want to take you apart, and eat you up. Like they all want something from you. At first, I didn’t want Bobby to help you. But then I realized I did want him to help you, I wanted someone to gather you up, and say everything would be okay. And he couldn’t. He doesn’t know how to do that, even when he tries. And then I thought I was the only one who didn’t want something from you, that I could see you and help you and didn’t need anything in return. I wanted to save you from everyone else’s need, and say that who you actually are is all you need to be. That everyone else is an idiot who doesn’t deserve to make money off of your talent.”
“But?” Joan can’t breathe. No one’s ever talked to her like this, and no one’s ever looked at her quite the way Sylvie’s looking at her, so serious and scared.
“But then I wanted things from you too. And I don’t think that makes me the hero either.”
“Sylvie,” Joan’s voice catches in her throat, “what are you talking about?”
Sylvie straightens her spine, and closes her eyes. “I’m in love with you. Completely, unfortunately, absolutely in love with you. Just like everyone else in the world. I know this isn’t special. And that I wasn’t supposed to like you at all. But I don’t miss Bobby. Really, I don’t. I miss you. But,” here, Sylvie gathers herself back together, “I wanted to tell you that you’re so brave. And when people are awful to you, it’s not your fault. And you deserve to be taken care of. You don’t need to prove anything. You don’t need to go at it alone.”
Joan shudders. Sylvie’s face is red, and honest, and see, Joan knows she can come off as a little aloof.
But it’s the only way she can stay safe.
And no one in her whole life has ever seen through the façade as well as Sylvie.
“I didn’t know you noticed me,” is all she can think to say, when she really means saw me in that way, deep and true and down to my bones and I see you too, I studied you and learned you and I think about you all the time but it’s okay, because Sylvie nods like she understands.
Sylvie’s close, Joan realizes, the closest they’ve been in a long time, so she leans forward and kisses her, just like Bob’s next to them, urging them together, except this time he’s nowhere to be found. This time Sylvie kisses Joan deep and long and desperate and doesn’t stop, tongue and teeth and warm hands against Joan’s waist. There’s no one to perform for, no one else to think about, and all Joan can muster is SylvieSylvieSylvie as her friend presses their bodies together.
She didn’t think it could be like this between the two of them. She didn’t know it could be this good. Sylvie, breathing hard, pulls her over to the bed, like they’re both adults and this is real, that’s really Sylvie’s hair tangling underneath Joan’s fingers and really Sylvie’s mouth against Joan’s neck. Sylvie laughs when she tugs Joan onto the mattress and Joan does too, a surreal giggle at the feeling of their legs tangled together and the hot pressure building in Joan’s stomach.
Because Sylvie, the girl who has been her mirror and her opposite and her enemy and her most unlikely friend, is slipping her hands deftly between Joan’s legs, and no one is here but the two of them, and it’s terrifyingly likely, almost completely possible, that the two of them like this, flushed and warm and close, is all they ever needed in the first place.